Rain, Heavy at Times, and Very Windy

Tick-tock. Six days until I blow this rain-drenched hell hole for (hopefully) sunnier climes. It's been very Octoberish of late - rain, rain, and more rain. And late tonight and tomorrow throw-in sixty mph winds for good measure. The forecast for this weekend now includes mixed rain and snow... And it's so g.d. dark!

Yesterday, we did have a sucker hole in the morning that allowed me to spend an hour or so in the elder's backyard pouring five gallon jugs of stove oil into the folks oil tank and chop a little wood. I also cleaned the chimney and put a clean cap on the stack. I went to the regional elections office and voted and got ballots for the folks to vote absentee - all the Lindstrom ballots are now signed, sealed, and delivered. And as a bonus, I hauled the elders to the doc so we could all get flu shots. Whew!

The poltical scene remains tense - two weeks to go to election day. The McCain/Palin folks continue to struggle although some polls show a slight up-tick in the G.O.P. numbers. Over the past week Mr. Obama's resume - according to the McCain folks - has greatly expanded. Today we are told that he not only pals around with terrorists; but apparently is also a terrorist himself as well as being a Muslim, a socialist, and now a communist. I thought communists had gone extinct - like the passenger pigeon or woolly mammoth. But wait! This just in from Fox News. Obama is actually Satan himself! Well, that explains everything...

Meanwhile back in D.C. closing arguments are underway in the Uncle Ted corruption trial. All the coverage seems to suggest it will be a close-call. The prosecution was pretty damn sloppy on a number of matters. Still, I am hopeful that justice will prevail. I cannot imagine a non-Alaskan jury getting a rancid whiff of Uncle's arrogance and sense of entitlement and NOT voting for conviction. In the real world a quarter of a million bucks of free goods and services (give or take) is not something that one fails to notice... And honorable people pay for these goods and services.

I have not seen any recent Alaska polling; but remain hopeful that both Uncle and Don Young will be shown the door on November 4th. Both the Democratic Senatorial and Congressional Campaign Committees are pouring a ton of dough into the race - although this could, of course, backfire. I just looked on a couple of websites and it appears that the consensus is that Berkowitz is up about 9 points on Young and the Begich/Stevens race is a toss-up.

My colonial era reading program continues. I just finished "Founding Mothers" by Cokie Roberts. It was very good. The wives and daughters of the "founding fathers" and other luminaries of the era were a plucky bunch.

What really struck me (as it did in several of the other books I have read) is how tenuous life itself was in that era - both sexes subject to untimely demise from diseases that we have long-since vanquished - smallpox, whooping cough, and yellow fever - to name just a few. And of course every woman of child-bearing age could expect to be pregnant every 18 months or so with a signficant likelihood that mother, child, or both would not survive the blessed event. The average number of children born to a woman was five (it would no doubt have been considerably higher had the mortality of mothers not been so great). Lucy Knox, the wife of the first Secretary of War, Henry Knox, had 13 children - only three of whom survived into adulthood.

I will try to post the final installment on my Legislative Finance years before I go on holiday. I have been frustrated by my scanner - when I scan items other than photographs it saves them in a format I cannot upload to my blog. It occurred to me this morning, however, that I should be able to copy them from one format and paste into another in Photoshop. This will be a somewhat laborious process and I may or may not get it done before I leave.

For the moment, I leave you with the the following from our third President, Mr. Thomas Jefferson:

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical... Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions of physics or geometry...

The opinions of men are not the subject of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction... Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself... She is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted to freely contradict them."