Change? At last?

The BIG change won't be happening for another 2 1/2 months, but it should be in motion after today. After four years of waiting, it's Election Day. Will America get it right this time?

Most of the states had some form of early voting. In Michigan, well, we're a little behind the times. Everyone votes on Election Day in Michigan unless they get an absentee ballot. After discussing it with my wife, we decided to do our voting in the mid morning, just as I was driving her to the church and the quilters' group.

Lovely weather. It's partly cloudy outside, and temperatures are in the mid 60s. Not bad for early November!

So how long did voting take? How long were we in line? It took all of 15 seconds before I got the little slip (signature, address, date of birth) that I had to fill out to get my ballot; I also had to show my driver's license. Then I went into another room with the little voting booths and filled out the ballot. Same with my wife. Studied the ballot proposals: medical marijuana, yes; fewer restrictions on stem cell research, of course. Fed the ballot into the optical scanner. (Our ballots have the ovals that you fill in with a black felt-tip pen.) The whole procedure took five minutes, if that. Then I drove my wife to the quilters and went back to work.

It was, I should mention, my first chance to vote for Obama. Ever. Many of you had the chance to take part in primaries or caucuses early this year, but Michigan held an illegal Democratic primary in January (10 months ago). Knowing the DNC wouldn't accept the results, many candidates, including Obama, took their names off the ballot. It raised a ruckus in the run-up to the convention in August. Eventually, they figured out a solution.

We have a little tradition here on Election Day: Pancake Day. The local Kiwanis Club holds its Pancake Day on Election Day, so normally we vote, and then we get pancakes. Except this time we voted earlier than normal, so I took her to the quilters--they took her to the church where Pancake Day was taking place at 11:30 a.m., and I met her there. Pancakes. Sausages. Milk. Butter. It made for a filling mid-day repast.

We had finished the winter tourism issue (final step: proofreading) this morning. Tonight (at 5 p.m.) I will be covering a district volleyball tourney; I cover one match, then go home for supper and to watch the returns come in.

The volleyball districts continue on Thursday and Friday. Meanwhile, our football teams will both be going for their district titles on Friday night and Saturday afternoon. Both teams will be home. Both were home last Friday night for "sub-district" games. The weather was pretty decent: temperatures were in the 40s with no rain.

It wasn't so nice one week earlier, the final week of the regular season. The game I was at Friday night had some interesting weather. For most of the first half, it rained. Things got pretty soggy. Here's a picture of the action on the field during the rain ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Fog-rainplay-10-08.jpg[/IMG]

The rain eventually stopped during the second quarter, but during the second half fog started building. It went from soggy to foggy pretty quickly. Foggy conditions are hard for photography, especially action sports like football. Especially in a small, old stadium with poor lighting.

For a while, I tried using my flash like usual. But the light from the flash picks up all the water vapor in the air and you get something like this ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Fog-handoffbefore-10-08.jpg[/IMG]

Playing around with Photoshop can help some ... but it only goes so far ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Fog-handoffafter-10-08.jpg[/IMG]

What was I to do? I finally tried turning off the flash and using available light. The trouble was, there wasn't much available light. This is what the field looked like from the sidelines with all that fog in the air ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Fog-field-10-08.jpg[/IMG]

I wound up using one picture from during the rain and a shot of the reaction on the bench after our team earned a safety--I got the shot of the tackle in the end zone, too, but it was just too dark to use. You don't believe me?
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Fog-EZsack-10-08.jpg[/IMG]

The next day (Saturday afternoon), David and I went to the dome in Marquette for an evening game. It was just cloudy, so photography conditions were much better. Here's what the Superior Dome looks like from the outside ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Fog-domeoutside-10-08.jpg[/IMG]

And here is what it is like inside ...
[IMG]http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b289/drdog/Fog-domeinside-10-08.jpg[/IMG]

If our teams win this weekend, we'll probably by back in the Dome for the regional title games. As the playoffs move on, of course, the U.P.'s weather gets less football-friendly. We have been lucky so far, but good luck lasts only so long.

Everyone else is fine. The cats continue to adjust to each other. David came over last night--it was his birthday, so we had a favorite meal of his, and we watched some football. I bought him something he had wanted for a long time--a DVD recorder and VCR unit with a tuner. The DVD recorder doesn't have a hard drive of its own (like mine does; you just can't get them any more), but he wanted it mainly to copy some of his old videotapes, and the unit I bought will handle that with no problem (according to the box).

I know I haven't been around here much lately. What can I say? The World Serious captured my attention. The election, of course--I've been watching CNN and C-SPAN a lot. And I've been pretty busy with night assignments. It should start easing off fairly soon.

I've missed writing. I like to write at night, and there just hasn't been the time lately--because my wife likes it when we sit together and watch something. Or else when I'm upstairs writing, Charlie comes around. She hops up on the computer desk, walks around behind the flast-screen monitor, comes out the other side and climbs down into my lap. That's just the way she does it.

Then she's happy. Purr, purr. And I'm done with writing for a while.