One last attempt to help this mess before bed, I was reading the thread of fired up, frustrated and pissed off Dems on Democratic Underground and one of the ideas listed was to donate to Kerry's Legal fund so I forked over some more money. I'm self-employed with bad health and no insurance so if I can donate something towards this cause a lot of you kids can too. I've been giving since the Dean days whether I could afford it or not, despite my husband's comments that I was "wasting my money" and I haven't regretted a dime of it. And I'm VERY glad both of our boys are lawyers, it can't hurt.

Now another attempt at going to bed, Ambien take me away...

Halloween is my favorite holiday. Always has been, always will be. I just hate all the crap that's going on at Halloween time this year. Our party went well enough, and somehow we managed to come out exactly right with the candy for the kids this year even though I was generous and several kids double-dipped. We only had two incidents, one a crying kid refuding candy because his father reprimanded him for ringing the doorbell three times, and the other a scuffle with a bunch of overly enthusiastic 8 year olds who ended up knocking over one of our lighted porch figures and falling into our bushes spilling candy all over the ground. Which caused their adult escort to come running out of her car offering to pay for anything damaged (just a broken bulb, it's OK).

Then Monday comes and my dad calls Sparky because they've got water leaking out of the walls in a closet. Which apparently has been going on long enough to cause mildew to grow all over the walls, yuck. And the water leaked under the wall into the adjoining dining room. What a mess, like they haven't been through enough crap lately. Neither one of them can hardly walk right now, my dad can't breathe and now they've got fans blowing gunk all over their house to try and dry the remaining carpet out and people tearing moldy sheetrock up. The same thing happened to me when I lived in a townhouse in Austin, my neighbor decided to install his own washing machine, which promptly drained through my kitchen right into my den. The fans blew dirt all over my house. My parents problem is due to a leftover AC condensation drain that wasn't rerouted properly when that part of the house was remodeled from garage into an extra wing of the house, and stopped up. We have a similar problem in our middle bedroom where AC condensation drips out of one of the air vents when it's really hot and humid outside.

What else happened on Monday... Oh yeah, it rained all fricking day! And all night! And into Tuesday... Not just rain, flooding, earth shattering thunder and lightning. Monday night the power actually went out (while I was in the middle of a long blog entry) so I gave up and took a nap. So I couldn't sleep Monday night. I'm considering going to bed earlier tonight,my brain hurts from all the election crap today and I feel a sinus infection coming on, good grief, that's what I need, to be dizzy on top of everything. And I know Sparky won't let me sleep on Wednesday, he's going to be way too freaked out...

Well, after a completely sleepless night/morning, Sparky woke me up at 9:30 in hopes we could hit our voting place in between rushes. And we did, it was like 20 minutes total, as opposed to most of our friends who voted early and faced long, slow lines (one friend was over 90 minutes). We actually stopped by our early voting station last Thursday and decided to wait and vote on election day because of the slew of people that were waiting. But then I'm in Texas, where no one cares enough about our vote to bother with us (hopefully), and in other states people are spending 6 and 7 hours waiting.

But alas, patience is going to be a huge factor again it seems. Here we go again, hopefully with different results this time, this time perhaps ALL of the ballots will actually be counted. There are already allegations of voter fraud in, of course, Ohio and Florida, which is really apparent because those are the only two states where the results of the exit polls are way off (in Dubya's favor, imagine that).

Black Box Voting also issued a warning on 11/1 for polling places to disconnect their modems and manually bring the boxes in to be counted because they had evidence of hackers targeting the central computers counting our votes.

There's definitely something fishy going on, all of the millions of new voters did not register to keep Dubya in office. That goes against logic, though the Neocons whole campagn is completely at odds with logic. But here at 2am, Ohio voters are STILL standing in line to vote (yes, really), so everyone hang in there. As John Edwards said this evening, we've waited four years, we can wait another day. Or eleven...

I'm still up listening to Air America, which is helping to keep me sane. Sparky is passed out and snoring thankfully. It's been really hard trying to keep both his and my spirits up for the last four years, and he spent most of the evening watching MSNBC, who like Fox, are calling states early in favor of Dubya again. On the other hand Dan Rather is being the cautious, pragmatic one (he actually learns from experience unlike our current administration who proudly repeat their mistakes).

I'm glad I decided to take a semi-break from eBay this week, it's going to be difficult to concentrate until this is all sorted out. And somehow I don't see hordes of people shopping this week, unless it's out of manic depression (I've binged financially that way myself, especially after 9/11). But I've got lots of little mindless, comforting things I can do this week... take photos of things to get ready to list, I've got a whole file cabinet worth of stuff to sort and two new boxes of pretty colored files and my new Brother P-Touch to make legible labels (my handwriting is anything but legible). Unfortunately, Phoebe thinks an open file cabinet is an invitation to explore, I've actually closed her inside twice now which scares the crap out of me. She's been sensing the rising tension the last few days and has been extra snuggly and attentive.

Just heard of a website set up to keep everyone updated on the misadventures of this election and to help frustrated voters take action. Thank Al Gore for the internet, to give us immediate access to this constantly changing world and not making us slaves to the networks...