After a week with temperatures in the mid eighties, somebody flipped a switch Friday afternoon and suddenly fall is here. It was a somewhat muggy 70 degrees or so as I waited for the bus at 7:00 Friday morning, and by the time I sat waiting for the bus to take me home at four o’clock, it was a rather chilly and damp 61. Between the relative cold and it being Friday, the bus, of course, was about 25 minutes late. Plus I (as usual) attracted the attention of one of the local street people, who decided to hang out at the picnic table with me. Which is fine, of course (theses are my peeps, after all), but he had a rather disconcerting tic that was kind of distracting. Plus he was shading my view of the bus arrivals.

Normally Friday and the weekend would give me something to look forward to, but as I’m once again on the wagon (no beer in over two weeks – not that I’m counting), basically my life is empty. It’s kind of like my best friend died or something. Where once I could look forward to hanging out with my good buddy Beer, sharing a laugh or two after work, now I got nothing. So I basically just go to bed as soon as possible (which is easier now that it gets dark so early). Since I get up before 4:00 these days, I guess that’s just as well.

On a side note – and I guess this is a rhetorical question, but… – does anybody really a give a shit whether Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are getting a divorce? I wish they’d spend this much energy on climate change or cops shooting black people. Those insipid celebrity “entertainment” programs are advertising that they’ll be telling us how the pair spent their “first weekend since the split was announced,” and another promises to tell us who the famous couple are “turning to” in their time of need. Oh for chrissakes.

So now the weekend’s over, and tonight’s the big night. The “Super Bowl” of debates, as one moron just referred to it on the news. Clinton fans think that Hillary will “mop the floor” with Donald, but I think that’s pretty naive. I mean, no matter how well you (or I) feel about Hillary’s performance or how obviously clear it is that she’s way more qualified and intelligent than Herr Drumpg id, the expectations for Trump are so low that all he needs to do to “win” is not fling is feces at the audience (otherwise, it’s a draw). He’ll make shit up (which may or may not get corrected during the post-game show, after everybody turns off their teevees) while looking “presidential,” and the “liberal” media will spin every Clinton misstep as criminal offense while the right wing nut jobs will call for her execution.

I don’t care how prepared and in command of the facts Hillary is, she can’t win. It’s the equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight. Or maybe bringing a brain to a food fight.

Needless to say, I have no intention of watching the festivities. For one thing, it doesn’t start until 9:00 and even with beer I’d barely make it long enough to see the start of it – no way I’d be around at 10:30 when it ends.

And, sadly, we say so long to Arnold Palmer. My dad was a golf fan (and therefore so am I) and if you were his age, then you were an Arnie Palmer fan. I was a Jack Nicklaus fan, but my dad wasn’t too crazy about Nicklaus at first, because he came out and started beating Arnie. I don’t really follow golf anymore (and I don’t think I’ve even played since my dad died), mostly because where once there was Palmer, Nicklaus, Watson, Player, Trevino, Rodríguez, and Elder, now there’s…. I don’t really know. Tiger seems to be washed up. I guess I should like that Rory guy since he’s Irish – but he’s from the North, so, he’s not one of the “good ones.”

I guess that’s just part of getting old. I don’t care for the new golfers, the new music, football aint what it used to be, and if those damn kids don’t get off my lawn I’m calling the cops!

But first I better get ready to catch the bus and start another mind-numbing week of work.

And so I’ve come to the end of my second week of life on public transportation. Other than not really wanting to wait around for the bus at the end of the day (not that I have a terribly long wait – but it unfortunately precluded the notion of skipping out early yesterday), it hasn’t been too bad. Thursday night was the worst so far. An elderly woman (my age) got run over by a pickup truck and the cops had a bunch of streets closed off, so traffic was terrible and I was almost an hour late getting home (as for the woman, she’s in stable but critical condition in the hospital, so I won’t complain about my slight inconvenience). They also have some streets closed for the Irish Festival (which I would’ve gone over to if I didn’t think walking around would get my feet fired up – I’m feeling a flare-up coming on, so I’m just gonna keep them on ice all weekend and hope they don’t get severely crippling, because that would really suck). Walking around with ice packs strapped to my feet makes me feel a bit like John Turturro in “The Night Of” – which I highly recommend if you haven’t seen it.

I also got lucky on Thursday because we had a brief but powerful monsoon-type storm blow through during the afternoon that caused some flooding. Fortunately it came and went by the time I had to walk to the bus stop, because the crappy little travel umbrella I keep in my backpack wouldn’t have done me much good.

I’d be happy about the weekend getting here if I didn’t have doctor’s appointment next week. Two of them, actually. On Monday I have to go in for blood work, and then it’s my six-month followup on Friday (I really need to see about getting them to do that on the same day, and then they can follow up with a phone call if they find I’ve got something life-threatening or something. Taking the bus makes it a pain in the ass to deal with doctor’s appointments). Anyhow, I’m hoping the six month thing isn’t going to be too intrusive. I just need my BP pill prescription re-upped and then I guess she can tell me I need a colonoscopy, which I have so far avoided. Harbor Freight has a Digital Inspection Camera for $80, so maybe I’ll just do it myself. It says it “fits most spark plug holes” so I should be able to shove it up my ass. But the cable doesn’t look long enough for me to look at the screen while I’m doing it. Good thing the wife’s a nurse.

I didn’t watch whatever it was they were calling the “Commander-in-Chief” dog and pony show on NBC the other night. This is mainly because I cannot stand looking at or listening to either Donald Trump or Matt Lauer. And, seriously, I know they’re a little hard up for actual news people at NBC but Matt Lauer was the best they could do? I don’t know about you, but when I think about foreign policy, Matt the Rat Lauer isn’t a name that jumps into my mind. But if you were expecting Lauer to suck, then you weren’t disappointed, apparently.

Or, as NBC Universal CEO Steve Burke put it:

“Matt did a tremendous job – driving one of the most serious discussions to date on these topics. My deepest thanks to everyone who helped pull off this remarkable achievement.”

Ayup.

And now Trump is aghast at the fact that the interview he did for Larry King’s Russia Today propaganda network was shown to actual Russians. Whoda thunk? Good thing Donny takes every opportunity he gets to kiss Vladimir Putin’s ass. Which is a good idea, because being mean to Putie Put (whether you’re a journalist or a political opponent) gets you dead.

It’s no wonder Dandy Don admires him so much (that and he no doubt owes a boatload of money to Putin’s pals in the Russian Mafia).

Oh well, time to get some more ice on my feet.

Happy Labor Day to everybody out there who labors. It’s very kind of those who exploit labor for their own greedy and nefarious purposes to let us have the day off. Unless you work for one of those greedy exploiters who aren’t closed today, in which case it sucks to be you (and I hope you’re at least getting double pay). I know Costco is closed today, and while I haven’t checked, I’m betting Walmart’s open. I mean, hell, they even force their employees to work on Thanksgiving, right? I can’t imagine they’d celebrate “labor” (except to have a sale).

Today is also the final day of the Great NY State Fair. As of yesterday, they had over 999,000 people attend (I was not one of them, though I really would have liked to go see Robert Cray there yesterday), meaning they not only will top the million mark, but are almost assured of record attendance this year (they’re about 12,000 away, and with yet another beautiful day weather-wise, dollar admission, and dollar rides, that shouldn’t be a problem).

Yes, this is what passes for news around here.

Even though we have more hot weather coming up this week, this pretty much means that summer is over. It’s getting dark mighty early now (I hate the thought of going back to “Standard” time), and the election is a mere 64 days away (seems like it’s been going on forever). If you believe the polls, the race is tightening up now. Whether that’s wishful thinking on the part of a media that’s desperate to sell advertising, I don’t know. But I can’t say it surprises me. As utterly absurd as the thought of President Trump is (to me, anyway – is there something appealing about him that I just don’t get?), an awful lot of people seem to despise Hillary Clinton and her husband (who last I saw wasn’t actually running, but, whatever).

Even many of the people who don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to the word “Clinton” seem to have a lack of trust in Hillary. Much of this is of course baseless (Bill and Hillary have had any number of people assassinated, Hillary is so ill she’s basically a dead woman walking, Hillary is mentally unstable, Hillary personally restrained a platoon of marines to prevent them from rescuing the folks at the US Embassy in Libya, Hillary wants to take your fucking guns away…). Some things she kind of brought on herself – the whole e-mail thing comes to mind. I understand her not wanting to give the crazy Clinton haters more shit to use against her, but it just doesn’t look good. And if this was, say, Secretary of State Donald J. Trump, Democrats would be howling about it. You can say that Colin Powell did it too, but he didn’t set up his own server and he didn’t use e-mail to the same extent that Hillary did.

The only personal experience I have with Powell and e-mail come from my time running a website for the families of the Lockerbie bombing. Before the UN announced the deal where Libya would accept responsibility for the bombing and pay off the victims’ families in exchange for lifting UN sanctions, the State Department wanted to issue a statement to the families ahead of time. So I had to sit around at work late one night waiting for an e-mail from Colin Powell. It was taking a long time, because his official e-mail couldn’t connect to the outside world. So he had to e-mail the statement to his aide, who then had to type it back into a different system that he could then send to me. And I guess he was a slow typist, ‘cuz it took forever.

It always comes back to Libya, doesn’t it? My advice – stay the hell away from Libya.

And of course people don’t like Hillary because she comes across as something less than Miss Congeniality and isn’t a good speechifier (whereas Trump comes across as an ignorant fat loudmouth conman), or they don’t like her voice. Hillary admits that she’s no Bill (or Barack). Should this matter? No. I enjoy a good speech as much as the next guy, but I prefer somebody who’s smart and, ideally, not insane (and say what you want about Hillary, I don’t think there’s anybody who wouldn’t say she’s pretty damn smart). But unfortunately, it does matter to at least some extent – gotta have a marketable product. As Jackson Browne said…

They sell us the president the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us everything from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars

I think one reason we got Dubya twice was because Al Gore was “wooden” (and smart – there are a lot of people out there who don’t like smart people. I refer to these people as “dumb”), and watching John Kerry speak was like listening to an Ent. And then there was Mike Dukakis, who basically lost because he looked stupid in a helmet (I thought he looked like Snoopy, personally).

I never could understand why they called Reagan the “Great Communicator.” He wasn’t much of an actor, and he stuttered and stammered and had these pregnant pauses in the middle of his sentences where you thought the sound dropped out for a minute. I guess for some people he came across as a kindly old grandfather type. Not to me. I was kinda concerned about a nuclear war back then, and I didn’t find him the least bit endearing.

But, anyway, back to Hillary. Even though I find the hatred of her to be ridiculous, and even though I, personally, think it’s a no-brainer that she’s at the very least capable of actually being in charge of the government (and am hopeful – though doubtful – that she’ll turn out to be this closet radical socialist the wingnuts make her out to be) without fucking things up, I know a lot of people don’t seem to like her.

And the dangerous thing about Trump is that the longer he hangs out, the more “use” to him people are gonna get. They become numb to his crazy conman bullshit, and the idea of him winning gets less and less outrageous as time goes on. Add to that the media desire to cover the “horse race,” the gullibility of the all the Archie Bunker types out there (to quote the Donald, “I love the poorly educated!”), and the relentlessness of the vast right wing conspiracy, and who knows what may happen in November.

The thought of Trump and Mike Pence (because you know he’ll be doing all the work) appointing Supreme Court justices, representing the US on the world stage, controlling the military, trashing the economy (and screwing me out of my Social Security), and having the nuclear launch codes terrifies me.

But, anyway, have a happy Labor Day. Hopefully there’ll be another one next year.

So, here I am in Dilbert world. This new office location is a confusing labyrinth of cubicles, and midway through day 3 I almost know where I’m going (as long as I’m going back and forth from my cell to the break room, bathroom, or the back stairwell where I sneak out at the end of the day). If I stand up, I at least have a view of a window, which means I can kinda see the building across the street.

It’s more than I had at the old place, so I suppose it’s a slight improvement. And since I’ve been standing almost exclusively at my standing desk, I can at least look over and tell if the sun is shining or not. I’ve decided to stand not only because sitting all day was slowly killing me, but also because they refused to allow me to keep my old (and rather expensive) chair because it didn’t “match” all the other peon chairs (the important people got better chairs – presumably because their asses are worth more than ours). I definitely prefer standing, but I’ve had to order an anti-fatigue mat because standing is taking its toll on my feet (among other things).

My feet have been giving me problems for a long time now, and I’m terrified of having a flare-up now that I’m a user of public transportation. I don’t have all that far to walk, but between that and the standing all day, my feet are definitely complaining. As a result, I’ve been keeping my feet on ice at home both before and after work. It’s more preventative than anything else – I just want to prevent any swelling if possible.

Speaking of public transportation I think I’ve just about got the whole bus thing down now. I missed my stop the first day and wound up having to walk quite a bit farther than I needed to. Buses have changed quite a bit since the last time I rode one. For one thing, there’s no rope to pull to make the bell ding to tell the driver you wanna get out. There’s also a message board that reads out the cross streets as you approach them, and an android voice that calls them out. This is probably not a big deal to most people, but since it’s probably been 30 years since I’ve been on a bus, I thought it was pretty cool.

My bus comes from quite a ways out (it starts in Auburn, which won’t mean anything to you, except perhaps that it’s where Harriet Tubman lived out her final years – from about 1859 until 1913 – and is buried), so we get more of a “coach” with bucket seats and the kind of overhead air nozzles and lights that they have on airplanes. Best of all, it’s not particularly crowded and I don’t need to transfer, so I can more or less relax and zone out.

In my younger days I used to bus all over the place – generally winding up in a downtown bar where I would very often proceed to miss the last bus home – which would result in about a 15 mile walk to where I lived in North Syracuse hitting every bar along the way, of course, and hanging out with the street people and other urban “characters.” Ah, those were the days.

Some things never change, I guess, as the street people still seem to be attracted to me. I had one guy decide to be my new best friend the other day, and I got his whole life story (divorced three times – got a good lawyer this last time, though, and got the house and half the old lady’s 401K – former Engineer at Carrier, musician, and good Christian). I think I ought to get myself one of those DILLIGAF hats.

So, I guess I’m getting used to the new routine, even if I’m not terribly excited by it. My biggest problem is that I’m always too damn early (it’s in my nature to be early anyway, but I’m paranoid about missing the bus – having missed it so many times before). It’s nice to have reduced my commute from 40 miles a day down to 4, though. And I figure I’m doing my part for the environment, so that’s good. I guess.

But this cubicle shit is kind of depressing.

Today marks the beginning of the NY State fair here, which ends on Labor Day. Basically summer is over, and I’ll be closing up the pool before you know it. I’m desperately hoping for a long Autumn. Like, one that lasts until February. Yesterday was the unveiling of the butter sculpture (don’t worry, I won’t spoil it for you be telling what it is). Day One of the Fair is Governor’s Day so we’ll be graced by the presence of hizzoner Governor Snotball himself today, and no doubt treated to photos of him choking down a sausage sandwich while pretending to be one of the common folk. At least when Bill and Hillary came here, you knew Bill was digging the food (probably being at least partly responsible for his ensuing bypass surgery).

Speaking of fall rituals. the annual crushing of our hopes and dreams (aka, football season) begins a week from tomorrow against the toothpaste powerhouse Colgate, If they manage to lose to them, it’ll be a long season indeed, but for now hopes are slightly high – meaning we’re holding out hope of going 6-6, wouldn’t be terribly disappointed by 5-7, and wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised at 4-8. Mostly were hoping to see some signs that better times are coming.

So, it appears that Donald Trump has changed his stance on deporting the 11 million or so “illegal” immigrants to the US. Now he says he’s all in on a plan to grant them legal status, as long as they pay “back taxes.” Given they kinds of jobs and crappy pay most of these people get, I’m not sure who’ll be paying whom. Might be the government issuing tax refunds. I’m just wondering if anybody is stupid enough to buy into Trump’s new enlightened stand.

On the bright side, Trump’s change in immigration policy comes on launch day of Ann Coulter’s new book “In Trump We Trust,” in which she apparently writes:

“There’s nothing Trump can do that won’t be forgiven. Except change his immigration policies.”

It seems Dreamboat Annie was not amused.

Or, as Ted Cruz’s former Senate communications director Amanda Carpenter put it:

“Everything Trump promises comes with an expiration date. We knew it during the primary, and now it is apparent he has duped his most loyal supporters on the issue they care about most, immigration. Don’t say we didn’t warn them.”

It doesn’t hurt that any loyal Trump supporter is, by definition, easily duped.

Now, about that wall….

It was a sad day around the office today. We’re moving to a new location and leaving our current digs behind. Not that I had the greatest office in the world (a stark, windowless room that was generally either freezing cold or too damnhot – usually too damn hot). But it was in a suburban office park with plenty of free parking and easy lunchtime or after work access to places like Home Depot, Trader Joe’s, Wegmans, Harbor Freight – you name it, we got it out here – we are moving to a downtown location with not much around it other than expensive restaurants, congested streets (by our standards anyway) and urban blight. Not to mention having to pay to park. And while I shared my office with a couple other guys (one who was rarely there, so mostly just the two of us), it at least wasn’t a cube farm, which is where I’m heading to. Yup. Dilbert World. It’s not something any of us are looking forward to, that’s for sure. I’ll now have to take a day off to visit my dentist, who is roughly a minute away from where I work now, or to get my free Toyota Care, which is roughly five minutes from where I am now. It’s all rather depressing. On the bright side, the movers were there early so I packed up and was out of the office before noon (though I’m on-call, so I’m never really away from work).

I’ve decided that, rather than pay to park, I’m going to avail myself of public transportation. I’ve wanted to do that for a while now (you know, make myself feel like I’m doing my part for climate change and all that), but it’s just too complicated and time consuming to get from my house on the western fringes to out where we were in the eastern ‘burbs. Now, though, it’ll be a one-bus trip to downtown Syracuse. There’s public parking down in the village, and the bus stop is nearby (at THE traffic light). So I’ll go from putting 40 or so miles a day on my car to about 4). Although it’s gonna be a bit of a transition for me (haven’t bussed around in probably 30 years, back when my ’76 Chevette spent more time sitting than running), I’m looking forward to letting somebody else deal with the traffic and school buses and snow.

My bus passes are all ready to go (I was kinda of bummed to learn that rather than getting a metro-type card that I can just refill, I have to keep ordering 10-trip passes. How stupid is that?), and I figure it’ll cost me just slightly more to ride the bus than the price of gas (and that’s only because gas prices have gone down so much – $1.89 last week at Costco. Once it goes back up again, I should start saving money). And that’s before the cost of parking.

As it happens, I’m taking next week off (for one thing, I have a dentist appointment on Monday morning – whoopdie-doo) so I won’t be hitting the bus for little while yet.

The Olympics opening ceremony (or is it ceremonies?) was last night, and apparently viewers in the US had to wait for “prime time” to watch it on NBC (meaning a 4-hour delay out west). I say apparently, because I not only didn’t watch it, I really don’t give a shit about the Olympics. Still, many people do, and they were simply OUTRAGED about it. And the commercials. And the fatuous prattling of the idiotic “Today Show” crew.

At various points, they said Luxembourg was in “central Europe,” joked about how Djibouti kinda sounds like “yer booty,” and seemed surprised to learn that the US (or Estados Unidos) would be alphabetized under E for the Parade of Nations.

This is why I don’t watch live teevee once the lo-cal morning news is over.

For those who opted to live stream the event from anywhere other than NBC, though, were apparently treated to a wonderful display. So that’s good, I guess.

When I was a kid, the Olympics were a big deal to me. Probably due to the fact that back then there were only four channels to choose from (five when Channel 11 from Kingston was coming in – watched a lot of curling, back in the day – but you had to fiddle with the rabbit ears), and you had to wait for four years for an Olympics back then, instead of two. Plus we still had our Cold War villains (namely the godless Soviets and East Germans) to root against (unlike today, when the Republican presidential candidate and the Russian president are BFFs).

Ah, those were simpler times.

Now, though. Meh. Oh there might be a few things worth watching (beach volleyball comes to mind – sure didn’t have that back in ’64), and there’s a local kid on the Women’s basketball team so I’d like to see her do well. And of course there are three former Orangemen on the men’s team (one playing, two assistant coaching), so I’d like to see them do well (plus I’m still not quite over the ’72 gold medal game when the referees gave the Soviets three chances to score the winning basket).

But mostly I don’t really care.

Besides, I’m waiting for the deluge of talking head commentaries about how the Trump campaign has “turned the corner” now that Donnie has gotten on message and endorsed the flaming triad of douchery – Paul Ryan, John “if I had my way, Sarah Palin would be the incumbent VP running for Prez right now” McCain, and Kelly Ayotte.

It’s all gonna be rainbows and party unity from here on out. OK, well, probably not rainbows, ‘cuz that’s a gay thing and the GOP don’t go for that kinda shit (other than in public men’s rooms, of course).

50 years ago today, after killing his wife and his mother, 25 year old Charles Whitman ascended the University of Texas clock tower with a shitload of firearms, and spent about an hour and a half shooting people before the cops managed to kill him. 14 dead, 30 wounded in what the news keeps telling me was the first mass shooting on a college campus (I don’t condone his actions, of course, but I support his right to bear arms – lots and lots or arms). See, we need to have various categories for these things. First mass shooting at a college, first at an elementary school, high school, movie theatre, McDonalds…. So if you want to be a pioneer in the field of mass shootings here in the US of A, you need to get creative.

Well, tonight’s the big night, when Hillary Clinton will officially accept the nomination to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for President. I don’t think you could ask much more from Bernie Sanders and even if a handful of bummed out Bernie supporters are getting a lot of publicity (because the media loves to amplify that sort of thing), polls show that a greater percentage of Sanders supporters are planning to vote for Clinton than Clinton supporters (the PUMAs, if you recall) voted for Obama back in 2008. And, really, the thought of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Oligarchy running our government (and our economy) for the next 4 – 8 years and beyond (I envision a lot of Supreme Court justices mysteriously dying of polonium-210-induced radiation poisoning, leading to a 9-Scalia Supreme Court) should terrify any non-insane person.

Oh, sure, if you live in Texas or Oklahoma or NY or California, you can vote for whomever you want, because the outcome in your state is pretty much already decided. It’s the “swing” states that really count – and there are an awful lot of insane people in those swing states. That, combined with the systematic attempts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to keep poor people and minorities away from the polls (plus what might be a generally low turnout election, given that these two candidates both have 58 percent unfavorable ratings) should make for a very unsettling election night, unless something happens to put the Trump candidacy in the crapper (and I don’t think there’s anything he can do that would hurt him among his supporters, whoever the hell they are).

So if you live in a solid red or blue state, it’s time to move to FL, GA, PA, VA, OH, NC, MI, or some other swing state (make it one with at least double-digit electoral votes, though – no reason to waste your time on pissant states like ME or NH) if you can afford it.

As for me, I’ll be staying put here in NY. At least, being a “safe” state, we won’t be subjected to as much of the incessant campaigning that other folks will (I hope).

Because I’m not a masochist, I watched none of the Republican National Convention – especially not last night’s official coronation of Herr Drumpf. Still, it’s impossible to ignore these things completely and there were at least a few moments of amusement. Wife #3 lifting part of her speech from Michelle Obama was kind of funny, for instance. Ted Cruz getting booed off the stage for not endorsing the guy that called Cruz’s wife ugly and said Cruz’s old man was palin’ around with Lee Harvey Oswald (I’m forced to admit a tiny nugget of respect for Cruz for that) was pretty funny. And, while it technically wasn’t about the convention, seeing Roger Ailes being forced to resign from Fux News was nice to see as well.

Apparently last night’s acceptance speech showed the world the angry, scary old man with a spray-tan so bad even Jon Boehner thinks it looks ridiculous that the Republicans have made their nominee for President (and for whom a disturbingly large percentage of Americans are apparently planning on voting for).

I saw one clip with a red-faced, spitting Trump yelling about something of other (he reminded me of my old boss Hermann – not to mention my father-in-law – when he got himself all worked up over something). I’ve never really cared for people yelling at me – I tend to just shut my ears off and wait for it to end. So that’s what I’m hoping to do for the balance of this election season – try to ignore it and wait for it all to be over. And hope like hell we don’t get Spokesmodel Trump and de facto President Pence.

One thing seems certain, though – Hillary Clinton is really really lucky to be running against Trump instead of a relatively sane human being (not that the GOP is capable of nominating a relatively sane human these days). Not that polls are particularly meaningful at this point, but the national polls the past few days seem to have Clinton anywhere from 4 points ahead to 1 point down – and neck in neck with Trump in Ohio and Virginia.

Not in NY, though, where Clinton has a pretty sizable lead. Which is a good thing, because as someone who isn’t a registered as a Democrat, I’m not allowed to vote for a Democrat in NY. At least, from what I recall of the primary here, I think that’s how the NY rules work. On the bright side, I like the candidate who I am allowed to vote for – Jill Stein. And I don’t normally care for doctors, so that’s saying something. Plus I’m pretty sure she isn’t considering a running mate that wants to deregulate the banks.

In other news, it’s a big day here in the old homestead. We’re getting a new refrigerator delivered. Not because the old one isn’t working, but because the old one is a side-by-side that I’ve gradually come to despise over the past five years. Basically, you can’t fit anything in it and what you can put in there basically has to be packed like a suitcase. Which, in the case of fresh food, means it typically gets forgotten about until it grows fur and tries to escape.

I liked the french door fridge with bottom freezer we had at the old house, and I’ve missed it ever since. So I finally pulled the plug and ordered one (plus it’s a good excuse to take a day off). And the new one is only supposed to cost about $6 a month to run – partly because it has an “inverter” compressor, meaning that it has a variable speed DC motor in it (hence the need for the inverter) and instead of turning on and off, it just goes faster or slower depending on the temperature and set point. It probably also means the sensor, inverter, and circuit board are all likely to crap out after the 1 year warranty (10 years on the compressor, though) and be very expensive to fix.

Having the fridge break is one reason I was reluctant to get a new one. I mean, I don’t ever recall replacing an old refrigerator because it stopped working in the olden days, but I’ve heard horror stories about problems with newer ones.

Well, too late to back out now. I guess I’d better go get all the crap out of the old one so they can haul it away.