Christmas came and went mostly without incident; we had one friend over, and phoned a couple of others. I had the week between Christmas and New Year's off, and we caught up on a lot of TV series: the Mandalorian, ST Discovery, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Dragon Prince, Hilda, the new She-Ra, and just this weekend, the Doctor Who New Year's ( Read more... )

We've been getting phone calls of late from a local market research firm (I looked it up and confirmed that it is indeed a local market research firm; their office is practically next door to my current place of employment) conducting what I am betting is internal polling for the Republican party. The questions range from the usual partisan "Biden ( Read more... )

Every time I think I cannot possibly despise Trump more, he opens his mouth. I suppose in a perverse way, the torrent of virulently xenophobic pro-Trump, anti-Mark Kelly commercials that the Republican superpacs have unleashed upon the Arizona airwaves is an encouraging sign, because they wouldn't be spending money here if they weren't worried. ( Read more... )

This is around the time of year that I start obsessively following fivethirtyeight.com, poring over polls and agonizing over approval ratings. (Though honestly, for the last four years I never really stopped. I'd love to be able to not care about politics again, but I don't think that's going to happen.) Fivethirtyeight is a place where it's ( Read more... )

Watching the debates hasn't really changed my opinion much -- my top picks are still Elizabeth Warren (for actually having policy positions rather than just talking points) or Kamala Harris (for being the most hard-hitting debater of either night), but I'd be perfectly happy if Booker, Buttegieg, or Castro got the nomination. I didn't think Biden ( Read more... )

But Kyrsten Sinema's pulled ahead in the AZ senate count, and as of today, her margin is increasing. And the majority of the votes left to count come from Maricopa and Pima counties, which are the state's Democratic strongholds (for Arizona values of Democratic stronghold.) They won't finish counting all the mail-in votes till Monday at the ( Read more... )

I have a whole list of things I would like to do to fix up the back yard now that the block fence is complete: put up a patio over the back porch, plant a couple of bushes or perhaps even a tree, put up a rain gutter on the portion of the roof over the tiki bar, go over to the place that sells scrap iron and see if there are any pieces suitable for ( Read more... )

I guess we should be grateful he didn't go straight for the nukes. :(


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I am watching this saga on Facebook where three people I met in BtVS fandom Back In The Day are arguing about Trump. Two of them are people I just didn't have much in common with once we drifted out of the same fandom. The third is a person I cut ruthlessly out of my life after she informed me, in 2004, that of course she'd voted to make gay ( Read more... )

The organizers of the Phoenix march were expecting five thousand people. Estimates are they got at least twenty thousand in Phoenix, and sixteen thousand more statewide, in Tucson and Flagstaff and half a dozen smaller communities. That's nothing compared to the big marches in L.A. and Chicago and New York, of course, but for a red state not ( Read more... )