I look forward to the end of that other season, election season. I don't get the debate hooplah. When I taught computer science in Slidell, I took programming teams to contests where programming habits that would be anathema to the writing of real software were encouraged. Similarly there is nothing about being president that relates to debate behavior. Calm and consistent, deliberate, slow to jump to conclusions, slow to go to war or declare policy -- that is what you learn in four years as president, and that is probably why incumbents are not great debaters.

I need to escape crazy TV as we approach election time and get some meta data, do some calming big-picture reading. I have E.O. Wilson's Social Conquest of Earth on the Kindle: " We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology." and this: "We are an evolutionary chimera, living on intelligence steered by the demands of animal instinct. This is the reason we are mindlessly dismantling the biosphere and, with it, our own prospects for permanent existence."

Last week I read two Paul Doiron murder mysteries about a game warden in mid-coast Maine. Fun local references and in his world the flooding of Flagstaff never happened: "In The Poacher's Son I've taken the artistic liberty of raising the sunken villages from the bottom of Flagstaff Lake and restored them to dry land as if nothing had ever happened to them. One of the themes of the book is dislocation, and the story of Flagstaff's flooding had special resonance for me as I contemplated the many sweeping changes currently taking place in the Maine North Woods."

Dahlias: I'm loving having flowers in October. After we get a heavy frost in a few weeks, we will dig them up and store the bulbs in the basement. Totally worth it to have a vase of them on the table.