Thanksgiving

I'm on my way back home from visiting my family in Orange County for Thanksgiving. This is a two part flight (Orange County -> San Francisco / San Francisco -> Eugene) and I'm currently sitting at the food court in San Francisco Aiport on a 3 hour layover.

I had a great week seeing my family. On Thanksgiving my sister and I teamed up and prepared an All-From-Scratch-Vegan-Feast. It's not ideal living away from family but I just can't see myself living in Southern California. This was the first Thanksgiving in as long as I can remember with my parents and my sister's family all together. I also got to spend a lot of quality time with my niece and nephew - they are so wonderful. I'm blessed to have the family I was born with and the family in Eugene that I've become apart of.

The loudspeaker in the airport keeps reminding us that we are at "Homeland Security Threat Level Orange". I'm not sure what this actually means and if I'm supposed to do something different. When I was going through security the guy in the line next to me had his little clear baggy of liquids and gels out and in a separate bin as instructed. It turns out he was over the limit of having 3.4 ounces. The TSA guy didn't have a scale or measure it but determined the violation by sight. I read a story about this the other day where a guy was over the limit based on the total measurements listed on the bottles and tubes and not what was actually in them. One bottle was mostly empty but counted as full and so he was sent to the back of the line to figure out what to do with his extra liquids as was the guy near me today. I figured I wouldn't carry on any liquids so there would be no problems. The same TSA agent who turned away Mr. 4.7 Ounces happily let Mr. Tacklebox through accompanied by some fishing hooks. I got a glimpse of the tacklebox with it's clear covered compartments fulled with HOOKS. If a box cutter can take a plane down so can fishing hooks ... or pens .. or fingers. Fear is a funny thing.

Soon I'll board the next plane and make my way home to Eugene where my sweet girl will pick me up and we'll spend the rest of the weekend chiling out with each other and our cats.

Husk

The band I'm in is called Husk. Here is a track called "Roman Candles at Walnut and Main." This is a demo track recorded live with the original trio of the band: drums, bass, guitar and singing. Since this was recorded we have added a couple more members to the band. We just booked our first Eugene gig for January 2007. We're very much looking forward to it. Enjoy this song:

Update: The below now plays the entire Husk Demo. You can choose which song you want to hear or just hit go and they will all play.

bMuze.com

Ukulele Version of "There is a Light .. "

Here is a cool video of a girl covering "There is a Light that Never Goes Out" by The Smiths. It's just her voice and ukulele. I love it.

Blogger Beta

I was finally given the go ahead to upgrade to Blogger Beta but there are some issues including that comments are broken you may have noticed.

I'm working on getting it all fixed and will post an update at that time.

Update: Comments are fixed. I'm going to now try and add tags/categories as that was the feature I wanted to most.

Update 2: Labels work in each individual post so I'm not going to try and add them in the sidebar.

Update 3: It's going to take a while to get the labels in the sidebar because of two reasons. The first is that I publish to my blog via FTP so the GUI template editing is not available to me. Second, the beta blogger templates have a new style of coding with these "widgets" that you call. I tried using the widget code in my template to call the label list and it did not work. Does anyone know how to get get the label list in the old style template?

It also appears that adding the labels is causing all my previous post to go out on my feed. I apologize to anyone who is subscribing to my blog and is getting blog reader spammed.

Update 4: Looks like there is currently no code to add the labels to the sidebar using a "classic" template. I have two options:

1. Switch to a beta template and customize it to look the same as my current template.

2. Manually code the labels list. This means I'll have to manually update it every time I add a new label.

Hmmm. I'll see if I can get Iriewoman to help me with this. She has mad web coding skillz. For now, if you want to browse all the posts of a particular label, you'll have to find a post that already has that label and click the link.

The Elections

This is just a quick post to say I'm thrilled with the results so far of the elections. At this point the Republicans have lost control of the House and the Senate lies in the balance. It is such a relief to get some balance back into our government. The people have finally spoken that they are not happy with what the Republicans have been doing.

More on this later as results are finalized.

Update: Bush admitted the election results say that the people want a new direction in the Iraq and therefore Rumsfeld is resigning. Things are looking good in the Senate as it has now come down to the election in Virginia and the Democrat is leading although it's close enough that it might go to recount.

This is truly amazing. We got our Democracy back.

Peace Candidates

My friend Paul was recently featured in an article at The Nation. The article is about only supporting "Peace Candidates" and here is an excerpt explaining what this means:

"In general, ‘peace candidate' means wanting to bring our troops home from Iraq," says Peace Action's Organizing and Policy Director, Paul Kawika Martin. "Although some also believe in cutting military spending, diplomacy for Iran, nuclear disarmament and other important peace issues."

This is a good policy to keep in mind when you vote on Tuesday.