I believe I have fallen for Texts from Hillary. Mainly, because I wish so much it was true.

I'm so easy to thrill - had the dogs out at the dog park, looked up to see a bald eagle flying over. I've never seen one in the city. Amazing.

Today's the day to file the recall petitions for Scott Walker. We needed 540,000 signatures.

We got over one million.

Every once in a while, the people stand up and the system works.

Today is one of those days.

Did I forget to mention there are only 5.7 million people in Wisconsin?

This morning. I'm one of those people that cry when I touched by something and a friend had a very good thing happened, and I teared up.

Does it mean anything when the dragonflies flock together? I was out at the dog park yesterday when a few hundred dragonflies descended on the park. One or two is quite common - the park is centered on a lagoon inlet from a larger lake - but I was literally walking through a flock of dragonflies yesterday.

Are they suppose to do that?

The weather is lovely, truly lovely. Which may not seem like much, but after the summer we've been having being able to say that is huge. No dew points in the eighties, no heat index over one hundred, no long, hot days without rain. Just cool mornings, wonderful sunny days, and the occasional soaking rain.

I actually have energy again. My house and garden would appreciate it.

Community more and more reminds me of Farscape. Characters that should be cliches seem so very real. And be willing to take real chances with the real danger of screwing up badly. But also, giving themselves the chance to do episodes that are truly amazing.

Pulp Fiction morphing into My Dinner with Andre? That's just fucking brilliant.

I have always had a fascination with Victorian and Edwardian gentleman and gentlewoman adventurers. That much drive and passion combined with so much racist blindness is always fascinating. The drive and foresight needed to get to the other side of the earth and then the inability to really see the people never ceases to amaze me.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann definitely fits in that tradition. Percy Fawcett was a British soldier determined to become an explorer. So he went to explorer school. Really, the Royal Geographic Society used to give classes on how to become an explorer. Grann does a good job explaining Fawcett's growing obsession with finding the lost civilization in the Amazon, though I could have done with less of Grann's own story. The growing trend to tell how they came to write the book, rather than telling the story is becoming old really fast.

To close out the year, we had three warm but gloomy days. Cleared all the snow off my little side street. That's all wonderful, but we literally didn't see the sun for three days. The sun came back with the new year, but so did winter. Thirty degrees colder and with a wind that made it hard to breathe when you faced into it.

A perfect day to stay in and read.

Does anyone know a Buffy:TVS fan under the age of twenty?