I voted today. Yes, it's a day early. Election Day is tomorrow— Tuesday, November 4.  But one of the nice things about California is that the state offers registered voters numerous ways to vote, including dropping off a ballot in a signed, sealed envelope at ballot drop-boxes in convenient places like my local library.



This year's ballot was pretty short. There were only 3 items: a statewide proposition, a county officer race, and a county proposition.

The statewide proposition is Prop 50, The Election Rigging Response Act. It allows a one-time, mid-decade redrawing of Congressional districts and specifies that it will be done by politicians instead of California's non-partisan redistricting commission.

I have always been a big supporter of non-partisan redistricting. I gladly voted for it when California passed it years ago, and I have urged that the practice be adopted elsewhere. But the situation is different in 2025. Whereas gerrymandering used to be something that politicians did but didn't admit to, it's now something that President Trump openly calls for in the national media— and his followers not only don't criticize but eagerly line up to do. If we on the political left want any chance at a majority in Congress— via representation that is commensurate with our popular vote— we must do as the other side is already doing.

One of the simple/simplistic arguments against Prop 50 I've seen is the line, "All it takes to end gerrymandering is for one side to stop doing it first." What a fucking idiot the person who said that is. One side did stop it first. One side did it first, and the other side went the opposite direction and raised their art of electoral manipulation to new heights with modern technology.

So now I'm voting for something that's against my preferences. It's against my preferences but it's still the least bad option. (Also, we're not giving up the preferable option— nonpartisan redistricting— for good. We're just making a one-time exception.)

Speaking of least bad options, the one county-wide race, the one for Tax Assessor, is also one where I picked the least bad option. Not that there was anything actually bad about the candidate I voted for, but the others all did/said things that are disqualifying bad IMO.

A few days ago I got a summons for jury duty. My first thought was, "Another one so soon?" I last had jury duty 2½ years ago. That seems recent by comparison because my last jury duty before that was 10 years earlier, and my last before that was... 24 years earlier! I don't know what the normal frequency of jury duty is. 24 years seemed anomalous... but so does 2.5.

My second thought upon reading the summons postcard was, "Wait, this is Thanksgiving week!" I already have travel plans for that week— and I don't wish to cancel or rearrange them. "It's like they're checking who hates their family," Hawk quipped.

Fortunately the courts allow one free deferral, no justification required. I registered online today and requested to be reassigned a later week.

I woke up this morning aching all over. Actually, I tossed and turned from sometime in the middle of the night, achy in various places. It wasn't surprising since I got my Covid-19 booster shot yesterday. And a flu shot, too. But the Covid booster has pretty much always left me feeling achy and tired the next day.

I finally dragged myself out to the hot tub for a soak this morning. I say finally because I've been telling myself, "A soak in the hot tub tonight would feel really nice" all week. But then I've felt tired and lazy and have just laid around the house instead of going out. Today I decided Just Do It after despite the body aches. Actually it was because of the body aches I went. I hoped the soak would help! Alas it did not. I was still achy after.

In a way, being tired and lethargic this morning helped me match Hawk's energy level. She's still healing from her surgery two weeks ago. She also recently adjusted her pain medication because the previous regimen she was on left her with a lot of residual pain and caused nausea. By increasing one med and decreasing another, she's now reduced the pain and gotten rid of the nausea— hooray! But she's traded one side effect for another, in that now she's more tired out. After she almost face-planted in her hash browns at Denny's the other night, last night she almost face-planted in her bowl of chicken tortilla soup at a favorite Mexican restaurant.

Update: Although painkillers didn't do anything for my body aches the aches kind of wore off on their own after lunch. Hawk and I then went shopping at Costco. It was a lot of walking for her, on crutches— about a mile! She's tired after that though not sleepy tired. She's spent the afternoon crafting downstairs while I've vegged with my computer.

Tonight is Halloween. Or as I've called it recently, Hallow-whatnow?

I don't celebrate. And not only don't I celebrate, but fewer and fewer people around me celebrate. Oh, the stores are all festooned with "PLeAsE GiVe uS MoNeY!11!" holiday decorations as early as August. But as I do less and less shopping in stores I'm visually assaulted with such things less and less. Plus, by the start of October Christmas decorations are already displacing Halloween decorations even as Halloween is still 4 weeks away. 🤣

Like I said, though, fewer people in my orbit celebrate. Halloween is a nonevent in our neighborhood. We're a townhouse community, so few people living here have kids, and those who do have kids have mostly younger kids— mostly too young to go trick-or-treating. And those who do have kids also tend to bundle them into their luxury SUVs and take them to carefully controlled parties. Most of them never play in the community any of the other 364 days of the year... why would their parents suddenly feel it's safe to let them walk around in the dark and knock on doors tonight?

Even my company hasn't done anything for Halloween the past few years. In the past we'd have a small costume contest. Small, as in only a few people would participate. But at least there was something. Or a few people would act on their own to dress in costumes, and it would be amuse to see them on videoconferences. This year there was nothing. No contests, no announcements, no funny surprises on camera.

I've always been a bit "Bah, humbug!" about holiday celebrations but this year it's disappointing there's been basically nothing.

Today is Day 14 of Hawk's post-op recovery. At the time of her surgery they wrapped her foot in a half-cast, half-splint with strict instructions to put no weight on it. That made her close to immobile. She could hop around short distances with the help of of a pair forearm crutches— "short distances" being like from the bed or sofa to the bathroom. Going between floors in our vertical townhouse took focus and real energy. She tried to limit herself to one trip up and down per day. Today she had a followup visit at the clinic.

For the trip to the clinic Hawk used a knee scooter. It does no good in the house because there are stairs everywhere. But it's great for covering long, flat distances like from the parking spot in the garage to the clinic's front door, and from the front door to the orthopedic department. She zoomed along on the scooter, going faster than me, walking normally. Though heavy closed doors were her bane as it was difficult to balance while exerting enough force to open them. I caught up to her every time there was a door. 😅

At the clinic today they removed the cast and replaced it with a bandage wrap and a boot.



The boot can be taken on and off. And even the wrap can be removed (by us) at home tomorrow. After that she just needs to cover her foot with a sock. And before very careful with it when it's out of the boot, of course, because it's still healing. She'll need the boot for at least another 3 weeks, possibly up to 6 weeks.

The switch to the boot has made her more mobile. Now she can put partial weight on her foot. She still uses the forearm crutches to walk, but she can move faster with them because she can put her injured foot down to balance instead of having to hop along on one leg.

Hawk celebrated the change today by asking that we visit a local bakery that has her favorite, princess cake. She boldly decided to walk (hobble) from the parking area to the cafe. It was across the street and partway up the block. She was okay getting there though it took more out of her than she expected. So she bought all the princess cake they had in the display (5 pieces) and asked me to pull up the car for her hobble back out.

Our clothes washing machine has been on time-out since Wednesday evening when it leaked. Since then Hawk has been shopping around online figuring out what washer we'd it with. We were deliberative about buying this one 10+ years ago; we'll be deliberative about the one that replaces it. Meaning, we've bought a short subscription to Consumer Reports (again) and we're checking reviews to select models that have above-average ratings for cleaning effectiveness, water and power efficiency, and low noise, at modest cost.

But before we click "Buy Now" we figured we'd give our current washer another chance. It seemed just barely possible, and an experience plumber who helped us look at it agreed, that water pressure spikes from water main work in the neighborhood that day could've made the leak a fluke. Today I finally had the energy to pull out the washer and take a look at it.

I unplugged the washer, disconnected the drain and supply lines, and taped all the cables and pipes out of the way. Then I trundled the washer out of the laundry closet. I had to unhook a fan-fold door to help get it out. (Little problem there. I've adjusted, removed and installed fan-fold doors in our house before.)

The floor beneath the washer is pretty messy. You can see that in the photo above. The mess there is years of dust bunnies, presumably from the dryer, mixed with water from the washer's leak a few days ago. Once I had the washer out of the way it wasn't too hard to clean it up with a water spritzer and a roll of paper towels.

I took the opportunity while the washer was moved out of the closet to do some additional cleaning. I pulled out the soap tray and gave it a thorough cleaning in the sink, with soap and hot water. We've never done a full cleaning on it, and was moldy. I also cleaned the rubber grommet and around the glass window of the door where it makes a seal, in case dirt or grime there was the source of the leak.

Speaking of finding the source of the leak, I tipped the washer onto its face to see if I could find a leak leak on the underside. No dice; the underside has a metal cover bolted in place with several bolts. I decided to skip it.

Again, our thinking here with cleaning up the washer was not just to clean up the space for a replacement but to give the old washer one more try. Just in case the leak was not a fluke, though— and I've got to admit, the chances it was just a fluke are, like, 1 in 10— I went out and bought a spill pan for the washer. It was $31 plus tax at Home Depot for one that's cheap plastic but fits nicely.



Here you can see the washer moved back into place, sitting atop its new spill catcher. I've got a (light) load of laundry in there. I'll know in about 90 minutes how much of a fluke Wednesday's leak was.

Update: The load of wash completed with no leaks.

It's time for another chapter in the story mystery of the church up the hill. This is now part 3 of the story. Originally I had thought I'd be able to fit it all in one journal entry but as I started writing the story it grew. It grew first from one blog to three. Then as I took a slight detour into writing about AI and photography in part 2 I realized the story will take 4, maybe 5, chapters to complete.

As I noted in the previous chapter, my dad lost his job when I was a little kid. The retail chain he worked for went out of business.



Dad's job wasn't a great job. The hours were brutal. As a store manager he was salaried, not hourly, so he didn't get paid for his extra work. And extra work was required every time a store employee called in sick and no substitute could be found, and every time there was a break-in afterhours and the alarm company and the police called. The way my mom told the story, years later, break-in attempts happened regularly, like at least once a month. The store was in a rough neighborhood.

Dad's job wasn't a great job, but at least it paid the bills. I think. Then he lost the job, with little or warning.

This was the mid 1970s. As I noted in the previous chapter, the economy sucked. Technically the US had just pulled out of its worst recession since the Great Depression, but hiring had not yet resumed. I imagine younger folks today who lived through the jobless recovery of the Great Recession in the late 00s understand the pattern.

Speaking of younger generations and modern patterns, my parents in the mid 1970s did something that's familiar to a younger generation today: they hustled. With "real" jobs not really hiring, my parents both took on whatever odd jobs they could find. Between hustling and scrimping and borrowing, they kept a roof over our heads and food on the table.



This is where some of my earliest memories meld in with the stories my parents later told. Oddly I don't remember my parents being stressed around that time, or unhappy. Probably that's because I was too young to recognize such emotions. It could also be that my parents hid their stress and worries well from us younger kids. One snapshot memory I do have from back then is my parents giving each other a high five when my mom said, "We did it! We paid the mortgage this month."

I also have early memories of some of the jobs my parents did during that time of hustling. My mom started selling Tupperware. Many of my earliest memories are of riding with her in the car as she drove back and forth to the Tupperware warehouse. We'd return with a suitcase full of products she'd sell via Tupperware parties.



I wish I could say that Tupperware was how my parents pulled out of the economic nosedive after my dad lost his job. I wish I could say that Tupperware was how my mom built  a lasting and fulfilling career as an entrepreneur— which was part of the Women's Liberation pitch Tupperware was making back in the 1970s. Alas, I'm not sure my mom ever made any money with Tupperware.

That's because Tupperware was, for many years, a multi-level marketing (MLM) organization. In MLMs most distributors make very little money. See Wikipedia's Tupperware page, for example.

Mom stopped selling Tupperware after a short period of time. Likely that's because she netted little or no money after a lot of work— work planning and presenting at Tupperware parties, hustling to get people to place orders (remember, in a tough economy), then having to pick up & deliver the orders once they were shipped to the local warehouse. But while the dream of making it a sustainable career disappeared quickly, the Tupperware itself did not. Mom bought a number of pieces herself, because they were useful. And they lasted. The bright, 1970s vintage colors and those fluted lids were a mainstay in our house for many years after.

To be continued....

"I'd like to attend as a fly on the wall." It's a line I hear frequently, particularly in sales. People want to join a meeting to listen in and see what's happening— but not be recognized as a participant and certainly not be asked to do anything, including stating an opinion or answering a question.

Having a few "fly on the wall" non-participants generally works okay. But what if everyone wants to be a fly on the wall?



I had a meeting like that yesterday. My sales colleague and I began a sales meeting with a customer. As we opened the videoconference very quickly 6 people joined in. We didn't recognize any of them by name. And they all had camera off and microphone on mute.

We introduced ourselves and asked them to introduce themselves. Nothing. We prompted them with a simple question about how familiar they are with our software— software their company has licensed for several years. Again, nothing. I'd say "crickets", but there wasn't even a chirp. They all sat there silently like flies on the wall.

Late afternoon Wednesday my ears were drawn to a drip-drip sound coming from the kitchen. The water had been off for several hours as plumbers fixed a leak in a neighboring building. (Some of the mains in our community have broken or missing valves, so sometimes fixing a problem in one building requires shutting off water to multiple buildings.) I wondered if maybe I left the faucet in the kitchen open slightly and now water was flowing again. No... it was a leak. A leak from the ceiling. Water was dripping down from the ceiling of our kitchen pantry. Yes, this is the same pantry where we just got a leak fixed a few days ago! 😡

Instead of creating a bulge in the painted drywall like the last leak, this one was pouring out through the fixture around the fire sprinkler. No, the sprinkler itself wasn't running; water was pouring out around it. That indicated water was leaking somewhere in the wall, flowing along the pipe, and coming out through the ceiling where there's an opening for the sprinkler.

Well, it's a good thing I've been lazy about putting the shelves back in our pantry after it was finished on Monday. If I'd put everything back in there Monday or Tuesday, I'd have had to take it all back out Wednesday.

We called the property management company to report the problem. They got in touch with the owner of the plumbing company that fixed our leak. The owner himself would come out Wednesday night to diagnose the problem— to determine if it's a failure in the repair his team just finished, or some odd consequence of the water shutoff on Wednesday, or a completely unrelated new problem that just coincidentally happened on the heels of the previous problems.