Foggy

It’s a grey, foggy/frosty morning. Kate and I went to bed relatively early, after watching Babe (I’d seen it before, but Kate hadn’t) and having roasted celery-root and other root-vegetable soup, “1-year artichokes” (smaller and more tender than their usual 2-year cousins), two leftover popovers from the weekend, and some really tasty spatlese riesling we’d picked up from Joe in New Jersey.

I love it when an idea for dinner comes together and I already have everything I need on hand. Using up vegetables past their prime, going through the chicken stock in the freezer – it worked out really well.

Since we went to bed together, I thought it made sense to get up (nearly) together, so when Kate finished her shower (and I finished 30 minutes of dreaming about orienteering with Howard Dean with rules that forbade any of the competitors to have had cosmetic surgery), I hopped up, made a cup of tea, told Kate I’d mail both our absentee ballots today, and got breakfast.

Poker and visiting sister-in-law tonight, I ;lt&heart;gt& Huckabees tomorrow night, my Xbox shows up Friday… the week is shaping up pretty nicely. If only there weren’t this looming cloud of anxiety about … something … next week. What was it again?

Oh, yeah. The fate of the free world. That was it.

The Weekly Reader poll of students, which has accurately predicted the outcome of the Presidential election since 1956, resulted in… a hefty win by Bush. This is the kind of statistic that sits my my throat like an unswallowed stone.

I comfort myself that between money and going down to Pennsylvania to drive people to the polls, I’m doing all I can to bring about change for the better; on the flip side, what if it isn’t enough?

One of my best friends has a cat who’s gone missing, this morning. Not that the two are really comparable, but it’s easy, just now, to project that same sick feeling of helplessness, of having done everything possible and now just having to wait and see how it turns out. These are the situations my mother used to call “Turn-It-Over” times, as in, one has to turn the outcome of the situation over to whatever one’s personal Higher Power is, and acknowledge one’s lack of control. Hard stuff in the best of times.