Sylvia's Journal

I saw Tessa and Steve off this morning as they headed for work with a promise to be back before Thanksgiving. I then donated 15 dollars to a small NGO in Central America that tries to get a permanent spot on the Global Giving website. It bought a vasectomy for one man. What a bargain!

I exchanged emails with my ex who I will meet for breakfast in Holland tomorrow morning, to analyze the elections results. It has been a few years since we last met, which included a bicycle trip along memory lane and a very long breakfast at the train station restaurant in Leiden. I declined the bicycle tour this time because it is a week day and the city is full of bikes and traffic. Biking is for Sunday mornings when everyone else is asleep.

I spent all of yesterday thinking about Afghanistan – some of it was thinking of what to bring and some of it was about what to do. I avoided the radio because I had had too much of that on Sunday and all people talk about now is either the elections or the economy.

Axel cooked the two of us a fall dinner: oven-roasted pork chops, sweet potatoes and applesauce made from some 30 apples picked from our neighbor’s trees. The apples did not look pretty but they taste great and made an enormous amount of spectacular applesauce.

Tessa and Steve returned from the city after dinner and Tessa joined us for desert and a family election briefing. Steve is Canadian; this is not his election and so he left us to our task. We asked Tessa to present the three issues on the ballot and the pros and cons of each. We got a somewhat biased briefing: a dogloving yes for ending greyhound racing (we may follow her lead); a yes on abandoning state income tax (I hope we convinced her that was not a good idea); and a resounding yes for decriminalizing small amounts of marihuana.

Voting advice on the main races was not needed. As for the local, county and state candidates, the compelling arguments turned out to be related to body dimensions, type of smile and sometimes compassion (as in “I saw him standing with a sign and he looked nice and lonely!”); so much for talking about issues. And although we pretend that none of this sort of reasoning applies to the selection of our next president, I suspect that in the end the heart casts that vote. I knew I was going to vote for Obama after I read both his books; that was over a year ago. Everything that I have seen and heard since is consistent with what I learned from those books.

The mother of our friend Chuck died yesterday, as did Obama’s grandma. They will never know who won the elections which is very sad. Chuck and his siblings, sons and nephews built a casket for grandma and made it into a party with everyone contributing woodworking and/or artistic talents. I am told the casket is sturdy and nice. Grandma was told about the party and was pleased. She died when it was ready. I hope that the other grandma left because she knew she could go and that the nation was in good hands for the next 4 years.