I've always held a quote from Anne Frank very close to my heart.  "In spite of everything, I still believe people are good at heart."  This came from a girl who hid for years from the Nazi's only to end up dying in a Concentration Camp.  I read something else today from a person in a similar situation.

You only live once. Let's keep trucking. If we don't do that, who's going to do it for us? We have to be happy. Why hate?  The world is full of hate, and yet they don't know what they want.

The man who said this was a Prisoner of War in a Nazi slave camp, who saw hundreds of his comrades die and who was told by his own government that he was not allowed to talk about his experiences when he came home.  You can read the full story here.

People like them give me hope for the world.  If they can hold on to goodness and hope when they've been through atrocities that I'll never come close to experiencing I certainly can.

This morning I asked those who follow me on Facebook and Twitter not to be dicks when it came to the election results from last night.  I feel that, in some ways, I am violating that request by making this post.  I honestly can't help myself, though.  Reading some of this I can't tell if I should laugh or cry.

President-Elect Obama,

I am writing this post with a full awareness that you will likely never read it.  I am not writing it for you per se, but I am directing the message at you and anyone who feels that you were elected out of some kind of blind hope or reckless idealism.  I am writing this to explain, and in some ways I am writing this as a warning.

Mr. Obama, we will be watching you.

In no particular order, and because I really don't feel like spamming Twitter with all of this today.

So....the Tampa Bay Devil (fuck all that dropping the Devil business...they only did that to try and get the religious freaks into the stands) Rays beat the Boston Red Sox tonight 9-1 in a playoff game.  Let me state right here and now that I do not give a damn about baseball.  At all.  I think it's a mind-numbingly boring game, and the only time I willingly go to a baseball game is when my son is in it (and even then I get bitchy about it).  If it weren't for the fact that Tampa Bay was in the playoffs I wouldn't even be aware that the playoffs were going on.

I just don't care.  Really.

But...

I'm gonna wax poetic for a bit about the economy, so if you're sick to death of hearing about it please feel free to move along.  I've just had some thoughts stuck in my head in the last few days and I wanted to get them out.

The following is the text of an email I just sent out to my local Family members.  Figured I'd cross post it here to broaden the audience (although the personal appeal at the end will have less of an impact).

If you play video games at all and don't live under a rock you're probably aware that Blizzard is releasing Wrath of the Lich King (the next expansion for World of Warcraft) on November 13th.  On the day this happens millions of happy little geeks will stay up until Midnight, plop down $50 to purchase the pre-order they made at their local video game shop, and proceed to ooh and ahh over all the shiny new content that Blizzard is offering to them.

So I have this very unusual sense of loss this morning that is related to the dream I had last night.  In this dream I had a daughter (the odd thing is that I don't know if I ever remember her having a name in the dream).  While this is not odd in and of itself,  what made this dream somewhat different was that about 3/4 of the way through it she realized she wasn't real.  She and I both knew she was a dream, and that our time together was only going to last until I woke up.

The last thing I remember of the dream is holding her while she cried and said "Please, daddy.  Don't wake up.  Not yet."

Another interesting thing about this is that I was woken up not by my alarm clock, but by my son's.  Not only was I profoundly sad when I woke up I was also slightly angry with him for cutting my time short with her.

Clearly I'm fully awake now and the dream is slipping away, but I still have this feeling like I lost something wonderful this morning....but it's something I never really had in the first place. 

How odd is that?

What's even odder is the fact that I was going to just write about this on my Twitter, but something inside me said that she deserved more than a 140 word recollection.  That her online eulogy not be condensed for quick reading.

So...yeah.  I've sat here and tried to think of some poignant way to wrap this up and it isn't happening. 

I fully intended to start this post off by talking about how I usually don't talk about politics, but then I realized I'd sound like everyone else in the blogosphere recently who has posted about how they usually don't talk about politics and proceeded to do so.  We're less than two months away from a Presidential election.  Like it or not, we all talk about politics at one point or another.  The question becomes whether or not we wish to actually have an open and honest debate on the subject or if we're so mired in our own beliefs that we cannot even hear an opposing view without feeling threatened our taking it personally.

Up until Wednesday, I had never served on a jury before.  I've been called once, shortly before Alex was born, but at the time I was working in a strip club and I'm pretty sure I did not match the criteria of "upright citizen" that they seem to go for in these things.  Twelve years and a fairly major shift in pay grade seems to have changed that, though.

So now that the month of vacations is over and I'm re-establishing a somewhat normal pattern around the house I decided to be Mr. Productive today and get some stuff done around the house.  Well, that was my intention at the beginning of the day.  I ended up being delayed in the morning by several hours due to the fact that there was yet another scammer trying to get our Member account information this morning.  It's the second one in a week!  Last week it was a pretty elaborate phishing scam, but this week it was automated calls that were asking folks to call another number and enter their credit card information!   I had originally intended to hit Home Depot early this morning, but I didn't get out of the house until around 12:30 becuase I was was waiting for official word on what we should post on the web site.

Well, the month of August has finally come and gone.  Convergence 14 is done.  Gen Con is done.  Dragon*Con is done.  I've blown through the large majority of my vacation hours and maxed out several credit cards. 

Was it worth it?

So the first two days of Gen Con are under our belts.

I'm having a "fat" morning.  You know the type, right?  Where you realize you've eaten a bunch of crap in the last few days and you know for a fact that you've put on some weight?  Yeah, one of those mornings.  I haven't worked out in about a week and I've been (and will be for the next three days) eating lots of restaurant food.  Coupled with the lower back numbness and stiffness I've been dealing with, and I really don't feel like someone who regularly works out for 30 to 60 minutes a day.

Which is kind of a pisser, yo.  You'd think that after nearly two years of pretty consistent exercise I could maybe wake up in the morning without being stiff.