Southern Kind of Life

For those of you who think the United States has a huge problem with the size of the federal debt (and I do) there is a movie tonight being shown in select theaters around the country called I.O.U.S.A. From the trailer, it looks good.  I’d love to go see it but I’ve unfortunately already got plans tonight.  It’s at the North Hills Stadium 14 in Raleigh, NC at 8pm and after the movie there will apparently be a live panel discussion with Warren Buffett and other financial leaders.  The movie in the theaters is apparently a one night only thing (update: apparently it has a limited 12 city run starting Friday, but the premiere tonight will be in 358 theaters, so your best chance to see it in the theaters is tonight) but the movie will hopefully be on regular TV in a few months.

See the trailer below:

After picking up Big-B from school today and having supper at Elmo’s we stopped by the Parkwood library.  We’ve been meaning to go for a few days now and I didn’t remember if they stayed open late on Wednesdays but we figured we’d go by and see.  Luckily, they were open.  Their schedule says they are supposed to be open until 9pm but I found out that they’ve been having some trouble lately with the parking lot lights.  I haven’t checked all of this out, but it appears that the Church that was in the plaza, where people used to vote, went out of business a while back (hence why voting moved over to the Parkwood Fire Department).  Unfortunately, they own the entire complex and as a result, it seems they have not been paying the electricity bills.  Eventually the piper (or in this case the electric company) must be paid or else he stops providing his service, in this case electricity.  So, after the sun goes down, the parking lot is completely dark.  Because of that, the Parkwood library has been closing early at 8pm when the sun sets.  Now, this isn’t as big of a deal now, when the sun sets at almost 8:30pm, but what’s going to happen when it gets to the time of year when the sun sets at 5pm.  Will the library be closing at 4:30pm then?!?  I realize this is a fairly bad situation for everyone involved, but there’s got to be something that can be done.  I’d welcome any suggestions.

It always seems like there’s way too much stuff happening. The big thing, though, is that Big-B started back to school last week. He’s in 2nd grade this year and likes it so far, so hopefully he’ll have a really good year. The first couple of weeks, though, are a bit rough as my wife is still in West Virginia at the summer camp where she works each summer. So, Big-B and I have been on our own. He’s been going to the afterschool program and seems ok with that. However, I’m not able to pick him up until 5:30pm at the earliest and his bedtime is normally 7:30 which leaves almost no time at all to eat supper, get ready for bed, and do anything else we might want to do (library, grocery store, Tour de France, etc…). But, things seem to be working ok. Thankfully, my wife gets back Thursday evening. I really have a newfound respect, though, for single parents.

Today has been fairly challenging as I managed to catch some sort of bug that has me keeping fairly close to the porcelin throne.  I haven’t eaten hardly anything since lunch yesterday and don’t really have any desire to.  I’m really hoping that things will feel much better tomorrow and this will just have been a 24 hour virus or something like that.

I finally got my car back yesterday morning and it’s running very well.  Thanks much to Wasp Automotive for the good work, even if it did take a bit longer than expected.  Unfortunately, because I had to return the rental car Wednesday morning, I was left Wednesday night with no car and no cable or Internet.  The cable technicians finally came out on Wednesday.  They were supposed to be there between 3 and 5pm.  They arrived at 6:15pm and promptly found that the line had problems and that I needed line maintenance to come out.  They said they’d try to be out that evening, but of course that didn’t happen.  Then, to top things off, just after the cable techs left, a storm blew through and my power went out.  So, there I was with no car, no cable, no internet, and no power.  I’m very thankful that we have a gas stove so I could cook my supper.

Anyway, I got the car back the next morning and then when I came home Thursday evening the cable and Internet were working.  My DVR box, though, seems to still have a few problems.  There are several channels that won’t tune at all, or tune but with a messed up picture.  I need to get through all the stuff saved on the box, though, before taking it in to get a new one.

This weekend, I’m going to be at the RTP Startup Weekend.  The goal there is to basically get a bunch of people together for one weekend and start a company together.  I went to the previous one about 8 months ago and had a good time, even though our company didn’t get past the weekend.  This weekend, I think, that we’ll actually be starting multiple companies, so we’ll see how that goes.  If you’re at all morbidly curious, they will apparently be streaming live video all weekend and you can see it here:http://www.ustream.tv/channel/rtp-startup-weekend

I got back into home last night after being away for most of last week and previously most of the previous week before that.  I had spent the last few days in WV in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone visiting the camp where my wife is working for the summer.  Cell phones don’t work there and it’s impossible to get cable or DSL internet so they use WildBlue satellite service.  Unfortunately, they had managed to transfer more data than WildBlue allowed so they had been throttled down to a 128Kbps down/10 Kbps up connection.  For 150 people.  Yeah, so, not so good.

So, I was looking forward to getting home to a good cable internet connection, watching some of the Tour de France on our DVR and figuring out what I needed to do at home for the next few days.  The reality, however, turned out not quite so good.  Apparently, while I was gone, Time Warner Cable decided to go belly up at my house and not only did my digital cable & internet not work, the upper analog channels are fuzzy and nothing was recorded as far as the Tour de France was concerned.  (Not that it would have mattered, the TWC DVR won’t let me watch any recorded programs because it cannot get a signal from the mothership.)  So, after calling TWC, waiting on hold for a full 30 minutes (!!!) they started to tell me that they could send a tech out this morning.  However, someone had swooped in and grabbed that timeslot so they had to call over to “dispatch” and after doing that they came back and said there were “service disruptions” in my area and wouldn’t schedule a service call for me.  They said everything should be fine by the morning and if not to call and someone could come out today.

Well, fast forward to this morning and sure enough, nothing works.  So, I call and the first thing I’m greeted with is the computer saying “you have a service call scheduled for … Thursday”!!! W! T! F!  So, after getting an operator they transfer me to the “local office” who after a while finally tells me they’ve scheduled someone to come out sometime today and that they will call me 30 minutes before they come (since my wife & son are in WV, there is no one to let them in during the day so I have to come back home in south Durham from my job in south Cary).  We’ll see if they actually call.  If they don’t, I’m calling the BBB and possibly whatever government body that oversees the cable companies to complain.

I’m just about to head to bed so I can get up and be at the precinct at 6am for tomorrow’s runoff election.  While I know there are only 2 races on the ballot in Durham county, I still encourage everyone to go out and vote.  It won’t take that long and you’ll have your say in who will be on the school board and who will be the NC Commissioner of Labor.  If we really want a democracy, then we need to work at it.  After all, we wouldn’t want to end up like Zimbabwe is right now where the opposition candidate has pulled out of a runoff election and is in hiding in the Dutch embassy!  So, please come out and vote tomorrow.

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Originally uploaded by clubjuggler

I got a new camera about 2 weeks ago and had lunch at Tylers at the American Tobacco Campus last Sunday. Afterwards, I had to take a few pictures because it was so nice outside. This was probably the best of the ones I took.

I started writing up my day as an election judge and then life intervened and I didn’t get it done. But, I had set myself up that I wanted to get it done before doing anything else, so the longer it went, the worse it got. I felt I couldn’t write anything new without finishing my election recap. So, I’m now backing off on that and presenting here an abbreviated version of my election recap so I can get on with life and actually post again.

Election day for me started early. Very early! I woke up at 4:15am and left my house in south Durham before 5:30am so I could be at the NC School of Science & Math by 6am. I’m an “emergency [election] judge” in Durham county, meaning I fill in where other judges cannot during an election, and as an unaffiliated voter, I can serve as a replacement judge for either party. For this election I was filling in for the Republican party judge in precinct 4 who was unable to be here for the election. We had set everything up the night before, so we were pretty good to go and opened the doors right at 6:30am.

We had a line waiting for us as we opened the door and for the next two hours turnout was fairly heavy. We got about 200 votes over those 2 hours.  After that it slowed down quite a bit.  I talked for a while with our other judges and election officials and because I was the judge with the least to do (because my main function was watching over the ballot machine), I ended up processing curbside voters.

The big news of the morning was that our chief judge had talked to someone the night before that had said the Bill Clinton was planning to come by, probably sometime between 5-7pm.  We weren’t really sure if it was the real thing, though. 

We had brought quite a bit of food to snack on and had planned to call up and order lunch from Elmo’s and have my wife bring the order by, since we couldn’t, by law, leave the polling place.  When we went to order lunch, though, neither of the other judges were hungry and the other officials were only working a half day, so I ended up being the only that that ordered lunch.

About 2-ish, we had someone come by and say that the democratic party office had told him Bill Clinton would be arriving at 3:30.  Sure enough, we started seeing Secret Service and State Police outside.  We didn’t want anyone voting to miss the opportunity to see the former president, so we made periodic announcements about his imminent arrival and worked out a schedule so that officials could go outside to see him and we’d still have everything covered.  I managed some provisional ballots while our Chief Judge was out trying to see Clinton and then I went out to try to see him myself.  I managed to get lucky and both shake his hand and get this picture of him.  He looked very tired, not surprisingly.

The main problem, however, with Clinton’s visit was that the police ended up blocking off our handicap parking and curbside voter location.  In fact, I ended up walking down the street to process two curbside voters while Clinton was visiting.  I understand the need for security, but the primary reason we were there that day was to vote, not to see Clinton and I fault his group a bit for that.

Other things that happened that day include running out of under 18 ballots and getting more delivered.  We also processed over 20 provisional ballots! (By contrast, the last election they said they only processed a very few provisional ballots, under 5.)

By the time 7:30 came around, we had started taking things down and closed down the polls right on time since there was no one waiting to vote.  We hooked up the ballot machine to the phone line to transmit the results and may have actually transmitted them twice since it wasn’t clear if it went through the first time. (Note that they aren’t actually counted twice since it is the same data.)  We broke everything down, loaded up and the chief judge and other judge headed off to the BOE for the audit. (Normally only the chief judge goes, but our chief judge has an eye disability where she can’t drive at night so the other judge drove her.) The chief judge was concerned about making it to the BOE in time, but I heard later that she ended up being the first precinct to make it to the BOE for the audit!

So, all in all, it was a very long, but good day.  We had over 60% of the registered voters in the precinct vote, and this is just a primary!  It will be interesting to see what the general election brings.

Also, it looks like there will be a runoff for 2 primaries.  This will entail a runoff primary on June 24.  I will again be working as an election official that day and have been assigned to work precinct 4 again.  However, this time, instead of expecting 800 voters, we’ll basically be expecting 8. So, not only will that be a very long day, but probably a very boring day.  If only the General Assembly had actually taken up the “Instant-Runoff Voting” bill a few years ago.

Anyway, now that the recap is out of the way, I can finally start posting again.  I want to post about the Trips for Kids Triangle group I went biking with this weekend that takes inner city youth out for mountain biking rides and there’s the Ride of Silence I went to tonight.  Also, I’ve been getting ready to head down to Orangeburg, SC this weekend for the National Sport (High Power Rocketry) Launch with the National Association of Rocketry and I’m busy building a couple of high power rockets.  But more on all that later!

I’m still writing up my experience as an election judge on Tuesday. I hope to have that done and up by later today. In the meantime, however, I just got an e-mail today from the National Weather Service about the fact that our current weather patterns are looking suspiciously like the weather patterns 2 years ago before Mother’s day. If you recall, the NWS issued 65 warnings that one day, had nearly 100 reports of severe weather including hail up to 2 inches in diameter, 1 F1 tornado, 3 F0 tornados and straight line wind damage. It wasn’t a really good day weather-wise. So, it seems that our local NWS is trying to learn from the past and is concerned that things are heading that way again. With Mother’s day celebrations and graduation at local universities, this could be problematic. So, they’re trying to get the word out for people to be on the lookout. The presentation they’re sending out is here.

If you’re interested in severe weather, you might want to look into joining Skywarn. Our local skywarn program trains people to recognize severe weather and report it. Why do we need this when we have radar, you might ask? Well, radar signals are well and good, but they travel in straight lines and the earth is curved. So, radar can’t tell you what is actually happening on the ground and that is where skywarn comes in. Skywarn is very valuable to the NWS and can use all the trained spotters it can get.