There were five of us at the Cheescake Factory Sunday morning, jovially bantering with our cute young waiter and laughing our way through an assortment of brunch delicacies, from French Toast to a perfect Breakfast Quesadilla. And, of course, cheesecake. I’m addicted to Key Lime cheesecake.
We like to kid around with young waitpeople, giving them “motherly” advice, making them laugh, and managing to find out more about them than they realize. And then we leave a big tip. They are aways a major part of our dining experience.
The pizza and several glasses of wine the night before relaxed me so much that the kink in my back that’s been there for a week finally started to dissolve. Wine, laughter, and good friends with whom you share the same politics — that’s the best medicine in the world. We laugh at ourselves and we laugh at each other, reminding ourselves not to take ourselves too seriously.
We do take politics seriously, however, and the brunch was as much a celebration of the election outcomes as it was a celebration of just being together again.
In between the wine and the cheescake, I ran around buying stuff I needed in stores that we don’t have here in the mountains. I especially load up on my cat litter at PetSmart — Swheatscoop, which is make out of wheat and so it doesn’t get my cat constipated, as other litter does. Apparently, she ingests a certain amount of litter when she cleans her paws. The wheat just gets digested and doesn’t plug her up. It’s expensive, but, hey, she’s worth it. And, since her litter is in my one large room living space, it sure helps that there’s no odor!!
Leaving my mother with my brother on Saturday was like leaving a three-year old. She cried, cursed, used guilt, and had an elder-trantrum. But I went, and she survived just fine.
For the past several years, I have spent every holiday with my mother. But this Thanksgiving, I’m planning to go to my daughter’s. I’ll cook the usual turkey and mashed potatoes and “kapusta” and my brother can heat it up (or not) on Thanksgiving Day.
I’m looking forward to having the feeling of family.

Yep. There it was, up over the crags of the mountain, set pale and half-faced into the cool powder blue sky.
It’s strange to so clearly see the moon in daylight. It’s like looking out at an alien landscape. It moves ordinary days into dreamtime.
Tomorrow I drive up to Albany for an all-girls weekend — pizza and a gab fest on Saturday and a sinfully fattening brunch on Sunday. I’m looking forward to hanging out with my friends.
I’m also looking forward to NOT being on the same premises with my mother. I’m OK with her in the mornings, but by mid-afternoon I have no patience left….to show her for the fifth time where she has the small amount of cash we let her keep on hand….to look, again, for her glasses, her comb, her favorite photo of my father….to repeat at least three times, each time louder, everything I say……
I’m getting away. Even though it’s only one night, it will be enough to reset my frame of mind, give me hours of quiet driving time to meditate on seeing the moon at noon.

He did it. Can you believe it? John Hall, original front man for the 70s rock band “Orleans” has been elected to Congress. He represents the district just south of here — still not far from Woodstock. He sang as part of his acceptance speech.
Watch it here.
He’s balding and middle-aged. And he still rocks.
We need more musicians and other artists in our government. They know how to think with both sides of their brains. And they listen to their human hearts.

I blogged before about exploring essential oils for whatever use they might be in helping my mother, both with her mental as well as physical states. She has very bad arthritis in her hands and has painful synovial cysts on her finger joints. I had one and had to have it surgically removed. It was painful to hold a pen.
But this time, I combined lavender and eucalyptus essential oils with almond oil and rubbed it on her fingers. Believe it or not, the swelling and redness has subsided and she says the pain is going away. We’ll see.
There are dozens and dozens or essential oils, and if I went by the reference books that explain how to combine and use them for specific purposes, I would have to buy them all. However, I have found that lavender and eucalyptus oils are ingredients in many of the formulas. So I’m experimenting with them, especially since I love the scent of lavender.
I know that lots of people don’t like Autumn. I guess because it’s a season of endings. But I love the scent of that season — the mix of drying leaves and damp earth, the air adrift with the crisp scent of apples, the late night whiff of woodsmoke from a neighbor’s fireplace. Autumn is a season that opens to loneliness — a feeling that I embrace because I have always been able to center myself in that loneliness.
Where I live now, there is not much time and space for being alone. Just late at night. Like now. When in the silent darkness I spray my sheets with lavender and wait for Autumn dreams.

Tonight we hold our breath as we watch Congress turn Blue. As of this moment, 10:30 p.m., eighteen states have made official complaints about voting problems, especially because of the electronic voting machines. No easy breathing yet.
And from today’s Harper’s Weekly:
* a paper-shredding service truck was seen approaching the Cheney compound at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.
* scientists claimed that at the current rate of consumption, global seafood supplies will be obliterated by the year 2048
* the World Meteorological Organisation said that the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had hit a record high
* due to the Lebanon war, Israel was facing an eight-fold increase in the cost of marijuana
* United States said it would fund millions of dollars’ worth of abstinence-only sexual education for adults
* researchers in Japan captured a dolphin with legs.
* a cache of unsent letters to God was found off the Atlantic City shore
Meanwhile NBC just announced that Nancy Pelosi will be Speaker of the House. Whew. Wow!

They sure do know how to spin, distort, and outright lie.
In her post from New Hampshire, Betsy Devine called attention to how On the last Sunday before Election Day, Republican operatives go out in force with a last-minute message to stick under windshield wipers.
But this year, Betsy goes on to say

The news here is that real NH Republican voters are too turned off to turn out for leafletting church parking lots–yay, NH! I knew people in my state had a lot of sense.

In the absence of actual volunteers, anyone willing to go door-to-door with GOP leaflets are allegedly getting $100 bucks for their troubles. And, in the absence of actual volunteers, the National Republican Congressional Committee has turned to 300,000 robocalls to NH, hitting some voters three or four times a day with calls that sound as if the Democrats made them.

Democrats have protested to the US Attorney that these calls are targetting even people on the national don’t call list–that’s illegal in NH. The NRCC says that calls will continue because NH law “does not apply” to calls made form out of state.

You’ve just got to love those Republican family values.

Factcheck.org cites a variety of outright lies being circulated by the GOP about a variety of candidates. For example:
&#9733 In Connecticut, Democratic House candidate Chris Murphy has been attacked in three ads, all misleading, by the NRCC and his opponent Rep. Nancy Johnson. One ad says, “Murphy’s record: Voting to allow sexual predators in public housing with families and children.” In fact, Murphy did no such thing.

&#9733 An ad by GOP Rep. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona says that Democrat “Harry Mitchell could have kept child molesters in prison, denying them bail backed by our Constitution. Mitchell voted no.” That falsely characterizes Mitchell’s actual position.While a state senator in 2002, Mitchell actually supported a bill that would have denied bail to child molesters.

&#9733 In another Arizona House race, Rep. Rick Renzi, a Republican, put up an ad that asks of his opponent, “What kind of person is Ellen Simon to lead the ACLU, which defended child molesters and the man/boy love association?” That’s grossly misleading. Simon led the local ACLU and never defended child molesters.
Actually, the Dems have distorted information about Republican candidates as well. But no one does it better than those GOPers.

Lies. Lies. All lies.
Vote those GOPers out. OUT!!!

A dollar and a dream. Every day millions of people who really can’t afford it drop millions of dollars on lottery tickets because “Hey, you never know.”
What we all do know is that the American Dream has become a myth for everyone but the privileged. ABC’s 20/20 the other night examined what standards elite universities use to choose which students they will accept, and it has little to do with intellectual brilliance. As George Dumbya said to one graduating class after congratulating the high achievers, if you’re a C student, you can become president of the United States.
Privilege begets privilege. Poverty begets, well, you know.
A day before the 20/20 program, Tom Paine.com posted a speech given by Bill Moyers (one of those who really knows) to to the Council of Great City Schools , an organization of the nation’s largest urban public school systems.
Moyers connected the dots between an insufficient education and the the disastrous faiilures of America today. His speech is lengthy, but worth reading and reading and sharing. Below are some of my favorite excerpts:

&#9733 One morning I opened The New York Times to read that tuition at Manhattan’s elite private schools had reached $26,000 a year, starting in kindergarten. On that same page was another story about a school in Mount Vernon, just across the city line from the Bronx, where 97 percent of the students are black and 90 percent of those are so impoverished they are eligible for free lunches. During Black History month, a six-grader researching Langston Hughes could not find a single book by Hughes in the library. This wasn’t an oversight: There were virtually no books relevant to black history in that library. Most of the books on the shelves date back to the l950s and l960s. A child’s primer on work begins with a youngster learning to be a telegraph delivery boy!

&#9733 The neglect of urban education – a capital moral offense in its own right – is but a symptom of what is happening in America. We are retreating from our social compact all down the line.

&#9733 Our country is falling apart. Literally. Last year (2005) the American Society of Civil Engineers issued a report on our crumbling infrastructure. The engineers said we are “failing to maintain even substandard conditions” in our highway system – with significant economic effects. Poor road conditions cost motorists $54 billion a year in repairs and operating costs, and the 3.5 billion hours per year Americans spend stuck in traffic, costs the economy more than $67 billion annually in lost productivity and wasted fuel.

&#9733 The report said the country’s power grid is likewise “in urgent need of modernization” as maintenance spending on transmission facilities has declined 1 percent annually since 1992, while growth in demand has risen 2.4 percent annually over the same period. In 2002, the Department of Energy warned that system “bottlenecks” due to transmission constraints were adding to consumer costs and threatening blackouts. The next August (2003) a blackout blanketed the Midwest and Northeast (and parts of Canada), leaving 50 million people in the dark, some for days, costing billions of dollars in lost commerce and production.

&#9733 Connect the dots: Neglected schools, crumbling roads, permanent environmental “dead zones,” inadequate emergency systems, understaffed hospitals, library cutbacks, the lack of affordable housing, incompetent government agencies, whether it is FEMA or state bureaucracies charged with protecting helpless children – these are characteristic features of our public sector today. Partly it’s about money; little noticed amid all the concern about growing deficits and entitlement spending is this fact – non-defense discretionary spending declined 38 percent between 1980 and 1999 as a share of Gross Domestic Product. According to economists Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, federal investment in non-defense capacities, including research and education, plummeted in the 1980s – from over 2.5 percent of GDP to only 1.5 percent in the late 1990s.

&#9733 Theology asserts propositions that are believed whether or not they meet the test of reality. Not only do our governing elites act as if there’s no tomorrow, they behave as if there is no reality. Alas, they won’t be around to feel our grandchildren’s pain.

&#9733 In his recent book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed , the Pulitzer-prize winning anthropologist Jared Diamond writes about how governing elites throughout history isolate and delude themselves until it is too late…… Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, Diamond warns, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their decisions. Then he describes an America in which elites have cocooned themselves in gated communities, guarded by private security patrols and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. Gradually they lose their motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply, social security, and public schools.

&#9733 But look around: Democracy has been made subservient to capitalism, and the great ideals of the American Revolution as articulated in the Preamble to the Constitution are being sacrificed to the Gospel of Wealth.

&#9733 I don’t need to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America. And it’s man-made. Over the last 30 years a disciplined, well-funded and closely-coordinated coalition of corporate elites, power-hungry religious conservatives, and hard-line right-wing operatives has mounted an aggressive drive to dismantle the public foundations and philosophy of shared prosperity and fairness in America.

&#9733 So I have a practical suggestion for those of you who are principals, superintendents, school board members, and teachers: Go home from here and revise your core curriculum. Yes, teach the three Rs; teach the ABCs; make sure your kids learn algebra, biology, and calculus. But teach them about the American Revolution – that it isn’t just about white men in powdered wigs carrying muskets in a time long gone. It’s about slaves who rose up and women who wouldn’t be denied and unwelcome immigrants and exploited workers who against great odds claimed the revolution as their own and breathed life into it.

Teach your kids they don’t have to accept what they have been handed. Teach them they are not only equal citizens under the law, but equal sons and daughters – heirs, everyone – of that revolution, and that it is their right to claim it as their own. Teach them to shake the torpor that has been prescribed for them by calculating elders and ideologues. Teach them there is only one force strong enough to counter the power of organized money today, and that is the power of organized people. They are waiting for this message; the kids in your schools have been made to feel as victims, powerless, ashamed, inferior, and disenfranchised. Tell them it’s a great big lie – despite their poverty, circumstance, and the long odds they’ve been handed, they have the power to make the world over again, in their image.

Moyers ends his moving address with this call to action:
I was at the Presidio in San Francisco yesterday. That former military enclave beneath the Golden Gate Bridge is now a marvelous and beautiful center of vital commerce and civic purpose – saved from exploitation and despoliation by citizens who rose up on its behalf. On the wall of one of the main buildings I came upon a painting of an enormous deep blue wave with white caps against an equally blue sky. The artist’s inscription beneath the painting reads: “This human wave expresses the concept of people at the bottom rungs of society waking up to using their united strength to claim their universal rights to economic, social, and environmental justice.”
Put that in your core curriculum. It’s America 101.
Use your vote to stir a new wave.

So go the findings of research reported in the New York Post.

A woman’s brain is, in fact, about 10 percent smaller than a man’s, even when factoring in physical size difference – but it also has a lot more going on, neuron-connection-wise…..

Thanks to Stone Age wiring, women also have a far greater capacity for understanding speech and body language, and have “elephantine” memories, especially when it comes to negative experiences…..

Of course, we’re not in the Stone Age anymore, so it might stand to reason that the divergent male and female brains would have adapted to be more like one another – and perhaps, in time, they will….

While I’m waiting for those millions of years to pass that might finally bring about a meeting of the brains, I’ll just continue to have more fun in the company of my women friends and not worry about finding a compatible male mate. It just ain’t going to happen. It’s a brain thing.
Go the the Post piece and read more about how the wiring of men’s and women’s brains affect their behaviors regarding multi-tasking, fighting, communicating, and having sex.
Live and learn.
(Although I do remember seeing a program on PBS years ago about how older men — those who are no longer led by their testosterone levels and associated body parts — become more companionable, better husbands and fathers and grandfathers. Maybe there’s hope yet.)

We were warned that those @#$%^ machines were going to screw up. We were warned that those *&^%$ machines were going to be manipulated. It’s already started BIG TIME with early voters,
Crooks and Liars links to a Texas television station that reports:

KFDM continues to get complaints from Jefferson County voters who say the electronic voting machines are not registering their votes correctly.
Friday night, KFDM reported about people who had cast straight Democratic ticket ballots, but the touch-screen machines indicated they had voted a straight Republican ticket.

And the Miami Herald reports:

Several South Florida voters say the choices they touched on the electronic screens were not the ones that appeared on the review screen — the final voting step.
Mauricio Raponi wanted to vote for Democrats across the board at the Lemon City Library in Miami on Thursday. But each time he hit the button next to the candidate, the Republican choice showed up. Raponi, 53, persevered until the machine worked. Then he alerted a poll worker.

The smart thing for everyone to do is vote by paper absentee ballot. Ronni Bennett has been enouraging that, and her post, including comments, provides information on how to do that in various states. The absentee ballot has to be in by 8 p.m. election day.
Like any kind of powerful technology, it only works for the general good if there are good people implementing and monitoring it. Otherwise, you get what we’ve got now — widespread invasion of our privacy and the outright pirating of the one vehicle we have to enforce change for the better.
This is what the ordinary German people must have felt like as their government leaders marched them over the cliff.

Today is Halloween, and I’m driving up to Albany to attend a retirement reception for my former (female) boss, whose favorite holiday also is Halloween. So the reception is “come in costume.” You can bet I am, including a mask. When I get back this evening, I will try to post a photo of me as “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant…..the wisest woman in all of Europe with a wicked pack of cards.” (from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.) I have printed out business cards with the above quote on one side and one of the Tarot’s Major Arcana on the other. I will hand them out at the reception. My former secretary, who is going as the Grim Reaper, will know who I am; it will be interesting to see if anyone recognizes me.
ADDENDUM:

So, there I am, in costume, with a great gypsy mask I bought on ebay and fringed scarves I got at the dollar store. There were some great costumes at the reception, including the Headless Horseman and a scarecrow on stilts. Even a former Commissioner of Education (my former boss’ former boss) showed up with a black cape and an odd black and red hat and a scary clown mask. My boss was an angel. Literally.
As I drove through my town, nearing home, it was already dark. Lots of young adults in costumes milled about and started to fill up the local bars. A lovely white-faced geisha wearing a beautiful kimono embroidered in gold thread stood on the corner. A couple of masked scuba divers crossed the street in front of my car. (In this town, we stop for anyone who has one foot in the crosswalk.) In my rear view mirror, I could see someone dressed in fringed boots and a battered cowboy hat, face covered with a bandana, walking down the street beating a Native American drum.
This is definitely a night when strange spirits walk among us.