Kaye at the shop put a bunch of hand-dyed Colinette yarns on the front table, marked way down.

Superwash merino? $2.25?! Seriously?

“I wanted to see what people would do with it.” It had been sitting in the back unnoticed for awhile but now everybody was going through it and stacks of skeins were going home.

Thus this hat, and as I finished up the simple pattern my brain had time to think of other hands around the world, busily creating…

All these years that I’ve bought those sweet little fingerpuppets knit in Peru by women able to put food on their tables for my purchases. All the small children and their tired parents here who have received one of those puppets, meltdowns diverted.

What if…

I was chatting with one of Sahar‘s American friends last night and asked her if she knew Truman Madsen, the late BYU professor who used to run tour groups in Israel in the summers. Turns out she had been in Israel just after he retired.

He was my mom’s cousin, I told her, and my folks went on the last tour he gave. He took Mom into a shop owned by Palestinian women selling their handicrafts (what town was that, Mom?) and Mom picked out a hand-embroidered apron (purple stitches, if I remember right) and then one for each of her daughters. I treasure mine.

Truman’s reaction was to exclaim that her mother had bought the same thing in the same shop!

I know there are talented women in the West Bank and Gaza and I wonder how much of a difference we could make by buying from them, whether we could help make their lives easier–I would certainly think so. (Typing that and going looking…) I found this and oh look! This!

It says their embroidery work is a connection to their mothers and their grandmothers.

As it is, now, to my own.

Five dollars for a small olivewood bowl made in Bethlehem from locally sourced wood, ten for a carved candlestick, beautiful. One to fourteen of those bowls is $30 shipping, the fifteenth kicks it up to $40.

I am suddenly wondering who around here would go in on an order with me.

And I wonder what it must be like to get a package to the postal service there. Any arriving order would surely have its own story to tell.

One of the most important talks I have ever heard in my life. I didn’t quite know what to expect going in but came away going, wow. I want to live up to what I just felt in that room.

I’m not sure I can do it justice, but let me try.

She was born in Jerusalem but is not allowed to live there now. She is Palestinian.  She is Arab. She is Christian–and she is a Mormon. I had badly wanted to hear what she had to say, whatever it might be; how often do we get to hear firsthand the in-person experiences from that part of the world?

It was not a political talk, it was a human talk. She described a little of what it’s like to live where she does–and what it’s like to try to simply go to church. Church was too important to her not to go: church was where she held onto the Spirit of God, to help her follow the promptings of that Love beyond all human understanding. Her circumstances made it so very clear how badly that was needed in the world. “Both sides think the other is” she shook her head, “horrible. But we are *all* children of God.”

She’s the Primary president there, ie the one running the program for the little ones on up to age twelve.

There are four small congregations in Israel, and if you are Palestinian, she said there are people who live 15 minutes from one but they have to travel for two and a half, three hours to go to a much farther one, because to go to the one nearby requires going through a checkpoint and if you don’t have the paperwork that would allow it you simply can’t get there. And you might not be let through anyway. And that checkpoint would take two to three hours, always, as it is.

She told us this: “Picture someone most dear to you. Your spouse, your parent, your child. Someone you love more than anything.”

She let us consider that for a moment. And then she asked us to think of someone who had done something terrible to us, just egregious, someone we found hard to forgive. Then she asked us to picture those two people side by side and asked us, “Can you love them both equally?”

As that sank in, “God does.” And she put up a slide asking, Have you been

Sexually abused.

Seen someone killed in front of you.

Been shot at.

Had a relative tortured.

She told us, gesturing at those words, “I have.”

She told us what it’s like to be a Palestinian at a checkpoint subject to the whim of whoever was on duty at the time. She showed a picture of men lined up, heads down, hands against the wall, with an Israeli soldier armed and dangerous standing over them. They had simply been trying to go to work.

She was at that checkpoint to try to go to church. And it hit her that she could not live her religion and be angry at those soldiers; they were children of God just as much as everybody else on this planet. Love the sinners, all of them, we are all sinners, and she said it was not easy and it most certainly wasn’t instantaneous. It took a lot of prayer, constant prayer, over a long time, sometimes fasting to gain the strength she so much wanted to have.

And then the day simply, quietly, unexpectedly came. She had to go through that resented checkpoint as at so many other times. And yet. That day, she saw an Israeli soldier and found herself completely, utterly loving him as a son of our Heavenly Father, capable of such great goodness, the scene at hand utterly apart from what he truly meant to God. She saw the best in him and felt a love from God for his sake that transformed her.

And that is how she always wants to feel. It is so hard but it is so necessary not to lose sight of that.

She described the prayer of a four-year-old in that Primary: not asking for food, though Sahar knew their family did not have enough to eat, but for Him to watch over her mother.

We make peace one person and one interaction at a time. And that is no small thing.

And poof, just like that it was gone.

Merlone Geier informed Steve Rasmussen today that their shared parking agreement that would allow Milk Pail to stay in business is, sorry dude, so last week: Phase II didn’t get city approval and it was contingent on that and oh well, tough to be the guy who’s not the multibillion-dollar company with major clout, huh.

It was all just a ploy to pressure the City after the Planning Commission had come down unanimously against them–vote for this while we don’t even tell you how we’re going to make this surprise change to the plans happen. Moving the parking structure? You don’t get to know, just do what we say.

Except that.

I keep thinking of that moment in the city council chambers a week ago where their rep called Steve up to make his bombshell announcement that after two and a half years, at long last, “Milk Pail will be able to stay as it is where it is and into the foreseeable future.”

And every face on that council was stunned speechless–and each was one thrilled. Deeply, deeply gratified. Now, it may be that for some it wasn’t for Milk Pail’s sake but rather for the relief of no longer having angry, vocal voters coming after them from now till Fall.

But I think it was about much more than just elections: in that moment, they every single one of them knew if they didn’t before that this mattered to them personally and that they wanted Steve’s business and all that it represented to the community to survive. That they wanted Steve to succeed after all these times of seeing him being the kindest man in the room no matter what, living up to his ideals when it could not have been easy, never showing the least degree of anger, always assuming the best of those utterly set to take him down after all he’d given to the community for so long.

It may well be that their reaction was a surprise to a couple of them. But I saw it and it was real and I saw the relief even in the face of the younger rep from that developer to be finally doing right by that good man.

But now Merlone Geier is back to playing the bully. They know that role so well.

Five local and city newspapers that I’ve found so far from San Francisco to San Jose had trumpeted the saving of this beloved small business and written up how glad the community was.

Merlone Geier has lost. They just don’t know it yet.

A member of the Mountain View City Council finally found out an hour before the meeting last night that no, he did legally have to recuse himself no matter how much he wanted to approve the project. He lived too close to it. That may well be why our agenda item scheduled for 6:30 was finally taken up at 9:00 pm.

Right there is a reason for people who don’t yet know how to knit to learn: portable, useful, gratifying, calming, and you don’t miss a thing while listening to people drone on when they’re in power and you can only hope that they hear what the community has to say.

Stitch. Stay.

They then spent three and a half hours on the Merlone Geier project that threatened Milk Pail. Geier was hoping to get final approval at long last and hoping that that guy would be the swing vote. Didn’t happen.

I wasn’t sure my 66g of Malabrigo Rios would last and it actually wouldn’t have but that my hands gave out by midnight.

When I arrived at City Hall, there was a small rally going on in front. If this passed they had a week to gather signatures to demand it be put on the ballot to try to stop it.

I said to the man addressing the group, when he said he was new at this, that I lived in the next town over and we did exactly that and we did defeat a poorly thought out development. Not only did people gather signatures but they put a copy of the petition online so that you could print it out, sign and mail it, and we won.

One of the women had made a whole bunch of signs and when she asked me if I wanted one that said I (heart) Milk Pail, I exclaimed eagerly, Yes please!

It turns out that opposition to the project had grown to include those dismayed at adding a million square feet of work space with no housing to balance it, further skewing the jobs vs housing ratio that has driven even the most modest studio apartments to $2500 rents here.  They wanted one of the proposed offices to be homes instead to at least ease some of that pressure.

And so we went in and waited.  The chambers were beyond standing room only–there was just no place left to put any more bodies in that room without the fire marshal hustling people out. The mayor asked people to be careful not to let their signs block their neighbors’ view. We were good.

The Council went over their slides and their stats endlessly. A few drawings had changed, the ten-then-eight stories were now to be six, etc.

Finally they announced that Merlone Geier’s representative would speak, followed by Steve Rasmussen, owner of Milk Pail.

The young guy with the slicked-back hair, shiny shoes and expensive suit, his face familiar by now, got up to give Geier’s spiel, trying as always to impress. Up pops a slide: a long list of all the meetings they’ve attended with the city over this.

(Well yeah dude that’s part of your job and part of their jobs. You wouldn’t still be doing this after two and a half years if you didn’t expect to make millions off it.)

But then–at the end he turned and gestured expansively towards Steve and darn if the guy didn’t smile, I mean, really smiled Steve’s way. I realized suddenly I’d never seen him looking anything but majorly stressed before.

Steve got up. He said that Merlone Geier had been helpful (while I thought, Steve, you are the salt of the earth and the nicest guy ever but that’s not a description I thought I would ever hear, not even from a saint like you) and he went on to announce that he and they had come to an agreement on the parking.

Yes it would cover the required number of spaces for his business.

Yes it would be for a long time to come. (Having his daughters inherit his business and being able to continue there for another generation had been a huge issue to the community.)

The Council sat there as stunned as the rest of us. We all clapped. The mayor reminded us we were not allowed to clap during a hearing. Okay, let’s see how loud our faces can smile, then–but the councilmen were grinning bigtime, too.

But Steve offered no details and he sat down and they had to go on debating the project while not knowing just what changes the developer was thinking of doing to make it so what Steve had just said would be feasible. Were they talking about relocating the proposed parking structure? Just rededicating some of the spots still a good hike away? Nobody seemed to ask, or if they did I sure missed it.

The planning commission days earlier had unanimously voted the project down, a complete turnaround on their part, pending the completion of the Concise Plan for the overall area. Etc.  I’m thinking surely all the public pressure in support of Milk Pail played into that.

Two hours later…

One Councilman finally asked the crowd, which at midnight was down by half and everybody could actually sit down in the seats now, how many people wanted this continued rather than put to an immediate vote. Nearly every hand went up.  And he asked Steve what everyone had been dying to know: what were the specifics of this new agreement?

Steve clearly didn’t want to endanger this shaky new truce but he tried his best. It was contingent on this Phase II being approved.

In the end, the vote: item delayed till this date.

So maybe Steve has an agreement and maybe he doesn’t now.

We poured out of the chambers at long last.

In the second picture is Jac Siegel, the one Councilman who after all this I’d vote for if I lived there. Really knows his city and a decent human being.

The senior Merlone Geier representative shook Steve’s hand, and then as he continued on by I said to the guy, with a warm smile in gratitude at their change of heart (however it happened, I’ll take it), “Take good care of him,” (motioning at Steve, now talking to another supporter.) “He means a lot to us.”

The guy went from approaching me, looking at me, to abruptly turning away and avoiding all eye contact as if I suddenly didn’t exist.

It hit me that maybe he was wondering if anyone in *his* business world would say words of support like that about him in such personal terms–maybe that’s not fair of me, but his sudden stricken change of demeanor was memorable. My heart went out to him, not that he would know that.

Steve loved my sign. I told him I really couldn’t take credit for it. The woman who had given it to me had gone home, though, so when I knew he wanted it, absolutely, I’d be honored.

He sent me a short note today thanking me for coming and saying that sign was in his kitchen now.

I took great comfort in that.

City Council meeting till 12:30 am. More tomorrow.

Calvinball is from Calvin and Hobbes, where the one who holds the ball makes up the rules and changes them constantly to keep their personal advantage going.

I’m going to go political today, sorry, and I know not all will agree with me and if you don’t, thank you for putting up with me anyway.

Okay. That Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision? Ruth Bader Ginsberg had some very relevant points to make on the dissenting side.

It looks to me like they established religion of one group of people over another. Hobby Lobby was not a household; they are a large for-profit corporation that invested their 401Ks in the companies manufacturing the very products they denied their employees and they sell goods made by cheap labor in a country with forced sterilizations and abortions, so the hypocrisy is strong in this one.

Here’s John Oliver the day before the case came down, anticipating how it was going to go. He gives credit to Hobby Lobby’s good deeds where they have rightfully earned it and then, in the stand-up comedian style he’s so good at, he tells it to them straight on the rest.

The question I have is, do job applicants now have a right to ask a prospective employer what their religion is? Because it is suddenly very relevant, while the employer sure can’t legally ask the applicant theirs.

Ginsberg brings up Jehovah’s Witnesses and blood transfusions, but they reject more than blood.

On the practical side, if you allow an employer to opt out of providing medical coverage for various cherry-picked items because of the employer’s religion, you have to deal with the outcome that will inevitably happen that someone someday will be in the hospital on TPN, IV feeding for the very ill like I went through five years ago with the infusion alone costing $2000 per day hospital care aside–and as this case stands, their employer in the name of their religion can stick their supposedly insured employee with that whole bill. Because, you know, the employee’s going to hell for messing with their veins but the employer doesn’t want to be dragged down there with them.

Even though the employee paid their premiums. Which were part of their compensation package. And even though this was not an individual denying them, it’s a corporation, ie a fictitious legal entity created specifically to put a buffer between an individual and the company they own.

Apply this scenario to any chemo infusion drug, too, and you see how widespread a problem we suddenly have here just to start.

Corporations are not real people.  This has not been a controversial statement for 200 years and it shouldn’t be now.

Scalia on his more outrageous cases like this claims that the ruling applies only to this one thing right here, but that is never true at the lower court level. Precedent sets precedents and other courts honor and uphold the Supreme Court, apparently more than Scalia does.

That IV case or something very like it is going to happen. They have set themselves up to be overturned.

We can only pray we have a different membership on the Court by then, and soon.

Just for fun: my cousin Dan, a math teacher, got his puzzle published in the New York Times.

While I marvel at the political puzzle of the day, political junkie that I am. Eric Cantor, the man so close and so desperate to be Speaker of the US House, down in flames, defeated in Virginia’s primary today by an unknown with almost no funding.

One commenter on the Washington Post explained his vote between the two Tea Partiers: his neighbor recently stepped into a local shop and did a doubletake and exclaimed, It’s Eric Cantor! (Surely expecting a handshake, because that’s what politicians do on being recognized by their constituents, right?)

“That’s *Congressman* Cantor.”

Interesting times.

If you’ve got a primary still coming up or a runoff, vote! Eighty-six percent in Virginia did not, and by staying home today they made history. And elected a Brat, perhaps this time in name only. (Edited to add, or maybe they painted themselves a Rep. Brat who’ll become an old master at the fine art of politicking.)

We were going over elections materials together in anticipation of voting Tuesday. He rolls his eyes at one or two of mine, I roll my eyes at one or two of his and we both fervently wish Jerry Brown, who’s going to win anyway, would drop the crazy-talk high-speed train that will do nothing but broadside a few stray cattle. Oh, and they hope to run it across the designated bike paths to about a dozen schools in our city about $99 billion from now.

But that judge who, in court, asked a criminal defendant for his phone number and a date?  Who assessed a $40,000 fine on a construction laborer for letting his worker’s comp insurance lapse? Whom the local bar association declared unfit? Out out out.

Amidst the prose and the impossible be-all-things-to-all-voters attempts, now that California has no gerrymandering and open primaries (YES!!!), the state Voter’s Guide shared the official statement of one Republican: “Most qualified for Controller.” The end.

Well, THAT settles it! Of course! Who else could we possibly have imagined?

Muttering puns about controllerfreaks…

VOTE!

A modest proposal ahead:

We as a society provide childhood vaccinations to rich and poor alike, without charge when need be for the good of everyone simply because it’s the right thing to do. Our grandparents suffered greatly but by the grace of God, our children don’t need to.

The old DPT shot is now the DTaP: diptheria, tetanus and acellular rather than whole-virus pertussis, just as effective but with no side effects, whereas the pertussis part was the biggest source of fevers and aches in the old version.

I chose to be a part of that change. My son was a newborn at Stanford when a researcher came to my bedside and told me that two million Japanese two-year-olds had been given a new DTaP vaccine with not. one. single. case. of reaction, and they hoped to be able to replace the old DPT entirely with this improved version that was so much easier on the children but that still clearly worked. It might require an extra booster later; they did not know yet. She offered me access to any information I might want about her team’s work.

But to be able to get that version in the US at any age would require finding parents willing to have their babies given this shot while it was still in study, Level III, if I remember right. It had not been given to anyone younger than those two-year-0lds. She explained the level of monitoring they would do and the care they would take to make sure my baby was okay and they would immediately discontinue it across the board if any problems surfaced whatsoever among the infants.

Of which there would be none. And so the FDA would later approve it and it would become the standard.

My oldest is allergic to the old DPT and, having reacted, cannot be fully immunized even with the new shot for all the wishing in the world.

So there was that, and, I pictured possibly millions of people spared a long night awake with a crying, unhappy baby in pain–my husband and I signed those papers. Which is why our youngest is part of why your children and my grandchildren have a safer, easier version of their shots now. There’s definitely an amount of pride in that.

Some don’t want vaccines for their kids. They haven’t seen their baby struggling for breath from pertussis or deaf from measles or paralyzed by tetanus so they don’t believe it could ever happen, and they put every immunocompromised person at risk too and don’t see it and don’t think it matters. They don’t know or they don’t want to know that the man who started the anti-vaccination fad had, by very many accounts, a huge financial stake in doing so.

I have an elegant, simple solution. A conservative solution, even.

Pass a law.  Aim it at any parent whose child does not have a valid medical reason and yet who knowingly outright refuses to immunize their child with the DTaP and MMR shots–the basic childhood shots, I’m not talking about Gardasil–any parent who cannot empathize with nor want to protect their own child from the harm these diseases could do to them, well, okay then, that’s their choice, even if I would want to argue with them that my real-world worst-case scenario, that their child dies, beats their imagined worst-case scenario, that their child becomes autistic.

But they should then be on the hook financially for the outcome of that choice. Hospitalizations, medications, therapies, hearing aids, doctors, nursing care, we can’t make them not risk their children’s suffering life-threatening or simply life-crummying illnesses but we can choose not to take the burden off those parents of the financial costs they expect to impose across the rest of us for it. Society already offered, they refused, they need to own it.

All we have to do to make this happen is to say that the insurance companies are, as of some date in the near future, not required to cover any costs incurred by a child’s illness of these specific and preventable types if this is why they were left susceptible and got sick.

The insurance companies will quite gleefully do the rest.

(Edited 5/18 to add: No, I certainly don’t think children should go without medical care. I do think we must speak out more about the costs, of every kind, of this terrible fad. See my comment below about friends of mine who dealt with a major medical debt and how it got worked out; another thought might be to, rather than withhold all coverage, impose a huge co-pay with, if needed, long payoff terms.)

Interviewer: so what is your take on global warming?

Guest: Well, in the San Francisco area, the fog is traditionally supposed to come in on *little* cat feet, but…

CUT!

A mountain lion was spotted trotting through the park yesterday and down a congested street in a highly populated area.

Details are a little squirrelly, but note that it came within a few blocks of where President Obama will be speaking Friday. Peace officers were watching it like a hawk but deemed its actions not a capital crime. Was it flushed out by Secret Service members trolling for cougars during advance staging? Some may find it hard to stomach that the animal may be in Limbaugh at the moment (there’s certainly no lion under oaf) but plans seem to be to release it in the Santa Cruz mountains, because, hey, that’s where commie pinkos Neil Young and Joan Baez both live, right? (Unseen from off camera: Now, now, let’s make a Concerted effort to Bridge over our differences. Yes? Gracias a la vida!)

Announcer, continuing: Cat’ll Rove pounced on the story. Next on Coyote News, where the only legitimate predator is our species, not theirs. Top of the food-fighting yank-your-chain and bringing you the latest.

All that lion knows is it’s going to wake up in some other cat’s territory and there will be a whelp of a lot of explaining to do.

(But seriously, to our relatives in Los Gatos, which means, yes, The Cats, and everybody else up there–keep an eye out and stay safe, y’all.)

I thought I was going to blog about picking the first two, so perfect blueberries of the season today. Instead I’m going to go political on you for a moment–but wait: there’s something for both sides.

Here is the interview from a year ago with the lead researcher from back in the ’90’s before the funding for what he was doing at the Centers for Disease Control got outlawed by Congress. He spoke with the reporter while it looked, ever so briefly, that his work might finally be a go again.

And here is the interview with the professor of emergency room medicine, a doctor who sees the results of our gun culture on the daily job, who had been one of those CDC researchers into the effects of guns on the American public’s health.

When his funding got cut off, rather than folding up shop, he used his inheritance and his doctor’s salary and by living simply he had the means to keep his team of four going. It was too important not to.  He won’t accept donations from anyone with a side in the argument: not the Brady folks, not the NRA people, not Michael Bloomberg, nada (the State of California, though, yes.) It’s too important to him to be able to offer up the findings in a way that nobody can claim is tainted.

You could take someone with a string of misdemeanors and he’ll keep committing nonviolent misdemeanors. But if he buys a gun, the chance that he will commit a crime of violence escalates.

Okay, that didn’t surprise me.

Closing the gunshow loophole would have not much effect.

Okay, that quite surprised me.

There are very strong emotions on the whole subject of gun control.  We desperately need an even-keeled voice offering a tallying of what is done–or not done–with the guns that are bought, stolen, or used however and in whatever circumstances. We think we know.  Perhaps, though, not so much.

This man’s whole life is about giving us the information we need to have rational discussions on the subject and as we plan for the future. I’ve never been quite so glad that someone had a nice inheritance. He is multiplying its value three hundred thirteen million times over.

Thank you, Drs. Amy Reed and Hooman Noorchasm. You did it! The FDA has now officially declared morcellation of fibroids a dangerous procedure that should not be performed. http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm393689.htm.

And here’s the New York Times article (blog glitch still won’t let me link, sorry.) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/health/fda-tells-doctors-to-stop-procedure-used-to-remove-uterine-fibroids.html?hp&_r=0

Well done. And I was so relieved to read that the radical multi-organ surgery, as hard as it surely was and is, that was done on Dr. Reed gives her so much greater a chance of seeing her kids grow up. Wishing them all my best.

Thank you, everybody, I appreciate it; today was a relief after yesterday. I was pretty discouraged there.

Interesting political theater, meantime: watching Congresspeople before the State of the Union address.

One guy, clearly aware there was a camera pointed their way, was smiling quite jovially as Ted Cruz talked to him. Cruz, even seen mostly from the back, clearly was getting more and more intense, jabbing a finger hard in the air, lecturing, the camera lingering to capture the moment while the other guy (dunno who he was) was being easygoing in response.

John McCain was just in front of the two of them and smiling in bemusement at the harangue going on behind him and lifting but not quiiiite entirely rolling his eyes but oh so close as to call it. Then they all sat down for the address and as the camera panned back their way my impression that that had to have been Cruz was confirmed.

I didn’t knit as the President spoke because I was at that indecisive what-to-start-next stage and besides, I didn’t want to miss a word. This was the proverbial and actual Leader of the Free World and I wanted to hear what he had to say.

President Obama laid out the challenges before us, invited Congress to help him meet those challenges and then, acknowledging reality, laid out what he personally was going to do to move us forward. He basically asked them to work together, take the credit for it and run with it.

When my uncle was a freshman in the Senate, there was no one law and in many states, anybody–anybody–could access your medical records for the asking *except you*.  You were legally barred. My uncle’s proposal was for a Federal law saying that other than in specific psychiatric cases where there is clear cause to shield the record, all patients should be allowed to access their own and others would need to meet a standard to do so.

The members of his party were quite upset. This would be a Federal law on something the states should regulate. States’ rights!

Uncle Bob responded by saying Senator (I don’t remember who but a ranking Democrat) is against it.

Oh well in THAT case! And his fellow Republicans rallied behind it.

Then-President Clinton ran with it and took credit for it when he signed it and that’s fine, presidents always do get the blame and the credit, the point was to get it done. Probably nobody outside the family associates my uncle’s name with that law. He doesn’t mind a bit. It needed to happen.

Given today’s political realities, I think any member of Congress willing to buck the trend of intransigence and (just) do their (bleeping) jobs would get quite a bit of personal and political credit from a grateful country.

(I started a Malabrigo Mecha hat during the rebuttals. An easy decision.)

According to the Washington Post, the drug companies average a 19.9% return on revenue, and the problem isn’t the strength of the insurers (who make 2.2%), it’s that they’re weak: they can’t band together to negotiate lower prices. So.

Another year, another first time in January at the pharmacy. Same guy. He’s the manager now.

He looked at me with a wry smile after entering my insurance info and the amount rang up. “You want to know what it’s going to be this time?”

“Like last year when we met the year’s deductible in one day here?”

He handed me the slip and let me see for myself. Not quite three thousand. Fun times. Having no choice, I handed him my credit card.

The grocery clerk noted my I Voted sticker and proudly pointed out his own.

Eighteen out of 32 precincts reporting, Measure D is going steadily down, now at 56-44% despite opponents having been outspent 10-1. I should hold off on the victory party for the moment, but I like those early results. Maybe the developers won’t get to rewrite all of the zoning ordinances in town after all.

And in Texas, re the new voter ID law that was pushed hard by the tea-party state attorney general: it is deliciously ironic that Greg Abbott on the voting rolls found himself face-to-face with the reality of Gregory Wayne Abbott on his driver’s license. Not a match. Bounce. He had to sign an affidavit saying he really was him and then jump through all the hoops he’d helped put in other rightful voters’ way.  Karma, up close and personal.

Update: all precincts in, 43.89% vs 56.11%. WE WON!!! Time to break out the chocolate and dance!

Hope all your election results are a fine, fine thing in the morning.