Apparently someone else has the same sense of humour as mine.

"So, what's your drupal name?"

"kitt, with two T's."

"What's your IRC nick?"

"kitt, with two T's"

"Oh, that's cool! What's your twitter id?"

"kitt, with two T's"

*blink*

*blink* *blink*

"Okay, what's your website?"

"kay eye dot tee tee"

"I hate you."

"I'm okay with that."

Today, I voted.

I have permanent mail-in voter status, so I am able not only to vote before the elections, but I am also able to avoid having to go into voting stations on election day. Crowd avoidance whoo!

On the ballot were a small number of district seats up for election, and two ballots. The first one (A) was a measure to change Sunnyvale's parliamentary system of Mayor selection to nominally a democratic one. Currently, Sunnyvale has a city council elected by city residents. From that body of city council members, they choose who will be the Mayor of the city.

Section 605 of the City Charter provides that the City Council shall select one of its members to be presiding officer and have the title of Mayor. The Mayor can be removed by super majority (five) votes of the Council.

The measure "Measure A" would change the city government so that we would have the mayor elected directly, instead of nominated by her peers.

Wow, this is SUCH a stupid idea.

My first thought was, WTF, if you have Measure B which limits city council member compensation, why would you want to create ANOTHER seat to elect and pay?

My second thought was in the current setup, the Mayor stays the mayor at the agreement of the rest of the city council. That means the Mayor needs to be able to work with all of the council to accomplish things, and that as a general rule she will be able to, they selected her to be their leader.

The people in favor of Measure A argue that the Mayor isn't directly elected. SO WHAT? The Mayor is an ELECTED council member. That she isn't directly elected is a red herring

The second one (B) was about city council compensation. The compensation one was kinda annoying, but not particularly controversial. I disagree with it, as it limits pay raises in ways that could be problematic later on (say, in a year with horrible inflation).

What I understand least about Measure B is why people focus on the pay of city council members, which is about $650,000 a year, when the city budget is $274,000,000 a year. I DON'T CARE IF THE CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS EACH MAKE FIVE THOUSAND MORE DOLLARS THIS YEAR. Seriously people, how about narrowing all of our streets and planting trees in the reclaimed 20 feet by hundreds of miles of ground space - we could save $45k a year not repairing the wider streets since they're narrower, and we could plant more trees, reducing the asphalt footprint and related heat effects. Then we could afford to pay the city council members more!

Focusing on the wrong things, people.

Or as Charles tells me David Schultz says, "Vote no, vote often."

Received not one but TWO envelopes letting me know this:

Yay me! I flew enough on Southwest to make their A-List.

Which sucks because I will have enough miles to make United's Premier Status this year, too.

Too much flying this year.

[Note: boring post. You should probably skip this one.]

Today was supposed to be the first Day of Me, where-in my schedule was full of events and I was going to Get. Stuff. Done. I had Master Gardeners in the morning, a doctor's appointment just after lunch, friends coming in the afternoon, and errands to run which included clearing out at least four boxes from the garage.

Instead, I woke up at 6:00 am (which in and of itself was fine, since I am nominally on East Coast time) with a sore throat. A fairly bad sore throat. That coupled with the heavy heart of the last few days, and, well, it was a rough start to a rough day. Out of bed with the light of dawn to down an Emergen-C then back to sleep in hopes my fever would break. Nothing like sleeping in pools of sweat to give you a good morning's sleep.

I woke up late enough that I wasn't going to arrive at the Master Gardener's class in the morning, and hit a bad spot mid-morning, so ended up cancelling the early afternoon appointment and sticking around the house. After a particularly painful chat with a friend of mine, I ended up in a different funk, and spent the next few hours trying to archive items from his various streams. I would later find out I missed a stream completely, but at least that realization ended up positive in the end.

Charles and Noelle were arriving today, so I spent a bit of time cleaning out the guest room for them. I moved all the boxes and clothes and other items in there to the office. And the closet. And the trash.

During the clean up, I pulled out the Dyson and started vacuuming. To vacuum the dust under the chair, I pulled out the hose from the vacuum cleaner, attached the hard floor attachment, and shoved it under the chair.

With no effect.

Puzzled, I pulled the end back around and stuck my hand on the end gently, expecting serious suction. It's a Dyson, afterall.

And nothing.

Barely a breeze.

Still puzzled, I started to look for the problem. I followed the tube down, and immediately saw the problem.

Huh.

Clogged.

Ooooooooohkaaaaaaaaaay.

I thought back to a month or so ago when my assistant had commented the hose didn't suck when she tried to use it, and it clicked into place. Clearly it was clogged. When I commented about it to Kris, he asked me, "Why didn't she look for a clog? Who doesn't look for a clog when a vacuum stops working?"

Um...

Me?

The insides were amusing. I mean, if I need a pen, I know where to go now!

Yeah, so the clog was pretty bad. I kept thinking, wow, I wish people wouldn't use the Dyson as a Shop-Vac. Amusingly, it was mostly dog hair and not my hair doing the clogging.

The upside of cleaning the vacuum was that I found the missing piece to the office light fixture.

Yay.

Charles and Noelle showed up late afternoon, and decided to stay despite my worries about being sick. "We're not germaphobes," N had commented. Thank goodness, because spending two hours with the two of them was amazingly cathartic. We talked about Hacker Dojo and what happened there. We talked about Jonathan. We talked about my next big idea, which wasn't so much an idea as a misunderstanding about a tweet of mine. We talked about their boys. We talked about life. We talked about how it's less the destination and more the journey in life. We talked about kids in general. It was a wonderful couple hours before they left for N's alumni weekend, and I had the evening to see about getting things done.

Yeah, that didn't happen. Ended up in a painful conversation with Jonathan, one where I learned more about him and more about myself. Not all painful conversations have unhappy endings. Some do.

I ended up going to sleep early when I was hit with another temperature spike, hoping that sleeping sufficiently will help me beat this sickness.

Yeah, not a great post. Pretty meh, which was my day.