Gone with the Wind

We almost got up to 70 degrees yesterday. It was a fine sunny and humid day as warm moist southern air pushed up into Minnesota in front of a wicked cold front.

After you start wearing them, it’s difficult to discard the jackets and mittens even though we’re sweating underneath them. But as the warm day wore on, I saw more people switching their sweatshirts for T-shirts and pants for shorts.

We have a thing that displays the outdoor temperature in the house and I watched the temperature climb as Saturday evening in front of the TV wore on. Sometime after we went to bed, I saw lightning flash through the blinds and Joe told me he heard booms of thunder.

When I got up this morning, it was raining. My mums on the front stoop were blown over, but that’s nothing new. When we turned on the news, we found out that there had been 70 mph gusts in St Paul and there were trees down and power outages in a suburb just across the river from us. Holy cow! We were lucky to have missed that!

The slamming of cold and warm air is always dramatic. Usually we see the drama in the spring. It’s unusual to see it in November.

The temperature has been dropping all day. And the wind is howling from the north. The clouds have been spitting rain and snow. It was a good day to hunker down and hang around the house.

The only place I went was to the gym.

Have you ever been working out and someone decides to hijack you?

I mean, it’s usually someone you know, and they walk by you and decide to start a conversation while you’re huffing and puffing on a cardiac machine. You slow down and converse with them for a couple of minutes, hoping they move on quickly.

But they don’t.

They just keep talking like they have all the time in the world. And meanwhile, your workout is trashed.

I saw that today – a woman who I see at the gym fairly frequently must have been bored or something and she decided to hijack two individuals and keep them from their workout routines. I was watching them from my cardiac machine and I could see that they wanted to be polite and talk, but at the same time, their bodies were twitching as they wanted move on with their workouts. She kept talking and talking until finally one of them walked away from her, almost leaving her with her mouth wide open in mid-sentence. It was kind of funny.

After working out, I went home. Joe always cooks Sunday breakfast for us. It was a chance for us to catch-up on the post-election analysis. The newspapers had some great articles today about how the Romney campaign miscalculated the strategy of the Obama campaign and lost the election.

My personal opinion is that the Tea Party movement scares a lot of people the same way “bleeding heart liberals” scare people. Estimates are that by 2040, whites will become the minority in the USA and yet the Republican Party seems to think that will never happen. The United States is this wonderful hodge podge of all kinds of cultures and religions, not just Christian white people.

I think if Romney didn’t have to pull so far to the right to please the ultra-conservatives and the Tea Party, and would have been able to be his moderate self, he could have won the election. Extreme views are frightening to the average person, right or left leaning. It’s OK to be moderate.

I also believe that Obama’s failure in the first debate was the best thing that could have happened to him. He realized he was human and made mistakes just like the rest of us, and he totally underestimated Romney. Out of his failure, Obama got the fire in his belly and began to campaign with the passion he hadn’t displayed before.

And then Hurricane Sandy hit. Romney had to sit on the sidelines while Obama got to act presidential and he also got the biggest endorsement of all from New Jersey’s governor Chris Christie (not an actual endorsement per se, but when Christie’s arm was around Obama, well, that was huge). And when Colin Powell endorsed Obama, well, that’s big, too, because Powell is a very respected leader, especially with voters who have a more moderate view.

The election is over. The USA marches forward and whatever the future holds for us, well, we’ll deal with it just like we always do.

So Joe and I stayed home on this cold windy day. We watched some football. I checked email. I baked pumpkin bars. I had chili simmering all day in the crockpot and I baked a loaf of bread.

I love days like this.