2. I wrote a query letter to a cool new magazine, offering to write an article for that magazine. I do not know if anything will come of it, but it is always good to stretch and try.
3. My blitz chess rating on the Free Internet Chess Server is back on the rise, having crossed into the mid-1500s again, so that I have some hope, but not undue hope, that I will cross 1600 this year.
4. I want to organize a new chess tournament, but I never seem to find the time. If I am to hold one in January, I must organize it by November 10.
5. Can any two term presidency can escape ignominy in its second term? The nation has come a long way from the days when it permitted Ari Fleischer to sneer at the media with impunity.
6. Either candidate from the television program "The West Wing" surpasses any living candidate I foresee for 2008, and perhaps that's as it should be.
7. The newspaper advertises huge, four-inch pansy flowers. I love the way that pansies last through winter here, and disappear only in late Spring.
8. It's time to plant two new trees. I'm eager to select the new candidates, and hope for their longevity.
9. I have not read as many good novels in the past few months as I usually do. I'm in the middle of Edna O'Brien's Country Girls Trilogy, which is a decent read. While I was at home, I re-read a classic from my teen years, Heinlein's "Tunnel in the Sky". I think that Heinlein's gentle satire is timely in that it points up the impossibility of hermetically sealing childhood. Still, the pervasive retro nature of his understanding of social relationships and gender relationships gets cloying as the pages wear on. He was nonetheless a fun way to spend a 13 year old's day.
10. In an era when conservatives threatened to monopolize the silly-o-meter, along came Judith Miller, to restore the balance of sheer, unadulterated, self-important silliness.
11. I now am waiting for both major parties to reclaim what is good about their parties from the wrong turns
each has taken.
12. I saw on CNN they are building a Creation Museum in Kentucky. I think I'd enjoy going to a museum whose displays showed people frolicking with dinosaurs, just like in the Saturday morning show "Land of the Lost".
"What's for dinner?" "Baked Triceratops".