If you’re in Colorado, remember that your caucus doors open up at 6:30 pm – doors close at 7, although rules apparently state that if you show up late, you can vote in any business from the time you arrive forward. Since the presidential preference vote comes first, though, it’s best to be there when the doors open to make sure you get to caucus for your candidate.

Ok, so there’s the public service portion of this post.

Now here’s the biased bit.

I’m caucusing for Obama, and I feel pretty strongly about it. I was torn between Edwards and Obama, frankly, but Edwards stepping out of the race solved that.

Why am I endorsing Obama? (Oh, yeah, and I’m sure my endorsement is reaaaal important )

There are two parts to it. The first is that I think Sen. Obama is an incredibly capable, straightforward and inspirational guy. I didn’t decide I liked Obama after a speech or some TV commercial – I used to listen to his weekly podcasts to his Illinois constituents on the way to work on the train and I thought they were considered, rational, and, most of all, right. Whether it was about foreign policy or domestic issues, this was a guy I could agree with.

And then the campaign started, and I am so impressed – and pleased – with how all sorts of people are getting involved, and how after these eight years of horror he has really presented a message of hope that people respond to. One can argue that it’s an abstract thing, but let me put it this way – people without hope become apathetic. And when people become apathetic, we get 8 years of George W. Bush, a ruined educational system, negative foreign credibility, war, no privacy, no accountability, etc. Without an engaged and hopeful populace, none of the rest of it matters.

But I also think it’s a ridiculous criticism to accuse Obama of being nothing but an inspirational speaker, which the Clinton campaign has strongly implied more than once. For a woman who is, quite frankly, running on her husband’s record and who furthermore voted for the Iraq war, the criticism rings a little hollow.

And I just want to say that his willingness to talk to our adversaries instead of this stupid policy of ignorance we’ve been following is a huge deal to me.

The second reason is, quite frankly, that I can’t under any circumstances vote for Hillary Clinton. Let me state something upfront – I was a huge Bill Clinton supporter in the 90′s. After 12 years of Reagan-Bush, it was hard to be otherwise, and he had charisma and energy that the country needed. And for the record, the 90′s under Clinton were the first years my family was able to prosper in my memory. I was ridiculously angry with Bill Clinton for the Lewinsky scandal – not so much for the blow job, but for walking right into the hands of right-wing folks who were just waiting for him to slip up and then, worst of all, lying about it. I figured the actual act was between him and Hillary, but that he was willing to do idiotic things after the fact that locked up the government and media for a year… that was really damned stupid. But I remained nonetheless a Bill Clinton supporter, politically speaking.

I am not part of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

But this isn’t about Bill, right? Well… the problem is this. Whenever it’s about the years of prosperity, Sen. Clinton talks about “we”. She includes her husband’s years in the White House in her “35 years of experience”. Fine. I don’t have a real problem with that, though it doesn’t really count in my book. Her experience arguement is pretty weak… But what it says is this – if you take credit for those 8 years, then you also take the liability that comes with them. And that makes you a huge liability for the Democrats in November.

Until recently, it was really only the electability thing that got to me. But then President Clinton decided he was going to get into the scrabble of politics again because he just couldn’t resist, and after South Carolina, I was truly disgusted. It was a reminder to me that we run a real risk of repeating that inability to move forward in politics due to real or imagined Clinton scandals if they become the first family again.

We simply can’t afford that, first woman candidate or not.

But my real objection to Sen. Clinton isn’t that – it just makes me think she’d be a bad candidate. My real objection to her are the votes on the Iraq War authorization and the Levin amendment.

“If I knew then what I know now”, my ass.

She has 35 years of leadership experience? I only have 35 years of breathing experience and I knew exactly what that vote meant, and was sickened to see Democrats support it at the time.

And the refusal to apologize is, I’m sorry, weakness. We’ve had 8 years of inability to say, “I made a mistake,” and this posturing has gotten us nowhere.

The word “change” has been so overused, but we have to have it.

And without hope and unity, there is no change.

End of my political blather. As a postscript, check this video I got sent today:

Click here to view the embedded video.

VOTE. Even if you disagree with me.

I’m off to the university in the snow.

That’s right – you heard me. Snow!!! I know I should have sympathy for all of the Thanksgiving flights that had to come through Denver today, but, well, it’s snow!!! I like snow as long as it doesn’t stick around until May – I’m “from” Wisconsin, after all (well, as much as I’m from anywhere). Seeing dirty snow hang around from November to sometime in late spring is depressing, my friends… it actually melts here, though it didn’t really last year during that evil series of blizzards.

Of course, the problem is that the week I’m due this year is precisely the week where it snowed so badly last year that cars couldn’t make it down our street and the stores closed. We’re prepared for the stores being closed should history repeat itself – lots of emergency rations in the pantry – but if I end up having to call an ambulance to take me to the hospital just because we can’t get a cab to pick us up, I’m gonna be annoyed (though Small Monster will have a story for being born in style!).

Anyhow. I’m off to the university to drop this off, and I hope the freaking building is still open, it being the day before Thanksgiving and all.

Congratulations, Small Monster – we made it to the end of the quarter and finished the course! Now you really should come out and see the world. Seriously. There’s like, snow, you know?

I’ve meant to post this week, seriously I have, but I’m been busy and tired and um… busy and tired. I’m nearly 8 months pregnant, people! Cut me some slack!

The week started off busy and hasn’t really let up – Sunday morning, I woke up to the following view from our front door (this was actually taken later in the day, when some of it had melted – as always, click to embiggen):

It was actually coming down pretty fast and furious in the morning, which made me think about the remains of this year’s garden. See, Christian had salvaged the last tomatoes before the freeze the night before, but we still had pumpkins out there which we were waiting until the last minute to harvest. I didn’t know if one freeze and some snow would do much to them, but I figured we ought to take the (mostly) ripe ones inside and start processing them anyway.

Now, keep in mind that pregnant women past a certain point cannot bend over. So me trying to get pumpkins out of the snowy pumpkin patch that took over our garden was um… probably pretty entertaining for the neighbors.

Also, in case you didn’t know this, pumpkin vines and stems are thorny and those little buggers are really hard to get out of your fingers. Just FYI – consider it a public service announcement.

Anyhow. So the following is not our entire year’s pumpkin harvest (I know of at least 4 other pumpkins that have gone to loving homes so far, and there are still some green ones on the vine in the back which may or may not be usable) , but this is what this big ole’ pregnant lady picked and cleaned up on Sunday morning to save from Jack Frost – click to enlarge:

That big one may look pretty diminutive with no context, but it’s larger than the Small Monster belly and will become our Jack-O’-Lantern.

The rest were destined for pumpkin pies and such, and I spent most of Sunday cutting pumpkins open, scooping out seeds and pulp, separating seeds for delicious roasting and eating pleasure, and roasting and pureeing pumpkin flesh to be made into pies, breads and soups.

That’s a whole lot of pumpkin, and sadly, it makes much less eating pumpkin than you might think. Nevertheless, I conquered all but two of them (the two greenish ones), and our freezer is now stocked with containers of fresh yellow-orange pumpkin.

And after that, I was exhausted. (Also, I dropped painstakingly separated and cleaned pumpkin seeds all over the floor, which in my exhausted and hormonal state made me cry, but I thankfully have a lovely husband who knew I needed a hug before we got it all cleaned up…)

The thing about being pregnant for me is that I never feel, upfront, like a task is going to make me want to pass out. And then I perform said task and find I can’t do anything else that day. And often then next.

And so Monday, I did nothing for most of the day before going to a talk in Christian’s department from some folks at Boulder (a very good talk, I might add) and then out to dinner with them before heading off to a coffee place to finish my German homework. (Note: while my German homework isn’t excessive, pregnant brain makes concentration really hard, and so it takes me a lot of extra time to read some of the texts…) Then I went home, watched the usual Olbermann with the snuggly evil German, and passed out. I think.

Tuesday I had to get up early for class and did some cleanup around the house and some laundry and cleaned some of Small Monster’s new toys and… gah, who knows. Was exhausted by the time I was done. Watched Olbermann and crashed at the end of the day.

And then there was Wednesday, which involved some more cleanup and organization and stuff I can’t remember, but whatever it was, that tired me out too. Oh, yeah, I finished putting Small Monster’s new clean clothes away and getting his co-sleeper in order, which consisted of the the surprisingly exhausting task of getting the bed linens and mattress pad on. I swear, they made that damned thing as hard to assemble and use as they humanly could. Went to Catechumenate and then came home and passed out after Olbermann. Are we seeing a theme here?

Thursday – up early for class again. Came home and started work on finally finishing the raising and lowering mechanism on the remaining roman shades in the living room which I made nearly a year ago. I still need to make bedroom blinds so that we can keep light out in the wee hours when Small Monster arrives (and, also, so I can stop entertaining the neighbors with views they really shouldn’t have , but it takes so long and involves so much work on the floor (remember, pregnant women don’t bend…) that I’ve been putting it off. It needs to happen this week, though… ugh. Just sewing the rings onto the backs of them takes me forever (I’m not very coordinated and I get bored, plus they have to be sewn on very well so as not to come off when raising the shades, so it took me about 5 hours to get 30 rings sewn on, which, with bending over to do it, left me, you guessed it, exhausted), and, well, I’m not really much of a seamstress.

Let’s face it – I hated Home Ec. (And my 8th grade Home Economics teacher, Mrs. Willis, pretty much hated me, I think…)

Anyhow. Now it’s Friday, so I’m going to get those curtains hung and the drawstrings attached and do the final big cleaning on the upstairs.

At the end of this all, I will be, you guessed it, exhausted.

But for the record, Small Monster is doing wonderfully – waking me up with kicks and flutters and hiccups. I can’t believe he could be here in as little as 3 weeks and still be just fine…

We got hours and hours of rain yesterday, complete with a shockingly loud (and close) thunderstorm which scared the crap out of both me and the baby. It was awesome. (Not that I think scaring the crap out of my kid is awesome, but the rain and the storm? Perfect…)

We’re supposed to get more tonight, but you can almost never trust the Denver forecast, so I won’t hold my breath. On the upside, though… it’s much, much cooler.

Pregnant women of Denver rejoice!

I get to be human again for like… whole 24-hour periods. Call it a fall preview (which may not have rain, but at least gets cool!)… I’d heard that we were supposed to get back up into the 90s next week – the Weather Channel doesn’t agree, but I’m afraid they’re often wrong in even predicting the next hour of weather around here, so… I’ll prepare for the heat.

At least I can hide in my newly air-conditioned study

In other good news, I can feel the baby more often, and I was pleased to feel him react to the noise of the thunder yesterday, even if I felt bad that he was startled. (Then again, we had lightning hit so close to the open back door yesterday that I actually freaked and ran out of the room – my husband thinks this is hilarious…)

The only real bad news is that my digestive system is giving me no end of problems. I often feel sick for no apparent reason, and the randomness of the onset of symptoms is really annoying me. There’s not much I can do but just sit it out, but I don’t have to like it. I’ll see the doctor in a little over a week anyway, so I’ll mention it then, but it’s pretty yucky.

Not much else to report – belly shot tomorrow (so I can hand the camera over to my husband, who needs it for the week)! No one is allowed to laugh at my hugeness.

I hope it was the latter, I really do, and I hope that whatever they did to affect this change was good to the puppy.

We shall see… but if they did take care of the puppy, I’ll be very, very pleased.

Apparently, some of our neighbors at the condo complex next door who are not home during the day thought it would be a great idea to get a new puppy (I think – I’ve never seen it).

And then they leave it alone all day. And it barks and yelps and cries all day long. As in roughly one bark per second for hours on end. This has been going on for days now.

Today the barking started at 6:30 am, waking me up after having a bear of a time getting to sleep in the first place, and it has not stopped since. That poor puppy is lonely and loud, and I don’t want to have to call the police. But seriously? It’s now 1:05 pm, and the longest that puppy has stopped barking is perhaps 5 minutes. Can you imagine leaving a baby to cry for almost 7 hours?? (Even a baby dog?)

Don’t get me wrong – I love dogs, and don’t blame the puppy – but those neighbors better do something to comfort the little thing soon. Small Monster and I need sleep, and I’m having trouble controlling the urge to go over, find the puppy, and make it feel better. Yeah yeah, I know, pregnancy hormones.

I left a note on the front gate of the complex, but somehow, I kind of doubt they’re going to do anything about it. Clearly they got a puppy without thinking about how it was going to feel alone without its mommy or owners during the day, so I doubt they’re going to care much about how the neighbors feel (even if the neighbors did, for example, cite the section number of the Barking Dog Ordinance in their note *cough*). I didn’t say which neighbors we were, mind you, but that shouldn’t really matter. Everyone has their windows open right now anyway because of the heat, so I’m sure I’m not the only one bothered by it.

I guess we’re probably going to see whether the Denver police actually respond to complaints like this, but I’ll give the neighbors a day or two to do the right thing before I try to find out.

So it’s another hot Saturday here in scenic Colorado, and the Professor and I are hiding out in his air-conditioned office. It makes all the difference in the world, I must admit – I actually feel like an actual person when I’m not all swollen and hot, and my mood improves vastly.

There is, of course, the problem of the portion of my moods that seem to be solely under the control of hormones. I haven’t been too bad, really, but the past couple of days I’ve just had times where I felt like crying and I knew it was only because of the hormones. Fortunately, I at least realize what’s going on, and so I can do more about it, but I hate having that feeling – it’s the same feeling I’d get as a kid at sleepovers, waking up the next morning in a strange place and feeling homesick. Not that I’m feeling homesick It just feels the same.

Mood swings aside, though, last night we spent the evening with Dennis and Petra, two very good friends of ours from grad school (and Petra’s mom, who was very enjoyable to chat with!), which was really nice. I really do miss my friends (it seems like I’ve been hearing this from lots of people whose blogs I read lately), and it was really good to catch up. Unfortunately, I was exhausted by the end of the evening, and worse, ended up waiting two hours for a cab from the light rail station to get home, since the buses had stopped running (word to the wise – if you want to get a cab in Denver on a Friday or Saturday night, catch it from downtown, or you will be waiting forever at some dark station with drunk creepy weirdos); that didn’t stop the rest of the evening from being nice, though, and it was a good time.

The only other bit of news, I guess, is that thanks for a suggestion from the wonderful Sarah, it appears that we can now get the Small Monster to wiggle around a bit by drinking a nice, ice-cold drink. Which is fine by me, because cold is good. I happened to be downing some very cold milk as I read her suggestion, and lo and behold, not long thereafter, the little guy decided he was interested in rolling around a bit Thanks for the tip!

Ok, so yesterday I was a miserable wreck from the heat. I took 2 naps, and crashed when I went to bed anyway. I drank so much water that I was afraid I’d float away, and it still wasn’t enough.

This morning I got up at around ten to get the milk from the milk box (yes, we do have a milkman, and no, he is not the father of my child, thankyouverymuch!), and the sun was so bright and hot I thought it’d bake me in the 10 seconds I was out there – being at a higher altitude where it is sunny most of the time may sound awesome to you, but all it means to me when we have no air conditioning and I need to escape the house is less protection from that hot day-star thingie.

Anyway, I had intended to flee the house for the comforts of an air-conditioned coffee house earlier, but it’s now 11:15, so it looks like I’ll have to brave the heat (and swollen ankles) to get there. Bah!!!

And here I was wanting to get a horde of cleaning done today. In this heat? Not gonna happen.

It wasn’t always quite this way. Back when I used to play in concert bands, the July 4th concert was always fun to play because the music was a lot of fun. And outside of the weeping pride for country, I enjoyed that. But the only thing I’ve ever really liked about July 4th is the fireworks. That’s right, the loud, pretty explosions do it for me. Not the flag waving, not the singing of patriotic songs, not the name-dropping of dead founding fathers who would be embarrassed and disappointed at what our country has become… just the explosions in the sky.

We’d talked about going to see some fireworks tonight, but seeing that the nearest fireworks to us (as far as we knew – this is our first 4th of July in Denver) were downtown at various sports venues, we really didn’t feel like climbing on the bus or light rail to go hang out with the crowds. After all, if it were a warm evening, there’d be nothing worse than standing for hours and swelling up like a big-old pregnant woman sausage. Other options were available, but late-night bus service in Denver is sparse, so it just didn’t seem like it was going to happen. And who wants to spend 90 minutes on busses for a 30-minute show?

So we decided not to, and stayed home and had a nice simple dinner. Sitting at the table, though, I heard fireworks go off. We’ve been hearing them for weeks (kids playing in the alley), but I happened to look up at the window and realized that there was in fact a fireworks display going on at the Country Club a couple of blocks over, mostly viewable from our front lawn! Some of the view was blocked by an apartment building, but we got to see most of it without leaving the comfort of our front porch, and it was a nice surprise.

And then it got much, much better.

Rain! And not just sprinkles, but rain rain! I’m sure our plants are pleased, but we were much happier. We went out and sat on the step until it the cold of the water was too much – it’s been dry and hot here for a while, and even when it’s not too hot, even when it’s cloudy, there hasn’t been a good rainstorm for a while.

The air is now clean and moister, and I suspect we’re going to sleep well tonight

You guys can keep your national songs and flag-waving – I’ll take rain any day!

Ladies and gentlemen, it is hot here in Denver. As in currently 98°F (about 37°C) hot. I don’t mind my body being that temperature, but I do mind my backyard being that temperature. Or, say, the whole upstairs.

Yes, yes, this is better than it was for us in LA last summer (I don’t even remember how hot it was, but the heat index was well above 110°F, and all we had was a fan – not even a cool basement to hang out in) when we ended up seeing horrible movies just to stay cool. But I wasn’t pregnant last summer, and I didn’t particularly want to hang out outside in Los Angeles all that much. My lungs tended to object.

I swear, in our next house, there will be air conditioning of some kind. Or evaporative cooling. Whatever works.

Staying hydrated, though, is the real challenge. Already I’m supposed to drink an ungodly amount of water for the baby’s sake, and with what water gets lost just by being at a high altitude in a semi-arid climate (current humidity: 9% – compare to Las Vegas, where it’s 4%…), the heat is not helping. I’m having trouble choking down enough water to keep up, so I’m tired a lot, and I just try to keep guzzling.

Thank God for the evenings, when it’s nice and cool. Unfortunately our brick oven house traps the day’s heat, but the fan at least helps suck some of that out…

(Yes, I know, whine, whine, complain, complain. It distracts me from the genetics results we’re supposed to get Thursday, so bear with me…)