Natterings From Nepantla

I have just heard of the meme where you post the first sentence of the your post of each month to look back on the year, and I would like to participate:

January: Regional headline of the day: "Several cars trapped overnight inside monster tumbleweed pile in eastern Washington"

February: "What’s in that bag marked ‘Bag Full of Drugs,’ sir?"

March: After all that drama about quarantining people on cruise ships and travel bans and so forth, it turns out the new virus has been circulating for weeks in the Pacific Northwest.

April: Like everything else these days, the Endeavour Award is attempting to become as virtual as possible, which means switching to electronic reading copies.

May: Oregon has an election coming up on the 19th, which is expected to have no particular extra drama despite the times because Oregon has been 100% vote-by-mail since 1998.

June: Technically an Irish casserole, since the recipe I used called for simply piling the ingredients into a covered dish and baking them.

July: The Open Gaming Convention is a yearly summer get-together in New Hampshire.

August: I had nothing much to do Friday morning, so I caught up on anime and blogging.

September: "FBI investigates after alarmed pilot tells LAX tower: ‘We just passed a guy in a jet pack’"

October: 3 of 4 summer shows wrapped up here.

November: There were quite a few trick-or-treaters out walking the neighborhood last night, by the sound of it.

December: Back in 2013, one of the losing bids for the 2015 Worldcon had wanted to hold it at a hotel in Walt Disney World.

You can sort of tell that there were a pandemic and an election going on, but I think the main conclusion is I love odd headlines.

Oregon has an election coming up on the 19th, which is expected to have no particular extra drama despite the times because Oregon has been 100% vote-by-mail since 1998. Yes, now that you ask, we are feeling a bit smug about this.

I dropped my vote in the mailbox today. This is the first time in several years I've actually involved the postal service in my vote, since there's a 24/7 secure drop box at the county elections office, which is conveniently located near a light-rail stop. This being a bad time to be on public transit, though, into the mailbox it goes.

Incidentally, although vote-by-mail is currently accused of being favorable to Democrats, the local paper recently reminded us that Oregon's first vote-by-mail election was instituted by a Republican secretary of state over the objections of a Democratic governor.