Critter in the Vines

Thanks for all the birthday wishes yesterday! It was a very mellow day around here. I walked Bailey twice, watched a couple of movies, and finished off a New Yorker.

When I walked Bailey down the Black Path in the afternoon, we passed this beautiful cascade of Virginia creeper. I tried really hard to get Bailey to pose in front of it, but this dog will not stop moving. I basically just had to snap her in action.

Then she plunged her head into the vines, convinced she'd heard some critter in there. And maybe she did.

I watched the movie "Network" in the afternoon -- still so relevant and entertaining after all these years -- and to compound my sense of birthday dissipation I ate leftover Halloween candy while I watched. Then, in the evening, I made an extra large martini and watched "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" for approximately the 40,000th time.

Dave came home from work with a big, beautiful bouquet of flowers, which I'll photograph today.

All in all, it was a perfect day and I just let myself do whatever I wanted with no self-recriminations. I'm 60 years old, dammit. I don't need to please anyone but myself, right?!

Today is election day in the USA. I imagine we won't know anything until tomorrow, but I will be biting my nails to see how this turns out. I wish we could eject the Orange One from office, but alas, he is not on the ballot -- these are midterm elections for congressional and local races.

I'm most interested to see if Talarico can win in Texas -- he seems like a great candidate but a Democratic senator from the Lone Star State still seems like a long-shot to me -- and I want to see what happens to Ilhan Omar in Minnesota now that she's been targeted (but so far charged with nothing!) by Trump's justice department. The right-wingers are spreading a story that Omar married her brother in order to allow him to briefly immigrate to the USA. Even if it proves true -- and I'm not sure it will -- I wonder how significant it is, since evidence suggests it was a relationship only on paper. Not to excuse felonious behavior, but wouldn't the greater question be, why have we built an immigration system that pushes people toward such ridiculous extremes?