It seemed that November would never come but here it is at last and there are two milestones left to negotiate which are Halloween on the one hand and the American mid-term elections on the other. I am also hopeful that we have a blast of one or two really fine warm days because this is the time of year when I generally give the lawns their final cut of the season and then go about ‘winter-ising’ the lawn mower. This consists of draining out the remaining oil and petrol so that it sits empty and does ot leave any ‘gunk’ behind to clog up the works before the ne season of lawn mowing starts at the end of March. The day before yesterday, I enjoyed the BBC transmission of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and it just so happens that two episodes are to be shown again on an obscure TV channel. But yesterday, I also watched the film of ‘Battle of Britain; which is filled with some stunning aerial photography but was a flop at the box office when it was made in the 1960;s and the whole of the country was in an ‘anti-war’ mode. But speaking of anti-war moods, there is an interesting little twist in the Americans mid term elections at the moment. Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee in Michigan’s highly competitive United States Senate election. If elected, he would make history as the nation’s first Muslim member of the U.S. Senate, and he is an Arab American of Egyptian descent. Donald Trump is pouring racist invective upon his candidature claiming that the candidate is a jihadist who wants to become a member of Congressional security committees so that he can sell out America to the Muslim Brotherhood. All of this is arrant nonsense of course but El-Sayed is several points clear of his Republican rival and the political attacks upon him are failing to land any blows. I came across a fascinating account of why this may be so and it relates to the strongly anti-war stance of some of the fervent MAGA (Make America Great Again) members. They did believe Donald Trump when he campaigned for President on the claim to exit from never-ending wars and feel betrayed when they see what is happening in the Iranan conflict at the moment. So some sections of the MAGA movement are turning against Israel on the basis that Netanyahu probably ‘bounced’ Trump into a way with Iran (which theory has some supporting evidence) and are therefore looking with interest at El-Sayed who is campaigning hard abandon the Iranian conflict. It does eel amazing to me that we have now approached the point where there are are only two days of campaigning ahead and the then the ‘non-day’ of election day itself where there is no news apart from reports on election turn outs (and possible election intimidation) before the analysis programmes start at the pont where the results are starting to roll in. I am rather leased that I have no real commitments on Wednesday morning because this is when some counts and lots of exit polls. Not to be forgotten is the confounding factor of the varying time zones of which are there six as well as some local territorial variations. The United States has 6 primary time zones across its 50 states, and 9 official time zones when including its inhabited territories (or up to 11 if counting remote/uninhabited atolls). The 6 Primary Time Zones (50 States) are Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific, Alaska and Hawaii–Aleutian. In addition thee are a series of complicated ways in which the various states count for military and overseas votes. California has the most liberal provisions but most of these rely upon the supposition that a vote is postmarked on or before election day (November 3) but may not be received until days later. In the case of California, this can be up to 17 days after election day. Of curse, this might only achieve and real significance f there are any real tight races or results but such could be the case this time around. A state will generally declare if the majority achieved exceeds the number of registered overseas/military votes but there could be one result where we have to wait about a fortnight to get the final count.
After I returned from church, I started to think about preparations for my lunch because I had a shoulder of pork cooking away in my absence in the slow cooker. Once cooked, the joint is divided into two, one half to be frozen for some weeks ahead and the other for immediate consumption in the week to come. Then I prepared some sweet potato which I sliced very finely and then parboiled before finishing off with a roast in the microwave oven and so I dined on pork n an onion gravy, sweet potato and pees. My son was de to come around early in the afternoon but I had not quite finished my dinner by the time he arrived. But he immediately set to work clearing out two problematic gutters in ‘corners’of the house where moss and loose masonry and this w=really was. a job that badly needed doing before the onset of winter proper. As the house is a dormer bungalow then the gutters are not at a tremendous height but can be accessed via a short ladder and this was a messy job well done. We then set to work relacing the toilet seat in the downstairs loo which is a job that has needed to be done some weeks ago to be honest but the most difficult part proved to be the removal of the od (broken) seat. This required a combination of spanners and Allen keys which, very fortunately, I managed to locate in our garage and after a bit of a struggle the old seat was released. The new seat seemed according to the diagram to be complicated as according to the one page f illustrated instructions but it was the same basic design as the seat which we had just removed so it actually went on quite easily. I was very grateful to my son fir both his gutter-cleaning and toilet-fixing assistance but my role in all of the latter was to make some tea, provide a kind of local floodlight so that we could see what needed to be done as well as locating the relevant tools. Consulting the TC=V schedules, there are some relaxng David Attenborough documentaries on marine life to keep me entertained whilst I have a leisurely read of the `Sunday’ newspapers, the rest having been assessed for press cuttings and then discarded.