Dormouse Is A Pisces, Born In 1959

WORD COUNT: 10,013

I woke up this morning, the sun rose in the east and I'm guessing will set in the west too.

The second and fourth paragraphs following this one are my paraphrases of two of Hendrik Willem van Loon's paragraphs regarding the Protestant Reformation (and the correspondent Counter-Reformation) in Europe's middle of the last millennium – sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – in The Story of Mankind. And I'm thinking of this in regard to our own political issues right now, which may as well BE religious. I kept the name “Reformation” for this period because I'm no historian.

Didn't get to see the election results until this morning, and when Martha had to leave for work I treated my mother-in-law Sharon, my aunt-in-law Shirley visiting from Garrison (does this one or two days a month by taking the bus from that town seventy minutes south of us, even though we know she can drive), my sister-in-law Mary, and my nephew Trevor to an asked-for lesson about the Electoral College. It's always fun when your family is paying attention to you, so I went into the basics – how there's 538 electors (one for each Senator and Representative) and when you vote for President yes you are voting for the man you want to see in the Oval Office, but whoever gets the majority popular vote in your state – another way of saying the most votes – gets all the electors, as many as there are U.S. Senators or Representatives, in your state. (North Dakota where I live has three, incidentally.)

Much later I went to live for a number of years in a Republican state. I found the people there much pleasanter and much more tolerant and quite as intelligent as my former statesmen and women. To my great surprise, I began to discover that there was a Republican side to the Reformation, quite as much as a Democratic.

And right now it's the race for one of our two Senate seats that is neck in neck – and in my mind briefly more important. Currently after all the votes were counted, the Democratic candidate is ahead by only a few hundred votes, not even two per cent worth. Under our state law, the Republican candidate can insist on a vote-by-vote recount with that margin of error – but will he? We've gotten ballot measures approved in this state that will keep farmers and agricultural workers able to use current and future technologies, prohibit smoking in practically every public place and within twenty feet of said places (Martha voted for this and I voted against it, despite us both being non-smokers, because I saw a slippery slope making smoking itself a felony), locally a half-per cent sales tax that will fund city office and prison expansion and changes in several county commission seats.

Of course the good people of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, who actually lived through the Reformation of the United States, did not see things that way. They were always right and their enemy was always wrong. It was a case of hang or be hanged, and both sides preferred to do the hanging. Which was no more than human and for which they deserve no blame.

I KNOW I'm missing something here, but what I won't miss is what today's title is about. Yes in the midst of moving back into our house this weekend and building a business prominence becoming a “business leader” like I have to be before I'm noticed, I am writing a novel this month. National Novel Writing Month. 50,000 words. 30 days (or less). And the main character born, Kenneth Allan Galbraith, goes about as a professional thief by the name “Dormouse” and finds himself in a secret government group with the alternative of prison performing “dirty jobs” .. at least, that's as far as I've gotten. But I take some comfort in this Pep Talk quote I read this morning:

Don’t worry if your ideas seem like huge blobs of jelly right now. Just get them down and you can worry later about rearranging them and reshaping them into delicious novel PB&J sandwiches.

So I won't worry, David