Wanna know how I know America’s campain apparatus has shifted into Get-Out-The-Vote mode? My inbox (well, my spam folder, anyway) is full of pleas to get out the vote from 1/3rd of the Avengers (Scarlett Johannsen and Mark Ruffalo), rock legend Joan Jett, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, the entire Democratic congressional leadership, The President *and* Vice President,and eleven(!!!) such emails from VA-10 candidate John Foust, all urging me to vote (with the “give money to $organization/candidate” stuffed sort-of unobtrusively at the end).

the most useful one was Mark Warner’s reminder about the last day to vote absentee in person in VA (which I have taken advantage of regularly for the past decade, but don’t need to this year), and the most encouraging was the note from VA-04 candidate Elliott Fausz’s campaign pointing out that the race in my district is amazingly close for once, and my chosen candidate has a decent chance of winning.

Otherwise, it’s just been clutter. But, that’s a politically engaged life in the information age.

We could talk the weekend, but not a whole lot happened. Trick-or-Treating happened, but my neighborhood was kind of dead; not that many little kids around any more. I sat on the porch, handed out candy to the dozen or so packs that approached the house, and played my ukulele for those passing by, by mostly for my own amusement. Otherwise, we kind of hung around the house watching movies, because it was pretty cold, windy, and wet out there.

Teenage child enjoyed the surprisingly well-formed double feature of Can’t Hardly Wait and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and appears to have actually done most of the cleaning I asked her to do, to boot.

Going to be a slightly busy week this week – I’ve got rehearsals for two different musical outings with two different instruments in coming weeks, plus I need to start going over bass parts for a Humdingers gig next month one of these days. The weekend’s also loaded, containing a big irish dance competition and a charity auction. Then there’s next week, which will be challenging for entirely different reasons.

Anyway, enjoy life, folks. I’ll see if I can stop and look around once in a while, lest I miss it.