After the Tea Party, what?

Here are a few thoughts that I shared with the crowd at the Florence Tea Party on July 4th.

Now that you’ve listened to the patriotic music and the good speeches, what should you do?

Be informed and share information with family, friends, neighbors and co-workers. Use every form of technology there is, telephone, word of mouth, email, snail mail, Facebook, Twitter – everything.

Inform your legislators about your feelings and opinions.

Every state and federal house seat is up for reelection in 2010 – and about half of the senate seats, city council, county council and school board seats. So, run for office yourself, or pick a candidate and volunteer to work for them. Or volunteer to work for your political party. There are dozens of ways to help out.

The most important place to volunteer, however, is at the polls. Josef Stalin is reported to have said, “It’s not who votes that decides an election, it’s who counts the votes.” I believe that’s true.

Do you remember where were you on November 9, 1960?

That was the election when JFK won by only about 112,800 votes – one vote per precinct in just four states! I was only 17 years old, not old enough yet to vote. But that night I was down at McKenzie School with some other teenagers, helping to count votes.

In those days, we still had paper ballots, marked by little short pencils. The woman in charge gave us skimpy training: “If a ballot has a stray pencil mark on it anywhere, don’t count it – put it aside in a pile. Also, if any election is not marked (has not been voted), don’t count that ballot either, put it in the pile too. I’ll come pick them up later.”

Later on she did come by. She collected those uncounted piles of ballots and sat at a table across the way, doing something with them. At the time I didn’t give it a second thought. Today, I would give it a second, third, fourth and fifth thought – what was she doing with those ballots?!

We need good, dependable, conservative poll managers to be sure the election is run honestly, and poll watchers to stop them if it’s not. The Florence County Election Commission is always looking for people to work at the polls, and conducts training sessions for both poll workers and watchers. Look up the number in the blue pages of the phone book, call and volunteer.

And most importantly of all – pray for our elected officials. Too often we pray for the candidate of our choice to get elected, and then when they are elected, they go to Washington or Columbia and they’re surrounded by lobbyists, power, influence, temptations on every side, and we forget to pray for them. It’s really a miracle any of them stay straight.

So, after the Tea Party, what? What should you do next? Don’t just go home today and sit on your hands. Pray, and then put feet to your prayers!

When they work right…

Sick computer

… computers are great.

Last Thursday afternoon my computer crashed, after giving me very few problems for a number of years.

First thing Friday morning, I took it in to the repair shop for a checkup. The nice repairman found that the hard drive was fried and I needed a new one.

Most data was not recoverable, he said. Bummer.

However, since I use a “My Book” (large external hard drive) for backups, I knew all was not lost. Several weeks of miscellaneous photos and other files weren’t backed up, but they weren’t critical.

The situation was certainly aggravating, but certainly not a disaster.

So, I had a new mega-giga drive installed, brought the baby home Monday afternoon and set about hooking things back up, mouse, monitor, printers, keyboard.

My internet keyboard refused to work. Have you ever tried to do anything without the keyboard? My trackball mouse worked just fine, but no keyboard. I unplugged plugs, unconnected cords, replugged, reconnected, and still nothing. Had it fried too?

Eventually, after doing all the above several more times and leaving the computer turned off a few minutes, the keyboard began to work.

Well, of course the next thing to connect was My Book, naturally. Here’s where big problem #2 cropped up. The computer didn’t recognize it, couldn’t seem to “see” My Book. Same problem as with the keyboard.

This time, nothing I did worked. I began to see real disaster in the making.

Putting that task aside for the time being, I set out to re-install my normal working programs. After some programs installed without a hitch, big problem #3 raised its ugly head. Some other programs would simply not install from the original CD’s.

They were old, granted, but they had been properly registered all those years ago and regularly updated since then, so what was going on? I went online to check this out.

I learned that some companies had changed hands, the new company did not support the old software, etc., etc. There were no Q&A’s that addressed my situation.

After a lot of research, I realized I would have to acquire new versions of some critically important software.

Back to My Book. I awoke yesterday with a new idea floating around in my brain. Try plugging it into a different port… so I did, and it worked.

The port I was using may or may not work with something else, that remains to be seen, but it simply wouldn’t run My Book. At least I have my backups, what there are of them, accessible again. Much relief.

Well, one time-consuming thing after another has occupied me for the past two days, and I still have several programs to try to install. Family Tree Maker is one big one yet to go.

But at least I can work and play computer games again, which I plan to do as soon as I make a cup of coffee.