Ready Set.................................................. Go!

Hey look, I'm blogging twice in the same week. Wow! Lets all try not to freak out. :) Anyway, I'm sitting here at work waiting for it to be hit the "minimally respectable going home time" notch on the clock, so I thought I'd take the time to blog and tell you some exciting news:

Remember the community garden I talked about like.. months ago? Well, it appears as though my attempts to kill the project via months of doing nothing and procrastination have failed... no wait... what I mean to say is that after months of playing bureaucratic phone tag, it looks like the various local and state agencies who had the say so have finally said.... YES! That's right, the community garden, in our first choice location, has been approved! So, now I've got to get off my butt and get to work making this thing happen. The most immediate concern (even before fundriasing the $15,000+ we'll need to build the garden) is that we'd like to take advantage of the season (and the offer of a dump truck of free leaves) and get a leaf composting operation started. The leaves are falling as I speak so our time frame on this is extremely short. We need to build some sort of composting structure to hold the leaves, so they don't all blow around or look messy. So, we've got a lot to do to make this happen. I'm still not even sure if we have the clear go ahead to start building things--like compost bins--on the site, so this may not work out at all... but we're gonna try. Here we go!

If you'd like to follow the progress of the community garden, you can check out our blog (and website) here.

Regrets

In case there's someone who hasn't asked me already, I'll go ahead and say it again. Um, No, I wasn't in Grant Park last night. Why? Because I am apparently an idiot and chose to avoid a large (and potentially dangerous) crowd and instead stay at home. I think I said something like "I don't have tickets for the rally area so all I'd be able to do would be watch his speech on a jumbo-tron in the middle of the park. I can watch him on TV from the comfort of my own living room." How could I have anticipated how magical the scene at Grant Park was going to be. How could I have imagined that everyone I freaking know would call / e-mail / twitter me and beg me to tell them that I was in Grant Park. How could I have known that they would call the election in Obama's favor before 10:00 therby aliviating any fears of riots.

So yeah, I suck and missed out on being able to experience history... blah blah blah. I guess its lucky for me then that today was so unbelievable and euphoric that I barely had time to dwell on what I missed last night. I think I'll semi-quote Michelle Obama and say that I don't think I've ever been as proud of my country as I am today. I can't believe we actually did it. I can't believe that Indiana went blue (barely, but that's good enough for me). I can't believe that these past two years of pre-election craziness are finally over. wooo-freakin'-hooo!!!

However, I must say that my enthusiasm and patriotism today was tanted by some otherelection outcomes that I can't believe. At least three states, including California, passed amendments to their state laws that would make it illegal for same sex couples to get married. WTF California et. al.??!!??!! In the same election where we come as close as we've ever come to achieving equal rights for one group of people in this country, we simultaneously take rights away from another? Ugh... I could rant about this for a long time, but I wont, at least not now. This is my first blog in like... three months so I'll try not to totally take you guys off the deep end.

I think I'll leave it at that for today folks But, there's been a lot going on with me lately so I hope to start blogging on a more regular basis so that I can share it all with you.

Thanks for reading!