Tonight’s the big budget meeting for Manteca Unified School District, where they try to figure out how to keep the schools going while Sacramento legislators diddle on state spending and scream at each other. We’re going. It’s probably going to be a zoo – a lot of teachers, a lot of parents, and there’s sure to be a lot of animosity.
Stay tuned. You’ll get the whole story.
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
– Henry David Thoreau (“Walden”, 1854)
“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Self Reliance”, 1841)
While we’re all still reeling from the election results, another story caught my eye today. Author Michael Crichton died yesterday of cancer at age 66. Wow; Crichton was one of my youthful inspirations to become a writer. He practically invented the technothriller genre with books like The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park (which I still think was his masterpiece). Few do it as well, and almost none better.
Reading that makes me feel like did in 2001 when I heard that Douglas Adams died. Another talent lost.
It’s still sinking in. It’s not every day – or every four years – that you’re in the midst of living history. It thins the air.
It was a fun night here. Last night was our regular online-gaming-with-Chris-and-quesadilla Tuesday night; for most of the early evening, one of us would take the PS3 controller and the other would read off vote counts from their laptop. We spent the evening nailbiting the horseraces in Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Montana and Missouri.
I really wanted to see Missouri flip, and it’s damned close but it looks like it won’t. But after 2000 and 2004, I’m immensely satisfied that it was Florida that put Obama firmly over the top.
Congratulations, Mr. President Elect. Now go try and get some rest. You earned it.
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