Weight Maven

What Dahlia Lithwick said on Slate:

Perhaps it’s the inevitable byproduct of the accusation that anyone who failed to support Clinton’s presidential bid has doomed feminism, but the claim that the doors have slammed on decades of future woman presidents is as maddening as the Olympics of Oppression that preceded it. …

One way or another, the naysayers all want to conclude (indeed, at times, Clinton herself is wont to conclude) that the Clinton campaign was ultimately derailed by the same pervasive sexism that will scuttle the next woman’s chances. …

If Hillary Clinton has taught the women of America anything this year, it’s never to say never. Which is why it would be lamentable if the only lesson we take from her candidacy were that nothing like it will ever happen again.

Granted, I’m not much of a Clinton supporter. And though I’m a relatively old fart, I’m not of Clinton’s generation (or older) who saw this as the best chance in their lifetime. But the idea that she was derailed by sexism appears to be an easier pill to swallow than what’s probably closer to the truth: not this woman.

Then again, we still have three months ’til Denver. Oy, it’s gonna be a long summer.

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From Politico:

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

As Dan Abrams just said on MSNBC, seems pretty unprecedented for someone this close to the administration.

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It took awhile (damn Firefox kept crashing…what’s that about?), but I now have some great bones for my trip up the Hudson River Valley.

Day 1: Travel plus visits to Sunnyside and Kykuit. Lodging at Tarrytown House Estate.

Day 2: Visits to Cold Spring and Boscobel. Lodging at Inn At the Falls.

Day 3: Visits to FDR’s place, Vanderbilt, and lunch at the Culinary Institute of America. Yum! Then off to Rhinebeck for a weekend class.

Day 4: All-day class.

Day 5: Half-day class, then travel back to DC.

Looking forward to it…too bad it’s a month off :(.

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I’ve been meaning to get out and get some pics of the irises in the neighborhood, as they’ve been really at their peak recently. Today, it looked like both the weather and my whacked knee (still not sure what I did) would cooperate, and so I headed off to Bon Air Park, a favorite local park.

I was a bit bummed that there were no irises at the park, though the early roses were quite nice. You can see all the shots on Flickr here.

Anyways, seeing irises on my drive to work had made me think back to the place I spent most of my childhood, as some previous resident had planted them on a hill in our backyard. And since irises, like daffodils, tend to multiply like bunnies each year, our hill was just covered with them.

Funny thing is that my mother just never warmed up to them. But I always liked them. I’m glad I was able to snap a couple of pics of these purple irises at the community garden in my neighborhood.

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I don’t know exactly when I noticed that my cat liked watching animal video shows, but now that I have, I turn them on occasionally. Fun for him and me :).

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Phew. I had thought I had plenty of time to get a house for Thanksgiving for this year’s “Meet in the Middle” in Deep Creek Lake. Not!

If you’re not familiar with it, Deep Creek is great … it’s in western Maryland, half-way between DC (where my sister and I live) and Pittsburgh, where the rest of the family is. So a few years back, I started getting a house for right after school let out. It’s always a challenge to rent a house from the Internet, but we’ve had pretty good luck.

The pic above was the “lakefront” of the house we had in 2006. What a hike … even the kids only made it down to the lake once that week. But the view was incredible, and the house itself was great for yakking, eating, and playing games.

Anyways, this year I thought that instead of Deep Creek in June, we would get together for Thanksgiving. And several weeks ago, I had even picked a monster house with indoor pool (but was debating if I really wanted to plunk down the several thou for it).

A moot point now. I had put it off long enough that, as of this weekend, there were only six houses with seven bedrooms still available. Yikes!

But in doing the math, I decided we could get by with six bedrooms, and after doing a lot of surfing, found a great house on the lake that should fit all 15 of us nicely. Yay!

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Yikes, I’d been putting off upgrading my blog platform, and it finally came back to bite me. It looks like the only casualty was an inability to upload images (I hope). But thanks to the nice support folks at Dreamhost, they quickly got me unstuck, and I’ve finally updated to the latest version.

Now all I need to do is figure out all the changes!

BTW, I added a new spam filter, as even good ol’ Akismet was allowing too much spam thru, and I logged on one day to find over 1,500 spam comments that I needed to delete. So if your comment got lost, let me know.

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