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Showing posts from January, 2014

Handicrapping the Rs

According to Rear Clear Politics , these are the average polling numbers for the various Republican Presidential nominees: Poll Date Christie Ryan Bush Paul Huckabee Cruz Rubio Walker Jindal Spread RCP Average 12/14 - 1/26 14.0 13.0 12.6 11.0 -- 9.2 8.2 5.5 3.7 Christie +1.0 Here's my prediction with 3+ years to go: Jindal, Walker, Rubio, and Cruz have no chance to win the nomination at this point (Rubio might someday, but not this time around, the others never will). That leaves Huckabee, Paul, Bush, Ryan and Christie. I think this is the order of likelihood they could get nominated: 1 - Ryan 2 - Huckabee 3 - Christie (tho he would move up if he moves to the right) 4 - Paul 5 - Bush And this is the order of likelihood they could win against a random Democrat: 1 - Christie 2 - Ryan 3 - Bush 4 - Huckabee 5 - Paul And of those 5, I think only the top 2 have a chance to beat Hillary, tho any of the top 3 could win if they run a perfect campaign. Christie on

So apparently, sometimes it isn't the just speaker who is doing the quaking, sometimes it's the listener.

Last week was a rough one for a lot of reasons, including the feeling that it seemed at times like my mission for the week was to upset people who mean so much to me, including Cheryl, Mike and another friend I think very highly of. (Though as I later told Mike and Cheryl at dinner Friday night, at some point it also hit me that I may have had it backwards - that it was a week for people I love to piss me off!). But then, in a job interview with a fellow Quaker, he told me about an encounter he had had some years back with a group, where the conversation became somewhat heated, with frank opinions being expressed with seeming little regard for the discomfort the statements may have aroused in those at whom the comments were directed. When the group (which was a meeting of the committee to choose the winner of the very prestigious Newbury Book Award ) was in the hallway taking a break from the discussion, one of the other committee people approached this Friend to apologize for th

Well, not including the Republican primary voters

Recent bridge-related events remind me of something I had wanted to write about earlier in the week and now seem all the more relevant: There is only one person who can keep Chris Christie or Hillary Clinton from becoming President and that is: Chris Christie
I don't usually write about things like this, things that are going on in my personal life that is, even though Mike Rellahan once told me that he'd love it if this blog did only that - things that were going on in my day-to-day and that he'd way rather read about that than my stupid not-so witty observations I had on the wacky world around us. (OK, he probably said it in a nicer way than that, but that's the way I heard it.) So here's what my week has been like: Monday - a relatively slow start: 11am - a meeting with 5 people here at work, to discuss, among other things, all the meetings we need to have this week. Seriously. I made a list of 7 meetings we need to have. We'll end up combining many of them so we don't need to split them out separately. Tuesday - the fun begins 10-11am - a Stewardship Meeting to discuss the meetings we need to have next month with our Conservation Biologists to discuss a whole list of issues we need to address re
Just a quickie today, since I'm so busy. There have been and continue to be so many conversations in my house through the years that I wish I'd written down, so I'm going to try to remember to post some of them here. Here's a recent one: Cheryl, Trev, Emma and I had just finished eating dinner one night and Cheryl and I were trying to kids to get focused on all the things they have to do every night to get ready for bed on a school night:  - eat "D" (dessert) (somehow they don't usually forget to do this one)  - brush teeth  - practice their instrument - Trev the drums, Emma they trumpet  - do their "walk-through" where they walk through the house putting all their things back in their rooms  - put 15 things away off the floor of their rooms (15 clumps a day?!)  - read for 30 minutes Yeah, it's a lot. So Cheryl and I were still sitting at the dining room table after dinner and as I say, Cheryl was getting more and more frustrated

Of politics, sex and...toilet paper holders?!

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GoodLordinheavenabove, as my Mom used to say. Or maybe it's me who says that, I forget. In any case, it's now been 50+ days since I last posted anything. I blame Judy Anderson for her amazing blog  which she calls Clump-a-Day. It's easily the best blog I've ever seen by an amateur, and I mean that only in the sense that she hasn't tried to monetize it, to use a popular word these days. I keep waiting for her to disappoint me just once so my blog doesn't seem just incredibly inferior by comparison. I've been so transfixed by her incredible writing and photographic talent. I am just waiting for a publisher to come across her work and turn it into a book. Or maybe a page-a-day calendar, a la Louise Hay, like the one I buy for Cheryl for Christmas every year. But I'm going to recognize that his isn't a competition and that we all have our gifts to share, and more importantly, this blog isn't written to please anyone else necessarily. It's just