Reprinted from 2014: Resistance is Futile

Just to show how far I can go to express my political beliefs, here's a story.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan was running for President. I lived in Washington State, where polls showed him running away with the GOP nomination. There was almost no chance Carter would be re-elected if Ronnie was the Republican candidate. A group of 30 of us in and around Seattle decided to make our voices heard, and try to block Reagan's nomination.

To do this, we needed to be able to vote in the state GOP convention. To do that we needed to be elected Republican Precinct Committeemen. Between us, we lived in 18 different precincts. I joined the Republican Party, paid my small fee to get on the ballot, and ran unopposed in my almost totally Democratic precinct. I won the seat. All 18 of us did.

At the time, there was an anti-war, socially liberal but fiscally moderate Republican congressman named John Anderson, whose name was on the GOP ballot. We chose him as our candidate, and went to the state convention as delegates pledged to him. I found this item in his wikipedia page: "Anderson increasingly found himself at odds with conservatives in his home district and other members of the House. He broke with the administration on Vietnam, was not always a faithful supporter of the Republican agenda, and was a very controversial critic of Richard Nixon during Watergate."

At the convention, there were 40 of us Anderson delegates from around the state. George Bush had about 500 delegates and their very smarmy campaign manager tried to buy our votes. Bob Dole, Howard Baker and John Connally were also in the race, but I think by this time they had bowed out in favor of Reagan.

Just before the convention started, Anderson left the GOP and declared as an independent candidate, with Patrick Lucey as his running mate. By the rules of the convention, we were still pledged to Anderson, he was still on the ballot, so we stuck to our guns.

I have to say that the state GOP chairman was extremely gracious, he allowed our nominating speeches the full allotted time, and he stifled any and all calls from the floor to have us disowned.

Reagan won on the first ballot. It was something like 1200 to 40.

I voted for Anderson in the November election, but the tally was:
Ronald Reagan/George Bush, Republican 43,903,230 50.75% [489 90.9% electoral votes]
James Carter/Walter Mondale, Democratic 35,480,115 41.01% [ 49 9.1% electoral votes]
John Anderson/Patrick Lucey, Independent 5,719,850 6.61% [ 0 0.0% electoral votes]

ADDay

Went to bed way early for me, 10-ish, and kept waking up at odd hours, and except for the last time at about 7:30, Spook was sprawled next to me, well within patting distance. But she makes a rude noise when I pet her more than a couple of strokes, and will completely move away and jump off the bed and out of the room if I try to cuddle. I didn't try this time.

unlike the last few days, there was no 8 am asshole east coast Indian recruiter calling with an underpaid 6-month contract in New Jersey for automated cat flossing equipment.  In fact there were no calls at all until maybe 10 am. Didn't answer any of them, they went to voicemail, and nobody recorded anything. My auto message is working.

Some call it ADD, I call it stream of consciousness and/or intuitive leaps. I am online, lots to do this morning:
- Applied for unemployment insurance
- Tried to rollover my 401k, they want to snailmail me paperwork
- Resurrected my CalJobs account, this is a useless job bank which one is required to have an active account with in order to collect unemployment. They take your uploaded resume, and parse it into insane bite sized pieces which basically requires filling in 2/3 of what you already uploaded. The good news is employers can download the original.
- Checked Fedex and USPS and confirmed again that my medicare and severance packages were delivered yesterday
- Updated Facebook
- Took a look at Twitter (I don't use it much)
Feeling hungry, I put the PC in sleep mode and went to make lunch, but remembered I was going to vacuum the bits Spook had kneaded off of her bed in the office, and ended up vacuuming the whole house.

And I needed bananas, and DayQuil, and maybe apples and limes and frozen meals, and if I was going to get to Safeway and be back in time for the scheduled 3:30 pm call from the Amazon/Alexa recruiter, I needed to leave real soon. So I did.

Got everything I'd gone for, resisted the urge to buy another black forest cake or an ice cream cake, remembering I have 7 stacks of 10-cookies each oreos and two boxes of Thin Mints at home.  Home and everything put away by 3. Email from recruiter postponing till tomorrow. :-(

Using the white bread, iceberg lettuce, turkey bologna from the shopping trip and already-in-the-fridge grey poop-on and kosher dills, I made my classic lunchtime sandwich. When I was in college and living on $8/day and $35/month of food stamps, I would take a whole bag of white bread, and when I was done the bag would contain as many bologna sandwiches as there was bread for. That was lunch for a couple of weeks. Or maybe just a week, I probably was eating two sandwiches a day. Nice to get back to my roots.

Ate while fast forwarding through the morning's NFL Combine. They have made it as boring and unwatchable as possible. I really do not need to see every candidate run a 40 yard dash. Or listen to commentators when I want to hear the audio from the field. They had Kurt Warner and Michael Irvin down there, but almost never let them speak. And they chatted over the instructions the staff was giving the players, without explaining what was going on. And then they had taking heads chatting about all kinds of unrelated stuff. Stupid.

Sandwich done, Spook was whining for treats so I put 4 on the floor. She won't take them from me. Have to be on the floor or in her treats bowl. I've stopped using that owl because she was getting fat on treats, and they are not a healthy meal. She has been eating from the tower, just not while I'm looking. As I was in that corner of the kitchen I saw that one of the vines hanging from the bay window curtain rods was growing across the top of the cabinets. And it dawned on me that there was enough space up there to put my collection of coffee mugs, which were sitting in boxes in the shed. And that led to the thought that in those boxes is food. Most of a case of shrimp flavored Nissan cup-o-noodles, and most of a family sized box of Quaker's instant oatmeal in four or five flavors. Individual packets. These were my standard breakfast until I hit upon 1 banana and 1 hard boiled egg.

So I went to the shed, brought the two boxes in, put them on the washing machine and went back to close up the shed. Where I saw my bike, and the bike rack. Diverted to the back of the car and adjusted the straps to see how the rack would fit on the Ford. After maybe half an hour, it was clear that the only stable arrangement would scrape off some paint. So back to the shed with the rack, and no taking the bike in for a tune-up till I get a better rack.

Locked the shed, went inside, saw the boxes. Opened them up, got  step ladder and parked all the mugs on top of three of the cabinets. There is room for several more. They are mostly Starbucks, and they are all from places I have been. My favorite is from the Berkeley Scharffen-Berger chocolate plant, which no longer exists. The collection includes London Paris, Brussels, Maui, Chengdu, Bali, Taipei, Bangkok, Phuket and more.

Put away the step ladder, and saw that the door chime which I'd bought at Fry's was still in its bag, along with the motion sensor security light. Checked to make sure the carport door bell still didn't work, so I installed the new one. I'll need more planning and tools to replace the carport security light. It works fine as a night time turn-on lamp, but it doesn't shut off at night anymore. 

Dinner was a microwaved meal - beef and pasta. Oreos for dessert. Home mixed Diet Coke too. A while ago I bought a big bag-in-a-box of real Diet Coke syrup, and it takes two Sodastream measures per quart. Or maybe it's a liter.

Saw that Commander Scott Kelly's flight home was soon, so I launched NASA TV and watched/listened. They didn't get live video until half an hour after landing,  as they were pulling the first guy out of the capsule. I think that first guy blew some minor chunks as he was getting out. Kelly was fine, he looked like he could go another round. The older Russian looked only slightly green around the gills at first, but he perked up quickly.

While I was waiting for the feed, I happened to notice my fishing license hanging on the door. And looked for places to use it. Turns out Lake Chabot, about 45 minutes from here, is open for fishing year round, just was stocked with trout last week, and I can rent tackle and buy bait there. The map shows a lot of fishing piers, and they also rent boats. It looks like they are expecting 70° and partly cloudy tomorrow. Slight chance of rain Thursday. They show a camp site on the map, but it isn't open, otherwise I would shove my tent & sleeping bag into the trunk. I should put my camp chair and a small cooler in if I go.

Plans for tomorrow:
Recruiter call at 10
Go fishing.