Vote NOW or VOTE Tuesday, But VOTE

These are the three candidates that Monkette wants everone to vote for!

SOMEBODY is STEALING yard signs! That's a crime, both the stealing and the trespassing.

That's OK, We know which side is doing the stealing. It's so bloody obvious that it's the candidate whose signs weren't stolen.

Regardless of what I wrote in the post immediately below this, it IS a TRUE story based on vampires that catch, torture, kill, and drink the blood of the yard sign stealers.

The Times Have Changed !!!!!!!!!!!!!! BIG TIME

It was a bit of a problem buying a Miami Herald this morning, at least the English language version. There were still lots of copies of El Herald for sale at the various 7-11 type stores that I went to. Finally I just went straight to Starbucks in hopes of finding some already read papers in the basket. Instead I just bought a new one, and thought about the fact that they don't even sell El Herald. They also carry the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Different demographics, I guess. VERY different.

As I drank my coffee I started thinking about the very different outlooks of the various ethnic groups around North Miami. Sure, we all live on the same blocks in very similar houses, but the Haitian community got energized by Obama's campaign. The Jamaicans and native born blacks added to the lines of voters. People hurried, as best they could, to get their United States citizenship, then they stood in lines at the polls for hours on end in the hot sun and in the pouring rain for the opportunity to vote. The one thing that I didn't see, at least here in North Miami, was any significant Hispanic presence in those lines, all the more a puzzlement because there were plenty of local races on that ballot with Hispanic names.

Thankfully the ammendments to the North Miami City Charter were defeated. They would have favored the incumbants with no benefits to the citizens.

I'd also like to congratulate a young attorney, Yvonne Colodny, on getting elected judge. Back in the early 1970's her dad, Mike Colodny, a young attorney at the time, was on the city council and later served as mayor, perhaps the best mayor we ever had.

On another note, my new computer is on the way and I won't have to be pecking away at this keyboard here at the North Miami Chamber of Commerce office every day. Hell, that means I can once more forgo shaving every morning, wearing unwrinkled shirts, making sure that I pick out a pair of jeans without holes....I can go back to looking like a bum again. HOORAY!

No Photo (yet) No Audio

Janis is extremely shy. She's also about as close to stone deaf as you can get, and has been since early childhood. I first "met" her about 1980. She lives less than a block away. She wears a huge hearing aid but mostly reads lips. Even the hearing aid doesn't help much. For the past few years I'd see her on Wednesday nights at Starbucks where an informal Deaf Club meets. One of the guys, Don Meredith, is my age. He makes little tops and he can do amazing tricks with them, like getting it spinning on the back of his hand and making it run up his arm, or suddenly jerking his hand out from under it, flipping his hand over and catching it, still spinning, in the palm of his hand. For a few bucks he'll sell one to you and try to teach you how to do the tricks. Few succeed. I need to get some photos of him with his tops. With that 15mm lens I could get a big hand close to the camera with the spinning top, Don and some other folks in the background.

A few months ago Janis unexpectedly became a widow at 55. One day she knocked on my door asking if I was going to the market. Since then she calls a few times every afternoon and evening. It's after 11 PM now and I just got off the phone with her. We went shopping at Publix earlier, then stopped at McDonalds because they have fifty-nine cent hamburgers on Wednesdays. She loves them! At Publix all she bought was some peanut butter that was on sale. That's normal with her. She never seems to do much shopping at a time. We took the McDonalds burgers to Starbucks and ate them with our coffee. She seems to use food shopping as an excuse the get out of the house, but Don says that it's really an excuse to spend time with me, that she has a thing for me. As we sat around with Don, Don's wife Mary, and a few other deaf people signing one another, I finally managed to shoot a few photographs with the 21mm lens that included Janis, without her noticing. I should be adding a photo to this blog posting in the near future.

I also found out that a lot of tonight's sign language conversation consisted mostly of Don and Mary trying to convince Janis that I would make a good catch. She didn't tell me that, Don did. Things might be getting interesting around here.

* * * DON'T FORGET TO VOTE! I'M GOING TO THE POLLS TOMORROW MORNING FOR EARLY VOTING.* * *