Tuesday

I elected to use a pic I shot last Friday on the golf course at Geneva as my Home Page photo-op to reflect the green, green grass of home.  The deep blue of the sky was placed in crisp contrast with those billowy white clouds.  Taken with my back-up, back-up mini-digi Canon.

And on the same sequence on the memory card was this recent shot of My Favorite Tree over by West Branch.  Shot from the Buick while doing about 80 MPH headed East.  I'm still seeking the perfect pic of that tree.  This one was taken one-handed while I was passing a semi, and has been significantly cropped to get the focus on the tree.

And the other interesting pic is this one of flowers just off of my door on Maplecrest.  There's a little lady-bug in the upper right portion of the flower.  That little Canon is a handy piece of equipment.

I did vote today.  There was only one race contested on either ticket.  (Remember that, at least in Iowa, you can only vote for the candidates of one party in these primary elections.)  I have no strong opinions about the two Republicans looking to run for our Congressional seat, and I was tempted to re-register as a Democrat to vote against the Democratic incumbent (Dave Loebsack), but I just couldn't pull the trigger. 

It will be hard to defeat Loebsack given the left-ward tilt of the district that now encompasses Iowa City, Ottumwa and the Quad Cities.  He's college professor by vocation (Cornell in Mt. Vernon, Iowa)and has benefited from the liberal muscle of Iowa City politics.  He votes with the Party on virtually all significant issues, and has the White House talking points memorized.

Iowa lost a Congressional seat in the 2010 census and our districts have been reconfigured.  Under the new map, two Republican incumbents were looking at facing one another for a seat, but one moved a ways and will now face a Democratic incumbent instead.  And our former governor's wife, Kristi Vilsack, is running for a seat this year as well.  She will bring in a lot of the Democratic hierarchy from around the country to her campaign trail as they work to defeat a Republican incumbent who has obviously represented only the interests of the 1%.  I'm pretty sure that the basics of this race will be similar to the National debate.  It won't be pretty.

I've had an outbreak of army ants on my door steps at home.  My pal Pete had commented that he had seen masses of the ants a couple of places on his walks last weekend with The W, and I had had to fumigate a little in my basement after NYC.  I'm sure that it's just a seasonal thing.  But very irritating.

All for now.  More later.

BCOT