On weight and words and...weasels?

After two bowls of peppermint ice cream and a pretty significant amount of cheese and crackers last night, my weight is up by over two pounds since yesterday. Sigh. I really long for the days when I could eat a double handful of candy every day and never gain an ounce, which is what Tom and I did for a certain period of time when we were in college. It is normal for my weight to fluctuate over a five-pound range, sometimes going from one end of the range to the other in just three days or so, but when it gets over the top of that range, warning lights start flashing in my head and I know I need to be stricter about my diet, and that's what happened this morning when I stepped off the scale.

Tom is almost halfway to the 50,000-word mark with his NaNoWriMo novel, as of last night (November 8), so he is way ahead of schedule, but now he's starting to worry about running out of plot before he gets to 50K words. This is after he mentioned to me a week or so earlier that his goal was to finish the book in November, even though he suspected it might take somewhat more than 50K words, because if you don't finish the book during the competition time, when ARE you going to finish it? Now it seems that he is writing more succinctly than he expected, even though he has gone back and expanded a bit in a couple of places when he started thinking that the word count might fall short. Stay tuned for the next installment of "As the word-count meter turns...."

Tom talked a bit about going to dinner with the rest of the cast following set strike on Sunday and discovering (during conversation triggered by the fact that there was a major election scheduled two days later) that almost all of them are unapologetically conservative Republicans (his comment: "Theatre people aren't supposed to be conservatives! It's unnatural!). After that, I started thinking about this, and I realized that of the people I know reasonably well whose political leanings I'm aware of, they are ALL conservative except for a few: my immediate family, including Tom (my mother is very active politically); certain close friends of my family (that is, certain of my mother's friends); Tom's brother; and the gay/bisexual people I know. That's it. There may be other non-conservatives among our friends and relatives, but I'm not sure enough of their opinions to say so. It's a little frightening to be dangling out here, nearly alone, feeling like there's almost no one who actually sees the train wreck that is just about to occur. Of course, that could very well be a form of...what's the word for believing that everyone else must be wrong/blind/stupid if they don't agree with you? Yeah, what you said. I keep reminding myself that this country has survived all of the bad politicians (a.k.a. weasels, so I can use it for the title of this post!) who have held office during its 230-year history, and despite the many problems that we obviously have, it will very likely survive another round of mismanagement. I'm happy that the elections brought in a breath of change, but I am pessimistic about the chances of true improvement taking place any time soon. Of course, I'm pessimistic about almost everything....