Wet 'n Wild

The second storm is upon us now. I can hear the rain and wind on the roof, although it's not nearly as heavy as it was yesterday. That was a nasty day, especially in the morning -- public transit snarls, everyone dripping wet, lots of power outages. Nothing that touched us here, fortunately, although we did go grocery shopping at a store that had been without power earlier in the day, and it was weird. Lots of closed or empty freezer cases, most of the fresh fish gone, all the poultry packed in extra ice.

Today isn't supposed to be as bad, although the weather report says there might be thunderstorms (which are rare here). It'd be a great day to curl up with a cup of tea, a book, and several blankets, but new faculty orientation waits for no one.

Various

It's been raining off and on all day, but I think it's pretty clear that the worst of the storm is past us. Certainly nothing like yesterday. So that's good news.

My DS arrived today!! No games for it yet, so to test it I pulled out T's old GBA Zelda card. I died a lot. And I can already tell that I'm going to have to play in small bursts -- the little buttons aren't great on my hands. Playing with a joystick makes a real difference. Which I already knew, really, from playing FFVII and VIII. Once I'm able to use the stylus and mix it up, that should help.

Now I'm off to see if I figure out how to make the wireless work...

ObPolitics

Ganked from iamleaper. I've taken a number of these now, but this one seems the most accurate.

( Candidate ranking behind the cut )

The problem with these quizzes is the logistics of providing simple answers. For example, on the question regarding Iraq, you get these options (of the ones I would be willing to chose):

* It was a huge mistake, and troops should be withdrawn ASAP.
* We need a phased and orderly withdrawal to end the war and free up troops for other uses.

What do you pick if you believe the war was a huge mistake, and that we need a phased and orderly withdrawal in order to get the troops out safely and preserve at least some semblance of order during the process? I went with the first, since I think it's closer to my views, but a significant nuance is lost there. Just for the heck of it, I changed it and clicked "submit" again, and all it did was swap my order around a little bit -- brought Edwards and Obama up, dropped Kucinich a few places. So I guess it doesn't matter that much. Still, it bugged me.

Well, anyway, I'm pretty well settled on Edwards, I think. Unless the day comes and it looks like the race is really close between Obama and Clinton, and Edwards is pretty well out of it; in that case, I'll probably switch to Obama. (I'll happily vote for Clinton in November if she gets the nomination -- I don't hate her or anything. She'd be fine. But she's my least favorite of the front-runners for several reasons.) It's a little exciting to think that the California primary might actually matter this time around. That's never been true during my lifetime. Of course, it's at the expense of how ridiculously early the whole process starts now. It's January 5th, and the Iowa caucus is already over? And 20-some states are having their primaries on the same day, one month from now? (California is one of them.) At this rate, we might as well just declare a national presidential primary day and get the whole thing over with at once. Crazy times.