Lately I have been spending at fair amount of time each day in our new hot tub. It's a lot of fun and so relaxing. Teres has enjoyed the Thermospa with me the past couple nights. I didn't think that I would really enjoy it that much and all summer i have basically just been wanting them to finish up construction on the room we built for it so that our house wouldn't be a mess any longer. Now I really like it despite what I thought before. Here's what it looks like:



Anyway, besides spending time in the spa I have been studying and doing research lately. Since getting back from Long Island I feel like I have gotten over some hurdle that I have been struggling with. This might just be wishful thinking but either way I have been in a better mood lately. Thanks to the people who have helped me lately. Even if your help came in the form of just wishing you could do more, that was enough. I know that it would be naive to think that I just miraculously feel better and I am not going to be down again but for the time being I am just taking everything one day at a time. Today was pretty good. Ask me about tomorrow tomorrow.

The only other thing that is interesting with me lately is that my turtle Erik has been growing so much! I am fairly certain that this is because he is being overfed by my mother who pathelogically feeds all living things within he reach, but I can't do much about it. He is still so much fun and I am so happy that he is doing well. He's been very busy lately and I love to watch him. I'm so glad that Andrew and I decided to make him part of our family :) Here's what our little Erik looks like:

This is my grandmother dancing in her kitchen. I took this video on my digital camera and I am not even sure if it will come out on here because the quality got so crappy when I changed its format. I am still trying to figure this stuff out...let's see if it works.

::Download Flash SWF::

I am in Long Island (MAP TO: 308 RUSHMOREAVE) right now visiting my grandmother. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do because she has become very bitter and unhappy since my grandfather's death 3 years ago. It really makes me sad because I used to come here for weeks at a time in the summer and have so much fun. My grandmother and I were always really close. We still talk on the phone at least twice a day. I know that might sound excessive but she doesn't get to leave the house much and we have always lived far apart so that is the only way to keep in touch. My grandmother is a really kind and generous person. My family has always said I am exactly like here, but lately I've realized that it's not for the good reasons I would have hoped. I am very judgmental. My mother calls me the "hang'um judge" because I don't cut people much slack. I definitely got that from my grandmother. Anyway, I need to work on nurturing more of the good traits she gave me than the bad ones that have gotten so good at. :(

As soon as I get home I am going to post some pictures of my grandmother. We took her to get a haircut and she looks so cute now!

So on one of the first nice days all summer, Teres and I went to the beach...


A couple days later Jill and Mike joined us for another trip...



Hooray for me finally figuring out how to make the gigantic pictures my digital camera takes into smaller ones that can be uploaded. Baby steps people!

So I have been reading the Wall Street Journal lately (since I got a free subscription and I don't want to waste it) and today I came across a really interesting article in the Opinions section. It basically says a lot of what I have been thinking lately about the Democrats presidential campaign. Don't get me wrong, I am not a Bush supporter, but I don't want to be an ABB Democrat either. Read on and you will know what I mean. Comments on what you think of this article would be interesting.

The ABB Democrats
July 26, 2004; Page A14

Democrats gather in Boston this week with a spring in their step but not quite a song in their heart. They have good reason to believe they can win back the White House this November. But their anticipation is based less on their confidence in their agenda than on the intensity of their anger at President Bush. They are the Anybody -- Anything -- But Bush Democrats.

We aren't disputing the power of this passion. Anger has won more than one election in U.S. history, and -- especially in this age of polarization -- intensity and turnout matter. This fear and loathing of Mr. Bush has helped John Kerry unite his party far more easily than any Democratic nominee in memory. The party's famously clamorous interest groups (trial lawyers, gay moms for lower speed limits) are muting their demands until after Mr. Kerry wins.

Many liberals profess to see in this unity of negative purpose the revival of their party as a governing majority. In this telling, Howard Dean in the primaries was the liberal Goldwater, and now Mr. Kerry can be the Democratic Reagan, riding a wave of newly mobilized, often first-time, voters to a 1980-style landslide. Not only will they retake the White House, but Nancy Pelosi might take the House of Representatives the way Newt Gingrich did.


It's foolish to dismiss this possibility, since political tsunami are often missed until they hit the shore on Election Day. This time too, in addition to their usual troops, the Democrats can call upon a nearly unanimous and fully mobilized elite culture. Leave aside "Fahrenheit 9/11," this year Hollywood is sprinkling anti-Republican messages into its television scripts. The mainstream media is also more anti-Bush this year than it was even anti-Nixon in 1972. Evan Thomas of Newsweek recently said this "bias" for the Democrats would "be worth maybe 15 points," and he could be right.

Yet for a party that believes it is the vanguard of history, Democrats seem awfully cautious about their ideas. To the extent that they're hawking any agenda at all this year, it is watered-down Clintonism. And late Clintonism at that, after welfare reform had passed and impeachment had reunited Bill Clinton with his party's liberals. Mr. Kerry has surrounded himself with familiar (and often capable) Clinton Administration faces, and his political calculus seems to be to campaign as someone who'd bring back the 1990s without the you-know-what.

Democrats remain the party of government, with more spending for every perceived problem but a claim to "fiscal conservatism" because they would raise taxes to reduce the deficit. They are still the party of income redistribution, through taxing high-income wage earners, and increasingly through the promotion of lawsuits. Al Gore's 2000 theme of the "people versus the powerful" has returned in the guise of John Edwards's "two Americas." The party has become somewhat more protectionist on trade since the 1990s, and it remains firmly liberal on the culture.

If any new Big Idea lurks, it is probably national health care, though even this dares not speak its name. Mr. Kerry's proposal amounts to a huge new taxpayer obligation ($653 billion over 10 years, by the Kerry camp's own reckoning), but it is disguised in large part as a federal subsidy for business in return for covering all employees.

Where this back
-t
o-the-Clinton-future strategy is most open to challenge is on national security. After 9/11 it is impossible to return to the holiday from world history that was the 1990s. Yet the Democrats are remarkably mute on how they would confront the largest threat to American national security since the Cold War. Their most notable hawk -- Joe Lieberman -- was routed in the primaries.

To his credit, Mr. Kerry has said he won't cut and run from Iraq, but he says precious little else other than that he'd somehow persuade the U.N. and France to help. Good luck with that. As a political matter, the betting seems to be that Democrats can get away with saying little because voters will simply blame Mr. Bush for any new terror attack or more trouble in Iraq. Look for Democrats to repeat the words "strong" or "strength" a few thousand times this week, a mantra in lieu of policy.

All of which shows that Mr. Kerry and his party aren't running on ideology. They have been running mainly on character and the Senator's biography as the anti-Bush. He won three purple hearts in Vietnam while Mr. Bush stayed home in the National Guard. He's smart and sees the nuances of issues that the uncurious and witless Mr. Bush doesn't. He'd get the Europeans to love Americans again, while Mr. Bush the cowboy cannot.

Perhaps U.S. voters will find this reason enough to return Democrats to power. But we wonder. Successful challengers to incumbent Presidents are usually associated with some cause larger than themselves. Bill Clinton ran on the economy and health care in 1992, while Reaganism was the confluence of a generation of conservative ideas on economics, foreign policy and the culture. Is there a single idea, even one, that any voter could yet associate with a Kerry Presidency? This would be the week to let the U.S. in on one.