BACK IN GEAR

• I got back home last night and was greeted with a good pasta meal from my Addams-Melman House mates.  It is good to be back but my time away was priceless.  My visit with my sister in Iowa for the last couple days of my trip was equally enjoyable.  She is always fun to be around and we had some nice walks together.  MB and I took our dog for a walk today and we played "hide and seek" with Homer the coon hound.  MB hid and Homer went and found her in the woods.  It's great to be home again.
• Today I worked in the yard picking up the many tree branches that fell during the rain and wind that we got here in Maine from Hurricane Sandy.  (Mostly Maine escaped major damage though I heard that about 90,000 Mainers lost their power for some time.)  I bust them up and store the fallen tree limbs in our shed and we use them to start the fires in our two wood stoves.  It's quite cold here now so we've got the fires burning.  We keep the thermostat turned down really low, about 54 degrees, and rarely turn it up.  So we rely on the heat from the wood stoves to rise upstairs to my office and our bedrooms.  
• We will sit by the fire tonight and watch the election returns.  The professional wrestling match between Obama and Romney has proved to be another squeaker like most other elections in recent years.  The Republicans are working hard across the nation (particularly in Ohio, Florida, and Virginia) to make sure that black community voters are hassled and denied the chance to vote.  Since 2000 this has increasingly been a problem and one wonders why the Democrats rarely ever raise hell about it.  One would think they'd want to defend the rights of their voters to the bitter end.  Gore never fought for the disenfranchised voters in 2000 nor did John Kerry when he ran against Bush in 2004.  Why not?
• Either way, whether it is Obama or Romney, we are still in a hell of a mess as military spending will stay in the trillion dollar range and cutbacks in social programs will continue.  I voted for the Green Party's candidate Jill Stein and it felt good to vote for someone that I believed in.  I don't do the "lesser of two evils" trip anymore.
• During the whole time I was away there was a tremendous debate on the Veterans For Peace and United for Peace & Justice list serves about voting for Obama or a third party candidate.  It's the first time during my organizing career that this kind of serious analytical discussion has occurred so openly and I take it as a sign that the long-time progressive community subservience to the Democrats is now fading like the setting sun.
• My son Julian called today and will come home for two weeks around Thanksgiving which is a great treat for us.  In January he will head to Taiwan where he will be teaching debate along with one of his old college buddies.  He's been saying for some time that he'd like to live outside of the U.S. so it looks like it will happen now at least for awhile anyway.
• My next big project is to get started on our Global Network newsletter Space Alert.  It's always a big undertaking but once I get rolling it turns out to be quite a joy to produce.  If you are not on our mailing list send me an email with your address information and we'll send it to you once it is done.  Write me at globalnet@mindspring.com