It is still quiet on our street, and I have not ventured out of the house to check what may be going on at the nearby intersection. There is a price to pay, of course. Pizza delivery man took almost an extra 30 minutes to get to the house, and was understandably cross about it. I tipped him well, though.
My social calendar has now got a few events on it to alleviate some of my loneliness.
Our good friends invited me out for a dinner with them Sunday night. They actually graciously invited me to spend a whole day with them, but I declined to inflict my general surliness on their poor souls for longer than a few hours.
Since I have to go to central London for the dinner, I figured I’d leave in the middle of the day and go to a gallery, or just aimlessly stroll around. I don’t expect that I will enjoy it a lot, but Natasha has been a bit lukewarm about visiting some of the places that I’d like to go to, so I might as well take a chance to satisfy my curiosity.
By the way, this outing will likely bring to an end my impressive rate of one post a day for this entire week.
On Monday, after work, I am playing nine holes of golf with an acquaintance.
And a week from Wednesday, I am going to Royal Albert Hall for a classical performance. It is part of the month-long yearly program called Proms that a developer who works for me has clued me in to. He planned to go with his girlfriend, and suggested that I might enjoy going as well. When I said that I certainly would not go by myself, he decided to invite me along with them. I figure I won’t be much in their way during the performance itself and probably will say my farewells immediately afterwards.
Tickets to the Proms are not easy to get, by the way. Our first choice of performance, featuring Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, was sold out. We went for Strauss instead.
If there are just a couple of other interludes of this kind, I just might survive until my girls are back with me.
In other news, I’ve reached a startling revelation about my politics today. Well, maybe not really startling, but certainly a bit unexpected.
As most Russian-American emigrés do, I normally vote Republican in general elections. There is one overriding reason for that: I am strongly against big government and high taxes. But I’m also pro-choice and pro-gun control, which puts me into Democratic camp on at least a couple of major issues, which I have been admitting for quite a long time now. I even now support the notion of universal health care, having been exposed to the socialized system in UK, which by most accounts works remarkably well. Yet I cannot imagine myself voting for Hillary or Obama.
With a tip of the hat to my friend and colleague Brian (whom I seem to expropriate a lot of blogging ideas off lately), I went to this site to test my understanding of which current presidential candidates share my political views the most. The test is based on the data from 2decide.com and is certainly a gross over-simplification, but Brian’s own results were reasonably close to his “gut feel”, so I figured mine also would be a healthy mix of both parties.
Ah… no!!! When my results displayed on the screen, all eight Democrats were on top and all nine Republicans below. Only McCain and Giuliani even managed to score in positive single digits. By contrast, five of the Democrats scored above healthy +20, indicating a rather close alignment with my views (I have just one disagreement with each of them).
Goes to show how truly apolitical I am, beyond my stated views on major issues. I certainly read news and magazines, catch an occasional debate, peruse political commentary, but I truly have very slight idea who espouses what views in the end. Otherwise, I would not be shocked to find that Rudi and I disagree on more items that we agree on.
Anyway, the winner was Biden, whom I turn out to have no disagreements with whatsoever. A respectable choice, but he’s not going to get the nomination, anyway. Hillary was just a point behind, with a single disagreement of middling importance…