Last night in the guitar class we learned the Allman Bros.' "Melissa."
That's a fun song to strum and our teacher pointed out it's really easy
to solo over, so we all had to try that. There are four or five of us
in the class on any given night and so far everybody agrees it's more
fun than private lessons. I was so glad when this was offered because I
still miss the Old Town School in Chicago and its group classes.
On the way home last night at 9:30 PM I was waiting at the light at
Boren and James--this is right outside the heart of downtown--and a
coyote crossed the intersection. I'd heard they are in Seattle and it's
not too unusual for them to be spotted, but I'd never seen one in town
and was especially surprised to see him in that totally paved, cold,
urban setting. He looked perky but I felt sad for him having to run
around on the concrete.
Our caucus was held in a 100-year-old school building, in a square classroom covered in student art and chalkboards. Several old sofas, tables and folding chairs, plus the banged-up, varnished cedar floor, provided places to sit. It was standing room only but it was comfortable. We saw three neighbors we recognized plus one member of my book club who lives nearby.
Our neighborhood is an historically black area that has gone to about 60 percent white in the past ten to 15 years, and of the 88 people in our precinct caucus room, there were maybe 10 black people. We didn't specifically count. What surprised me was that the room went 85 percent for Obama, with 75 votes for him, 12 for Hillary, and one undecided who later swung to Obama's side. I had thought it would be closer and that there would be more undecided voters.
The New Yorker magazine had written about the Iowa caucuses. The story gave me the impression that there would be aggressive recruiting from the two sides, with people trying to persuade the others to come over to their side. Our caucus had none of that. One person was spontaneously chosen from each side to speak in favor of their choice for sixty seconds. After each side spoke, the one undecided voter identified herself and changed her vote.
Votes had been counted by a couple sitting next to me on the sofa. They had collected the sign-in sheets on which each person had written their choice, tallied the votes (two or three times, though no one else doublechecked their count), and then handed the sheet back to the woman who wanted to change her vote.
Luckily there were more than enough volunteers to be delegates and alternates to the next levels, the district and county conventions. Our precinct assigned five delegates--four to Obama and one to Hillary. Tom and I didn't volunteer, though we would have if there hadn't been enough people who wanted to do it. Once that was over, we left.
Well... This is one of the default styles. If I want Northwest Notes to look the way it used to, I will have to figure out the css and so on. But at least now I can blog! I was starting to go into the D.T.'s with no blogging. Even though I was routinely going a month with no entries.
I wanted to get FitNotes fixed first, because I'm now a professional fitness trainer, having made this official last week by leaving my day job at the law firm as a technical writer/helpdesk. I've been training people for almost a year and a half and now I'm ecstatic to immerse myself in it. My first major offering, my six-week kettlebell class, is full. I also have some private kettlebell training clients. This is exciting! Not a good time for one's websites to vanish.
What happened with the blogs was that I installed Movable Type 4.1, saw that my styles were wiped out, got frustrated over several days and deleted my blogs. I did a clean install for the second time. I still can't get FitNotes working right because it's a subdomain--at least I think that's the reason. I could only apply a stylesheet by hard-coding, because the StyleCatcher could not find the "real" css it was referring to. A second problem is that the comments aren't working--you can see the existing comment but there is no interface to type one in. Also the Search path is no good. That one's definitely related to the subdomain arrangement. But Northwest Notes works because it's the actual domain.
I think I'm going to delete the FitNotes blog again (currently at fitnotes.net/blog), delete everything related to it, and start over on that blog, either by (1) reinstalling MT into a subdomain path, or (2) by purchasing fitnotes.net as a separate domain instead of a subdomain.
