1……2…….3……..clear!  *Brrrrzap*  beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep….. "………..my God, we’re losing it!  More wattage, please, Nancy, I’m not giving up that easy!  1………2……..3…..clear!" *BRRRZZZAAAAPPP*    beep, beep, ……, beep, ….beep   "We’ve got it back, however faint!  Now the syringe, please…"

…phew, that was close.  This weblog is back from the dead.  Hopefully we won’t have to go through that again anytime soon…

You’d think I’d have posted something in the past few weeks, with all that’s going on.  A new Congress come January, a trip to Vegas in a couple weeks, holidays, parties, etc. 

So I guess I’ll start with the elections.  First, the bad news.  I didn’t vote.  Nope.  Second election I could’ve taken part of, and I didn’t get my shit together enough to cast a simple freakin’ ballot.  Poor performance, Alec.   But in my defense, I’ve moved four times and lived in two different countries since the last national election.  I don’t know where my absentee ballot is, but it sure never made it here.  My fault for not contacting the Lewis County board of elections in time.  So bring on the good news then.  Well, the senate/gubernatorial races weren’t even close in New York (like most statewide elections here) so Clinton and Spitzer cleaned up nicely.  Both congressional districts (here in Monroe county and back home) were won by Republicans, but I couldn’t have participated in the vote here, and McHugh back at home cleaned up by about 2-1.  (On a side note, my district, NY #23, is just hilarious: it’s the biggest district in the state by far, and you could drive for over four hours without leaving it, from Oswego way over to Plattsburgh in the extreme northeast.  And this is in the country’s third most populous state.)  But more importantly, we’ve taken back both houses of Congress.  Thirty more seats in the House and six in the Senate.  The question remains, though:  Will we actually accomplish anything over the next two years or just continue bickering amongst ourselves?  The Democratic party has little reason to pat themselves on the back, they still can’t form any sort of consensus on a lot of issues and don’t have a consistent image in the minds of voters, unlike the Elephants.  It was the President’s unrealistic, unrelenting optimism on Iraq that tipped the congressional scale.  It’s too bad it took two more years and thousands of US soldier and Iraqi civilian casualties for the public to realize this, for now it’s too late to salvage much of anything from the Iraqi quagmire.

That being said, let’s get back to the peephole.  I haven’t posted in almost two months, and regretfully haven’t done all that much during that timespan, so I’ll just hit the high points (as usual).  One weekend in mid-October I headed down to the Catskills to do an overnight hiking trip.  I wanted to do some hiking while the fall colors were still decent, and had so many memories of dsriving through the blazingly red and orange Catskills on the way to New Jersey growing up that I thought I’d give ’em a chance.  The weather turned out to be really nice, in the 40s but clear.  Most of the leaves were off the trees but there were enough still on to make the views really nice.  I unfortunately forgot my camera, but Marcin took a pretty good set of photos to bail me out.  The nice thing about having other people take the photos is you actually get pictures of yourself!  We ended up doing a loop hike of my choice, the Slide Mt-Wittenburg-Cornell range.  It was a pretty long day hike, about 15 miles over 8-9 hours.  We ran into a dusting of snow above 3500 feet that gave the woods a nice frosting.  Ice was still minimal so conditions really couldn’t have been better for that time of year.

Two weeks later, and it’s the weekend before Halloween.  We decided to throw a Halloween party for that friday.  I spent a couple afternoons making the rounds of all the thrift stores in the city, and picked up enough random articles of clothing to become Oliver Twist (albeit slightly taller) for the weekend.  Maybe I’ll find a picture or two to show everyone. 

The party was a success, we decorated (or should I say Adrienne decorated) the place and picked up two kegs for party fuel.  It ended up being way too much so we made a pact to finish one of the two by the end of the weekend so it wouldn’t get warm (the other we could just throw in the fridge).  Well, as it turns out there’s a lot of beer in a keg so Saturday ended up being a bit of a blur.  Endless games of pong led to a trip to high falls to a huge bar/club called Saddle Ridge.  It was pretty fun, I entered a costume contest but lost to a bunch of lame Chippendale’s dancers and Cinderellas.  How clichéd. 

This thursday is Thanksgiving, so I’ll be home to spend the weekend with my family and aunt and uncle.  Should be a lot of fun.  The weekend after that I’m heading to Vegas.  Just an afterthought.

Thus, the next few weeks will undoubtedly be interesting enough to fuel another post or two.  See ya then.