Another Year living in Amerongen's Neighborhood
As has become our habit, we start the year with two Ballard Street offerings that seemed particularly apt during the year. The captions have been modified slightly. If your paper doesn't offer this —the Austin American-Statesman dropped it for some reason — you can read it at http://www.gocomics.com/ballardstreet/. Meanwhile, the photo shows what we look like in real life, with Claire included for effect. Despite passing the most powerful birthday in our lives — 26 is the only time your birthday is a sixth power — we are still in good health and enjoying life.
Politics
As you may have guessed, this was a big year for us politically. Long before it was fashionable, we put a Texans for Obama sticker on the back of both Priuses. Jim can be seen wearing a button in the photo at left from April.
Jim did his civic duty by serving as Precinct Judge for the elections. The primary election was mass chaos. We had three times the normal number of voters, and 80% of them voted in the Democratic Party primary. Our precinct, on a good day, is 50-50 Democratic-Republican. Acutally, we usually have about 5% Libertarians thrown in. After the primary voting, we had caucuses. You probably heard about the “Texas Two-Step,” derided as the most complicate delegation selection process in the country. That night, we had about 300 people show up. Typically, we have 10-12. At least we were prepared with enough paper for signup sheets. Many precincts weren't so prepared and resorted to taking paper from the restrooms!
That was only the start of the fun. After that, those of us lucky enough to be selected to attend the County Convention, got a second dose, when again we had far more people than usual. Traffic getting into the site was bad enough, but we were early enough to get a parking spot at least. Then we stood in the wrong line for 30 minutes before finding out that we had to go around to the other side of the building. Fortunately, we managed to vote on delegates to the State convention and leave in time for dinner.
Then there was the State Convention. This was the fourth time one of us has been a delegate, but the only time it really counted for anything. Despite what you may have heard, delegates to the national convention are selected by the people who show up at the state convention, so we really had a Texas Four-Step. Voting was strictly along candidate lines, and in our little slice of the world, 2/3 of the delegates preferred Obama. That should have made things easy, but no. Jim staggered home in time to fall into bed at 4:45 the next morning. He took some photos of the crowd to show what the scene looked like. One is shown at the left.
More Politics, sort of
Linda's cousin, Leslie Fuller, had a job with the Obama campaign canvassing potential voters in New Hampshire. Despite spending six years working for Data General, and traveling to Massachusetts many times, Jim had never seen the fall colors New England is famous for. So, we took advantage of the opportunity for a visit. Leslie was living in a borrowed house two miles down a country road from, Nelson, a typical New Hampshire town consisting of a Church, Post Office, and in this case, a Library. We were lucky and had fabulous weather and amazing colors. We don't get much in the way of fall colors in Austin, so it was quite a treat. Here are some photos from the visit.
Cindy Garcia, shown on the left, was a great help taking care of Lil this past year. She and Lil managed some trips to the Mall for some shopping and lunch in the food court. We took this photo as they were preparing to leave. Cindy was about the only person who could coax/cajole Lil into doing anything.
We have some new comensals. Our niece, Panika and her dog Nina are here on an extended visit. In addition, Panika returned from the Kerrville Folk Festival with two kittens, which she assured us would soon be living in a happy home. Turns out that the happy home is ours. The kittens, Cash and Cary, are now cats, and likely to be around for some time. Cash, a female, is Jim's new favorite. SkinMin, her nose totally out of joint, seldom associates with us any longer.