So, I was over at EFF's Verify the Vote page, checking to see if my Congresscritter was doing the right thing and supporting the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003. I clicked the "Learn More" button, scrolled down and found "Barbara Lee," and then realized that Barbara Lee isn't my congresscritter anymore.

So, I hunted around, and discovered that I live in Congressional District 15 now, and my congresscritter is now Mike Honda. Who also supports the bill. Yay, congresscritter!

So, I got a bit curious about my new district. Here's a map of it, which I found pretty funny. Would you have guessed that Milpitas and Gilroy would be in the same congressional district? If I knew the area a bit better, I could probably come up with the rationale that produced this gerrymander, but for now I can only be amused.

Then there's the Census Bureau Survey of my district. From this, you can tell some unsurprising things: residents of my district are well-educated (90% of adults have high school diplomas, 44% have a bachelor's degree or higher), and we pay too much for housing (45% of owners with mortages and renters pay more than 30% of their income for housing). Perhaps more surprising, 35% of residents are foreign-born, and 44% speak a language other than English at home. (This actually gibes with what I see in my own neighborhood - I can sit at the local Starbucks of a morning and hear five different languages being spoken - but I think it's neat that this apparently extends across the whole district.)

I looked up the survey for my old district, Congressional District 9. (Here's a map - it's a less funny looking than District 15.) At a glance, I glean from this that residents of District 9 compared to those of District 15 are less likely to be Asian, more likely to be black, more likely to be poor, and less likely to drive to work. We needed a government survey to tell us this?

It's quiet here at work today. I'm looking forward to having tomorrow and Friday off. I need the break. For the past week or two, nearly all my time when I haven't been at work has been consumed by packing, unpacking, or assembling furniture. There is still much unpacking to be done, and many bookcases to assemble. But I think I'm going to spend Thanksgiving morning lounging in bed (in our brand-new non-broken bed, assembled last night by a crack team of furniture assembly experts consisting of me, Daniel, and a cordless electric screwdriver), drinking hot cocoa and reading Pamela Dean's The Secret Country.

Thanksgiving evening will be dinner with Daniel's grandparents, his aunt and uncle, his sister and her fiance, a passel of cousins, and possibly the odd stray Stanford student or visiting prof. Should be a hoot.

Friday will probably be spent putting together bookcases and unpacking books onto them. And maybe figuring out how to fix a broken toilet. (I have read Columbine's excellent The Book of John and I'm pretty sure that the problem is a worn tank valve that isn't sealing properly, but we'll see.) (Sometimes I feel like my life is running in a strange parallel to M'ris's. Her printer starts printing funny. My printer starts printing funny. My toilet breaks. Her toilet breaks. What's next, I wonder?)

Well, what's immediately next is getting back to work. Have a very Happy Thanksgiving!