Who do you love?

Sometimes it's handy to look at the issues apart from the candidates themselves. There's a little quiz sort of thing that lets you do just that.

Match-O-Matic

I came out with one McCain-ite answer. The rest was all Obama.

New project

I'm putting aside the cross-stitching for now. I need the magnifier/light combo, but it ends up making the frame too heavy and unwieldy. I know what I need, but I can't find it. I don't want one of those clamp-type lap frames. I want an easel sort of thing, with a shelf to prop the frame on, but all open in the back so I can access both sides. And everything being adjustable. I wish I could do carpentry.

So, for the time being I'm going to put it aside and go back to knitting. I've got some yarn left over from a baby afghan I made for a friend's daughter. It's the color "1323", in the last row on the page with the yarn. Baby colors. :) It's very soft and it's also machine washable and dryable. I wasn't sure that I would have enough for a good-sized afghan, though, so I'm pairing it with some off-white Dazzleaire that I got from ebay. (Dazzleaire was discontinued years ago, but it's really nice -- soft and also machine wash and dry.)

I'm going to use a free pattern I found on the 'net, that is a variation on the old feather and fan pattern. I like it because it starts in the middle and works outward, resulting in a square blanket. It's great to use that sort of pattern when you don't know exactly how your yarn is going to work out. I've made some that were intended to be wide, but then ran out of yarn before it was long enough, making the width longer than the length. Majorly weird.

This will go to a site a found last night called Miracles Happen which sends out items to young mothers in crisis. I liked the site because it's not associated with any religious group and she specifically says that she's not going to talk about the politics of choice. I like that. At the point when a baby is born, choice is rather a moot point. I tried to find a crisis pregnancy center locally to take something like this, but all of them that I could find were run by religious groups and did talk about their political opinions. I'm going to let her make the decision as to where it will go. It also lets me have a little distance emotionally, which is something that I need.

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ION, a while back, Steph had a post about misheard lyrics. As I've been listening to Pandora, I remembered a couple from my past.

Dan Fogelberg's "Part of the Plan"
Correct lyric: "Someday we'll all understand" (emphasis on the "der" in understand)
What I thought: "Sunday will fall on Thursday" (Why or how this would happen never made any sense to me, but I thought it must be something very deep and poetical.)

The other one isn't actually a mishearing, but a misunderstanding of what the lyric meant.
George Harrison's "Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)"
Lyric: "Keep me free from birth"
Correct meaning: "Give me freedom, starting at the moment I was born"
My interpretation, when I thought I might be pregnant and hoping I wasn't: "Keep me free from being in the position to give birth"

A Day in the Life

Yesterday we went out for our weekly late lunch/early supper. It's really the only time every week that I actually get out, aside from short walks in the apartment complex. We've only got the one car and Jim is using it during the week to go to work. Besides, I wouldn't trust myself driving still.

We went some place different than the normal list of restaurants, a little further from home. We drove on a road I hadn't been on for quite a while. I noticed several things...

• A hand-lettered sign on a telephone pole, advertising for a "BRAISTA" at one of the corner coffee places
• A larger home-grown sign over the door of a business in one of those little industrial strip-mall places that said "I am Da Boss". I'd love to find out what sort of business it is.
• A bumper sticker in the back window of a car that said: "Keep Portland WEIRD".
• On the door of the restaurant (actually a soup-and-salad place) were their hours: "Sunday-Thursday -- 11 a.m to 9 p.m; Friday-Saturday -- 11 a.m to 9 p.m."

(BTW, "A Day in the Life" was on the radio when we were driving. The station doesn't usually play oldies, so that was a nice surprise.)

After lunch we went over to Michael's Crafts to pick up some things for my cross-stitching. Like always, though, within 10 minutes of looking at stuff, I was starting to get dizzy and weak. We paid for the things that I had picked up and headed out to the parking lot. By the time we got to the car my vision was beginning to get cloudy. Jim unlocked the door and when I was able to sit down I was a lot better. Within ten minutes I felt fine.

Back at home, I fell asleep on the couch for a couple of hours while Jim watched college football and then worked on my cross stitch stuff for a while. Oh, the excitement of our lives!

Okay so I'm back

Do to an overwhelming public outcry -- well, okay, two people expressing mild dismay -- and coming across the Blogging Without Obligation badge-thing, I've decided that I may post from time to time. Maybe I'll wax philosophical from time to time and then I'll have everybody confused!

ION, I've not officially joined the group, but I'm following along with the 25 Things for Charity blog. I need to accomplish something -- to have something that I can hold in my hand that I have actually done. Also, I need to regain some of the manual dexterity that I lost when I was so sick. I seem to be doing pretty well with the knitting these days, most of the time. Cross-stitching is a bit more of a challenge because it requires using finer muscles. Also I've found that my eyesight isn't what it used to be. I had to get me a magnifier/light thingy to clip onto my frame. It makes things a whole lot better.

The election is just fucking depressing. I've stopped reading the politics mailing list that I've been on for years because there's nothing but constant sniping from both sides and rehashing the same arguments on the same topics for the umpteenth time. Of course, it's likely that my resolve to not discuss politics will last about as long as my resolve to stop blogging.

So here I am. I'll post again when the spirit moves.

And in the end....

I don't think I'm going to worry about updating this blog any more. I think this is the end of it. I wanted to be a blogger, but it's just not in me to do it. I can't count the number of times I have written posts halfway through or more and just abandoned them for one reason or another. Yesterday I was writing something that triggered a crying jag that lasted several hours. This is not of the good.

It's rather like when I was a kid. I was given those nifty little diaries with locks on them several times for Christmas from relatives and I always intended to keep them up. All of them had entries for the first week of January and then were just blank.

I'm a really great blog-reader. I think that's my role.

Why I support Barack Obama

He is a man of true class and style.



Compare the above to this about McCain:

Earlier this month [June 1998], at a Republican Senate fund-raiser, McCain told a downright nasty joke making fun of Janet Reno, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton....

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?
Because her father is Janet Reno."

McCain's two-liner conveys some interesting insights into what he considers humorous (lesbianism, a young woman's physical appearance), particularly since it was delivered to a Republican crowd. Remember, this is the party that champions pro-family values.

http://www.salon.com/news/1998/06/25newsb.html