bird counting week

[tielan]

Every year I plan to participate in bird-counting week, and every year I miss the deadline. Best of intentions, but time fritters away.

I have decided to start harvesting the nectarines. It is, of course, raining CRAZILY this week, the kitchen is a mess, and someone is coming around to clean the house today.

I had a pretty good weekend - quiet-ish Friday night, Saturday night women's fellowship 'socially distanced', Sunday writing my Shipoween and then dinner at parentals'.

I skipped church again.

My work contract is likely to be renewed in January; when I asked the work boss about it via email, he said he intends to renew it and the contracts department is already asking. My first instinct is to think "well, I've got them fooled as to my competence" but...that's wrong thinking and unhelpful to boot.

Today in my part of Sydney, it's 13C, feels like 11C. It's raining and things are beginning to overflow. I really wish that I'd gotten the water tank hooked up a couple of months ago; at some point we need someone to look at the slow leaks in the roof.

The internal anxiety wheel is running and will do for for the next fourteen days until the US election. I am both deeply encouraged by the indicators and also deeply disturbed by them, because everything was so wrong last time. And, too, even if progressives win this time, it'll still be a fight to change the world - and the thing that hasn't changed its angle amidst all this is Murdoch's media and the conservative think-tanks pushing the world to fear and distrust above all.

In Australia, our PM hasn't been seen to do anything in the last six months except PR announcements and smirky 'I'm just your average bloke' posts, and the media is lapping it up. All the focus of negativity is on the Labor premiers who are trying to keep their states intact, with a little bit to spare for the NSW premier who had an affair with a fellow MP for five years during which she ignored his intersection of politics and personal business advantage. As you apparently do in NSW politics.

Depressing.

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

Oooooooh, imposter syndrome is NASTY, do NOT let it get its hooks into you if you can at all help it!

[thothmes]

Unless the election is a complete landslide [Oh, please! Oh, please! Yes, please!] I’m afraid the uncertainty is likely to hang on a bit as the last of the absentee ballots come in and are counted. It’s an almost certainty that Trump and the RNC will try to contest the results. It’s not going to be pretty. I’m very hopeful of a good final result, but we should all prepare ourselves, here in the States and out in the spectator sections abroad, for a roller coaster ride before it’s all done. 2016 was a total own goal. This time we must do better, and I trust that those who were complacent and didn’t bother to vote back then have learned their lesson. This is certainly a section of history I do not care to repeat, and that feeling at least certainly seems widespread.

Now if Rupert Murdoch’s so-called news engine would only stop churning out such truth optional pap for the critical thinking deficient!