1. Happy Birthday to Spencer! Who, like Little Cindy Lou Who, is no more than two. A soccergame-type bag full of toddler-sized balls of various sports like his older siblings play with started the little guy’s day off in just his style.

2. The phone finally rang.

They want you *where* in twenty minutes?! (Mentally counting the number of cities away.) Did they know where we live?! C’mon, let’s go! I have never dropped my knitting so fast. He was actually only three minutes late, but I got him there before they closed and that was the important part. Yay for pandemic rush hours, I guess?

3. And then there was the debate.

Trump tried to badmouth his way through the entire thing, loudly, angrily, nonstop, utterly bulldozing Chris Wallace and thinking he could shake Joe Biden that way, who at last said, “Will you shut up, man?” It’s already been made into a t-shirt. Except that you’d have to wear that face.

Kudos to the caption writers who managed to get most of both men’s words even when both were talking, one’s lines in line above the other’s. I don’t know how even people with normal hearing made out what they were saying otherwise. Biden was not going to let Trump simply steal all his time–he wanted to be polite, y’know, have a debate, take turns, be respectful, do it normal, but that just wasn’t possible.

So. We learned that when asked directly, repeatedly, even by someone from Fox that no, Trump will not renounce racism. Instead, he called on the violent militia men like in Charlottesville and Portland to “Stand Back and Stand By,” and to (illegally intimidate) at polling stations (one guess as to which ones). It was a clear call to arms and not as a metaphor. When asked if he would abide by the election results he would not answer but instead called on the Supreme Court to, clearly, call it for him.

Biden, meantime, was trying to put out a firestorm of lies with a single garden hose: “That’s not true,” again and again. A couple of times he simply laughed, because, what are you going to do? You can’t change this guy and get him to abide by the rules or even plain decency.

Biden talked directly to the American people. He said he would not defund the police as Trump claimed but rather would give them actually more resources, not less–so that they could hire mental health professionals to help deal on scene with those who could be helped that way, and so that the police could get better training. He proposed bringing people together in the White House, Black Lives Matters activists and police activists, for them to see that much of what they want is the same thing. More justice. More awareness of how it is to walk in each other’s shoes.

More peacemaking.

You’re only going to get that from one of these guys.

Every vote matters.