— पांच हजार तीन सौ तेईस —
Today's three Daily Lunch Update (DLU) photos are from Pike Place Market, because that's where our Merchandising Department is headed after work today! It's my next holiday event for the season, and I'm really looking forward to it. Even though the confirmed attendance seems to be dwindling: two previous "confirm" people have in the past couple of days switched to "declined." I had a list of 22 confirmed attendees now shortened to 20, with a total of six now unable to make it. Oh well, 20 is still a pretty good number.
I was in a Zoom meeting yesterday where Eric made it sounds like his attendance is dependent on his wife getting home soon enough to look after the kids so he can leave. I mean, I don't see why he can't just arrive late but whatever. We'll see!
This will be our first department outing outside the office since 2019. I'm pretty excited about it regardless. It's apparently a pasta making class, but including free hors d'oeuvres and two glasses of wine each. Sounds great to me!
I know it has a fairly high price tag, which would be one of two reasons it is limited to employees only and no spouses or family—the other being that this event space, a restaurant, caps at 22 and our department has 26 people. I did get to thinking yesterday, though, that I would really like to start brainstorming less-expensive ideas that would allow for us all to bring family, or at least spouses. I think that would also be fun.
In the meantime, I'm delighted just to have a department holiday event outside the office.
Incidentally, it's kind of just by coincidence that, after I found three holiday-season photos of Pike Place Market that I liked best for today's post, they are actually from three different years in sequence: 2020, 2021, and 2022.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ तेईस —
— पांच हजार तीन सौ तेईस —
I was a pretty good husband last night, I think. Not that it took all that much effort, but, as much as I had wanted to watch a Christmas movie last night, I realized it was the runoff election for the Georgia seat in the U.S. Senate, and knew Shobhit would want to be glued to the news all evening. I had the leftover lentils heated on the stove, a fresh couple of toasted bread slices, and the news already on when he got home from work. This was after I walked home from work myself, thus arriving myself at about 5:30. If it hadn't been Georgia Election Day, I might have just started a movie before Shobhit even got home. But, I knew this wasn't the day for that.
Shobhit actually called me from his car as he was headed home. "Walker took the lead," he said. "Darn it." He sounded legitimately despondent. I was like, "The evening isn't over yet." And, indeed, over the course of different counties reporting new batches of votes, the lead switched another three or four times before, in the end, indeed Raphael Warnock won the race—51.4% to 48.6%.
The incredible thing about that breakdown is that Walker is
a rambling nutcase, but that many Republicans (1.7 million) still voted for him. One of Shobhit's news program hosts joked about how many Republicans will vote for a candidate no matter how horrible they are—a
credibly accused pedophile, or probably "Lucifer himself." That's actually not that far off the mark, honestly. It's insane, the depth of these people's partisan loyalty. There is no hope of them changing their mind based on clear moral values, which leaves only the slight lead in hard voter numbers our only real hope on the Democratic Party side. And that's bonkers. The Republican Party has no standard of ethics at all.
But hey, at least we won—and the importance of our Democratic majority actually
increasing in the Senate, in spite of losing our majority in the House, cannot be overstated. The House is not in any position to accomplish anything at all over the next two years, with their majority Republican but both the Senate and the Executive Branch controlled by Democrats. It occurred to me that the Senate's responsibilities have far greater long-term consequences anyway, and with a 51-seat majority, it changes all committees to a slight Democratic majority as well, as opposed to evenly split with constant voting ties preventing any progress. As it is now, the Senate is poised to run a sprint over the next two years
finally confirming countless judicial seats that have been needing to be filled for far too long.
So this Georgia win, which itself is on top of John Fetterman flipping a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, is very, very good news. It would be a lot better, of course, if we retained the majority in the House, but given what history usually brings in midterm elections, this is just about the best we could hope for. Even the Republican lead in the House is now at a very thin margin: 222 to 212, or 51.2% to 48.8%. Even this spread was largely considered a win last month, because usually the majority-flip is far more dramatic than this in a midterm election, and Republicans convinced themselves there would be a "red wave" that really never came. Some called it a "red ripple" and that's a lot more accurate. In short, the overall elections this year were a huge relief, because they could have been way, way worse.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ तेईस —
[posted 12:21 pm]
