BUT, WHICH TEAM IS HE PLAYING FOR?

during this week i have been:  Alexander Hamilton, from the Which Founding Father Are You? quiz via John Scalzi;  Albert Einstein, from Cheese Louise's What Famous Leader Are You? and Simone de Beauvoir, from Which Western Feminist Icon Are You?  quite a group.  i feel vicariously pretty smart and famous.  and dead.  what's with all these silly quizzes?  is there one that asks  Which Infamous Historical Scoundrel and Blackguard are you?  probably.  anyway, this morning i am my silly old self, off to my saturday  class, which was mercifully changed from starting at 8 am to 9 am.  i was able to just rest and drink tea all yesterday, so i feel marginally better. 

i probably won't be online much until next week, so i'm leaving you this totem for sunday's game.  we live in a great country, don't we?  free enterprise can bring us the most amazing things, n'est-ce pas ?  don't get all outraged or indignant here at ME.  this is Bobblehead Football Jesus, which you can find, AND buy ($14.95), right here.  should this not satisfy your Bobblehead Jesus needs you can also get a Giant Life-Size Jesus Bobblehead, weighing in at 300 lbs and costing a mere $2750.  check it out.  life is good.  (Coming soon Hockey Jesus!!)

Calling All Tree-Huggers, Damn Hippie Liberals

i've said this several times before in this journal, and i have the feeling i'm going to say it several more.  for me, the environment is the single biggest issue in this election.  if we terminally f-up this planet, none of the rest of it matters: economy, civil rights, immigration, war and peace, supreme court justices, et al.  or, as Mark Morford puts it..."if there is any better time in American history to proudly announce yourself as an environmentalist, this is it.  It really doesn't matter where you stand on other issues.  Because when that beautiful bitch Mother Nature really begins to strike back, nothing else will matter." 

and so, the fact that the energy bill is being brought back into play for yet another vote very very soon is something we need to think about.  do something about. i received an email from the Natural Resources Defense Council group Biogem Savers today that i have sent on to many people in my address book.  it asks us to take a relatively simple action, by which they will send a letter or fax to the senators from our state, over our signature.  it's a request not to vote for this evil bill.  it failed to pass by a miniscule margin before the recess.  you know the oil/gas/coal/etc industries are going to be wooing congress to get a few votes to change.  we need to speak louder than these industries, for the sake of our children, ours and all other species, the planet itself. please stop by here and send your letters.  your grandchildren won't have to pay off the deficit after all, or do much of anything else,  if there isn't any air to breathe, or water to drink, or food left unpoisoned.  

and maybe that's what all this new enthusiasm for heading out to the moon and mars is all about.  we've trashed this planet, time to move to the next one.
(the picture with this entry isof the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.)

whine. snivel. gaack. pule. snuurrrpp.  oh, excuse me, hello!  don't mind me.  i have turned into the snot monster from hell.  and that's probably more than you wanted me to share with you, yes?  halfway through class last night my voice completely left me, between one utterance and the next....nada.  gone. this is one serious drag, on a par with, and probably related to, the weather.  what a frigid mean-assed cold windy frozen day we have here.  classes were delayed two hours again this morning, but i schlumped in for my 10:30 group, then came home to drink huge glasses of juice. yes, tedious subjects, weather and health, or loss of it.  i just need a little intensive ranting here and i promise i won't speak of the cold, the wind, the snot, nyquil, dayquil, or ice, ever again.  dayquil.  what a strange concept.  but it works, which is even scarier.  for exactly four hours, and then....BLAM, it wears off and i metamorphose back into...well, you know.  that monster. 

so it's Kerry ahead by a head, huh?  if he's the candidate i'll get behind him all the way.  but it's early days, kids, early days.  when we lived in MA and he was our senator we used to hope he'd be a presidential candidate eventually.  he was a good senator.  and his environmental record is outstanding. but, about this war, John.....????

here's something:  there are two sets (that i know of, anyway) of internet blog awards going on.  the 2003 Koufax Awards are for liberal/progressive blogs, with one for right-wingers just for noblesse oblige, in various categories.  the other, the 2004 Bloggies, is for every kind of blog you can imagine, some you maybe can't.  even if you get overwhelmed (i did) and give up on voting, you will find a lot of interesting new places to visit in these lists.

so, here we are.  waitin' for the train.  that is to say, the New Hampshire train.  i have never felt so much like a bird on a wire over primaries.  well, i have never felt that an election mattered so much.  a week to go until our primary here in Delaware.  and i'm still not sure who i will vote for.  not that Delaware's votes will have that big an influence on anything.  still, it's my vote, and that counts.  Progressive Musings has the antidote for anxiety here, in this link. i laughed til i choked.  (if you can't get this link to work from my journal, go here, to fdtate and try it.  i don't know why it works on his journal, and doesn't seem to on mine.)

the college had a 2 hour delay this morning, which effectively wiped out my only Tues morning class.  so i get another morning off.  i will have a class tonight, and i doubt it will be cancelled, unless the temperature drops and the roads freeze up. since i have a viscious cold i may not keep them the full four hours.  i'm beyond wretched.  just came back from taking the dog for his second constitutional (G took him for his first).  that was no fun at all.  something small and frozen is falling from the sky, and there's a biting wind.  Honey (dog) didn't like it either. cranking and whining.  you know how it is when a cold takes over your entire being, body and soul.  think i'm gonna go turn on the TV and see what the Talking Heads have to report from NH so far.  snort, sniffle, hack, phlllfff.

i've been up off and on through most of the night, checking on the snow.  at 5:30 i called the college and got the inclement weather message:  all classes, day and evening, cancelled.  a plow came by on the main road in front of the house soon after that, and i have seen a car or two come by since then.  people in the upper midwest or new england would die laughing at how people down here panic at a little snow.  there may be four inches out there, and everything shuts down. it is supposed to become freezing rain about now, however, and that will be much more dangerous.  mainly because people don't know how to drive on icy roads. i'm mostly glad the p.m. classes are cancelled; last winter one of my p.m. students had a bad accident on black ice on his way home from class, totalled his car.  i felt somehow responsible, even though i'd let them out early because of the ice.

so here is our message from mother nature:  stay home, drink tea,  make lentil soup,  watch the birds at the feeders.  i filled them all yesterday afternoon, put the heater back in the birdbath, put suet in the baskets.  there's a grey squirrel who is managing to get most of the suet blocks, no matter how far out of reach i think i put them.  he, or perhaps she, can hang on to a branch by one toenail and grab pieces off the block with front paws, munch away. in my secret heart i have to admire this determination. 

it will be light pretty soon, i'll be able to see how much snow there actually is out there.  it looks like enough to go x-country.  if only we still had skis.  i think G has a set in the garage; i sold mine before we left massachusetts.  the boots had about disintegrated and we didn't know where we would end up settling after the time in the motor home. (which is a long story from our life that i might just try to tell here someday.)  and seven years later i still don't have new skis.  there's a beautiful place nearby, Redden State Forest, that would be heaven to spend the day on skis.  we walked there with the dog after a big snow last winter, breaking tracks in the snow, the first and only humans in the big woods. 

LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW, MAYBE

i'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but....it's cold. it's really so friggin' cold.  we're waiting to see if the promised (threatened?) winter storm actually arrives this evening.  it was supposed to start this afternoon, now they're saying tonight.  snow, with sleet and freezing rain.  through the night and into the day tomorrow.  it's always a temptation to root for school cancellation, a snow day at home: hot chocolate, watching the birds at the feeders, curling up in front of the fireplace reading. but with sleet and freezing rain there's the possibility of tree icing, broken power lines, curling up in front of the fireplace in order to try to cook over the fire, by flashlight.  not so much fun. 

the worst ice storms i've experienced have been in Texas.  they are winter's worst gift to the Lone Star State.  we had one in Dripping Springs, a Hill Country town west of Austin, about 8 years ago.  we were staying out in the real boondocks, steep rocky dirt road to the house, miles from stores and other people.  the storm knocked out power and phone lines for close to a week, and the weather stayed cooold.  we huddled in blankets, tried to cook over the cedar log fire in the big stone fireplace, cursed our foolish plan to spend the winter in the country.  the devastation to trees all over the Hill Country was awesome, in the true sense of the word.  snow seems benevolent by comparison.  though a late winter/early spring heavy wet snow can do the same kind of damage. 

and, given the accuracy percentages for weather forecasts, we may just get some flurries.  we're going to hope for the best for the afternoon and go stock up on pet supplies, bird seed, and take in a movie.  it's between Big Fish and House of Sand and Fog.  after all my dithering about it (Sand and Fog) in The Biblio Philes i think i will see it after all.  last weekend we saw Calendar Girls, because we are Ladies Of A Certain Age ourselves and could identify.  if you're young and firm and fit i don't know that you'll feel the same way.  it was funny and poignantly moving at the same time.  but then, i'm a serious Helen Mirren fan.

it's snowing like crazy here, and i had to get up in the freezing dawn to go to the weekend class i'm taking.  it's an Educational Technology Certificate course, i'm working on the first level.  today's class was Computers for Morons, and we had covered the objectives by 11 a.m.  so we fooled around with various tech toys for a while after that and called it a day.  hallelujah.  this will go on through April, the classes for the first level certificate.  two saturdays a month.  from here on i will be learning something, as everything i know is selftaught and i think we came close to reaching my limit today in Computers for Morons.

so now i'm home, G is making a whatever's-leftover-in-the-fridge pasta for our lunch, the snow is lovely, i have a good book to read.  life is good.  except for my dilemma of only having a little over a week to decide who to vote for in the primary.  David Corn has a good column today about Our Boys in NH, how they're looking and sounding, the various flavors of Populist, and then there's Joe Lieberman.  interestingly, he reminds me that Paul Tsongas won NH in 1992.  we all know how far that got him.