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I’m really starting to get excited about politics again. There’s a presidential election this year. Yay!!! I really haven’t been into politics much since the 2004 election. I guess I’m just ready for new leadership.   I’m glad that you’re moving on, Mr. President.

One good thing about Bush is that he may have made it possible for a woman or a black man to become President. Clinton and Obama don’t look so unappealing after him, do they? I think it would be cool to have our first woman or black president. I guess I like rooting for the underdog, but would either of them be an underdog against John McCain? I’m having a hard time choosing between those two as the Democratic nominee. I really hate to see either one lose and I doubt that either one would want to be Vice President. I could support either one of them as a presidential candidate.

I had a weird dream on Thanksgiving morning. In the dream I was watching a musical performance on an awards show. This was one of those group performances that you sometimes see with several famous people singing together. For instance you might see Mariah Carey standing on stage singing her part and then they’ll cut to Celine Dion standing in the balcony singing her part and then they cut to Beyonce walking down the aisle singing her part, etc.

In my dream I think it was Christina Aguilera who had just started singing her part of some song. She was standing in the audience at the top of a set of stairs. All of a sudden she trips. I expected her to sprawl out across the steps, but instead she starts tumbling down the steps. The camera zooms in on her and follows her descent down the stairs, similar to the way it does during sports games when the camera is following the ball or the ball carrier. I start screaming at the TV for them to cut away or go to commercial, but they don’t. It must have been a long way down, because she was tumbling down for a long time and I watched the whole thing. Finally, Christina reaches the bottom and lands on the floor. And the song continues. The camera cuts to the next performer and she sings her piece. I start screaming that they should stop the song, but of course they don’t. In my dream I was horrified. Then I woke up and it was hilarious.

Thanksgiving Break was pretty good this year. It was great seeing my family again. I got to finish reading the new Terry Goodkind book and begin another Stephen King book. I always got to watch the end of season 3 of Deadwood. I also undertook a major cleaning project here in Starkville. It took a lot a work, but I’m glad that I did it. I’m hoping that it can remain this clean…for a while at least. I wish I didn’t have to go back to work tomorrow.

Yeah, I voted today. Mississippi is having elections for all the major state offices. There were some local elections too. Going down the ballot, there were some names I recognized from the ads I’ve been seeing/hearing. For the most part I was lost. I haven’t been keeping up with politics as much as I used to. After I left the polling place, I was listening to something on WMSV where they were listing all the candidates for the state offices. I didn’t recognize most of the names that I heard even though I had just seen them on the ballot just a few minutes earlier.

I’m just glad that I don’t have to listen to the ads on the radio anymore. I could always skip the commercials on TV. In one radio commercial, some guy is blasting his opponent’s record on education. He says “His record on education smells worse than your old hog pen” and then you hear hog noises. I am not making that up.

Nice being back in New Orleans…taking in the city…good music…Pumpkins were awesome…won money at the casino…lots of walking…muscles still sore…stomach still upset…picture with Wolverine…good time.

Voodoo Fest in New Orleans in 2 weeks. Looking forward to that. Can’t wait to see The Smashing Pumpkins. Haven’t been to a concert since 2003 I think. Haven’t been to New Orleans since that same year. Haven’t been outside of Mississippi since 2004. Shame on me.

The weekend is here relaxation shall commence in about 2 hours. Looking forward to that too. Catch-up time.

A promotion at work and a raise effective January 1. Looking forward to that as well. A promotion also means more responsibilities.

Today is the 20th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is one of my favorite shows of all time. If my memory is correct, I watched the first season, skipped the second season, and came back during the third season. I think I caught reruns of all the second season episodes while the show was still on the air. Thanks to my friend, John, I have the collection of all 7 seasons on DVD. The nerd in me wants to celebrate by watching something TNG-related, but if I do it won’t be anything from the first season. The first season was really bad.

I think my mom was the one who got me interested in Star Trek. She would’ve been in high school when the original series debuted. When I was still in college and went home to visit, after she would go to bed sometimes I would hear The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and probably Voyager reruns playing on her TV. Even I didn’t watch Deep Space Nine reruns back then (I do now). She doesn’t wear it anymore, but every once in a while she would wear her Star Trek: The Next Generation t-shirt. Go mom!

I went to Jackson last weekend. My family was celebrating my grandmother’s 88th birthday. Her birthday was in August, but Labor Day was a better time for every one to get together. It’s weird how many from my generation have children. It’s a sign that I really am getting old.

On the way back to Starkville I had made it to Louisville when I noticed that my car felt weird on the highway. Thinking it was just the road, I kept going. After a short period of time, I could tell that something was wrong so I pulled over. When I got out I noticed that I had a flat. I could smell the rubber and I could see streaks on the road. The tire was HOT. Because of the crappy tools I had I couldn’t get the lug nuts off. I eventually got help from a policeman. I’m not even going to talk about how one cop drove past me earlier without stopping, making me not want to call the police. The lug nuts came right off when I used the policeman’s wrench. I made it back to Starkville on the spare, but the last few miles gave me a little worry. It was almost dark when I had to pull over, so I was a little worried. I usually leave earlier in the day when I travel just in case I have car problems. Thankfully, I wouldn’t have been stranded. My roommate John was on his way down to help when I finally got some help. A new tire and a new lug wrench later, my car is doing okay.

A little over 2 weeks ago I accidentally kicked a box that was in the middle of the floor with my left foot. I can’t remember if it hurt a lot when I first kicked the box or not. Since then my 3 middlemost toes have hurt a little when I walk but a lot when something touches them. I tried to ignore that and tell myself that I would be in a lot more pain if it were something serious. Well, it never got better and over the weekend it actually started getting worse. I went to the doctor today just to make sure everything was going okay and fortunately nothing is broken. The doctor thinks they are just bruised. He even gave me some pain pills to make the hurt go away. Hopefully everything will be better soon.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with the look of the website and the new features of Movable Type. I had created a style using a style generator and thought would be okay with a few tweaks, but then I realized that it looked like crap in Firefox and Safari. I want to keep blogging while I figured out what I wanted to do, so I’m basically going back to the default style / templates. Hopefully the plain white won’t be there for long, but I don’t know how much time I’ll have to spend on this over the next few days.

I would say pardon my progress, but I’m not sure that what I’m doing can be called progress. Also, I hate those “Pardon My Progress” signs. There’s so much construction happening on campus, the progress gets in the way sometimes. The Student Union on campus is being renovated. It makes navigating around that part of campus a little bit of a pain. There was one one of those “Pardon My Progress” signs outside of the Union a while back. Not only are they inconveniencing me, but they’re being smug little smart asses about it. At least they’ll be finished with that building soon.