I swear to god, if I read many more stories like this, I'm tearing up my USA membership card.

I wanna give a shout out to all my peeps in Precinct 127, Legislative District 28, Ward 2, Congressional District 8, Supervisory District 4! Where is the love, yo?

Woohoo -- busy week so far, in that I finally got my foot in the door of the archaeology world once again! After paying my $10 to become a member of the Center for Desert Archaeology, a non-profit group, today I solicited and was offered a volunteer position with one of their researchers. Not where I want to be ultimately, but I've got my hands on the artifacts again, and all looks promising.

And I'm gathering signatures on my petition to become an elected Democratic Precinct Committee-member -- whatever the hell that means. What I understand it to mean is that I'll be an official hardcore violunteer Democrat shit-kicker in this here neighborhood, shaking hands, getting people to register and vote for the good guys, and generally be a politico-nerd until the general election and beyond. The thought isn't necessarily the most welcoming I can think up, but things being the way they are, it's really something I don't think I can avoid undertaking and still feel I'm doing enough for the cause. This week, I think I've already swayed one under-informed Bush supporter toward the light, and registered another prevaricating Democrat to vote. Seeing as Gore won Pima county in 2000, it's probably a foregone victory anyway, but Arizona sure as hell isn't, so maybe I can make a dent.

Janine's pestering me to use the computer, so I better end it here. Will I be able to tolerate this abuse for the next 50 years?

Ah, who am I kidding?

Rate my Valentine's Day stabs at Romanticism!

Didn't tell Janine where we were going, but grabbed over-sized picnic basket and dog and drove across town to new, highly touted Mexican joint for take-out, which went into the basket. Drove downtown to the lawn of the city hall to the Same-Sex Marriage Rights rally, where we cheered on the speakers and their sentiments while eating enchiladas and decent salsa.

Later, did Janine's laundry without complaining!

Circle level of Romantic oomph.

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Quickly, more wedding info...

The last couple of weeks have actually been pretty dull, hence the absence of amusing, witty, confusing, senseless, etc. posts -- dull in some ways, interesting in others. Janine picked up a paperback copy of Smart Couples Finish Rich, by cookie cutter financial self help savior John Bach, and while I'm sure any financial self help book would have done the trick nicely, Bach helped me get my mind around the concept of money management, saving for retirement, and what the hell is meant by variable annuity, large cap growth fund, money market, ad infernum. My skills in personal finance have been absolutely wretched since I was able to crumple up bills with my infant paws, but things have been clicking over the past couple of weeks. Again, nothing anyone would want to read about, and really nothing I want to actually spend my time doing (a sadly neglected copy of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street lies frozen in Chapter 2 on my nightstand), but something that really really badly needed doing, and I feel much more grown up now (even though I'm inclined to subscribe to Dan's philosophy that this is a step in entirely the wrong direction).

All this is hopefully enabling us to save up for the big wedding day, now semi-officially to be on August 28 at my Uncle Fred's place, about an hour from DC. More details when I update my wedding website, which as it stands now still has us getting married in May on a yacht off of Sarasota, FL. Dinner will likely be BBQ. Vegetarians best like sauce.

Next goal: get "Girl From Ipanema" out of my head.

Shit's comin' together, man, but it's too late to go into it now. For now, I'll leave you all with my current desktop wallpaper.

What the hell -- I'm still in a really great mood, and I'm still unable to account for it. Maybe it's the whole honeymoon period of the new year -- I so want things to work out between me and 2004, to be much better friends than my rocky relationship with its predecessor allowed me to be with 2003. We just met, it still has that luminous glow about it, coupled with a tinge of hard-won experience -- I think it just might work out.

And I just added a sci fi section to my DVD collection, which makes for 2 whole sections now: sci fi and muppet. Dark City is the new one -- very cool flick.

Very sleepy, but I've been in an exceedingly good mood over the past several days. I've gotten back into lifting weights early in the morning at the local gym, which I think is helping out nicely. Just me and the very old guys who carry themselves like they used to be asskickers in their day, and others who are either super-dedicated or health-conscious insomniacs. I kind of got scared back into it, when I recently read that from age 20 to 50, the average guy loses a half-pound of muscle every year and gains a pound and half of fat. Which means I'm short 5 lbs of muscle, and I'm already just over the edge of overweight.

So anybody got any dire stats to scare me into becoming more financially responsible? "If you haven't saved $40,000 by the time you're 28, you'll die early early, broke, and infested with earwigs and weevils." Anything to curb the Starbucks demon inside!

The new year's been pretty dandy so far, although the Metro failed on the way home from a night job , stranding me in the parking lot of an auto parts store, which I believe was its way of telling me not to give up on it. The symptoms seem to indicate that something's going on in the fuel line, which isn't a very good sign, seeing as that in the fuel-injection era of Metros, the fuel pump and filter are both located inside the gas tank. Which could possibly mean that I can't mess with it myself. Dammit.

Janine and I spent Chirstmas and New Years with assorted friends here in town, had several good times, and drank a lot of Apple Pucker -- Christmas was the first time in a while I actually gathered around a piano and sang carols, most of which were requested by me from the Bing Crosby/Andrews Sisters songbook. I sang the part of Patty Andrews. Janine was somewhere between Maxine and LaVerne.

The wedding's taking somewhat definite shape, and is now planned for late June in Virginia. Janine wants to include some sort of plant in her wedding bouquet (a green amaranthus) that hangs down around her arms in these springy tendrils that swear-to-God looks like something summoned forth from the depths to occupy a flower bush. An excellent spooky-elegant flourish. Maybe I'll carve an elder sign in my top hat.