My chorus concert is Sunday. I am nervous, because I can't seem to remember my music. So I have some work to do.
The date is final for the viewing of Lord of the Rings, so my plans to head east for Christmas will proceed as scheduled--10 days off, arranged to use only my last day of vacation and two unpaid days.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, "not to be outdone by New Hampshire, let alone the Episcopal Church or the Province of Ontario", ruled, in what seem to be extremely strong terms, that a ban on gay marriage violates the state constitution. There's a readable annotated description of the decision available; with this and the Lawrence v. Texas case, where the US Supreme Court ruled that the government doesn't actually have a compelling interest in regularing people's sex lives, I'm starting to notice a pattern. Check out the state's reasons for restricting marriage to male-female relationships. From a legal standpoint, they're pretty dumb, because they're trying to find a legal basis for what is really just a cultural habit, this idea that "family" means the "Leave It To Beaver" version, despite the fact that there are 13 million single-parent households, holding 25% of America's children. And sure, marriage has a rich religious history, but in much of the world, and for an awful lot of Americans, it's a civil and/or emotional concern without real religious involvement. The Texas attorney general's arguments in Lawrence v. Texas were similarly flimsy, torn to pieces by the casual questioning of even the conservative justices who didn't even break a sweat. They stopped short of directly asking "So, how exactly does anal or oral sex between a married couple in their own home cause detriment to society at large?", but it was along those lines.
So all this makes me think that (a) state lawyers are idiots, or (b) there isn't really a good purely legal (as opposed to religious or cultural) grounding for criminalizing homosexuality or prohibiting gay marriage. And since you don't send your second-stringers to argue cases in the highest courts, I vote for (b).
Work was exciting today. I could do with work being a lot less exciting tomorrow, and with that happy thought I'm going to pass out now.