Weekend

Friday night I was still thinking about the murder - Try not to think about a murder that took place within sight of your house, and I decided that Dogger and I were going to go see where the story ended and then we were going to go see where it started.

The cops did a very good job cleaning up after themselves. The crime tape was all picked up and there were no dis-guarded donut boxes and for a bonus, no bloody gauze left behind either. The Raleigh Police are very tidy. They take only crime scene photos and leave only a sense of foreboding behind. Good for them.
I knew where the story ended, I was curious about where it started. I thought that since it was alarmingly close by, that Dogger and I could take our evening walk and just swing by...Yeah about that "swinging". There was no going by at all. It was raining too hard. I don't care how strong my desire to see where the murderers lived, I had a greater desired to not spend even more time in soaking wet jeans. We went home. Later, after the rain stopped and while it was still light I had to run to the store anyway, I set out to finish my mission.

I was pleased to discover that the 900 block of East Martin is not the Martin Street that abuts my street. Yay. However, the trip to the actual 900 block was very fast and very obvious. My neighborhood is nice, well, it's nice enough. It's a nice place to live. There is always someone watching. I find this comforting, its kind of nice to know people are looking out for you. I would like to point out that there is a huge difference between being looked out for and being watched. One is nice the other makes the lizard part of your brain cue the hair on your neck to stand up. I was three blocks from my house and my hair was on end. This place didn't look anything like what I was used to. This was a third world county - All it was missing was flattened palm frond huts and wandering chickens. And I was being watched . If I had been on foot I would have hotfooted it out, I know when I am not wanted, but I wasn't on foot, I was locked into a giant tin can so I drove around a little and found a lovely, well tended community garden and a house that looked like a giant cartoon cake.

I never did find 910 East Lincoln. That part of the street was so unwelcoming that I didn't feel comfortable even slowing down to check addresses. If slowing down wasn't an option, stopping to take a picture would be laughable. The rest of Martin Street is nice, the end closest to downtown is nice as is my end. It's just the three crummy blocks in the middle that would benefit from a good, therapeutic carpet bombing.

And then it was Saturday. The District Convention. I don't belong to an organized party, I am a Democrat. When we came in we were asked if we supported Clinton or Obama, our answer decided which packet we were given. Delegates who were Clinton supporters got yellow delegate slips while Delegates supporting Obama got green slips.

The whole point for the District convention was to elect delegates to the national convention. This took entirely too long and the process was inefficient and time consuming. I'm pretty sure it mimicked the process that will happen at the national convention to pick a candidate, but it's slow, annoying and inefficient. It should not take three ballots to pick delegates and if it must be done this way, it would be nice if the ballots didn't have to be hand counted. GAWD. The good news was all this time was spent electing Obama delegates. The Clinton delegates didn't show up. There were five or six men who were candidates for this and not a single one showed for the convention. We laughed at them at 3pm when the Clinton supporters left in a huff, but by 5pm we were really jealous. They they are backing a losing horse but that horse got them home earlier.