Like an exoskeleton

It's a shame that Obama's delicious victory is alloyed by the bitter taste of not one, not two, but three propositions and amendments across the country to ban gay marriage. Whose fucked up idea was it to legislate the definition of a word? I am so pissed about this. Also, California's humane animal treatment proposition is silly. Guess I should have voted in California instead of Texas... our local propositions were boring.

One victory at a time, I guess. Obama, show us how it's done.

Hi everyone!

GO VOTE.

Thank you.

Tuesday, day four of our journey, was a ( teary farewell to Gatlinburg )

Why the hell do I ( enjoy hiking so much? )

As Andrew is also documenting on his new hiking blog, he and I have spent the last two days ( on the road South. )

Onward!

Stuff like this is worrying me more and more as my trip to China gets closer. Lake Tai is the source of Taihu stone used in Chinese gardens for millennia, and it was once a prime tourist destination. Now it's become so polluted that rice farmers don't dare touch the water without gloves since it makes their skin peel. What can we do about institutionalized negligence in such an ecologically and historically important part of the world? For so long the mantra in China has been economic growth before anything else... it's frustrating and depressing to read stuff like this.

...but if I were to make a fundraising video, I wouldn't make it a priority to scare small children. Jimmy, your eyes and hands terrify me!

So I sit down at my desk and check the email to find this fun little tidbit:



So it looks like somebody ripped me off for just over a hundred dollars. Fan fricking tastic. The mess of bullet points eBay tries to pass off as "instructions" leave me totally confused. There's a list of things to do based on how I paid: the first item is for PayPal, which is how I paid, the second is for checks, the third is for credit cards... but wait! I paid through PayPal with a credit card! Which do I do? And then the fifth bullet is a different set of instructions for PayPal! There's even a few typos... I double-checked that the message was actually from eBay just to be sure that some twelve-year-old who can't spell "copy and paste" wasn't trying to dupe me. Why do the eBay help pages have broken links? This is ridiculous! They won't even let me file a complaint until ten days have elapsed... so HOW THE HELL am I supposed to even do THAT much?!


But then I found this. And it was all better.

The drought that cut Minnehaha Falls down to a trickle and kept my umbrella dry all summer has finally broken in a pretty spectacular way. The worst of the storm hit just as I was walking the dog. The million-dollar playhouse someone is building at the corner sourced a vast vulgar smear of reddish runoff streaking across the road, and the blacktop on a hill just past that was a rippling whirling rapids racing past our feet. Huge droplets crashed down just as we ventured from tree cover in a cacophonous roar. As we looped back the neighbor's puppy bounded out of their garage and streaked over to say hello, as the damp, apologetic owner tailed him in her soon-soaking cotton sweatshirt. The puppy turned it into a game, and I was too giddy from the rain to be angry at her for not keeping him leashed.