Well, I did get home in time for the first results (Obama won Vermont), but that is not the actual reason I am home early. It is that Brandy and Amy will be back in a few hours, and I need to get the house back in some semblance of order before I head to the airport. Not that many hours left. Their flight is currently over northwest Indiana. Looks like they may be just coming out of some nasty weather. I’m sure that was fun for them.

But… and this is where the less fun for me comes in… Plan was originally to come home one or two hours from now (and just catch the election returns on my phone until then) and then clean up and such while watching the returns come in. But in the last few hours I’ve started to feel unwell. I think I have a slight fever, although I can’t get the thermometer I found to work, and my head is getting all swimmy, and I’ve got a few other random symptoms that just suddenly started making me unhappy a few hours ago and are getting worse by the hour. Bleh. Bleh. Bleh. So once I finished my last meeting, I just headed home.

I just took some Tylenol. Hopefully it will be enough to make me feel somewhat functional. Right now I just feel like lying down.

Bleh.

Since the new Apple laptops finally came out, I ordered Brandy’s new laptop yesterday. It should be here next week sometime. As I mentioned in my earlier post Brandy’s current laptop is barely functional. This is desperately needed. It will be good for her to once again have a computer she can use fully.

(She can’t use either my desktop or Amy’s very well because it would require her sitting upright in an office style chair, which her back can only handle for very short periods of time…. plus Amy and I are too busy using our computers.)

Anyway, shiny new laptop, coming soon.

Making sure the three of us have decent computers is one of the few luxuries we allow ourselves. (And we allowed Brandy to go a little too long with her dying laptop.) Besides that, Amy’s school takes all our free cash flow. As long as neither of our cars finally decides to die, that should be just fine. :-)

Anyway, did I say shiny new computer coming soon. Yay!

Of course, I have promised not to so much touch it, so Brandy can do all the set up and configuring herself and make sure she’s familiar with every detail and feel completely like it is HERS. So I just get to watch. Maybe. :-)

So last night I check my schedule before heading to sleep. I notice a meeting at 16:45 UTC, which is considerably earlier that I have been in the habit of getting to work lately… although really, a 17:00 UTC start time would be a good start time for me, and I should aim at that, but really I am at 18:00 UTC and often am a little later than that… in any case though, this was way early for me. But I made a note of it and even though it was already after 10 UTC by the time I was heading to bed, I set my alarm appropriately.

Of course, in the morning having had only five or so hours of sleep, I hit snooze one or two times too many… and I’d forgotten I had to let the dog out in the morning… but I still got to the car running less than five minutes behind pace to get there on time. If I made up a little time on the road, I’d be late, but only a couple of minutes late…

But then I realized that it had gotten cold over night, and the windscreen and all the windows had a nice layer of ice on it, and although by that point I’d already driven 20 or 30 feet down the road, I really couldn’t see a damn thing, and needed to stop and make sure I could see before driving further. Which cost another five minutes. Once I got started I still wasn’t making up time. I was going to get to our parking lot 7 minutes late, and then adding in the 3 minutes or so to get to the meeting room, I’d be 10 minutes late. And this was for a 15 minute meeting. Oops.

So as the moment passed when the meeting was supposed to start I call my boss’s boss, who was also supposed to be at the meeting, and whose cell number I happened to have on my phone. He was having breakfast. He was not at the meeting. He had basically told them they were crazy, and talk to him later in the day. Or something like that. He wasn’t sure if they had actually moved the meeting, but he had something later on HIS calendar.

Anyway, I get to work, run to the meeting, and sure enough there is an empty conference room with the lights out. A few minutes later I get back to my desk, get synced with the calendar, and sure enough, about two hours after the last time I had my laptop connected to the work network (and thus syncing my calendar) the meeting had been moved from 16:45 UTC to 20:00 UTC.

Oh well, I now have some extra time to catch up on things. Of course, I lost some of it by making this post, and will lose a few more minutes by going and grabbing some breakfast, but hey, this is an hour I wouldn’t usually be here anyway.

Lesson learned: If you check your calendar late at night and notice an early morning meeting, before going to sleep, connect to the network even if you weren’t going to anyway to get an updated calendar and make sure it has not been rescheduled. Worst case, it hasn’t been. Best case, you get to sleep more.

So, I’m about to fill in my ballot for the Washington State Primaries. They need to be postmarked by today (Tuesday). Now, since I participated in the Democratic Caucus, I am bound to do the Democratic Primary, not the Republican. It would be nice to do one of each, but that is not allowed.

Now, the Republican primary matters. Half of the states delegates on the Republican side will be determined by the Primary (the other half were determined by the caucuses a couple of weeks ago).

But on the Democratic side, this doesn’t matter at all. All of the delegates were determined by the Caucus. So this is actually completely irrelevant. None the less, I am going to think about it somewhat. The choices are:

• Joe Biden
• Hillary Clinton
• Chris Dodd
• John Edwards
• Mike Gravel
• Dennis Kucinich
• Barack Obama
• Bill Richardson
• Write In: ______________

Hmmm… remember some of those names? Only three of them are still running of course. And nobody pays any attention to Senator Gravel. But the rest are all still on the ballot. Which makes me think about it again, and makes me sad about how we have this process where since not all of the primaries and caucuses are at the same time, peoples first choice may be “not running” by the time of the actual vote.

Now, I’ve been noticing on the election returns on the last few states on the little pie charts they show on TV, there is actually usually a fairly decent sized grey wedge that is “other”. Now, some of that may be random write ins, but I’m guessing most of it is people voting for candidates who have already dropped out. Which is of course still completely valid. They may not be campaigning, but they are indeed still on the ballot.

Which brings me to me. My first choice overall before Iowa was Ron Paul. But my first choice on the Democratic side was actually Joe Biden. Should I take this opportunity to give Senator Biden the nod?

On the other hand, I’m now actually an Obama delegate to the county convention. Should that hold any weight?

And has my mind actually changed? If Joe was still running, would I still pick him over Obama now?

And, of course, why am I even thinking of this, since there are no delegates at stake and this actually doesn’t matter at all?

Then I think… the only way the results of this contest could be at all relevant are if everybody thinks it doesn’t matter and doesn’t bother… and in the low turnout environment Hillary manages to pull out a win… a win that doesn’t matter at all really, but might give voice to some sort of “Obama won here two weeks ago, but now Hillary won, Hillary has the momentum again!” sort of bull.

So… sorry Joe… I’m filling in Obama.

Nobody changed their minds, although some people lobbied Brandy. So 3 Obama delegates (and none for Clinton or Uncommitted) were elected from my precinct to go on to the county convention.

I am one of them.

(To be clear, I’ve been elected to represent my precinct at the district caucus and the county convention along with 2 other people… This is NOT to be a national delegate. The county convention will elect delegates to the state convention and the state convention will elect delegates to the national convention.)