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It was weird, yesterday, feeling a sort of calm after several days of legitimate dread. I have no idea why it would happen that way, except perhaps that I finally made peace with whatever the outcome of the election might be, without quite yet realizing it.
As of today, with vote counting still underway, control of Congress remains an open question. I hesitate to get my hopes up, but it's looking relatively likely Democrats will retain their razor slim majority in the Senate, and there's even still an outside chance (yet still unlikely) that we'll keep control of the House. Things have shifted to the right, quite clearly, but there is a lack of severity there that was somewhat unexpected: the "red wave" conservatives hoped for did not come, and at best, as I have now seen more than one person state, there was merely a "red ripple." For a midterm election, that alone is out of the ordinary; the "party rebuke" is usually by a far wider margin.
Now, if Republicans manage even a slight majority in both houses, no matter how slight, it changes a lot, and remains a relief to have Biden still in the White House. That said, a lot of the news coverage I overheard last night, with Shobhit glued to it all evening, included commentary that I found at least somewhat of a relief: even among Republicans, the "MAGA crowd," Trump cultists are proving less popular than I expected, and at least comparatively speaking, it sounds like the Republican party is shifting toward more moderate ground. That alone is a good thing, and lessens the likelihood of a second President Fuckwit term.
As I said to Shobhit last night: I deeply loathe Ron DeSantis, but he's still better than Trump. This election is actually giving me greater hope for 2024, to be honest, and it seems the abortion issue has
galvanized the right people in many areas, even among conservatives. It's also a relief to see many 2020 election deniers
lose their races. It's a huge relief to see John Fetterman win the Pennsylvania Senate seat over Dr. Oz, although it's nuts the margin was not wider (50.5% to 47.1%). Arizona is a crucial state with Republicans hell bent on election denialism, and right now apparently their nutso Republican gubernatorial candidate is "slightly favored" to win even though she's currently behind in the vote count. I'm kind of amazed to see the Democrat leading for governor in Kansas, a state otherwise surrounded by red states, with the exception of Colorado.
It looks like in the end it'll be a real mixed bag for both parties. But given the fact of it being the midterm election in a president's first term, that can easily be seen as a win for Democrats—because if history is any indication, this should have gone way worse.
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With Shobhit glued to the news all evening, there was no watching any TV shows otherwise last night—there wasn't anything new for me to watch anyway; season 5 of
The Crown is out on Netflix today so I hope to watch a lot of that tonight, although presumably Shobhit is still going to be glued to news.
I watched news with him sporadically, but otherwise spent my evening ironing three shirts I still needed to iron, or working on my projected vacation expenses budget for Australia next year. I've also done the same thing I did when I went to Louisville to visit Barbara last March, when I had two other cities to visit: I put all the places of interest I wanted to see in a list in the Reminders app on my phone, with separate lists by city: Louisville, Indianapolis, Cincinnati. I found this to be a very effective system, checking off each place of interest as I did or saw them.
So, I now have lists, complete with addresses and/or notes and websites, for five different specific places in Australia: Brisbane (9 items); Gold Coast (3 items); Sydney (14 items); Kangaroo Island (3 items); and Adelaide (7 items). The 14 items for Sydney may seem excessive but bear in mind we'll have two different three-night stints there. Plus we can take at least two off of that to make it more like 12, because I have listed four bathhouses as options and at best we're likely to patron two of them. In any case, this makes it a lot easier to track what I am interested in as well as what's already been done as we go along, as opposed to relying solely on my notes in Google Maps, which never displays notes that include URLs properly when viewing on my phone.
It's kind of amazing how much time I spent in preparation for these trips, exponentially more time than the trip itself actually takes. My greatest hope for this trip, actually, is that we
not come home just to face a global cataclysm, as we did in 2020 (lockdowns starting literally four days after our return flight). My second greatest hope is that Kangaroo Island will not be devastated by bushfires the way it had been in 2020, preventing us from even entering into Flinders Chase National Park. This is the whole reason we are returning: because I want to get into that park, and see the beautiful natural sights I have seen photos of my paternal grandparents at, with Uncle David and Mary Ann, some forty years ago.
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[posted 12:30 pm]
