Do the Yak

A confluence of old friends in new situations... last weekend we went to a resort in the Berkshires where there was a reunion of some of Ben's old friends (more on that below). In the past two weeks, I've gotten pinged via LinkedIn by several old friends from grad school and my days as a reporter/editor for a twice-weekly paper in Connecticut (still the most fun and stimulating job I've ever had). One of them was still in the newspaper industry until quite recently, when he quit for reasons I'm unclear on, but general disgust with the job and industry had to have played a part. So I was thinking of trying to engineer a reunion of some of these old friends and was about to call C., whose house has always been a natural gathering point, when she called me first -- not to plan a reunion per se, but to tell me that the wife of another of these old friends (not one of the people who got in touch with me) had just died of cancer. He too is planning to quit his long-time job ...

It appears that Obama has the nomination pretty much sewed up, but of course the big question is whether he can beat McCain -- and Hillary's sole remaining scrap of argument for remaining in the race is that she can and Obama can't. Interestingly enough, data compiled by the conservative Karl Rove and the liberal Electoral-vote.com agree on this point. Electoral-vote.com has maps (updated daily from the latest polls) that show the general election delegate tallies for Clinton-vs.-McCain and Obama-vs.-McCain. As of today, the results would be Clinton with 310 delegates and McCain with 211, where as Obama would get 242 compared to McCain's 285 (270 needed to win the presidency). If you scroll down almost to the bottom of today's Electoral-vote.com post , there are tables showing new polling data from several states showing that Clinton would do significantly better than Obama in the key state of Florida and would also do better than Obama in North Carolina and Missouri....

Michelle and Jim Bob are still at it . #18 will be about 17 months older than #17. The photo is worth it even without the article. All I can say is... oy. Oy vey. So... career. I've postponed posting about this but I can't think of anything else to write about at the moment, so the thing is, I started taking prerequisite classes to go to nursing school -- specifically, an associate's degree in nursing from a community college, which is the cheapest and easiest way to go about it, since a second bachelor's degree is not an option with kids and mortgage. After you finish the associate's, you're allowed to take the national exam to get licensed an an R.N. The maybe later I could get a master's and be a nurse practitioner, but that's looking way too far ahead. This spring I took Biology 101 in the spring term and just found out I got an A+ which makes me happy, though not as proud as I might have been, given how easy the class was. Thirteen weekly multiple-c...

Thomas Friedman explains why the idea for suspending the federal gas tax this summer is so dumb. Boo on Hilary for supporting it. Being president ages a person, and some outfit called PopPhoto did some Photoshop work to show what the three major candidates might look like after four years in office. I've written before (God knows why) about the history and technology of, um, indoor plumbing, so I naturally loved this video that Dooce linked to: Catchy, huh?

Very busy last week so I'm finally getting around to writing about the highlight of our Florida vacation: the dreaded Disney World empire, which we were forced to visit during a single-day side trip (Orlando is less than three hours from Ben's father's place). We started at Typhoon Lagoon -- more on that later -- but the bulk of the day was spent in the heart of darkness, the Magic Kingdom, which I hoped I would never have have to revisit (I was there once when I was about 10), but the other adults prevailed. We got in there just in time for the daily parade of gaudily costumes and made-up Disney characters on permanent floats accompanied by endless blaring lops of "It's a Small World After All." As I watched the massive blobs of sensory overstimulation, I tried to figure out how to describe it, but all I could come up with was "there are no words" and "this is the essence of America." Today I looked for some links to accompany this post, b...