Sheep Guarding Llama

Thursday.  Pretty slow day, no news from the home front to report.  Still we are just dealing with the emotional and planning impacts of the election results.  Everyone is still very hopeful that the electoral college will overturn things, but we don’t have much faith in that, they have never done it before.  They are basically just a rubber stamp process.

This whole affair has made it a lot easier to talk Dominica into being out of the country far more than we had planned on previously, however now we are talking about contingency plans in case things go really badly in the US and what if we are stuck having to not return to the US for a long time in case it goes into martial law or whatever.  That might sound extreme, but things have already happened that we did not think were really possible and we have to be ready for anything to happen now.  There is every possibility that things will be fine, but every possibility that we are looking at a worst case scenario, too.  We need contingency plans, we have little kids to think about.

So that has been taking up our time.  Not much else to tell about today.

Today is a very, very depressing day.  We all feel terrible.  At least Dominica and I (and the kids) know that we are leaving the country before all of this takes place officially, but we are going to be embarking on a new degree of the “International Trump Apology Tour” when we head out for Europe again in January.  If we thought that it was bad and embarrassing before, this is going to be so much worse.  Now we have to apologize for the entire country.  [Edit: In January we were out of the country for one entire hour before having someone confront us about the situation!]

Our entire day was pretty much taken up by political discussions, crying (not kidding) and trying to figure out what this all means for the real future and how it affects our life plans.  I always felt that it was likely that Trump was going to win, however it happened, so this is not coming as a shock to me in the way that it seems to be to so many people around me who really did not believe that he could possibly win the election.  So I am much more mentally and emotionally prepared for it all.  This is going to be a rough four years, and I have no feeling that this will end at four years (or eight) and totally expect that in January we will have the final peaceful transition of power in American history.  I truly believe that we just witnessed Gaius Julius crossing the Rubicon and this is the end of the republic in America.  Not that that is all a bad thing, the Republican form has proven to be very, very bad and democracy clearly has not worked in a country of this size.  But this is not how it should have been torn down.

Today we got up late and started the day going out for a very late breakfast at Denny’s up on Frankford.

This afternoon we went for a walk to both do a Pokewalk and to go vote.  Our local voting location is right in our neighborhood and was a very short walk.  It is at the local elementary school.  We were able to just go through the greenway to get there, very convenient.

I cast my vote for Jill Stein.  I know that there isn’t any chance for her to win, I’m just trying to get my voice heard in some small way.  Voting is a pointless exercise in America, it affects nothing in reality.  Even the popular vote is meaningless.

Later today we heard of a few cases of voter fraud in our own district.  First hand, some from people who had been involved in it directly and some who had had it done to them (someone voted using their ID!)  The amount that we heard of first hand fraud is terrifying, definitely to a point where the fraud makes up for vastly more than the difference between votes from the small cross section that we have access to information about.  It’s crazy that voter fraud is so open and common in Texas!  And no system for addressing it, the people who had their votes stolen, for example, just lost them – no recourse for them to actually get to vote.  Literally, no democratic process at all, not even the attempt to make it look like one.  This is what we hear is supposed to be the problem in the third world, but right here in the US it is happening and no one is talking about it or doing anything!

Tried to go to Quiz Night tonight as it is Tuesday and that is our thing on Tuesdays, but the bar had the election on instead of Quiz Night so we got stuck watching the election results come in all evening which was incredibly depressing.  Not only did Trump surprisingly “win” the presidency but he did not win the vote.  So, once again we have a president that was not elected by the American people but used “the system” to take control of the nation without the people having voted for him.  Just showing how corrupt America is, how little Americans care about it and how non-democratic we are as a country.  The system is rigged to give power to the minority and not to let the people have even power.  But that is how it has always been; a blight on humanity since the very beginning.  A horrible system designed for oppression.  Our only hope now is that the electoral college steps in in December and does its sole job and protects us from gerrymandering.

It was a very sombre and sad night as we went to bed tonight.

Had heavy rain this morning.  Then some friends came over for coffee in the late morning.  By noon we had a huge storm roll in, there was tons of lightning and thunder.  Really heavy storm.

I was in my office and looked out into the atrium and noticed that the rain did not appear to be falling onto the rubber mats that are normally out there but it looked like rain falling directly onto standing water; and that means that the atrium was flooding.  Thankfully Rachel and Shawn had warned us about this and we knew that this could happen.

I grabbed a broom and stood by the atrium door monitoring the situation.  The rain was coming down so heavily that the water in the atrium was rising at about one inch every minute.  It was incredible.

I gave it two minutes but I could see that the water was just about to make it to the top of the foundation and would soon be flowing into the kitchen through the open door and we know that it went into the bedrooms through the windows previously when it flooded a year ago.  So once there was no sign of it stopping, I had to just jump in.  I was bare foot because what do you wear when going into nasty black atrium water.

I jumped in and the water was up to my calf and very cold.  The rain was coming down so hard, I was drenched in a second.  There were fire ants and muck and everything in the black water, it was kind of awful.  Luciana stood at the door watching me as I waded deep to the back of the atrium and worked on clearly the drain.

I used the broom and a dust pan to try to bail water from around the drain.  All of the muck and leaves was filling the drain so that the water would not stop flowing.  I was out there for a long time trying to get things clear.  Finally got the water flowing, but it took forever.  The tarpaulin that was out there from the grill and that was blocking the water flowing and made the water back up even more.

In the end I managed to keep the place from flooding, but it was a near thing.  What a pain.  We have to get that figured out in the atrium, the drainage is a real problem.

I made myself a tuna salad sandwich for lunch today.

This evening we finally got the queen bed that we have for the girls set up in their bedroom (Luciana’s back bedroom) so that they don’t have to sleep on the floor any more.  They like sleeping on the floor and don’t really care, but it looks a lot more normal to have a bed in there.  And sometimes they ask me to sleep with them (okay, all of the time) and I just can’t take how hard the floor is back there any longer.  So this is more for me than for them.  Plus is will make it possible to walk around their room now.

Rachel made mac and cheese for dinner tonight.

 

 

It’s Sunday and today is all about resting.  So exhausted from this past week.  There has just been so much going on, it has been insane.

I went to bed early last night and was up around nine this morning.  A good night of sleep.  I felt good getting up but was relatively tired for much of the day.

Rachel made French toast for lunch today.  That was very cool.

For dinner this evening we got Panda Express.

Went out this evening for a four kilometer Pokewalk with the girls.  We went way over to Josey on the greenway and it went really well.  We found a gym and a couple of stops. We had a nice time together.