It's over, and we lost.

But hey!--it's not all bad. First of all, remember that Ohio (this year's "Florida") uses Diebold computerized voting machines--machines that are relatively easy to hack or reprogram without leaving a paper trail, and the CEO, Wally O'Dell, promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush. And while the margin between Bush and Kerry in Ohio was more than 100,000 votes, there were more than 200,000 ballots thrown out in Ohio, mostly from Democratic precincts. And there are a number of other suspicious results in other parts of the country.

Of course, it's too late now. No one's contesting it this time. We've got the miserable failure for another four years--four years of war, homophobia, racism, ecocide, tax cuts for super rich, shitty healthcare, "abstinence" education, and an increasing merge of church and state. Oh, and a bunch more states passed legislation against same-sex marriage. The idiots really are taking over.

It's never fun for your candidate to lose the first time you get to vote for president. But--it's not the end of the world. "Don't mourn, organize" is the meme going around the left half of the blogosphere these days. I think that's sound advice.

Some good things:

1. The other three people I voted for--Feingold for Senate, Obey for the House, and Sherman for state assembly--all won. Not surprising, I guess, since they were incumbents. But good nonetheless.

2. John Ashcroft is retiring. Yay! (Although, rather unfortunately, he's likely to replaced by Alberto Gonzales, the same guy whose roll it was to brief Governor Bush on death row inmates before he allowed them be executed--and did a really shoddy, deceptive job of it.)

3. I was pissed last week when I missed the total lunar eclipse--stupid clouds blotted out the entire sky for the entire time the earth's shadow was crossing the moon. But I've seen an eclipse before (the last one, which I believe was in January 1999, was my first and it was absolutely amazing), and I will again in 2007; this week something happened that was even cooler and more rare (for an almost-Southern girl like me)--The Nothern Lights. Definitely one of the better sides of being stuck in cold, remote Northern Wisconsin. I saw them my freshman year, but they weren't very bright and I was very high at the time and don't remember it too well. This time they were incredibly bright and beautiful, shimmering blue/turquoise, forming a sort of starburst pattern rising up into the center of the sky. At first you could think it was clouds, but clouds don't generally glow, and it wasn't moving the way clouds do, straight across the sky. It was more like it was pulsating, maybe quivering from the cold. I'm never going to forget that.

4. In the wake of the loss of Angel, the one show on television I was genuinely excited about, I was starting to get depressed about the derth of quality television these days. It's all eating scorpions and tricking your loved ones for cash these days. But then I started seeing commercials for Lost, a stranded-on-a-desert-island show, which sounded interesting (I went through a phase in my early teens when I obsessively wrote story after story about desert islands, and the subject still fascinates me for some reason). Anyway, I started watching, and it's fucking AMAZING. You'd think it'd be silly, like Gilligan's Island, or preposterous, like Lord of the Flies, but it's great. It's got the adventure and the struggle to survive, and the mysterious monsters, but it's mainly pyschological. So far, each episode has been centered on one of the survivors, showing flashbacks of their life before, letting us see a little bit more of their character. I'm quickly falling in love with Kate, the tough-girl who was being sent back to the US for trial after hiding in Australia from the cops (and we still haven't seen what crime she committed, or maybe didn't commit). And, incidentally, it features two alumni from Angel--Daniel Dae Kim (Gavin Park on Angel) is playing Jin, an angry Korean guy who can't speak English, and David Fury (executive producer, writer, director, and goat sacrificer on Angel) is producing and writing--he wrote the fantastic "Walkabout" episode. So, maybe there's hope for TV after all.

5. I ran out of room with my old domain host, so I moved to a better one, and now have ten times the space and 5 times the bandwith for only a bit more money per year. So I've got some plans for expansion on my website--I'm working on an encyclopedia of my favorite plants and their uses, and eventually I'm going to put up a site with my favorite Simpsons quotes, something I designed for my web design class sophomore year that needs some fiddling and updating, but should be fun.