My Very Nice Young Husband and I live on the top floor of a lovely old house in a quiet neighborhood near campus (we're grad students). It's on a tiny private lane that's shaped like a T: the stem of the T connects us to the main road, and the houses are all along the top of the cross-bar of the T. Both ends of the cross-bar are dead-ends.

It's a private lane, so each homeowner owns the street in front of the house. Houses in the middle have an easement (gotta be able to drive past 'em); the houses at both ends don't need easements, so they can park two cars side by side. Everyone parks in the street in front of their house. We're no exception. This has been working great for over a month. We park in front of our house in a space granted us by our landlord, and since the street literally ends at our house we don't keep anyone from driving wherever they need to go.

Today my aforementioned VNYH came home early because, being a sweetie, he wanted to make dinner and set the table with flowers, china and candles (it is our two-month anniversary, and I had no idea it was such a big deal!) He discovered that someone had left a very charming note on our windshield:

PARK HERE AGAIN YOU WILL BE TOWED

This note features an unusual system of grammar previously unknown to us, but he made the reasonable interpretation that this is a threat. Somebody doesn't think we should be parking there (though we have every legal right to), and did not want to leave the matter open for discussion (say, by leaving their address or phone number). Very neighborly.

He talked to the next-door neighbors, who had no idea why anyone would have a problem with our parking. We talked to the downstairs neighbors, who've been parking there for two years and have never had notes like this left on *their* door. So I guess now we'll have to leave explanatory notes on our windshield, and be prepared to fight with the tow-truck company (if they come, they WILL tell us who called them, and we WILL take them to small-claims court if necessary to recover the fees). Our neighbors have kindly offered to call off the tow truck if it comes when we aren't there.

Pretty exciting. Funny, ain't it, how after years of living in dorms and off-campus student housing, it's after we move in with the grown-ups that we start having problems with petty dictators and power games ...

So I'm voting Democratic.

I don't think your average Democrat is more moral than your average Republican. There are a lot of things about which I disagree with Democrats.

But I love the Constitution and I love the principles that the U.S. was founded on. We were very lucky in our founding fathers. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Monroe, Morris, Hamilton, Adams -- they all understood that people who think they're doing the right thing all too often commit horrible acts of evil. That's why they set up a divided system of government: the President acts as a brake on Congress. Congress acts as a brake on the President. They both act as a brake on the Supreme Court, which in turn acts as a brake on them. This is supposed to prevent the worst excesses and the worst misjudgments.

For whatever reason, our current Congress has decided that it's more important to give our current President everything he asks for than it is to keep him within the bounds of the Constitution. They've recently given him the power to hold people, including American citizens, indefinitely -- even if they've never been convicted of any crime. They've given him the power to authorize "extreme interrogation techniques"; when these techniques were used by the Nazis, and by the Khmer Rouge, we rightly called them torture. They still are. Remember, the victims aren't all terrorists. John Yoo, a former administration lawyer, has argued that the President should have the right to order the torture of children if it would cause their parents to give up information.*

I don't want to owe my life to the pain of a three-year-old.

I don't want our honorable soldiers to be ordered to torture children, or anyone else for that matter. That's not the way I want myself protected.

And even if I did, it's been shown, time and time again, that torture doesn't work very well as an information-gathering tactic. People will confess to anything, say anything, to make it stop. And the things they say aren't necessarily true. Our government is selling our soul to the devil for nothing, for no benefit at all.

Maybe George Bush would never order such a terrible thing. Maybe it just comforts him to have the power to do so, knowing that he would never authorize it. But in giving him that power, Congress also gave it to every President who follows him. Do you want to place that much trust in whoever will be elected in 2008, or 2016, or 2032, without even knowing who that person will be?

This Congress has failed in its duty to make sure that the government obeys the strictures of the Constitution. The President is not supposed to be an absolute monarch, and Congress is supposed to make sure he isn't; this Congress hasn't. I want my children to grow up in a democracy. This Congress must be replaced with one that will do its job.

I'm voting Democratic tomorrow. This issue is too important for me to stay quiet.

*I'm editing to provide a citation for this. In a December 1, 2005 debate with Doug Cassel (a Notre Dame professor of law), John Yoo -- a former deputy assistant to the U.S. Attorney General, and an important architect of the administration's wartime policies, participated in this exchange:

Cassel: If the President deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

There is no excuse for that; none. Tomorrow's election is the best chance of the American people to send a clear message that this approach is unacceptable. This is our last chance to tell this government that this is not who we are.

What are the contents of your junk drawer? 

Junk drawer? Ha! I have a whole junk bookshelf. It has origami paper, saved wedding cards in a box, letters from my mother that I just can't throw away, stacks of physics papers that I should really sort through at some point, magazines I intend to read and pictures I'm still planning to hang on my walls, one of these days. I've also got a fair bit of yarn and embroidery floss, and a stack of those fancy gift bags that I intend to reuse a bit at Christmas.

Ok, if you dumped out your wallet or handbag or backpack on the table, would it be a frightening sight? Are there any interesting things in there?  My backpack would likely be pretty frightening; it's a little bit of a black hole. I've got a bottle of aspirin, some makeup, a glasses case, and some other random toiletry items; memory cards for my camera; books and papers and bank statements; and a fairly wide array of office supplies, just in case. I used to regularly carry around a stapler and a small steam engine.

What's under your bed?

A box of winter clothes, neatly folded. That's because they're my Very Nice Young Man's and he's neat like that. My junk goes on the bookshelf, not under the bed!

Have you ever performed a defrag on your computer?  

Yes, on an old machine. It helped a bit but it was on its way out.

I've also done some disassembly sometimes. My work computer recently managed to half-destroy itself; it lost a hard drive, some of its memory and the ability to get a keyboard signal from the PS2 port. That was exciting, but now it's running again better than ever. Plus my new (USB) keyboard advertises itself as the only keyboard I'll need for life!

A new quiz of mine has been placed online!  It is in the Peru category, in Geography.  Click on the link below to play it, and feel free to leave comments!

 

	A Whirlwind Tour of Peru (10 questions)
	Thank you for choosing Whirlwind Tours! Over the next few minutes we’ll show you some of the highlights (and highlands) of Peru, a beautiful country of nearly 30 million people. Fasten your seatbelt – we’ll be moving very quickly!

The weekend started out well. I passed my qualifying exam "with flying colors" (my adviser actually used that phrase), so the only hoop between me and my PhD is conducting an experiment and writing a thesis. (Sadly, that hoop is a doozy). We made some phone calls and got the number of unknown RSVPs down to 8. We unpacked a vast number of boxes in our new apartment and actually managed to find space to put a bed. And we cleaned out almost all of my old apartment.

That's when things went horribly, horribly wrong.

All summer I've been working on an embroidery project: two interlocking wedding bands, one silver and one gold, with our initials inside and the date of our marriage beneath. It's meant to be the ringbearer pillow at our wedding, which is in a little under two weeks. It's a bit more than half done after hundreds and hundreds of stitches (the pattern is about 12 inches by 8 inches) and uncountable hours of work. It was kept in a blue plastic grocery bag, since I have so many of them.

I brought it to my old apartment yesterday so that I could do some embroidery after we finished cleaning. Last night, after clearing the place out and going to dinner, I couldn't find it -- not anywhere in the old apartment. We drove to our new apartment and combed through all of the suitcases and boxes we'd just brought back -- not there. And we realized that, during the cleaning process, we'd thrown innumerable blue plastic grocery bags down the garbage chute of my big apartment building.

So, with a boxcutter and a flashlight, we were down underneath my vast apartment building at 3 in the morning, trying to find the outlet for the trash chute. That found, we sifted through an entire day's worth of trash for a building with about 75 apartments. We opened every bag that could possibly have been ours (and we did find several bags that we had thrown out, near the bottom of course), and we moved them to another dumpster. We eventually disassembled a discarded floor lamp and used it to pole through the unbagged trash at the bottom of the dumpster. No joy (except on the part of the maintenance man, who found our plight amusing when he arrived sometime later).

Filthy, frustrated and exhausted, we trudged back to the new apartment. I made one more desultory check through the boxes and bags that we'd upended on the floor. And lo and behold -- a blue plastic bag, sitting clean and pristine on the floor of the new apartment, was the bag we were looking for -- and we had BOTH checked it already. The embroidery was nestled in among kitchen towels and ice cube trays; my fiance had packed them in the bag without noticing its contents.

So the evening had a happy ending, but there were a couple of take-home lessons:

1. My embroidery is now in a cloth bag that can in no way be mistaken for garbage.
2. It will probably be months before we use any plastic bag for anything without shaking it out six ways from Sunday.
3. In any fiasco like this, the situation is much improved when all parties are partly to blame (him for packing it up and forgetting about it, me for not having kept it more carefully). Dumpster diving is waaay worse when you're also picking at each other.