The Laundry Will Always Be With Us.

Ten loads today. Three loads of towels, three loads of sheets, two mattress pads, and two loads of clothes. It costs us around one hundred dollars a month just to do the laundry. I surely do miss having machines in the apartment. At least we have a good laundry room, and the college kids who live here don't do their laundry when I do ours. I almost always have the room to myself.

I re-read John Lescroart's "The Oath," which of course I enjoyed. I like the complexity of his plots and the reality and depth of his ongoing characters. His jabs at San Francisco politics are a hoot. San Francisco is my mother's (and grandmother's) hometown and we still have a lot of relatives there, so it's fun to read about it.

From the library, I just finished "America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation," by Kenneth C. Davis. It was interesting to read, full of vignettes of the sort of people and incidents that the more ordinary history books don't discuss. Davis has a series, "Don't Know Much about. . . ," which I'll look up. I like to learn some of the little weirdnesses that have gone on in the shadows of history.

I just started "Lincoln and Douglas," about their debates. Those debates must be a hot topic now, as there were two separate books on the new non-fiction shelf about them. Either that, or it's a startling coincidence. Lincoln is someone I find endlessly fascinating; I look forward to learning some more about him.

Tonight KidThree and I are going to a meeting to kick off the local campaign against Proposition Eight. That is the proposition to restrict marriage in California to male-female couples only. I've never done anything political other than work as a pollworker and am looking forward to seeing how it all works. I don't know what we will be able to do, given our extreme poverty, but maybe there is something administrative we can do that won't cost us anything.

And now to have some coffee before that meeting.

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