My civic duty.

Tomorrow is Election Day in Detroit, and I’m working it, so… you know what that means. Yes, excuses! My own suburb isn’t deciding anything tomorrow, but there’s a lot on the table in Detroit — control of city council, some other elected positions, and a revision of the city charter that is too complicated to explain here, but trust me, it’s complicated.

So I must soon get my black pants and white shirt laid out on the bed in the other room and prepare to sit on my butt for the better part of 14 hours. God, another election. Didn’t we just have one? Seems like it, and yet — here we are.

Fresh thread for any comments, but sorry, I feel just a little bit tapped out right now. Back on Wednesday, and maybe with more material.

Posted at 8:42 pm in Same ol' same ol' |
 

21 responses to “My civic duty.”

  1. indiana jack said on August 2, 2021 at 9:45 pm

    Get some rest. You deserve it. Proud of you for doing civic duty, particularly on a “less important” election. All of them are important.
    Heading to Fort Wayne for lunch with some other newspaper codgers on Tuesday. A mix of gossip and pissing and moaning.

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  2. Sherri said on August 3, 2021 at 1:00 am

    Primary election here, so the only thing decided tomorrow is a culling of the candidates. But thanks to universal vote by mail, voting happens at the dining room table.

    I’m advising a few city council candidates, only one of which has a primary. She should make it through the primary easily, since I don’t believe either of her opponents have done any canvassing.

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  3. Dexter Friend said on August 3, 2021 at 4:23 am

    Graham of South Carolina has a break-through case of The Bug, and he said he isn’t suffering much as he is vaxxed.
    The richest man in Major League Baseball (unless someone just signed another huge deal) ,Gerrit Cole of the Yankees, has Covid19 also. The crawler on espn that caught my eyeballs was the one stating Jimmy “Jimmy Buckets” Butler of the Miama Heat of the NBA just inked a deal worth $184M for 4 years, $46M per season…now yeah, I knew he has been good for a few years with the Bulls, the 76ers, and the Heat, but holy shit, what a deal.

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  4. Deborah said on August 3, 2021 at 9:21 am

    Good for you Nancy, getting involved in another election.

    I’m wearing a mask again now whenever I’m inside public spaces. I never really stopped except for briefly in our building halls, elevator and lobby. I had no idea until around 2015 or so how many of my fellow citizens in this country are assholes. There sure are a lot of them.

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  5. Suzanne said on August 3, 2021 at 9:37 am

    “I had no idea until around 2015 or so how many of my fellow citizens in this country are assholes.”
    Deborah, I think this every day and I more and more am reluctant to engage people as so many that I previously had great respect for have proven themselves to be firmly ensconced in that asshole community.

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  6. JodiP said on August 3, 2021 at 9:48 am

    Deborah, I read the twitter stuff allegedly by Cormac McCarthy on the last thread–great stuff, and I hope it’s real!

    Nancy, if you are in Paris, David Lebovitz’ August newsletter has suggestions on places to visit:
    https://davidlebovitz.substack.com/p/august-2021-newsletter
    [edited to link to the newsletter, not Jodi’s gmail.]

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  7. Connie said on August 3, 2021 at 10:16 am

    1. Appliance update. While setting up utilities with consumers they offered to haul away any older freezer or refrigerators and give me money. Done for both at $150.

    2. I knew this but it has taken awhile to sink in. I am now the owner of a vintage metal Youngstown Cabinet kitchen, not consistently in original condition. It includes the original1962 yellow sink and yellow laminate, complete with chrome! “bullet nose” edge and backsplash. Will post pictures when I get a chance.

    If I were going to Paris I would be follow David Leibowitz newsletter and web page. He blogs about shopping for cheese, produce, others, and restaurants and bakeries as well.

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  8. LAMary said on August 3, 2021 at 10:43 am

    I thought Trevor Bauer had the biggest paycheck in MLB. Makes no difference now since he’s suspended. He was accused of rape. The chatter is he had some sort of S&M arrangement with a woman but rape was not supposed to be part of the deal. I have no idea if that is what actually is going on, but Bauer’s team mates don’t want him back. I guess he was not a pleasant person to work with.

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  9. David C said on August 3, 2021 at 11:28 am

    Crisis actors? That’s what they call their victims. They’re master of projection.

    https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1421931374567563264

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  10. Deborah said on August 3, 2021 at 11:28 am

    I was just complaining that our closet and kitchen doors have been leaning up against the wall for months when lo and behold a knock on the door this morning was the contractor who found out he wasn’t able to work on another unit in the building because of drying floors or something, so his guys are coming in a few minutes to our unit to fix the floor to ceiling pivot doors that became unmoored from their sockets because of the shifting building. I would just as soon put hinges on the doors but my husband wants to keep the clean lines of only the ceiling and floor having hardware. The doors are very heavy, we were lucky that they didn’t come crashing down on someone. The pivot shafts are going to have to be made longer and so deeper into the floor and ceiling to keep from coming out of their sockets when the building shifts. We also have a window in the far NE corner that won’t open because of the shifting. That’s a shame because it’s the window that allows for good cross ventilation. Eventually the window will open when the building shifts back. These shifts are slight but they can mess things up inside. If the building didn’t shift, then we’d be sunk.

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  11. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 3, 2021 at 11:32 am

    What floor are you on, Deborah? Morbid curiosity, as I work on a 1975 home with two floors but all kinds of interesting shifting that’s not at all what you’re dealing with . . . oh, the lies I have told a nearly deaf 92 year old today. But we have a new router installed and water heater coming this afternoon, gutter crew in the morning. And MeTV tonight!

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  12. Deborah said on August 3, 2021 at 12:46 pm

    Jeff tmmo, we’re on the 17th floor, NW corner of the building. We get torque as well as mostly east/west movement because we’re on a corner. The E/W axis of the building is much shorter than the N/S axis and because the prevailing winds come from the west we get a lot of movement. The units in the floors directly above us get even more. There are 26 floors in these 2 buildings in our compound. The building we moved from across the street (Delaware) has 29 floors, we were on 27. We didn’t get as much movement because that buildings E/W axis is extra long.

    Our cabin can sway 3 inches along its E/W axis, again prevailing winds are from the west. It was engineered by a structural engineer to withstand a 90mph 3 second wind burst, which has never been recorded anywhere near that in Abiquiu, of course with climate change who knows. When it’s windy in Abiquiu and I’m sitting in the butterfly chair in the sleeping loft I can definitely feel the sway.

    I’m probably getting a lot of this wrong right now, my husband has explained this all to me before and I’m going by my often faulty memory.

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  13. Deborah said on August 3, 2021 at 1:44 pm

    This is an excellent article in the Atlantic about a lunch she had with the My Pillow guy https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/mike-lindells-plot-destroy-america/619593/ there’s a paywall but you get some free clicks. Also I have a subscription to the Atlantic, but sometimes it tells me I’m almost out of free clicks, which bugs me.

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  14. Deborah said on August 3, 2021 at 1:54 pm

    Im, sorry I should have said Anne Applebaum, not “she” in my comment above.

    Also, I’m stuck inside while the guys are working on the kitchen and closet doors, because those doors are next to the front door and I don’t want to disturb them, and they’ve got all of their tools in the way of the door.

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  15. Suzanne said on August 3, 2021 at 2:16 pm

    This podcast is quite interesting. Game designer who discusses alternate reality games which seem to have bred the QAnon people. I am not a gamer at all so this was eye opening.

    https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reed-berkowitz-a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon/id1542261788?i=1000523609652

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  16. Deborah said on August 3, 2021 at 8:52 pm

    Another asshole, the Missouri Governor pardoned the St. Louis McCluskys, they were the couple that pointed guns at peaceful protestors on a street in the Central West End, not far from where I lived at one point.

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  17. Deborah said on August 3, 2021 at 9:52 pm

    We took a walk earlier in the afternoon after the door fixer guys left, up to Lincoln Park and back. Then in the evening we took a walk up the lake to North Beach and back. That was 12,640 steps, 5 miles total. Taking 2 separate walks is the way to go to get all the steps in. It was a lovely day in Chicago.

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  18. alex said on August 3, 2021 at 10:38 pm

    Perfect day. Perfect weekend it was, actually. Just came home from a lovely dinner, smokes outside in the twilight as I ready myself to go on another Wellbutrin quit-smoking adventure. I hate Wellbutrin and what it does to me, but it sure makes me quit smoking. It also makes me a raging bitch who gets begged to go back to smoking, anything, please.

    Gonna have to work especially hard to rein it in when dealing with the passive-agressive bosses whose way of assigning work is to inquire about the status of work that was never assigned in the first place, then pitching a hissy about why I haven’t been on top of it. Thankless fucking shit, lemme tell ya. I wish my retirement savings were just a tad more than they are because I’d so be fucking outta there.

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  19. Julie Robinson said on August 3, 2021 at 10:48 pm

    Tonight I met real Florida, up close and personal, and now I understand the Covid numbers in a new way.

    We learned late in the afternoon that we have our inspection tomorrow, and all the sliding glass doors surrounding our pool need door alarms. With no time to order, we had to leave our pleasant little hipster paradise for the one place we could find 16 in stock, Walmart. Yup, that place.

    There were no carts in the store, always a bad sign, so we had to troll the parking lot, where the only one we found had a bad wheel. So every five seconds we would hear a thunk and feel a jolt as the bad part went around. Of course the alarms were in the back corner of the store across from where we went in, because isn’t that where what you need in a big box store always is?

    It was a mass of humanity and crying babies, and we were pretty much the only people wearing masks or wearing them properly. Except the employees! What a bright spot. Too bad there were only four checkouts open, with nary a self-check in the store.

    The lady in front of us appeared to be buying groceries for a week and a single green pepper was her only item of produce. The rest was black beans, white rice, and half a cart of sugared drinks. I foresee diabetes in her family’s future. She paid with cash out of a large stack in her purse, sitting open and not even in an envelope, just kind of spilling out all over. It would have been very easy for someone to come along and grab it while she had her back turned getting her change.

    You had better believe I hit the sanitizer station on the way out of the store. Shudder.

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  20. Dexter Friend said on August 4, 2021 at 12:45 am

    LA Mary, Bauer’s deal was so complicated it was not properly reported in the press. While he could have made $85M by the end of 2022, this year he was to make $31M. I think Cole and Scherzer get more, based on just 2021. Facebook me if you know where I can find more on Bauer’s case. Gawd, he was candid as hell in the TV interview I saw with him…he went to Tinder as I recall, and bargained for a woman who could take Bauer’s brand of “rough sex”. The woman then said he went past “go”, like way too far. I had not heard Bauer now is charged with rape. From my sports sources on TV, I hear the Dodgers have not completely shut the door on Bauer, but it’s going to be a long time…they are planning on winning the pennant without him.

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  21. Sherri said on August 4, 2021 at 1:27 am

    It depends on how you want to count Bauer’s salary. The $31 million doesn’t represent the actual money paid to Bauer in 2021, it represents his base salary of $28 million plus a pro-rated portion of his $10 million signing bonus. In terms of cans paid to Bauer this year, the Dodgers owe Bauer $38 million, and like NBA contracts and unlike NFL contracts, MLB contracts are guaranteed. So even if the Dodgers release Bauer, they would still owe him the $102 million total of the three year deal, unless they can argue that he broke the terms of the contract. Which they will certainly do if he is charged with a crime, and there will be lawyers.

    None of his teammates are jumping to his defense because Bauer has demonstrated well before this that he is an asshole. For now, he’s on paid administrative leave.

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