DeLay: McCain = worst thing evar?

I heard a brief snippet today whilst riding home on the van that a certain former house majority leader (Tom DeLay) went on a rant on that bastion of independent media, Fox News about the Republican candidate who appeals most to independents and moderates, John McCain. Now, I am not going to do much defending of McCain; in fact, I could write a fairly vitriolic blog about what a phony he is, but that's a subject that would be best left to Alison's energies and angers. No, instead I am going to take this time to make fun of Tom DeLay (awfully french-sounding name, don't you think? Oh, it's irish? Dang.). Go watch the video; I'll wait.

OK. DeLay makes some criticisms of John McCain, and I would like to lead your attention to a few of them (Is this unfair? Should I keep in mind that this statement was not prepared and written down, but was instead ad lib and that he may have said some things that came off a little different from his meaning? After all, I do that constantly. What's that? I was never elected to public office? You make a good point. Touche.).

"John McCain himself killed our ability to drill in ANWR." - I realize that the audience for these comments is not the left, or even the center. But with the recent polar bear news and the administration's efforts to keep them off the ESA, I think that drilling in ANWR is going to become a less and less attractive option to mainstream America. In case you had not heard, the Fish and Wildlife Service decided to delay a ruling on whether or not to post them on the ESA until February 6, which gives the administration enough time to sell off all of the oil leases in the Chukichi Sea of Alaska, which is important polar bear habitat. I wish more people paid attention; this is not a coincidence.

Joseph Lieberman is "one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate." - With the Democratic Party very close to a Senate majority, Lieberman lost his Democratic primary in Connecticut, and, rather than take it like a man, he decided to run against winner Ned Lamont as an "independent" and somehow won his Senate seat back. Lieberman now labels himself an "Independent Democrat" and does not necessarily vote party line. There's nothing wrong with not voting party line, but anybody who refers to Joe Lieberman as "one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate" is clearly off his rocker.

"I think McCain has done more to hurt the Republican Party than any elected official I know of." - The stupidity of this statement should be self-evident. Let me direct you toward a photo:

Now to the quote again: "I think McCain has done more to hurt the Republican Party than any elected official I know of."
Photo:

Now, even considering the fact that McCain is only a self-proclaimed "straight talker" (Alison would certainly beg to differ, and I agree with her), I love the implication that straight talk (i.e. telling people the truth) is damaging to the Party. This does not surprise me in regards to the GOP. Here's a fun game: can you think of any elected officials who have done more to hurt the Republican Party? I think I can name a few.

The weather in Quito

My wife is near Quito for two weeks, and as it didn't break the freezing mark here in Abq today (high of 30 degrees F; felt like 21 F), and as it is supposed to get down to 14 F (feels like 3 F) tonight, I thought I'd check into the weather in her area. At the time of this writing, it is a brisk 52 F in Quito, with an expected low around 50 F. Tomorrow's high is to be 62 F. However, it does look like there's a chance of rain pretty much every day. Oh, and the humidity is 100%. At least here, it's a dry cold.

And resolutions too.

I made some New Year's resolutions this year (I don't usually, since I believe I should have my life together enough that I don't have to use some occasion as an excuse to improve myself), and forgot to mention them in my two posts today. They are:

1. Stop cracking my knuckles. I am worried about the arthritis, and I think I already have it to a certain degree. But maybe I'm just being paranoid...
2. Reduce my sugar intake. After the diabetes scare with my mother right before my wedding last year, I'm a little worried about the future, considering how much Mountain Dew (oh my god, check out that page - "Mountain Dew’s name is a previously-existing euphemism for moonshine, which likely traces back to Ireland (see the Irish folk song “The Rare Auld Mountain Dew”), and has generally been marketed to highlight its potency. It was originally marketed as “zero proof moonshine” and had pictures of hillbillies on the bottle until 1973.") I drank as a child.
3. Make significant progress on my research. I am now 1.5 years in, with not enough to show for it. This semester I need to do lots of field work, and build the base level of any models that need to be made, and actually start writing.

I think there was at least one more, but I cannot remember now. I think that I have done a decent job on the first two. A couple Hershey Kisses per day, soda once in awhile. Less knuckle-cracking, although I didn't go cold turkey of course. It's funny, I've been doing it for so long that I now feel very uncomfortable when I don't crack them. And then, of course, when I give in and do it, it hurts. Research has not been as much of a win for me. I've gotten so little done this past couple weeks, it's pathetic. I've been questioning myself a lot lately on this count, and I don't understand why I just can't seem to focus on work.

Edit: 4. Be nicer to my wife. If you're reading this and don't know her, she's great. Not sure how I'm doing on this one so far, since she's in Ecuador.

Taking the plunge

I finally spent some (way too much) time today trying to figure out for whom I should vote in the Democratic primary coming up on February 5 (Tsunami Tuesday) here in New Mexico. The Washington Post has a candidate quiz that actually gives the candidates' answers to a questionnaire. This quiz has one extremely mega-major flaw, in that it only provides answers by Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, neglecting my favorite candidate, Dennis Kucinich. Of course, I know that he has no chance, and I may end up voting for him anyway if he's still in the race, because of my quiz results.
Not surprisingly (to me), the quiz tells me that I should vote for John Edwards (29 points) because of a variety of things. Clinton and Obama come in second and third at 16 and 15 points, respectively. If Edwards is somehow out of the race by that point, it appears that there will be no major candidates about whom I am particularly excited; in that case, ol' Kucey gets my vote. Things I like about Kucinich: he wants to impeach Cheney; he wants to form a Department of Peace; he's been against the war in Iraq from the beginning; he wants us to sign onto Kyoto (the ONLY developed nation not to do so now); and he supports same-sex marriage.

Of course, I found a second quiz, which has given me different results, as these things often do. This one includes all of the minor candidates, and is much much faster to do (and therefore probably less accurate). Edwards comes in a whopping 6th on this quiz. The order, with their point totals:
Kucinich (69)
Gravel (54)
Obama (40)
Clinton (39)
Dodd (38)
Edwards (36)
Biden (33)
Richardson (24)
Paul (-6)
Giuliani (-22)
T. Thompson (-22)
McCain (-26)
Cox (-35)
Brownback (-40)
Huckabee (-47)
Romney (-56)
Tancredo (-63)
Hunter (-67)
If you don't know much about the candidates, this should be a good demonstration that Kucinich is the most whacked-out liberal amongst the group. Again, unfortunately he will not get the support he deserves.

Hello....internet.

Every day I check my favorite blogs to see whether there have been any new posts. This includes my wife's blog, even though I should theoretically know exactly when she writes a new blog, us living in the same house and everything. I mostly do this out of a desire to not do anything worthwhile, which is apparently my life goal. The reason I say this is that I have realized that it's been about 3 weeks since I last posted a blog. Hypocritical, yes. It's not that I haven't had anything to say - that is, anything more to say than I usually do when posting here.
Since I last posted we of course has Christmas (actually, we had like 4 Christmases - we opened stockings on the 20th, opened some presents with Alison's family Christmas morning, opened more presents with my family Christmas afternoon, and finished when KC and BC showed up on Dec. 29). New Year's -- we went to bed before midnight. We had the pleasure of driving home to ABQ on New Year's day; at least there was very little traffic. Oh, I did get to go to a Phoenix Coyotes game with MD in which the Coyotes won in a shoot-out, the first shoot-out I had ever seen (not getting cable -- which really wouldn't help very much).
Since then, not a hell of a lot has gone on. Alison left on this past Friday to spend two weeks in Ecuador on a volunteer vacation with her sister. They're staying at an eco-resort and spending their days building trails or something, she wasn't entirely sure what they would be doing. This is definitely the longest I will have gone since I met her without actually talking to her -- even when I was in Canada for a summer I only spent about 4 days at a time in the field. It's a weird thing to suddenly not have any contact with her, and kind of depressing. I have not gotten enough work done so far with her gone. I've spent some time playing Evil Genius, one of the greatest computer games ever created, and good training for myself and the other horsemen (you know who you are brothers!). I also did some house cleaning last night, taking down our Christmas decorations and such. I went running the past three days in a row, and boy am I sore; this is my effort to be a little thinner when Alison gets back.
Today I surprised myself by actually getting up in time to get to the van and come down to Socorro. Trying to go to sleep last night (not very successfully, as I slept in pretty late on Sunday), I gave myself maybe a 25% chance of actually getting up in the morning. Maybe this will be a good start for me. This week I have to get writing more on a proposal I have to have done in a couple months, as well as doing some GIS work for my research. I also have to apparently get ready for the class that I am apparently going to T.A. this coming semester. Finally, I have a few secret blogging projects in the mental works that I'd like to get firing up.

Two days in the Valles

This week I spent Wednesday and Thursday up in the Valles Caldera with my advisor. We deployed a few more temperature probes and did some sampling. Mostly we got to hike up a streambed in 1-2 feet of snow with snowshoes strapped to our feet!


I have discovered that my old gaiters do not work all that well. The backs did not stay on my boots, instead resting on my socks, which allowed snow to get into my boots. My feet were therefore damn cold by the end of the first day. Eventually I thawed out. Check out the windblown snow we saw about halfway up:


The second day we hurried up the catchment and did some more sampling up at the top. It was a productive couple of days, and we brainstormed some good ideas for furthering my research. Hopefully things really get moving this winter! I'll hopefully be spending much of the spring (post-snowmelt) up in the Valles.

Welcome, winter weather.

I got up at 6:12 this morning to get myself down to my vanpool. I usually try to get up at 5:40 (my alarm goes off at 5:30) so I can shower and maybe even eat breakfast. This morning I had to sacrifice both to laziness. I left the house at 6:30, and arrived at the parking lot just a little before 6:40. The van is supposed to pick us up at 6:45, but that time came and went with no sign of a van. This happened once recently, and that time there was only one person at the north stop (I board the van at the second, south stop), and he apparently didn't want to drive because he sat there and waited for a long time before deciding to drive down. He also almost ran us off the road, leading to my first experience driving the vanpool van. But that's another story.
The van never showed up, but a car of usual van-riders did arrive around 6:50 to 6:55. Four of them piled out of a fairly small car. There were two of us waiting at the south stop for the van. Hmm. I decided not to go down to Socorro today because of that, and am instead working from Albuquerque. This fact has allowed me to observe the winter weather happening down here near the Rio Grande this fine day.

7:00 a.m.: When I started biking home, it was overcast and nothing was going on. Right around 7, we started getting an extremely light snow. Very exciting; I haven't been snowed on since last year. That snow steadily increased as I got home and walked Alison back to her bus stop for her trip to work. By the time I got home, a little bit had actually accumulated.

8:30 a.m.: By this time, the snow had stopped completely. We had probably about a tenth of an inch or so of accumulation. I took this picture:


10:00 a.m.: Most of the snow has sublimated or melted away. I figure this is the last of our winter weather today.

11:30 a.m.: The sun is out and shining in through the skylight above me.

12:02 p.m.: Graupel starts, up to pea-sized. At first I thought it was hail because it was hitting the skylight pretty hard. But no, it was just graupel. Large graupel lasts only a few minutes, and turns into very small grains of the stuff.

12:15 p.m.: Graupel stops. Within five minutes, much of the clouds have gone away and the sun is shining again. It looks pretty clear to the west, which is where our weather tends to come from this time of year. Out east looks damn ugly. That's where Alison works. I can't see the mountains at all, so they are probably getting hammered. I hope she can make it home today.

13:37 p.m.: The sky has clouded up again, and there is the lightest little bit of snow falling. Pretty much everything that had collected previously has melted. There was a cat in the yard, but he didn't want to be my friend.

13:53 p.m.: The light snow has stopped again, and the sky is once again clearing up fairly quickly.

14:31 p.m.: Extremely light snow, but the sky is clearing up already.

After that, it cleared, darkened, and cleared one more time. What strange weather. This morning it was 8 degrees in the Valles Caldera, and snowing heavily. We will not be making a trip up there this weekend.