When worldwide events and events close to home get crazy it gets hard to focus on smaller things like food and writing on one's weblog. In the past two weeks we have had a close personal friend have surgery to remove a large tumor in their prostate and we have had another close personal friend have a sudden heart attack. Plus terrorist attacks in Spain, vicious attack dog thugs and weasely apologists in our government, disruption to the only vacation plans we have made in a year and much more. I spent Saturday night in the hospital sitting with one friend.

But enough about the gloom and doom. I still managed to get a few other things in. I have not yet bottled the beer. Hopefully it will still be good when I get around to it. But I did make a grand vegetarian Indian feast on Saturday (before going to the hospital) and enjoyed a wonderful meal at my friends' house on Friday night and did some other odds and sods of cooking.

I think I am going to try to recover my weblog equanimity by just catching up over the course of this week and we'll see how I do.

But first, I'm going to make my official endorsement for President. In a perfect world I'd think a lot harder about this. In a perfect world I wouldn't have to feel that the only thing that counted was kicking out the lying, thieving, mean-spirited, unpatriotic (in the real sense) and greedy bunch of bastards that have hijacked the White House. But here in the real world there isn't any choice. You either voluntarily give up your freedom, your rights and your future economic prosperity and vote for the Shrub or you vote for an honest man with good intentions to restore America and its place in the world as best as he is able - John Kerry.

The shrub is a tool of big corporate interests. He is owned lock stock and barrel by big energy companies. He doesn't care about the lives of ordinary Americans, whether they are dying for his cronies' oil in Iraq or whether they are dying because of the lack of opportunity and healthcare here at home. George Bush is destroying America's position as a leader in the world. He is crippling America's economy by handing out corporate welfare to multinationals while simultaneously helping them to move their wealth offshore and move their operations offshore so there are fewer and fewer real jobs for Americans and taxes have to be paid more and more by ordinary working people. He is letting giant corporations - many of them not even based in the USA - gut America's natural resources. He can't even do the basic things he promised he would do. It was his government that ignored warnings about terrorist attacks. It is his government that has failed to catch Osama bin Laden. It is his government that has grown at a faster rate than any Democratic government this century, even though he claims to be trying to reduce government. It is his government that claimed that cutting taxes would boost the economy - without result. In other words, he has proved he can't do the job he was marginally elected for. It is time to pay the piper. It is time for the shrub to be uprooted. In short, it is time for John Kerry.