Wasted votes? I think not

I’m proud to be a Libertarian, and I’ve been voting for Libertarian candidates and principles for well over a decade (see here, here, here, and even here). As so many people have seen and commented lately, the two leading presidential candidates are abhorrent choices on so many levels. One is a smart criminal and the other is an ignorant bigot. I’m surprised, frankly, that so many educated people think they are the only two choices, and thus we must cast our votes for “the lesser of two evils”.

To that end, I really like this quote from an article by Steven Weese (emphasis mine):

Your vote is an expression of yourself and your beliefs. Your vote has power as a statement. People voting out of fear of the worst candidate is a self-perpetuating cycle. If no one ever has the courage to vote outside of the two main parties, it will never be broken. However, if enough people vote and it shows in the total election count, it will give cause for us to reconsider and embolden even more to vote outside of the two parties.

I’m voting for Gary Johnson, and encourage anyone who is unhappy with the crook and the bully to do the same.

Falltimate

Today was one of those perfect fall days: sunny, blue skies with a peppering of clouds, crisp air with no wind, and the trees changing color. The grass was cool but not cold, which made it ideal for some barefoot ultimate at lunchtime. What a great day to throw a disc around and enjoy beautiful Colorado.

“A scream becomes a yawn”

On our road trip last week, Thom had a few songs by Metric in his playlist. I’ve been listening to them, and a lyric from “Dreams So Real” caught my attention:

“A scream becomes a yawn”

I feel a ring of truth in that statement. These days it seems that we hear about something terrible out in the world, and we get all upset or angry or self-righteous or whatever. But before you know it, those emotions fade away because we have other things that we care about or that consume our time, or because some other issue pops up and starts the cycle all over again.

We humans are funny creatures, I suppose.

Bad days

So the last two days have been pretty rough days for me at work. Web sites were down, email wasn’t working, spammers were attacking… it was generally a disaster and I was scrambling to get things running, keep clients happy, and make sure my team had the tools they needed.

I was mentally exhausted and thinking how horrible my days had been. But then two things happened:

1) I talked to a friend who is facing some pretty serious issues in her family.
2) Ben bought me a board game to make me feel better.

It made me realize that in the grand scheme of things, my “horrible days” weren’t really all that bad. It’s pretty amazing what a little perspective, and a kind gesture from a friend, will do.

Lightsabers make everything more awesome

I was writing my weekly email to Alex, and he’d sent a photo of himself with a few other missionaries, all of whom had fake swords (long story). I decided to have a little fun with it, so I found a plug-in for my graphics software that lets me add lightsabers to images. The result:

IMG_1303

Yep. Definitely more awesome.