No, no - not catsup. I'm home sick this weekend (as opposed to being at Tammy & Todd's for dinner, or out at the movies, or even home cleaning), and playing a bit of catch-up in my webspaces. I'm not sure what it has been about November, but i haven't been writing much. I finally updated litwank with my October and November reads (wow, it's been mostly magazines and web-browsing in November - that's unusual), added some pictures and another menu to gastronome, and am finally writing a bit in here. I still need to update my main home-page, and do some maintenance around estarcion, but i'll be happy with the current accomplishments.

In other news, the symphony on Friday was amazing - Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra joined the SFS and the SFS Chorus to perform Marsalis' piece All Rise. It was all incredible, but the percussion at the beginning of Save Us was worth the price of admission, alone.

When i get photoshop reinstalled, i'll show you the lovely lego alien Russell drew for this year's tree-trimming invitation.

To start with, Damien has come out of surgery as ok as one can hope for. If you know Damien and want to follow his recovery, jsam is posting updates in his livejournal. I'm very thankful for this. (Yes, thankful both for the success of the surgery and for the regular updates from Sam.)

Dave Eldred had best have a good, solid alibi for Friday night. I'm pretty sure he was standing in for Ed Ka-Spel last night at the LPD show. Stunning resemblance, really. (Yes, i quite enjoyed the show. I really could have done without the opener, Origami Galactika. Luckily, i brought a book and hung out at the bar.)

Oof. Yesterday was a complete mixed bag of emotions.
Relief: our offer was accepted by our lead candidate for one of my two jobs. Soon i will have one job that's mine, and be training my replacement for my other job.

Joy: a coworker who i quite like told me that his wife is expecting a healthy baby girl in February.

Stress: The project. Always the project.

Distress: A friend has been diagnosed with cancer. I'm very worried about him and his family.

I hope my friend is ok. I hope that today is a little less of a roller-coaster.

Y'all need to get out there and vote today if you haven't already.

The San Francisco ballot is HUGE this year. 20 local propositions and 7 state, plus the usual slew of elected offices up to State Governor, yielding a total of four big ol' ballot cards. Some fairly major issues are on the ballot: $13 billion bond issue for improving school facilities statewide, $1.6 billion to repair and quake-proof the water supply infrastructure for the Bay Area, and the like. There are also some pretty trivial issues in question, like "do we change the way the city decides which newspapers it publishes official notices in?"

I don't really know how it works in other places, but here in SF we have a Board of Supervisors, one each elected from 11 districts of the city, who share power with the Mayor. It's all pretty leftish here in the city, and you have to start thinking in the finer grain of "liberal" versus "progressive" versus "radical", but the Mayor is perceived as being owned by special interests, while most of the supervisors tend to populist representation of their neighborhoods. We live right on the edge of the largely-Hispanic Mission district, and up until this year were represented by district 9's Tom Ammiano, the gay stand-up comedian who had a pretty good run against Willie Brown in the last Mayoral race. However, the district boundaries were just revised, and a section of the border between districts 8 and 9 moved over a block. We're on that section of the border. We're on that block. So we're suddenly part of the Castro-Noe Valley neighborhood, upper-middle-class yuppies and guppies. Since the odd and even numbered districts elect their supervisors in alternate elections, we wind up voting for our Supervisor in two successive elections due to the redistricting, which feels kind of like we're getting away with something.

The redistricting itself is kind of amusing. According to the "Task Force on Redistricting" web site, the factors taken into account in setting the borders include:

• US Constitution & SF Charter rule requiring districts equal in population,
• Federal Voting Rights Act rule against diluting the voting power of minorities,
• Consititutional rule prohibiting use of race as the principal factor in redistricting,
• SF Charter Requirement to keep "communities of interest" in the same districts and use adjusted census data where available, and,
• 2002 Election Task Force goals of considering "propensity to vote" and maintaining neighborhood boundaries, commercial districts and grouping related institutions.

The second and third items are my favorites. You can't split an ethnic neighborhood and dilute the voting power of minorities, but you can't split the city up on racial lines either. The solution is to tack a more or less complete ethnic neighborhood (like the Mission) onto a more or less complete white neighborhood (Bernal Heights) and call that a district (District 9 in this case). Seems to work OK, but what do I know? You can see the changes made here — see that little sliver between 8 and 9? We live right in the middle of it.

Wow.

What a fantastic celebration this year. In addition to our personal altar, we participated in our neighborhood festivities.

We had a few friends over for dinner, joined in the processional (next year, better costumes! Large paper maiche skulls, please!), admired the community altars and lit some candles to add to them, ran into friends, viewed the altars and art exhibits at the Mission Cultural center, and then repaired to 16 Hill to relight our candles and share some hot chocolate.

Things i really liked:
The personal-percussion. The laughter. The families. The children painted with skull face-paint. The community. My neighborhood. The gorgeous altars. Remembering my dead, with joy. Looking at death, and letting go of the fear. Hot chocolate and good food and conversations with friends. Walking in the streets; watching dancers in the 24th & Mission intersection. The joy, full of knowledge.