The cat’s away and the mouse is playing. While Donna spends a weekend in northern Arizona with her sewing and quilting friends, I’m livin’ large. In my most recent post I mentioned my sister Mary from Montana, and my plan to meet her and her entourage at the air museum. That happened and here’s the pic to prove it:
Left to right: me, Mary’s husband Dennis, Mary, Dennis’ sister Shyla’s husband Jim, Shyla. Looming behind us is a jet I once flew (no air museum guests of mine get away without a little showing off).
Continuing the social whirl, my book club met yesterday and later that evening our friend Mary Anne took me to dinner at a local steakhouse. Is it really a date if you go Dutch, though?
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Whew! That’s a lot for a hermit. But wait, there’s more to come: a skin cancer procedure on Tuesday, then a get-together with another friend who’s in town.
There’s a local election to approve or deny the continuation of a half-cent sales tax to finance road construction and repairs, so I’m thinking about elections. We signed up to vote by mail ages ago: our ballots come by post and we can either mail them back or drop them off at designated collection stations (we always do the latter, just to be sure we’re counted). When we moved to Arizona 28 years ago, we registered to vote at the DMV. Proving our citizenship was pretty easy … we didn’t have to provide birth certificates, I recall; it was nothing like the FBI-style background check we underwent when we applied for new RealID licenses a couple of years back.
States are responsible for elections, vote counting, and setting and enforcing voter registration requirements, not the federal government. Of course Trump wants to change that, and if Congress and the courts allow it to happen you and I will have to re-register from scratch, whether we already have passports and RealIDs or not. Those huge detention centers they’re setting up all over the country are going to fill up toot sweet. And maybe that’s what they’re really for.