election day

well, today i'm back in arizona. it was a good trip back east! i am glad i got to see my friends and family, even if i missed out on the fall colors. and had to wear sweaters and hats and socks. we're having a bit of indian summer here, highs around 90 this week. i think now we are getting to the season where i will like arizona better because it is warm, even though phoenix is awful. so if you want to visit, now is the time! we can actually go outside during the day!

anyway...

today we voted. we went mid-morning, and there was no line at all. tim was prepared to wait, he brought reading material. but we just breezed right in. we voted on 18 propositions. good thing we got a 100-page booklet in the mail telling us what they were about because if i had to actually read them on the ballot i would have been (1) perplexed how to vote and (2) really slow. but i decided ahead of time and wrote down my choices. among the things we got to vote on were making english the official language of arizona, defining marriage as between a man and a woman, having all elections done by mail, two different smoking bans, and establishing a lottery that you are entered in when you vote and one voter will win $1million each election. we also voted for the govenor, some other state positions, state representatives, and US congressman and representative. we'll see how it turns out.

on the way home, we saw a dead northern flicker (an ant-eating woodpecker) in the street. i learned that they come in red-shafted and yellow-shafted forms (the color on their wing feathers), and the red-shafted form is in the west while the yellow-shafted is in the north and east. that is probably why tim said, "hmm, i think they are usually more yellow."
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Northern_Flicker.html#map