Dinner with Mom and Dad

Work went pretty well yesterday. I was able to reach a compromise with the product guy and the attorney about documentation in that big court case. Hopefully we'll be ready to go at the arbitration next month.

I'm plowing further into House of Leaves. I was having a hard time getting in to it, but kept on because Justin had recommended it. I think I'm finally beginning to follow the thread more easily. It's a tough read though. I've been reading on it for about 4 hours now, and I'm only on page 75. I usually read slightly more than a page a minute, but then so many popular novels are written on a 7th grade reading level.

I talked to Michael online, he and Joe invited me to dinner again Friday night. That will be nice.

After work, I went over to Dick and Eve's for dinner. It was a nice enough time. Eve made a vegetable supper, which was nice of her. We had creamed corn, fried okra, corn bread, cole slaw, sliced tomatoes, and cooked cabbage. It was quite a spread. She kept telling me to eat more and more. We had a civil enough conversation, despite veering into politics. At least we didn't get into a knock-down-drag-out fight this morning, although dad drinks whatever Kool-Ade the RNC feeds him. Tonight I was treated to a brief tour of:

- the Clinton muder conspracy theory, courtesy of internet rumor
- the reverence for Ronald Reagan as "one of the best presidents in history"
- the dispargement of community organizers, courtesy of Sarah Palin

They both think Sarah Palin can walk on water, for some reason. She's just Bush in a skirt to me. The return and reinforcement of the partisan politics we really need to move beyond - especially with the crises that are facing the country at present. But then they are hardly alone in their Sarah worship, and when you get all your information from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News it's really hard to be objective. Interstingly, Dad aired the opinion tonight that GW is a "friend only to big business, and could care less about small businesses", which I found interesting. He also intimated that he is not thrilled with Bush in other areas. If Dad is unhappy, there's got to be a LOT of people unhappy, because Dad would vote for roadkill if it ran with the RNC. He's hard core. Of course, he will be holding his nose and voting for McCain, chiefly because of the great reverence for Sarah Palin. He votes almost solely on gun control issues, since he owns a gun store.

The family is going to celebrate Grandma Shumate's birthday at the rest home next month, so I will have to go to that. I've been needing to go see her anyway. I haven't been up there since she had to go there.

Thankfully, we were able to move beyond politics, which is a great step forward in our relationship. There was a time that I just didn't go over there during an election year.

Some program they were waiting for came on, and it was the season premier, so I went on home and went to bed.