Not a knockout, but certainly a good shot to the body.

Kerry didn't knock Bush out, but he looked better than ever in tonight's debate. More animated, alive and presidential than I've ever seen him. He did have a little too much blush on, it sort of looked like a junior high girl who was just learning how to put makeup on.

Bush stumbled and stuttered throughout the debate, at one point losing his thoughts so much I hollered at him through the tv, "Hurry up!"

Bush continued to try and paint Kerry as inconsistent, but I believe that those claims didn't work as well as Bush had hoped. Kerry finally started to show Bush as being incapable and unwilling to admit when a policy is failing.

Kerry by decision.

I just started reading Crimes Against Nature : How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy and it's already pretty interesting. I figured it was time to get re-involved in the world, after my narcissistic pursuit of survival over the last four months. My last day at cardio rehab is tomorrow, I'm headed across the street to Gold's Gym to see what they have to offer. I also bought Jon Stewart's "history textbook," an hilarious send up of schoolbooks.

I knew that 43 had a bad record on the environment, but this is amazing! I'll fill you in as a I go.

Time to get back to it all.....

When we last left off, I was about to have my second angioplasty procedure. And I didn't know if I was going to be able to go to Philmont. So, here's a quick catch up and then on to the current stuff.

My second stent went pretty well. It's kind of weird having this procedure, because they have a live video picture of your heart up on the screen and you can see the catheter thingy poking around, inside your heart. You don't feel it in there, just a tug or two where they insert it into your leg artery. The biggest problem with the whole procedure was that because I was already on blood thinners, it took forever for the bleeding to stop at the insertion point. They finally taped a massive amount of cotton to my leg and put a weight on me to apply direct pressure! I had to sleep like that all night - except I didn't really sleep. Boy was I stiff in the morning.

I had the stent with just about a month to go before Philmont. I worked pretty hard to be sure I could go, and I took another stress test just a couple of weeks later. The doctor cleared me to go and off we went to New Mexico!

Philmont was great. We took the train to Raton, and got picked up by the Philmont bus and taken right in to the ranch. Everything went very well. We're currently working on a movie with all the pictures we took and over 4 hours of video.





That last picture is Mike, Brigitte and I having a cup of morning coffee. The other one is li'l ol' me. I'm pretty sure you can figure out the other two. But just in case you're curious, there's the sunrise at Sawmill. We got up early and sat on the bench just to see that. We also had tons of sunflowers, they were really very pretty. You don't get those much in the Sierras!

We had a blast, the weather was pretty terrible the whole time. Lots of rain, flash floods, lightning and hailstorms. We had a great time! Everyone would have liked to stay a couple more days. After 11 or 12 days on the trail, that's pretty impressive.

Well, after we got back from Philmont, it was time to get Will ready to go to college. He's at Westmont, near Santa Barbara. He's been doing great, really enjoying school. We came back from the orientation at Westmont in time to get Patrick to Freshman Orientation at St. Francis. Yes, four more years there for us!

Since my return, I've been doing a bunch of biking, and going to Cardio Rehab. I'm now almost done with rehab - only two more visits. That is very exciting. Tons of other things are going on too, too much to mention now...

Thanks for reading this, I'll try to keep up with my blog again, now that I'm back and I'm starting to catch up at work.