Kouryou-chan and the Storm

Last night, it seems like almost every hour Kouryou-chan kept coming into the bedroom and saying that she had a bad dream, or heard a noise, or that she was scared. The wind and the rain knocked about the trees outside and kept rousing her, and she kept rousing us. This morning I have all the mentual acuity of a rutabega.

Which is not to say that I am not thinking this morning. And I am most certainly not celebrating the decision of the Massachusetts high court this morning.

Quick: without invoking religious or nationalistic ideology, complete the following sentence: "Conservatism is the premise that..."

( More on gay marriage. )

Even without the meandering, intellectual thinking about marriage as an institution, we have to be aware that there is an election coming up next year in which we have a slim, but real, possibility of tossing out of office a man who embodies, in my opinion, the worst impulses of the Republican party with respect to pandering to power, abuse of authority, and spending our future's inheritance today. This court decision has galvanaizied and aroused the ignorantly "conservative" (as well as their less-ignorant leadership) and will create a backlash guaranteed to make removing an abusive president even harder.

( Side note )

I think we should keep this in mind: conservatism is not the enemy; rousing the complacent to reactionary fervor is the enemy. The Massachusetts decision, if it is spun into a "nation-wide precedent," is going to condemn us to four more years of Ashcroft and Bush.

Do we have phone yet?

Apparently, sometime yesterday the wind and rain hosed our phone service. This is not good as we're also supposed to be getting Covad in our neighborhood this week to install DSL in the house sometime soon. We got back a line this morning but the audio quality is so bad we have no data access. So I can't get to the 'net at all from home.

Omaha had a seizure yesterday, so she was very much out of it when I arrived home from picking up Yamaarashi-chan. With her being so spacey, I wimped out and made tuna noodle casserole with bread crumb topping, which I placed under the broiler for a minute or two to toast completely. Quite yummy and ridiculously simple to make.

I've been thinking about revamping my home page. Y'know, just trying to update it to make it look better. I was thinking as an experiment that the next revision will use no tables at all, just divs and CSS. My problem is that i'm not really a very good visual designer; my training is mostly in industrial design, making things obvious when what I want is for them to look cool without blowing up every browser in the universe that isn't running Mozilla 1.2 or above. Time to get visually creative-- not my best subject.

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These people, while cute, are also genuinely bad.

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And while I don't have independent confirmation of it yet, there is apparently a letter floating around LA from the city comptroller stating that, "The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived... One such recent example included the manufacturer's labeling of equipment where the words ''Master/Slave'' appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label."

Enjoy.