craving fulfilled

baked sweet potato = yum.

i've traditionally never been much of a fan of sweet potatoes. my main exposure to them was, up 'til relatively recently, as candied yams at thanksgiving. honestly, if it weren't for my grandma's german-style noodles, i probably would've starved at thanksgiving as a kid; i was a parent's nightmare picky eater (and i hear it's genetic... so i'm likely doomed if i ever have offspring!). i've since come around to most dishes, but i still tend to get a pretty small spoonful of the yams.

i've since discovered, though, that if you keep it really simple and add butter and salt instead of marshmallows, i love it. today i was out at the grocery store as much as an excuse to use my new bicycle basket (yay!) as because we needed anything, and randomly grabbed a couple of huge sweet potatoes. scrub, foil, bake on 325 degrees for 80 minutes (thank you interwebs)... that's about as much cooking as i've done in quite a while.

and i just gobbled down all of mine before jesse really got through poking and prodding his. oops.

AC adapter woes

i woke up this morning to find my computer had turned off. (passed out by my laptop, as tends to happen weekends when jesse's working nights -- i try to stay up to adjust to his schedule a bit and fail.) it didn't want to come back on. it was acting like the battery had drained, except it was plugged in.

my instant reaction? go login as a guest on jesse's laptop, start shopping for new AC adapter cord.

fortunately, i ran across this article before i bought anything.

internal circuit breaker. that was it. is this a part of standard laptop ownership training that i missed? i wrote a thank-you note to the guy who wrote the article.

music from 11/20 in Williamsburg

this one was from the once-every-six-weeks graduation dance in williamsburg; wendy runs 6-week courses in three levels of basic lindy hop, and this is the party at the end. while she's got some regulars who are comfortable social dancing, and several folks from the wider scene usually show, the dance is beginner-heavy. i try to keep the music easy. this time i got first half, which meant keeping it even easier. as often as not, this leads to playing lots of stuff that was "top 40" in the knoxville scene back when i was starting out...

Shout Sister Shout - Lucky Millinder 140
Potato Chips - Slim Gaillard & his Shintoists 140
Swingin' On Nothin - Jo Stafford 125
Solid as a Rock - Count Basie 136
Ja-Da - The Famous Castle Jazz Band 152
My Baby Likes To Bebop - Ella Fitzgerald 140
Everybody Eats When They Come To My House - Cab Calloway 154
South Of The Border - Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra 146
Let's Do It - Billie Holiday With Lester Young 152
Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop - Lionel Hampton & His Orchestra 136
Winter Weather - Benny Goodman 156
I Got The Sun In The Morning - Artie Shaw 138
Baldhead - The Fabulous Treniers 139
Yes Indeed - Dick Haymes With Harry James & His Orchestra 159
Now You Has Jazz - Louis Armstrong 172

happy turkey day!

dunno why loudtwitter doesn't seem to be shipping over right now, but lesson learned: i ramble a lot more if i bother with the one- or two-sentence stuff. for the better or the more boring...

we had turkey dinner over at jesse's boss's. nice family, excellent food, not quite like going home to MY family but awfully generous of them. and it was fun to have thanksgiving with kids around for the first time in years. i remain stuffed.

but not too stuffed for a glass of eggnog. i'm a bit of a grinch on many things holiday -- too much fuss, too much commercialism, and i'm not leaving the apartment before noon because black friday's really not my thing. but eggnog is excellent.

~~~

i didn't read the news for a couple days and all of a sudden mumbai's a mess?!? ugh.

~~~
ok, after noon, jesse just got off work (pity the poor navy guys who had to work after their turkey dinners!), and he wants to go shopping. so i suppose i'll peel myself away from the computer...

rumba, november 17

jesse and i djed last monday night. it was a small crowd to start, and i had second set, so a lot of it was just struggling to get anyone to dance. this week, the crowd was a little bigger, and beth and i traded 4s... that format's a little less frustrating for the venue, i think.


Rag Mop - Joe Liggins And The Honeydrippers 154
Save The Bones For Henry Jones - Nat King Cole & Johnny Mercer 145
Ragtime Cowboy Joe - Pied Pipers 138
Love, Nuts And Noodles - Rosemary Clooney 217 (this one officially doesn't swing. won't play it again!)
Solid as a Rock - Count Basie 136
Gotta Pebble In My Shoe - Chick Webb 159
Hellzapoppin' - Louis Armstrong And The All Stars 170
Ja-Da - The Famous Castle Jazz Band 152
Jump for Joy - Duke Ellington with Ray Nance 188
All That Meat And No Potatoes - Fats Waller 146
Sixty minute man - Billy Ward and his Dominoes 130
Let's Do It - Billie Holiday With Lester Young 152
All of Me - Lizzie Miles with Sharkey 160
The Gal From Joe's - Duke Ellington 164
The Walkin' Blues (Walk Right In, Walk Right Out) - Jesse Powell Orchestra 166
For The First Time - Kay Starr 168
We'll Meet Again - Paul Barbarin's New Orleans Band 163
Bei Mir Bist Du Schon (Album) - The Andrews Sisters with Vic Schoen and His Orchestra 167
The Preacher - Quincy Jones 155
Chief - The Dutch Jazz Orchestra 125
Froggy Bottom - Andy Kirk and His Clouds Of Joy 153
Doin' What Comes Natur'lly - Pied Pipers 146
John The Revelator - The Dirty Dozen Brass Band 122
Chicago - Dutch Swing College Band 206
Don't Get Around Much Anymore - Bob Crosby 146
Chloe - The Dorsey Brothers 160
Why Don't You Do Right? (Album) - Benny Goodman and His Orchestra 125
Nature Boy - Johnny Hartman 145
They All Laughed - Gunhild Carling And Her Swing Band 131

human barometer?

i've been noticing lately that the debilitating headaches seem to correspond to big weather changes. last time, it was a big drop in temperature. yesterday, i spent about 24 hours with a headache; when the rain finally got here around 7 or 8 p.m., i was suddenly fine.

just discovered that the weather channel online has an aches and pains forecast, theoretically good for predicting arthritis and migraines. think i'll start watching and see if the correlation is real.

mumbles and factoids

• 09:50 severely limited report types make me grumbly. seriously, i'd rather learn sql than have to manually look up hundreds of phone numbers.
• 10:31 yay macros! still gonna have to look up the numbers, but at least getting from report to useful data columns is just a few clicks now.
• 11:00 will DJ for food! (well, and a ride home. waiting to see if any of the peninsula crew is planning on rumba tonight...)
• 11:52 sinus headache plus sore back muscle that hurts when i inhale deeply equals likely to skip the gym again today... sigh.
• 15:58 beth, while not of the peninsula, is heading to northern virginia for thanksgiving after the dance. logistics solved, dancing on!

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eastpak

back in probably 1994 -- beginning of high school-ish, i guess -- i talked my parents into buying me a freakin' huge backpack (or so it seemed at the time... i hadn't yet encountered hiking/hosteling backpacks). because high school books were big. i think it was something like $40, which at the time seemed ridiculous, but it had a lifetime warranty.

i carried it all through high school and college. recently, with the advent of daily adventures on the bus, i started carrying it again. the right strap, the one that gets twisted off the shoulder a lot when i'm reaching for something in the bag, started to fray. i looked up the address.

i sent my decade-plus-old backpack back to the company for warranty repairs.

just got it back. new straps, and i think they patched up a couple other places that had looked less than new.

so yay eastpak. and yay for the parents for getting a pretty great deal.

and now my laptop bag is getting torn up... no such warranty on it, alas. maybe i'll just get one of the protector pockets and use the old eastpak when i need to bring it along.

klx saturday late night setlist

from 11/15, the 3-5 a.m. shift, shared with mike marcotte. approximate reconstruction, because i still hadn't gotten the hang of actually having to manually save them.

Drunk (Album) - Jimmy Liggins 165
Take It and Git - Andy Kirk & His Clouds of Joy 161
The Donkey Serenade (Album) - Artie Shaw 147
Sunday - Kay Starr 155
Sugarfoot Stomp - Harry James 165
Swing, Brother, Swing - Billie Holiday 151
Midnight In Moscow - The Firehouse Five Plus Two 180
Diga Diga Do - Joe Venuti & Zoot Sims 225
Hellzapoppin' - Louis Armstrong And The All Stars 170
April In Portugal - Oscar Aleman 182
The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives To Me - Glenn Miller 174
A Study In Brown - Bunny Berigan 198
Swingin' On Nothing - Bob Crosby 129
Tap Room Swing - Adrian Rollini 179
Hallelujah Joe Ain't Preachin' No More - Harlem Hamfats 166
'Tain't No Use - Benny Goodman 155
Salty Dog - Lizzie Miles with Sharkey & His Kings Of Dixieland 194
Drop Me Off In Harlem - Mills Blue Rhythm Band 143
It Dont Mean A Thing' - Duke Ellington 178
Dinah - Lino Patruno & His Blue Four 224
Ta-Hu-Wa-Hu-Wai (Hawaiian War Chant) - Andrew Aiona 186
Why Do Hawaiians Sing Aloha? - Fats Waller 147

mumbles and factoids

• 10:51 currently rating nearly every song in my library as "bad"... (just using rating as a binary to say it's been looked at and tagged.)
• 18:19 dancing in richmond tonight!

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mumbles and factoids

• 00:07 can preview while DJing in linux! audacious plus amarok = easy set-up. i still want to learn mixxx, though.
• 07:17 Snow!
• 10:41 the office bathroom has a phone. it's blinking like it has voicemail. now i'm tempted to call it and see what the greeting is.
• 16:15 "extension 3049 does not answer. please leave a message after the tone." i did not leave the bathroom any new voicemail.
• 21:45 ok, so it was mostly removing code instead of coding... but i got an amarok script to make my playlists look like they used to for posting.

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last thursday at the attucks

not a bit in the right order (didn't realize the program i saved the playlist from was likely to scramble it!), but here goes:

We'll Meet Again - Paul Barbarin's New Orleans Band 163
Madame Dynamite - Eddie Condon 184
The New Call Of The Freaks - Luis Russell 138
The Hot Canary - Paul Nero 151
Comes Love - Billie Holiday 107
Sunday - Bunny Berigan & His Orchestra 192
Celery Stalks at Midnight - Will Bradley 156
Twenty-Four Robbers - Jimmie Lunceford 144
The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives To Me - Glenn Miller 174
For The First Time - Kay Starr 168
Coquette - Bob Crosby & The Bob Cats 186
Chloe - The Dorsey Brothers 160
I Like Pie, I Like Cake - The Four Clefs 160
Ubangi Stomp - Warren Smith 162
Bassology - Slim Gaillard & his Flat Floogie Boys 159
Hit That Jive, Jack - Four Vagabonds 190
Ta-Hu-Wa-Hu-Wai (Hawaiian War Chant) - Andrew Aiona 186
Why Do Hawaiians Sing Aloha? - Fats Waller 147
Yam Brown - Bob Hunt's Duke Ellington Orchestra 241
This Little Light of Mine - The Boilermaker Jazz Band 168
Sugarfoot Stomp - Harry James 165
I Want A Roof Over My Head - Helen Humes 154
Dinah - Lino Patruno & His Blue Four 224
Doin The Voom Voom - Duke Ellington 196

mumbles and factoids

• 08:56 unexpected issue: big, fuzzy knee socks plus wide-leg pants -> odd-looking static cling. but my feet are warm today!
• 11:04 temp employee no longer!!
• 13:41 gmail themes! NINJA!
• 00:07 can preview while DJing in linux! audacious plus amarok = easy set-up. i still want to learn mixxx, though.

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DJing, linux, whistling, ice skating, beer

tonight will make four DJ sets in eight days (attucks, klx, rumba, williamsburg)... that's a lot for me, even when i'm NOT trying to adjust to a new software setup. at least it's keeping the cost of dancing low. and it's not exactly like i mind having an excuse to go around with at least one earbud hooked to my mp3 player most of the time in hopes of finding more gems i didn't know i had.

overall, the transition to linux has been pretty smooth. i still haven't figured out use of two sound cards simultaneously, but i have enough clues that a long morning hanging out in pjs ought to help. (can you tell i'm looking forward to doing not-so-much this weekend?!?) i just saw a bug log claiming that my biggest complaint about amarok, the program i've been using to replace itunes, is fixed in the version that's in beta. (generating smart playlists by "label does not contain" doesn't work so well right now. and itunes smart playlists were kinda a cornerstone of my organizational system.) plus, john and brooks in atl have been big helps -- judging from swingdjs.com, atlanta must be the linux lindy hop DJ capital of the world.

other thing to do while flannel-pajama-clad this weekend: figure out how to make netflix's instant play movies work with linux. or if not, there's always jesse's desktop windows machine, i guess.
~~~
random downtown norfolk coolness... there's this one guy who's incredible at whistling. like, if i were going to record a song that featured a lot of it, i'd probably seek him out. i first noticed several weeks back... another guy was banging on the side of one of the bus shelters, being a little obnoxious... the next thing i knew, it'd developed into a regular rhythm, which then became this strange little duet with the whistling guy. gorgeous, one of those spontaneous moments you just don't look for when you're standing around at the bus stop. ever since then, when i hear a particularly catchy tune floating in the air (as i did on lunch break -- that's what prompted this), i look around; he's usually in range.
~~~
they're putting the final touches on a seasonal outdoor ice skating rink a couple blocks from my office. hurrah. oh, and parade stands. i didn't know about it, but apparently the grand illumination of the christmas lights is a big deal around here. williamsburg has one in a couple weeks. i think we're dancing in their parade, and for some kind of event in the mall here.
~~~
current beer obsession: legend chocolate porter. it's seasonal, brewed down the road in richmond. thus far i've only seen it at cogan's, the pizza place where everyone usually winds up after the wednesday nights at the fred. then again, i don't get out to beer-drinking locales all that often. but yummy.

mumbles and factoids

• 15:41 cold weather is making me want to cancel everything to hang out at home in flannel pajamas with a cup of tea. going dancing anyway, though!
• 16:08 holiday airplane tickets bought... the madcap nashville-manchester-crossville-asheville-cookeville-manchester-nashville trip is on!

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mumbles and factoids

• 10:16 back to work... whee?
• 18:54 think costco would take back a jar of artichoke hearts on the basis that we can't open it? (and when i say we, i mean all-out team effort!)
• 19:54 modern linux continues to surprise me. i hadn't thought to try, but ubuntu had no trouble with jesse's printer. plug in USB and bam!

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klx

this year's knoxville lindy exchange was a lot of fun, or at least the friday-saturday portions of it were.

my first time riding the greyhound was not the least bit traumatic. nor were 7 hours in the car with adrienne. we made good time, successfully found the starbucks when we needed it, and got to knoxville in time for dinner.

friday night didn't feel like klx to me... i finally figured out that it was less about what was going on in the dance venues than about ME -- the fact that i wasn't in host mode, wasn't going around making sure everyone knew what was going on, wasn't trying that hard to meet everyone i didn't know. of course it didn't feel like klx as i've known it! the streamliners were in good form (if a little loud!), though, and everything seemed to run pretty smoothly.

saturday felt more like home. i started the day by almost losing shannon's dog for her (i got mixed up about which one is reliable and likely to come back if you let him out...), got to know some of my fellow guests at the casa de shannon and jewel over doughnuts, and headed to the afternoon dance. after that, i skipped the lindy feast and, with davenne, took shannon out for a belated birthday dinner at sitar's. good times. the villains ball went off with plenty of costuming, and christabel and the jons gave the dancing the warm feel that goes with them. michael gamble kicked the late-night off right by playing a kickin' dixieland set in the "blues room" -- i have to admit, that was one of the weekend highlights for me. i got to trade three-song sets with D.C.'s mike marcotte for the 3-5 a.m. shift, and that was another weekend highlight; i really enjoy that format, and mike's a top-notch DJ.

unfortunately, i'm still figuring out the linux DJing, and i forgot to save my playlist. i'll post my best guess at a reconstruction as soon as i get a little time with my laptop, along with playlists from thursday and last night.

i wish we could've stuck around for the afternoon dance, but making it back to richmond in time to have dinner all together before adrienne handed me off to jesse was nice.

i wound up taking yesterday off too... i had asked for it in case travel plans necessitated it. i was defeated by the combination of having the option, needing to catch up on sleep, having the boyfriend with the day off, and finding the world outside my bed much too cold to deal with. i'll probably miss the day of pay, but it totally felt worth it.

mumbles and factoids

• 10:09 my croatian penpal from approximately the junior high years just friended me on facebook. craziness!
• 10:27 decided to take the greyhound up to richmond tomorrow for simplicity's sake...

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mumbles and factoids

• 21:56 woot! dvd player works in ubuntu!
• 22:17 anybody know a hangout in williamsburg that's public transit accessible and interstate-convenient? meeting up with adrienne to ride to klx!

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mumbles and factoids

• 14:00 santa claus has set up shop at the mall already?!?
• 15:23 happy veterans day! (banks are closed, so much for buying quarters for laundry...)
• 19:56 perl is funny-looking! but it worked - perl -pi -w -e 's/C:\/home\/kait\/Music/\/home\/kait\/Music\/Music Backup/g;' *.m3u

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linux on the laptop, round 2

i last tried installing ubuntu linux on my computer last september. the lack of sound made it a little impractical -- the primary things i use my laptop for are internet and music, so it didn't last all that long.

a year makes all the difference. now all the drivers work straight from the cd. back in college, when i regularly used linux (mandrake-flavored!), it pretty much took a fairly knowledgeable geek to deal with it. my tech skills have deteriorated, but it's a nice surprise -- ubuntu's user-friendly! i've only gone command-line so far for a few bouts of moving files around, and that's just because i've missed doing it that way.

i was intending to go dual-boot, but, um, "experimental" is probably not the ideal method for figuring out why a windows vista partition isn't shrinking properly. the internet tells me -- too late -- that it's better to use vista's built-in partitioning tools. i think my oops would've been fixable, but i couldn't find my windows cd. (ransacking the apartment did reveal some floorspace we hadn't seen in a while, though...) i finally decided to just go for it. i'm very very glad that jesse talked me into finally getting a backup hard drive; i tend to reformat when frustrated, and having another copy of everything significantly reduced the associated angst.

tonight's project? see if i can get itunes playlists imported over and set up so i can DJ off this system without having to sort all the music again. preferably by thursday! amarok looks promising, and i actually already managed to get from the itunes library xml file to m3u form playlists... they still point to windows filepaths, though, so learning a teensy bit of perl might be in my future.

(and yeah, we skipped the dancing last night... jesse was tired, and i was wanting to play with the fresh operating system. i don't know what was leading to all the confusion yesterday, but not going out was NOT meant as a political statement!)

mumbles and factoids

• 11:24 fighting absurdity in the database...
• 14:03 lots of contradictory e-mails coming in, but i'm pretty sure that there's really no dancing at rumba tonight.
• 14:30 or... maybe there is.
• 16:30 scene politics make me crazy. 3 incoming phone calls and 10 e-mails later... (it's on, but dunno yet if jesse and i are going...)
• 20:43 windows-free! and a little terrified, but yay! (or oops?)

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mumbles and factoids

• 10:57 suddenly pouring rain... maybe i should drink tea and install linux instead of getting out on the bicycle.
• 12:33 and "installing linux" quickly turns into getting distracted by old photos and stuff i didn't realize i had on the backup harddrive.
• 16:02 linux still not installed, but at least all my music's backed up now... off to richmond for the 2nd Saturday dance shortly!

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wednesday night hop

more because posting a playlist forces me to do the cleanup work like checking to see that the tempos i have in the tags are accurate than because this one actually made anybody dance... wednesday night was a dark and stormy night, the dance didn't get advertised like usual, and the few people who DID show up were more interested in talking about dance and teaching each other than in social dancing. after a while, i gave up and played what i wanted to hear instead of trying to create a dance... so, um, here's what i felt like hearing wednesday night.

Ragtime Cowboy Joe - Pied Pipers 138
Flying Home No. 2 - Lionel Hampton & His Orchestra 162
Shout 'Em Aunt Tillie - Chris Barber 166
Functionizin' - Alex Hill 179
Sunday - Bob Wilber And The Tuxedo Big Band Of Toulouse France 153
I Swung The Election - Jack Teagarden & His Orchestra 199
Boy In The Boat - Steven Bernstein 161
This Little Light of Mine - The Boilermaker Jazz Band 168
Take It And Git - Andy Kirk & His Clouds of Joy 161
T'aint What You Do - Sy Oliver 172
AC/DC Current - Charlie Christiana 204
Drop Me Off In Harlem - Mills Blue Rhythm Band 143
I Hear Music - Billie Holiday 167
Tomorrow - Slam Stewart & Major Holley 152
You Gave Me The Gate - Duke Ellington 171
Come On Over To My House - Julia Lee And Her Boyfriends 146
Whistle While You Work - Bunny Berigan & His Orchestra 150
Good Evenin' Good Lookin' - Benny Goodman with Helen Forrest, vocals 157
Killing Jive - The Cats & The Fiddle 183
My Blue Heaven - Helen Humes 163
The Garbage Man - Harlem Hamfats 210
For The First Time - Kay Starr 168
Shorty's Got To Go - Lucky Millinder 146
Belleville Rendez-Vous (French Version) - The Triplets of Belleville 270
That's a Plenty - Firecracker Jazz Band 320
Egyptian Fantasy - Sidney Bechet 98
I Got The Sun In The Morning - Artie Shaw 138
Yes Indeed - Dick Haymes With Harry James & His Orchestra 158
Massachusetts - Gene Krupa 159
Honeysuckle Rose - WNEW broadcast, NYC, May 31, 1947 198
Our Love Was Meant To Be - Count Basie 163
I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me - Boyd Raeburn 171
As Long As I Live - Jonathan Stout And His Campus Five 159

today's collected short ramblings

• 08:27 Testing? -from phone
• 08:33 at work early, playing with porting from twitter to the blog...
• 08:36 it occurs to me... i started tntech more than 10 years ago. that means more than ten years of process names, status updates, etc.
• 09:15 one more test post...

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~~

edit: ok, it works, yay. now switching post time to late evening. not sure how much i'll use this, but i have a twitter account i never really use for anything, so why not?

VICTORY!

11 o'clock on the dot, and CNN, Fox, and the Daily Show have all called it. looks like i get to go to bed earlier than predicted!

(2000 made me wary about going to bed early on election night... but it looks good, it really really does.)

watching the polls roll in...

virginia's at 50-49 for obama right now. a couple likely republican districts aren't reporting yet, but fairfax county's only at 35% reporting.

it's not looking like it's going to matter in the big scheme of things -- hopefully the big scheme's not even close. but i'm really enjoying watching from a state that's up for grabs!

i voted!

i was going to get to tell a tale of slogging a mile and a half each way in the rain for the sake of exercising my right, but jesse happened to get off work early and loaned me his car. (he's still registered in california, so he voted absentee weeks ago.)

i took a photo when i got there. but (a) i don't have an SD card reader handy at the moment, and (b) the line of umbrellas outside in no way captures it -- inside, every bit of hallway in the little elementary school assigned as my polling location was lined up, complete with switchbacks in the final stretch through the cafeteria. two hours. there's a certain splendor in people being willing to hang out that long without even a roller coaster ride at the end, just a paper and a felt-tip marking pen. except for a little disgruntlement over the P-Z line running significantly faster than the others (fastest poll worker? dearth of smiths and thomases and williamses in the neighborhood? who knows...), people were incredibly cheerful over the whole thing, giving big rounds of applause whenever a first-time voter was announced.

yay for being in a swing state where nobody really knows how it's going to turn out. hoping to find someplace fun to watch the returns come in this evening...

and i'd like to make a big shout-out to the people working at the polls all day. my boss is among them, and he told us what a long day he's in for -- 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., plus however long it takes to get through the people lined up at 7.

i got up earlier than usual and didn't get my habitual snooze on the bus, so i may need the free starbucks before the day's out. happy election day, everybody!

how far?

it's been a quiet weekend. no halloween craziness here. not needing a costume at all made me sort of miss my old office, with the big group costumes and associated hijinx; i need to call and get the rundown on what went on this year.

i put an odometer on the bike. it's starting to become obvious how bicycling folks turn into gear junkies. thus far, it's all simple, easy stuff (headlight, tail light, odometer)... but now i really want a rack to make hauling groceries easier.

if i got the wheel size in there right (i think i did!), i put about 14 miles on it this weekend. i made a google map of today's running around, just to see if my distance is roughly right. it is! because the big red loop is somehow oddly satisfying, i present:

View Larger Map

a few errands, and i found my polling place for tuesday, but mostly i was just enjoying what's maybe the last of the warm days. no great distance, but it's more than i used to ride. speaking of weather... i heard tom friedman in an interview talking about how maybe "global weirding" is a more obvious term/effect than global warming. i'll believe it here. i bought a winter coat thursday evening. needed it friday morning -- there was frost. saturday, it hit 70 degrees outside.