Reprieves

Doctor this morning, she says the stuff on my hand is definitely a mild case of shingles, which had gotten infected - probably when I tried to lance a couple of them. The infection is gone, the shingles are in the process of drying up and falling off, the anti-bodies I built up means I won't need the vaccine for 2 years. She loved that I had photos showing the progression, and asked me to upload them (I had prints with me).

Work was a SNAFU festival, I don't think I'll bore you with anything more than that.

Took automation guy to Barn Thai restaurant. Tried the thin rice noodles with crab, but there wasn't enough crab to taste it. Also had roti canai. It was okay but the roti was not puffy enough and the curry was not the right color for Penang curry. Very lightweight taste too. Nice place, though, and the food was good enuf. Automation guy vacuumed up his pot tai. 

Home, planned on reading till it was time to go to 9 pm rehearsal, but got called and told not to bother. Too little work to call the ensemble. So I didn't get a chance to share my concerns with the director in person - wrote her email instead. My main concern is I don't want to be dancing, let alone front row center, especially not as the only ensemble member in the group. I think she forgot I wasn't the minister anymore at that point.

Checked my financial stuff, the inheritance chunk has not yet hit TechCU, and the rent payment did not hit Keypoint CU (both probably tomorrow). I did update my PG&E payment to Keypoint, but am not sure if it will take. It's not due till 8/21, so there may be time for the change to take place.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Starbucks
Maybe do some more work on the trip photos, now that I have a super-fast paid-for connection.

Politics

Y'all know I do not like Obama. One reason is the race thing. He's almost as white as I am, but because he looks like the grandson of a sharecropper he got a lot of votes for being "African-American". Which he literally is, in all the ways which do not symbolize a step forward away from racism. His father was a wealthy African, his mother an upper middle class white woman from Kansas who went to Mercer Island High School, which speaks volumes to anyone from the Seattle area pre-1970. 

I don't like the fact that he converted from being a free thinker to a born-again Christian, which he did his best to hide during the 2008 elections. He was anti-choice, and anti-gay-marriage when he took office.

All his major campaign promises he has either broken, seriously delayed, or compromised to death. Instead of withdrawing all US troops from the middle east in 18 months, he sent 100,000 more. 80,000 are still there. Don't Ask Don't Tell he could have rescinded as commander in chief, but he threw it to a committee which, at the time, was not inclined to reverse it. That process took three years. He has finally come around to not being opposed to same-sex marriage, but has done nothing to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. Instead of national health care, we got mandatory health insurance, with no limits to premiums. The very poor can get some help paying for that, but not the middle class.  I'll stop there.

Willard Romney has a track record as MassGov which is relatively liberal and proactive, but you wouldn't know it from his presidential campaign. He has done some Truly Stupid things, but he also built a financial empire and managed to legally not pay a lot of taxes in the process. I have no problem with him keeping funds in the Caymans, those banks are less avaricious than Wells Fargo or BofA. They also pay better interest, and don't tend to buy bad loans. His anti-choice stand is infuriating, but I happen to agree with his hard line against those people who are in this country illegally. I've heard the stories of how my immigrant grandparents had to wait for quotas before they could come here legally.  I know how hard they worked to learn English and become US citizens. But Romney's sucking up to the tea party is a show-stopper for me.

So the bottom line is I have no one to vote for who would end up in office. I don't see either of these guys as the lesser of two evils. I just see two separate but equal evils.