Such is the life of blogging that there is little or know chance that a handful will live blog the election tomorrow night left alone hunt out a bunch of blogs and the predictions wannabe pundits with a variety of prefixes offer for passers by. I blame Facebook and Twitter. For a while there My Space was promising us that actual social media was an utter flop and that blogs would survive. But no. My prediction of nine and a half years ago that blogs were the era's CB radio has been fulfilled. So here we are. You the reader. Me the predictor. Sure is quiet.

Anyway, I love a good election. Took Wednesday off to enjoy the spectacle last into Tuesday night. I am relying on NCPR, ElectoralVote and Real Clear Politics and plan to watch WPBS on the TV. I am Blitzer-less for the first time since Gulf War I due to cutting out the cable channels. These are the races I think are worth watching here in Easlakia:

♦ President - I think the President gets a second term. The Sandy effect wins the day in both a close race for a vote and less close electoral college vote. I could be surprised but what has Mitt done lately really? Plus gas is down. And people are getting hired. Not enough but just enough. Romney gets Florida but Obama gets Ohio and Virginia.
♦ US Senate - 52 Dems and 48 GOP.
♦ US House - The Dems got over 200 seats but the GOP holds and in ditching many of their moderates assures that Gov. Christie starts a campaign to wipe out the Tea Party before 2016 when he wins the Presidency.
♦ NY - 21: I think the GOP get this seat. The ads have been outrageous and amazingly well funded.
♦ NY Senate: The boundary tweeking has done its job. GOP holds in a squeek. Don't see the GOP losing the 48th across the river.
♦ NY Assembly - redistricting has done some crazy things to norther NY. Is this the new map? Who knows. Pause for a moment and have a thought for St. Lawrence County. The inhumanity of it all.

How's that? Good for a start. Probably more late. Better check my aggregator to see what the other cool kids are saying, too.

Hurricane Sandy. Sounds too benign to be a real threat. It's only a category one at the moment. Nothing like when Juan bashed the family cottage nine years ago. Not like Gustav the year before that knocked down the big old birth at the farm house. But still a big water dump is a coming. Six cm or so by Thursday according to the handy dandy Sandy-app over at The New York Times. Not sure why it needs to take the sharp left turn into Philly. As always, the best information is at the Forecast Discussion at the NOAA. Got all the yard stuff stowed away yesterday. Rolled my ankle on a skittles log and slammed into the ground like only a fat man in his middle age can.

Update 2 pm Monday: Storm now tracking more easterly. Eye no longer thought to be passing over Lake Ontario and may shoot up to Quebec more directly.

I better make some comment on this election, make some statement given the history around here even if the digital world has deemed blogs to commentary what 8-tracks are to fine audio media.

I was over in the states yesterday and found an active economy. My favorite lunch spot, the Fairgrounds Inn where I have been going for at least six years now was hopping on a Friday lunch. I had the Italian Combo, thanks for asking. And I got my hair cut. The guy getting sheered next to me went on about the Biden debate. Unhappy but a bit shallow. Was there really cause to gripe? Businesses were expanding. On the way out of town, my rear passenger side wheel just about seized and we were lucky to come over the hill on #37 and see Frenchy's Auto Repair right there. An hour was all it took to get a part delivered and see us back heading to the border. We lapped up the warm late late summer air on a gorgeous rural vista out back of the repair ship. Everyone in the place was happy and busy and working. Some were having a beer. One of my favorite things about the slice of the USA I get to see is how it is both so similar to the Maritimes as a bit of a hard luck corner of the nation but also how frankly cheerful and confident folk are. The restaurant was at a dull roar of conversation the whole time we were there. It was hard to tell if the auto repair was a place of work or a fairly hearty social club given all the people coming and going while we were there.

What will America do on 6 November? My take is that Obama has not been passed, the Federal Senate will not budge and a number of member of the House will move to the left, not the right. There will not be a throw the bums out movement. I don't think Mitt Romney would be a catastrophe any more than four more years would. No wave of nuttin'. But the next four years one way or another will be about managing recovery. Whammo. Not sure the will be a WHAMMO!!! but there will be a Whammo.

Three types of carrots. The smaller ones to be roasted with olive oil. The bigger ones will be shredded and mixed with parsley, garlic and rice wine vinegar in a salad. Add to that swiss chard with tarragon and orange zest as well as box choi with fish sauce and lime juice. Not to mention small onions roasting under the dripping beef. Lawn food is good.

Remember the glory days? Remember when political blogging was done by bloggers and not journalists with staff and resources and... ethics? Remember when I led Google in 2004 for the search "Kerry's policies" and got paid by the CBC to blog the 2006 election? Me neither.

Four and a half weeks to do with an invite to hang out in NNY with political folk on election night. Debates were good. This week the Moderate from Massachusetts was up against the President who looked like he was preoccupied by an airstrike somewhere or another. I wish them both well as it is not my country. But Ohio and Florida as well as Virginia and North Carolina being in play? That is just fun! I am following the VoteMaster as I have for yoinks. Me, I think I am seeing rope-a-dope by the President meets a moderate contestant whose base is well to his own right. I like. I like it all. It is a fight for the center. What could be greater than that?

Yellow carrots. Small onions. Mine. Bought the seeds for the carrots in early March from Stokes. The variety is Yellowbunch and the seeds cost $2.25 a packet. Been eating them for likely 2 months now. Next year I am buying ten times as much. I believe I planted the carrots from May 5 until mid-July. Some are over a foot long now. Others are tiny like those above. The green bits taste like parsley when lightly roasted. Next year the spuds will be mine as well. I am building a tower, a crib, a box. Fill with soil. Ram spuds in through the sides. Potato high rise. A spuddy ziggurat.

My place of work in the 1850s when the waters lapped up to the stone wall of the market battery. As in a battery of cannon that protected the market. Because City Hall was built in the 1840s on part of the market square that he been there for decades before that. If you click on the picture you will see more detail. Like these bits:

To the left, you see the sign for "A & D Shaw" but I am not sure why there was a sign like that on the front of a government building. Were there businesses in the building, too? In the middle there is the detail to the left, a week glimpse up Market Street. To the right there is the same thing up Brock. The Market Street buildings are still there but there is no awning or porch on the south side as there was back then. An one of the buildings on Brock could be Sipps or Casa Domenico.

Onions are no so much a vegetable as a necessity. At the old farmstead, I planted 2000 onion sets a year. This year, a quarter of that on about ten square feet of where the front lawn was removed last Easter. They may last until Christmas. Unless I make a whopping pile of onion jam or something nutty like that. The smell of harvesting them with your bare hands is exotic. If onions, something we ate 1,000 years ago, were not common they would be a spice. Next year, more.

As I described six years ago, it was a sunny beautiful day like today. Here is what I wrote in 2003. Here is what I wrote in 2004 including comments I wrote at Acts of Volition in September 2001.