Excuse me if this doesn’t make any sense, I’m a bit endorphin high. I just got finished mowing the front lawn – with an electric push-mower.
The lawn has been a battle. We discontinued last year’s lawn service because they were doing things that we asked them not to do, resulting in large dirt patches in our lawn. So this year, with no service, our lawn has been growing uncontrolled, much to the chagrin of our mower-loving neighbors.
The riding mower that came with our house has a dead battery from the kids leaving the headlights on (why does the mower have these?) so I tried for a good bit this afternoon to get that working again, to no avail. And in the end, I bought a new corded electric push-mower from Home Depot. It’s corded, because the battery on the last one went kaput. Speaking of going crazy while mowing the lawn, Bill Clinton called me today. Don’t believe me?
Bill!Operatives from the two democratic candidates have been going nuts calling me over the past few days, trying to get me to come out for whatever rally they have planned. More accurately, their recorded messages have been talking to me, when they’re really calling for Berta. As I’ve said on many occasions, I’m not a registered Democrat. Anyway, we got interesting recorded messages from Obama himself, Hillary Clinton herself, Governer Rendell (supporting Clinton), and Bill Clinton (supporting his wife, I guess), along with the sultry tones of maybe some intern on the campaign trail.
What interests me about this whole calling thing is trying to imagine how many people they’re contacting will actually show up at the rallies, versus how many people will go vote. My thought is that if rather than inviting people to go to some pointless love-fest for the candidate they were likely to vote for anyway, they used those 30 seconds to pitch their actual issues, then they might get people who are otherwise disinclined to vote to do so. I dunno. Calling me the day before to get me to show up at a steelworker’s “local” to rally behind a candidate certainly doesn’t leave me raring for a candidate.
I heard a good opinion piece on KYW today about this whole lapel flag pin thing today, about how not wearing your Phillies hat when you’re not at the ballpark makes you any less of a fan. It does make me angry that they’re wasting the debate talking about tabloid crap, just slightly madder than I get when they talk about the same old drivel.
I’ll put it this way: I don’t care about Iraq. I mean, I don’t care when they’re going to get the troops out. I mean, I care about the troops, but frankly, they’re there, and they’re doing a job, and no, we shouldn’t be footing Iraq’s bill for their freedom, but nobody else is gonna do it, and I’m just tired - tired of hearing about it. Let’s just do it right and be done. Or bring them home right now and say “oh well” - I just don’t care. But while we’re doing either of those things, let’s fix things at home so that when the troops do come back, they’ll think that they were defending an idea that was worth it. Because right now, I’m not sure it is.
I’m tired of being scanned. I’m tired of losing my privacy. I don’t care if it wasn’t something to which I was entitled, it should have been. I’m sick of paying money into social security and knowing that I’m going to get nothing out of it. I’m mad that politicians running for office are spending more time fighting with each other (even in their own party!) than explaining what they’re going to do to get us out of this depression. Yeah, it’s caused a lot by oil prices, but that’s just a part of it, and applying remedies to that alone isn’t going to restore the strength of the dollar.
After all of the extra taxes I sent in last week, I’m wondering what the heck they’re doing with it all. Flushing it all down to chase after last year’s. Bah.
So I ordered an Amazon Kindle yesterday, since they came back in stock. It should arrive on Tuesday.
If you don’t know, the Kindle is a device that holds digital copies of books and magazines and displays them for you to read. The technology is different from LCDs, since LCDs require constant power to keep the image on screen. The Kindle uses e-paper technology that lets it use very little power to set the image, which remains mostly static. The result is a screen that isn’t geared for animation, but is well-suited for reading books and long-lasting batteries.
My goal is to try to use the Kindle as a replacement for my large library of D&D books. I’ve read so far that they don’t translate very well, but I doubt that the people who tried it had access to the source files I do. I have a few well-assembled text files that will likely do better than PDF-versions of the same books. I don’t really need fancy pictures with my D&D reference materials. But if I got so inclined, I might make some monster manual translations to Kindle for myself that include halftoned photos.
I hope that I can get the same style source files for 4th Edition. I’ve got my books on order already! No Kindle version. Boo.
