Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
What’s Medical Physics? Ask me!
It’s not often I blog about politics. It’s just not my thing, but I will this time.
Tuesday I got to participate in my first US election as a new US citizen. Went early in the morning to the voting place (even managed to not get lost too), which was an elementary school. It brought back memories of elections back home when I was in elementary. We weren’t allowed to go anywhere near the gym (on pain of death!…or at least a severe chastising… well, more like a shoo-ing away by the grown-ups, but when you’re 6 is there really any difference?) because there were secret things going on (or so I thought…nobody ever told me it was for voting).
The voting process was pretty painless. Only a couple other people were there to vote when I arrived. I showed my voter registration card and ID at the check-in table, they looked me up in the laptop and gave me a yellow card which got promptly taken away by the poll worker who set up my voting machine.
The voting process was pretty simple and the buttons on the screen were large and hard to miss. You either have to have really fat fingers, or the touch screen calibration has to be really off to mis-register a vote.
I made my selections (7 screens worth) followed by 3 more screens worth of verifying my selection, a warning screen telling me I hadn’t filled everything out, and finally a confirmation screen. (Make your selections. Are these your selections? Are you sure? Really? OK.)
Then I was done. Another poll worker handed me an “I voted” sticker and off I went to get the rest of the day started.
So now that the Republicans have a majority in both the House and Senate and have governors in a lot of states, there’s a lot of Republican swaggering going on and broad brush painting by pretty much everyone.
Will be interesting to see what happens in the next two years.
Added a new tool to my collection of coffee-making related implements: a burr grinder. Nothing fancy, it’s like an oversized pepper mill.
The main reason I wanted to get one of these is so that I can adjust the size of the grounds, which is something I can’t do with the electric blade type grinder I currently have.
One nice thing about this one is that the hopper is large enough to hold enough beans for a jar of my cold brew coffee, where with the electric grinder I have to grind the beans in two batches. It takes a little bit longer, but for now it’s kind of fun to do.
The other nice thing about this manual model is that it’s pretty simple, not a lot of pieces, and comes apart pretty easily for cleaning.
It also comes with a cap to screw onto the jar to store any coffee you’ve just ground, but I probably won’t use it much, if at all.
Looking forward to doing some coffee experiments with this.
Get your boarding pass!