I've been collecting the State Collection of Washington Quarters, and I've reached the point where I'm going to appeal for help. As you may know, each of these quarters represents one of the 50 states. The quarter is minted at either Philadelphia (P) or Denver (D).

I'm missing the following: Delaware 1999P, Pennsylvania 1999P, New Jersey 1999P, Georgia 1999P, New Hampshire 2000P, Virginia 2000P, South Carolina 2000D, and Virginia 2000D. In the 2001-2002 series, I'm missing everything (both P and D) except New York 2001D. Anyone who can help me out in completing the collection, please send me an email. Thanks!

Anyone interested can get a virtual tour of our recent bathroom remodel via a slide show I've posted at my DOT MAC address: http://homepage.mac.com/tydavison/PhotoAlbum9.html.

Happy Thanksgiving! We spent much of the day at Mom and Dad's where we carried on the family tradition of eating too much, falling asleep in front of the TV, and playing various games around the dinner table sometime thereafter. Erin, Dad, and Bret broke with tradition and went for a walk at Minto Brown, but I've had a headcold for several days now, so I bailed on the trip. Sounds like it was pretty neat though.

Erin continues to grow rotund. She's not waddling yet, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time. She'll start week 18 on Saturday, and she should begin to feel the baby moving around any time now. The more comprehensive ultrasound is scheduled for December 16, so we'll be able to "see" things more clearly at that point. We're not planning on learning the sex of the child until birth, but we're not going to be terribly distraught if we happen to find out. (In case anyone's wondering, we're not aiming for a boy or girl, we're aiming for "healthy.") Erin's had a remarkably convenient pregnancy up to this point, and that, along with so many other things, is something for which we are thankful indeed.

I'll be meeting with Richard Woods, MD a little later this morning where we'll decide whether the solution to my collapse last Friday morning is (1) to never, under any circumstances, ever pee again or (2) to institute an on-going policy of bed wetting. I'm reasonably confident that either approach would solve the problem, but the law of unintended consequences would probably come into play.

Having now updated the sign on the wall to read, "2 days straight without an accident," our factory at Davison HQ will be swinging back into full-time production later this afternoon, assuming the doctor gives the OK. Look for an update later today with details.

UPDATE: As expected, the doctor gave me a sufficiently clean bill of health that I'm now authorized to re-join the regular prison population. I'm going to do a couple of follow-up tests over the course of the next few weeks, but he's reasonably confident that my experience was vasovagol syncope and that it is highly unlikely that it will recur.

Ye ol' Davison clan assembled today to celebrate Bret's birthday. Food, apple pie, goofiness—your regular family get-together, really. Bret also brought down some CAD plans of our house he's been working on, and I'm was (and am) suitably impressed. He's doing slick work in Chief Architect and should have our house all done up in the next two weeks. Then hopefully I'll be able to start seriously messing around with a remodel of the plans. (Previously contacted parties should expect a slew of new information including pictures, drawings, and the like by the end of the year. I'm very interested to have folks' input on remodeling plans and ideas.) Thanks and happy birthday to Bret!

Joe and Carol came down to visit today, and we had a jolly time hanging out, watching the Beavers pummel the Ducks in the Civil War game, and munching on chips, Jelly Flops, and pizza. Flights of conversational fancy were common, and by the end of the day Carol and Erin had somehow rather inexplicably entered Joe and me into the Mr. Universe competition where my talent was to be playing the bagpipes while wearing a kilt and parachuting out of an airplane, and Joe was going to do a Chippendales routine with a chop saw. Maybe it's trauma from Friday morning's event, but it was one of the funniest bits I'd heard in weeks.

Many thanks to Joe and Carol for the great Saturday!

I'll open with the most important news: I'm feeling fine. I didn't start out that way this morning, and that led to a one heckuva an adventure which I will describe for you now. Pull up a chair and pop some popcorn. I had a wild ride.

I was up late last night working (again) and had settled into bed for a little night time reading around midnight. I'm working my way through a book on US tax policy and its various permutations and political ramifications. You'll just have to trust me when I say that it's much more interesting than it sounds. Anyway, after about an hour of that, I grow weary, turn off the light, and go to sleep.

At about five o'clock, I wake up with a full bladder and an urge to relieve it. So I swing myself out of bed, head to the bathroom, and start doing my duty. In the midst of this, I begin to feel...very...unwell. Having relieved myself, I start washing my hands, whoa, this doesn't feel right...not good...I put my head down against the towel on the counter. I feel light-headed...worse, I'm looking at myself in the mirror, and I'm thinking, "This is wrong. I shouldn't be feeling this way. I have a problem." It's dawning on me that it's a problem I can't solve.

Erin tells me now that I bumped into the bathroom door (I remember the sound of hitting a door) and banged my head against the bedroom door as I attempted to right myself. Erin says I opened the door, said I was sick, staggered a bit toward the dining room, and went down like a sack of bricks -thump- backward on to the bathroom tile floor. I have no personal recollection of any of this other than the sound of hitting a door. I just remember waking up on the bathroom tile floor.

Apparently I was only passed out for a minute down there, but obviously I have no recollection or sense of time passage. I remember Erin talking to 911 and holding my hand which she described as "clammy." I remember feeling cold. Erin told me to stay put, a somewhat redundant command since I wasn't planning on getting up, she wouldn't have let me, and I was physically incapable of it regardless. I remember looking into her eyes—she has marvelously expressive eyes—and seeing fear. I felt badly for worrying her.

The paramedics arrived a few minutes later. I was in relatively good spirits by then, which is to say that I felt terrible but not as terrible as I had before. They moved me into Erin's office chair and rolled me out to the dining area. That didn't feel so great, but it was tolerable. They got a very weak pulse. They were unable to get a blood pressure reading. Simply put, that is never a good thing. After a couple minutes, they had me try standing up. Very quickly that turned out to be bad news. I seem to remember that they again got a weak pulse, but my feelings of impending sickness and doom returned. They again couldn't get a BP, so they sat me right back down, and told me I was headed to the hospital. I had no complaints with that whatsoever. I felt terrible.

Next the EMTs rolled me to the doorway, lifted me out in the office chair, and transferred me to a gurney. Laying in a stretcher and being wheeled out in an ambulance was almost surrealistic. I wasn't thinking that at the time, though. I was actually very buoyant—thrilled to be laying down and feeling so much better than I had standing up or sitting down. I remember thinking briefly about death—having trained medical professionals not be able to get a blood pressure on you does that, I guess—but it wasn't with a sensation of panic or fear. In fact, if anything I remained chatty, thankful, and jokey throughout the ride to Salem Hospital. How to tell when I'm in pain: I make jokes and lots of them. If I'm going, I'm going with a smile. I'm sure it was a relatively amusing trip for the paramedics.

The EMT was a fellow named Chris from Newberg. He and another EMT guy took turns trying to stick an IV drip into the veins on top of my hands. Apparently, I'm thick skinned. Who knew? After a couple failed attempts (ouch), they got the saline solution going and took some vitals and drove down to the hospital. Erin, who had already called my parents, rode in the front seat.

They wheeled me into station 12 and did some blood pressure checks. Pretty low. I'm normally a 110/70 type of guy (120/80 being average range), and I think upon admittance I was something like 70/whatever, where "whatever" equals a number they don't care about because the systolic pressure (when the heart is pumping) is already too low for them to care about the diastolic. They put me on a IV pump and started dumping another liter of saline into me.

Somewhere in here my parents show up and of course still Erin's hanging around. I'm on an automatic blood pressure cuff—that's a sphygomomanometer to you folks who, like me, were forced to learn the technical term back in high school Advanced Health—that takes my blood pressure every 15 minutes. I'm also on a pulse monitor. Erin has fun watching the pulse meter move when she tells me jokes and pats me on the head. I swear the Davison clan is a goofy lot.

Eventually, a doctor came by, heard my story, and checked me out. The doctor spoke a lot of big words, none of which I understood, so I had him write down his diagnosis: "vasovagal syncope/postmicturitional syncope." The Merck Manual medical definition of syncope is "a sudden brief loss of consciousness, with loss of postural tone." That's a fancy way of saying I blacked out and collapsed to the floor. "Loss of postural tone...." That still cracks me up.

Interestingly, unless you really clock yourself on a night stand or something on the way down to the floor, the condition is usually self-correcting. Laying down equalizes the blood pressure, and less than a minute later consciousness generally returns. My friend Sue likened this to an airplane stall; the airplane stalls, falls, picks up airspeed so that it doesn't stall again. Good analogy, Sue.

The "postmicturitional syncope" is pretty funny too. It basically means you went to the bathroom and blacked out. That seems to fit the bill pretty well in my case. Of course when I talked to Bret, he claimed I was just experiencing morning sickness and that it would pass after the first trimester. I swear I'm in a family of comedians.

Ultimately, we think a confluence of factors caused my problem this morning. First, I got up quickly out of bed giving my body relatively little time to activate the autonomic reflex that is supposed to equalize the blood pressure. (See orthostatic hypotension.) Moving from a relatively warm environment (the bed) to a relatively cold one (the bathroom) didn't help matters. But what probably did me in was these factors combined with the urge to urinate. The neuro pathways for these signals somehow got crossed and the BP never got equalized. -Thud- like a sack o' potatoes.

The statistics I've read on syncope are interesting if less than thrilling: According to a 1985 study, about 3% of the population have syncope at some point in life. Annually, it accounts for 3 percent of all ER visits and 6 percent of all hospital visits. About 30 percent of people with one syncopal episode have a recurrence. The mortality stats around syncopal episodes are sobering, but since these problems mostly occur in the elderly population, statistics likely don't apply to my situation. (Nice epitaph, that: "Statistics don't apply to my situation.")

As I said at the outset, I'm feeling fine. It wasn't exactly how I planned to spend my Friday, but all's well that ends well. Doctor appointment scheduled for 11 AM on Monday. I'll keep you posted.

As some of you know, I was a beta tester for Quicken 2003 for Mac this last year. I couldn't admit that at the time thanks to the nondisclosure agreement I was under, but now that the product is out, no problem. You can even check the About Quicken box and see my name scroll by in the "thanks" section, though they've misspelled it "Davidson" (much to my dismay). Oh well, trust me when I say that's not the least of the bugs they missed. The Net Worth graphs still don't work right, and from what I hear they won't get fixed until Quicken 2004. C'est la vie.

Nonetheless, as I've long said, don't let piddley things like that dissuade you from using Quicken. If you want to control your finances, there is no better program to use. It's changed how I live my life, and if you let it, it will change yours too. I'm happy to report that I've had numerous opportunities in the past year to help family and friends get started with Quicken. If you're not among them, but you'd like to learn about the program, I'm happy to help you get started. Just so you know.

Hopping back aboard the train of thought that I started with, I'm again doing beta testing for Mac software. Like last time, I won't be able to speak about it publicly until after the beta testing is concluded, but suffice it to say that it's fun, that I spent all afternoon today working on it, and that I'm really happy this program will be going Mac OS X native.

Erin and I continue to be suckers for The Amazing Race and The West Wing. Sadly, they both occupy the Wednesday 9 PM time slot on competing channels, but last night Amazing Race got bumped to 8 PM thanks to a Victoria's Secret fashion show—a dubious use of the term if I've ever heard one; the adverts made it look more like a Betazoid wedding—so we watched both our favs and partied it up. We're probably back to the regular dilemma next week, almost making me wish I had a TiVO.

Dave and I road-tripped it to the Woodburn outlet stores and to Fry's Electronics in Wilsonville yesterday. Lunched at Jack-in-the-Box in Woodburn. Generally raised cain and played Spy Hunter on the freeways. I looked at FireWire-based web cams to see if anything was cheap enough to warrant purchase. Nope. $100 minimum. Only like $20 for a USB-based model, but the frame-rates tend to be really low, so that's not worth it to me. I'll keep waiting. Great fun with Dave, though.

Erin's doctor appointment yesterday went just fine. The PA took some vital stats, hooked up a little audio monitor so we could listen to the pleasant swoosh of baby's heartbeat, and answered all our questions. There wasn't much to do or say really; the big stuff (like the complete ultrasound) is in about four weeks.

Erin starts week 16 today, and so far, so good. She's at 129 lbs.—up about 14 from her norm—and has only recently begun to look anything other than slender. Baby is about 6.5 inches long now and is starting to move around a little bit, though Erin can't yet detect anything.

We watched the special edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring last night (I got the 4-DVD set from Amazon.com) and The Royal Tenenbaums this evening. Rings is, as I've said before, brilliant. The special edition is even better than the theatrical release; the extra 30 minutes they've edited in help clarify the characters and the story.

The Royal Tenenbaums was almost like watching an independent film with Hollywood stars. It was strange, funny, surprising, and interesting. It's not terribly deep stuff intellectually—it kind of dips a toe in the thematic pool of redemption, forgiveness, and love—but it's quirky and loving enough that I don't care. Ultimately, the film's heart is in the right place and when that is so I'm inclined to give full points for the effort alone. Recommended.

Our friends Jim and Terri drove up from Eugene this afternoon. We lunched, watched the Ducks go flying down to defeat, and conversed on various topics of interest. After the Duck game, Erin and Terri took off for a walk and Jim and I geeked out on Mac hardware and software. Jim trotted out his über-cool iPod which I had the pleasure of hooking up to Trinity and generally messing arould with. Great gizmo, that iPod. Got to, got to, got to get me one. We played some MacMAME games, fiddled with his iBook a bit, and messed about with FireWire target disk mode. My kinda fun!

Thanks to Jim and Terri for the wonderful afternoon!

Now we begun to see the consequences of the recent election. The Homeland Security Act, another Patriot Act in sheep's clothing, is being pushed for passage by the Republicans. In its present form the Homeland Security Act represents the greatest threat ever to US citizens' personal privacy. I do not say that lightly.

For years, the US and its allies have, via a system code-named Echelon, monitored a substantial body of the world's international and foreign electronic communications. This revelation was part of what initially prompted my move to encrypt the email I send. I continue to advocate email encryption as a standard practice. Your personal electronic communications should be private like your letters sent in the US mail.

But the Homeland Security Act dwarfs these privacy concerns. As detailed by NY Times columnist William Safire in "You Are a Suspect," the Homeland Security Act does the following:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

Welcome to 1984. The time to protest to your congressional representive is now.

It looks like my bet on Aquila (ILA-NYSE) isn't going to pan out in the short-term. Today they suspended their dividend and announced another quarterly loss (mostly attributted to their exit of the energy trading business). There's an old investment joke about how "if you liked Company X at $30 a share, you'll love it at $3" and while sometimes that's true, I don't think so here.

Without the dividend, Aquila becomes a long-term turnaround play. I think it has merit when studied in that light, but it's not something I'd recommend to new investors. If, like me, you've already ponied up the cash for shares, I say ride it out and in the 3- to 5-year time frame when I think things will be more than fine. Indeed, I expect a resumption of dividend within 36 months. But Aquila isn't exactly turning on a dime in altering their business direction, and it's going to get a little worse before it gets better.

I expect a bad 4th quarter 2002 result and mediocre earnings for 2003. So far as bad news in the next quarter, well, Aquila's admitted as much in statements and regulatory filings. Getting out of the trading business has proved expensive. This economy isn't helping matters either, what with the over supply of energy on the market. If the company survives 2003—and their going under has always been at least a remote possibility—they should be well-positioned for stable growth and earnings in 2004 and beyond. That assumes a lot—maybe too much—but unless you have a need of a loss for tax purposes, I continue to advocate a buy-and-hold approach. I still think there's an upside for the patient.

I watched October Sky while up in Portland this morning for a donation at the Red Cross. It's a feel-good film about a group of late '50s high school boys in a coal mining town who are inspired by the Soviets' Sputnik satellite to build their own rocket. It's a touch melodramatic in places, but the acting is fine and the story—a true one—is solid. Recommended.

I pre-ordered the Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones DVD, and it arrived from Amazon.com today. I watched it again last night, and have additional comments to make regarding my brief initial entry (May 21, 2002) on the subject. First, the good news: This is a much better film than Phantom Menace from a filmgoers perspective. Also, the end-of-film special effects-rich Clone War is mind-blowing. For science fiction or special effects fans (all of whom are likely already Star Wars junkies), there's definitely stuff to like.

It gets decidedly mixed after that. Acting is good on the whole, and though scenes and dialogue tend to clunk around quite a bit, that's more of a screenwriting issue that an acting one. This film's Anakin Skywalker, Hayden Christensen, is far superior to Phantom Menace's Jake Lloyd. Christensen has Anakin's brooding teen thing going, and he traverses the mindfield-laden dialogue about as well as one can expect. (In other words, sometimes it goes "boom.") Natalie Portman is called on for more range in this film, and it's not in her. Physically, she's very captivating (and given plenty of outfits which prove it), but her acting talent is questionable. Ewan McGregor is again fine as Obi-Wan. Newcomers Samuel L. Jackson and Christopher Lee are excellent.

Now the bad news: The screenwriting is a mess. Dialogue, motivation, and storyline are sloppy beyond what one would expect in a feature film, and all the special effects in the world won't get you greatness when that's the case. Finally, the tone is wildly inconsistent, rendering the mistakes made here large—even bigger than the idiotic midichorians thing in Phantom. But we'll start with dialogue....

At the best of times, Star Wars dialogue is a difficult. Actors in the series have long complained about it, and it's not hard to hear why. Things like "When I'm around you, my mind is no longer my own" and "I am haunted by the kiss you never should have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me" are retch-inducing. (Go ahead. Try saying them aloud.) Even worse in Clones, occasionally the dialogue is character-destroying—witness C3PO's lines during the Clone War. Yoda's schtick of placing the verb at the end of his sentences comes off as stupid in the heat of battle ("around the survivors a perimeter create"). You begin wondering why, if he's so Jedi wise, he can't just talk normally. Actors, computer-generated or otherwise, try gamely to make the best of what Lucas has offered, but it's a losing proposition. A lot of the Clones dialogue stinks.

Character motivation must have been an afterthought. We have no problem seeing what Anakin finds attractive in Padmé (however awkwardly it is expressed in the film) as she's exhibits any number of charismatic qualities, except apparently good judgment in boyfriends. What does Padmé see in Anakin? Other than hunky good looks, there's just anger and a lust for power. Is this a Jedi mind trick?

It gets worse for other characters. Whose side is Janga Fett on and why? He builds a clone army then fights against them? The unfortunately-named Count Dooku is a confusing villian. Lucas has tried to make him mysterious, but—like the main mystery of the story—we're never in much doubt. What would have been cool is if Lucas had made Dooku a good guy, and the only one who grasped the truth of the situation in the Senate and who left the Jedi order only after the Council wouldn't listen to him. That still wouldn't have solved all the character motivation issues, but it would have made for an interesting and unexpected twist. As it stands, Dooku's actions make little sense. If he's working for Palpatine, then why is there a Clone war? If Palpatine was ultimately the one ordering the clones to be built, then doesn't Palpatine control both armies? Why doesn't he just give Dooku control of both armies and rule the universe?

The largest issue confronting Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones: Its tone is utterly inconsistent. If it's a '50s B-movie serial with a big budget, then the romantic stuff doesn't play and it needs to be less serious about itself. If it's a romance, it's horribly overwrought, incredibly ill-expressed, and remarkably unbelievable. If it's a straight up space action flick, then it does better but it's not up to snuff with say, The Matrix, Star Trek (pick in of the series except Star Trek V), Starship Troopers, Aliens, Terminator, Total Recall, or 2001. To name just a few. The jokes of the film, particularly C3PO's Clone War comments, are devasting to the film's tone. An audience can't take the battle seriously when Threepio is up there doing a Jerry Seinfeld. This is easily the worst bit of the movie for me, and one of those things you wish Lucas had never done. In your mind's eye, contrast C3PO from Star Wars marching in the Tatooine desert with the Threepio of Clones being shaken about in the droid factory, and I think you'll see what I mean. The tone is completely different, and for me, Clones represents the death of Threepio as a serious character in the saga. (Maybe he'll get a memory flush in Star Wars III; God knows the audience may need one too.)

So I think Clones, like Phantom, is another mixed bag. It does action and special effects very well, but just about everything else very poorly. That's not a great trade-off in my opinion, but whether audiences agree is an open question. Clones did $303 million in US box office and is, as of this writing, ranked 13th all-time. That's not bad. Of course Phantom did $431 million and is ranked 4th all-time. Maybe for others it is as it is with me. Despite the incredible special effects, I find waning my enthusiasm for the series and my hope that Lucas will recapture the lightening in a bottle that was the original Star Wars trilogy.

Played the final game of my Men's over-30 team today. Had a goal and assist against a chippy and undermanned English squad out of Portland. Relatively fun game in the sense that nobody got hurt, and I got my exercise. Final was something like 7-2. I dunno. I lost count. Good season anyway, and I'm glad I played.

Now that soccer is foreclosed as an exercise option, I'm staring long and hard at the treadmill. I usually don't want or need it during the spring and summer months, but there are very few options in the winter. Probably start up on that this week (he said unhappily).

I watched the French film Amélie again last night. It's a happy, surreal, romantic flight of fancy, and assuming you can stomach the subtitles, it's well worth the viewing. Nominated for 5 Academy Awards (including Best Original Screenplay), Amélie is every bit as quirky as you'd expect a French film to be, but ultimately a lot more uplifting than what you'd expect. Highly recommended.

Erin begins week 15 today, and all is happiness. Baby is getting bigger, Erin's getting bigger. These are the days of peaches and cream because presently there is very little inconvenience to her (and, therefore, to me). No fatigue going on. No morning sickness. Nothing but happiness, really. Second trimester rocks.

Last night we watched Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly. Although I don't think it was movie of the year, taking the life of a mentally ill math professor and making it interesting viewing is unquestionably an achievement. In addition to the Oscar for Best Picture, it also won for Best Director (Ron Howard), Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Connelly) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Akiva Goldsman). I would have given all but Best Supporting Actress to Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Russell Crowe, however, was utterly robbed of an Oscar for Best Actor. Maybe Denzel Washington was the cat's meow in Training Day (a film I'm unlikely to see since the premise sounds idiotic to me), but I have a very hard time believing that anyone could watch Crowe in Gladitor, turn around and watch him in A Beautiful Mind, and do anything other than give him the statuette. He is superb here.

Ron Howard does good directorial work much as he's done in the past. His films have a standard of quality that is very high, and the complete body of his work is impressive. He's made a lot of very good films. He's not, however, made any great films, and though I don't think A Beautiful Mind is any exception to this, it's his best effort yet. His pictures—among them Apollo 13, Splash, Far and Away, Backdraft, and Parenthood—are consistently well-made and are solidly entertaining. They also rarely move the audience beyond the medium or substantively deal with larger issues, something A Beautiful Mind does and why it's also his best picture. As such, I am hopeful that this represents a breakthrough in Howard's work, and that he may be on the verge of something spectacular. All the component pieces are there for him.

I did not believe that the attractive Jennifer Connelly merited Best Supporting Actress over either Helen Mirren or Maggie Smith in Gosford Park. Connelly's performance was solid, and I have little complaint other than I thought Mirren and Smith were better.

While the screenplay for A Beautiful Mind is excellent, screenwriter and Oscar winner Akiva Goldsman was taken to task by many critics for excluding a number of salient details about John Nash's life and inventing a number of others. Converting book to screen is all about making choices and finding the story that works on the screen. For what it's worth, I think Goldsman did fine work, and I'm not inclined to quibble over artistic license. ('Cause, hey, generally speaking, math is pretty boring, and you gotta tell this story somehow.) I also don't think it's nearly as good as the work done by Frances Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson is bringing Lord of the Rings to the big screen.

So I highly recommend A Beautiful Mind. I think it's a very good though not great work by director Ron Howard with a brilliant performance by Russell Crowe. I didn't think it deserved all the Oscars it won, but it's surely worth your time.

And now we get to deal with the hangover.

Nationally, it looks like all of last night's results will stand. Two immediate results of this are that the federal judiciary will grow even more conservative and that any hope of a balanced budget are long gone. I wouldn't object so much to the conservative judges if I still believed the rhetoric about judicial restraint, but Bush v. Gore two years ago put the lie to that one, and it's clear that, at least at the Supreme Court level, it's Republican party first, good of the nation second. I don't know why anyone should expect different from the lower federal court appointees.

The great Clinton achievement of budget surpluses is a distant memory, which is precisely the way the Republican Neo-conservatives want it. The truth is that this nation is more than wealthy enough to fund social security and a raft of social programs if not for (1) military spending well beyond what is necessary even in the midst of a war on terrorism and (2) a continuing budget deficit, the interest alone on which costs hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Philosophically, the Neo-cons are opposed to government handouts (which isn't wholly wrong). Since in the minds of these Reagan Republicans virtually everything except prison time constitutes a "government handout," theirs is a general opposition to education grants, social security, medicare, and so on. They'll rarely if ever admit that publicly, because you can't directly attack social programs without getting punished at the polls. So they dry up the funding anyway they can. In the next two years I think we can expect big military budgets, tax cuts for the rich, and another attempt to privatize social security.

The Oregon state and local races skewed sharply Republican as well. The only change from last night appears to be that Democrat Ted Kulongoski will win the governor's seat. It also appears as if the Oregon Senate will be equally divided, something that will hopefully keep lots of right-wing ideas popping out of the House from becoming law.

Even closer to home, I was very surprised to see Democrat Bryan Johnston lose to Republican Jackie Winters in our local Oregon Senate race. Johnston ran about as good a campaign as you can on the local level. Apparently, he couldn't overcome the low voter turnout (a nearly 40 year low for Oregon) and a plus 7 percent margin for registered Republicans in the district. I don't see the Demos fielding a better candidate here any time soon, so it's going to be a Republican seat for a long while. Lot of that going on, it seems.

Just thought I'd mention that Erin's next OB/GYN appointment is next Friday, November 15. Don't know if we'll have an ultra sound at this one or not, but we should be able to hear a heartbeat and get a general update on how things are going. From our vantage point it's been "so far, so good." (Though I will note that yesterday Erin's expanding waistline, for the first time, ripped out some pants.)

I love election night. I don't necessarily love the results, mind you, but there's always something about seeing the will of the people expressed that I find exciting. The Bush v. Gore battle of two years ago may have been powerfully depressing in some respects (like Bush stealing the election), but the political junkie in me also found it captivating. Some people slow down to look at car wrecks; I watch election coverage.

So I've been staring at tonight's returns with that same air of expectation and excitement. Nationally, it's looking like a disaster for the Democrats who apparently couldn't campaign their way out of a paper bag. Hint: You can't pass Bush's tax cut, stand behind him for a war against Iraq, and then tell everybody he's doing a lousy job. He is doing a lousy job, but you're supposed to at least put up token resistance, otherwise the Democratic core may decide—as they've done tonight—that it doesn't matter who gets elected. Honestly, this party needs Bill Clinton to run the DNC. He may be a snake in the grass, but he's also the best Democratic politician in the last 30 years.

On a national level it looks like we'll be faced with a Republican-controlled White House, Senate, House, and—dare I say it?—Supreme Court. There is no way in which this is good for the country. I don't care if it's Republicans, Democrats, or Neo-Nazis, nobody should control all branches of government. This is a bad thing.

Sadly, Oregon's political landscape is shaping up much the same. It looks like Republican Kevin Mannix will win the governorship (though it's pretty tight at the moment), and the Republicans will maintain control of the House and Senate. Not a good thing for Oregon either, and that's an understatement, since the Oregon Republican Party as presently constituted is only slightly to the right of Mussolini. Truth be told, though, the Mannix ran a much more effective and energized campaign than Democrat Ted Kulongoski and from a campaigning perspective deserved to win.

The good news for me was the state ballot measures were everything that needed to lose lost, and everything that had to win won. Most of the major national issues seemed to break that same way, so at least that's a bright spot. I'm looking forward to seeing Florida's reelected Jeb Bush implement the smaller classroom sizes mandated by voters, especially since he disparaged the initiative earlier. (BTW, there is almost no greater positive educational impact than smaller class sizes.)

It was a near disaster at the local level where both the police emergency services bond and the parks bonds failed. This qualifies as very bad news, but I'm not sure what's to be done about it. Both measures would have raised taxes considerably, and in this economic climate that's just not going to fly.

I sped up I-5 this morning to join a work gang (Matt, Ginger, Maria, Mike, Jamie) helping Dennis move. Pretty speedily accomplished transfer of goods. Dennis had already packed everything out of the house he was staying at, so we drove to the storage facility, loaded the Budget rental truck, and headed to the new apartment. The crew fairly short work of things (though Dennis will have a lot of sorting and going through boxes to do).

After we'd finished up and Dennis had returned the truck, we walked over to a local Mexican restaurant where Dennis treated the work crew to lunch. Good stuff, and a more than fair trade for a little heavy lifting if you ask me.

On the walk back from the restaurant, Maria and I got to chatting about cell phones. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned that the only reason I really wanted one was for emergencies. The idea of being stuck some place—or worse, of Erin being stuck some place—with a means of getting help has always kind of gnawed at me. Having a cell phone for something like that would be very comforting.

So Maria solved my problem: She gave me her old cellular phone and charger. Apparently every cell phone, whether it's on a calling plan and signed up for service or not, is capable of dialing 911. I had no idea. (Heck, I didn't even know that you don't get a dial tone with cell phones.) Maria's got a new cell phone and had this old, somewhat bulky Nokia just laying around in her car and seeing the opportunity to give it to a fellow like me who really wanted one for emergencies...well, you can do the math.

So a big, heartfelt thanks to Maria! Hopefully neither Erin nor I will have to use the phone, but I feel a lot better knowing we can if we have the need.

Our neighbors Brian and Debbie held a Halloween party this evening, and let me tell you, they really know how to throw one. The hot tub was bubbling, the keg was pouring, and the music was blaring. Costumes were optional, but a number of folks showed up in Halloween attire.

As the night turned cold and the party moved indoors, we got a chance to examine the house. Like many others in the neighborhood, it's of the same style as ours with various changes made over the years from the base model. (Our house is fairly representative of the base model without changes.) In their place:

The walls between the kitchen and living room have been removed and the ceiling vaulted

The two upstairs bedrooms have been combined into one larger room

The front door has been moved closer to the kitchen

There is a hot tub room outside of the downstairs bedroom

There is an upstairs deck and a downstairs patio

The utility room downstairs is finished

Downstairs the family room and the bedroom are connected by a hallway

It was a pretty cool place made even more interesting by the similarities to our own home. A lot of the changes there aren't changes which we would or will make, but it was fun to see, and a great place to party.