Thank you to everyone that sent or gave me pressies for my birthday, I haven’t had this impressive a haul since I was in single digits!

The Led beanie will come in useful on Winter dog walks, the little scoop is for making my mini muffins and the Mount Difficulty is already going down nicely!

The pounamu pendant was a gift from The Duchess (as they should be for luck) and was sourced from a genuine master carver. The toki design represents courage, determination and success as well as respecting the past.

Hands up, I bought the Star Wars figure myself. You only get to be The Child for a short while, but you can be childish as long as you wish!

9.30pm edit: Well the wine is history, the roast pork was delish and the gluten free cake was amazing! All in all a great weekend, not traumatic at all 😉

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It feels like a weight has been lifted today and my faith in humanity restored (to a small degree at least). I’ve been walking round a wet and windy park listening to the news and grinning like an idiot. It really does feel like a spell has been broken and the World is waking up from a bad dream.

The Orange Shit Factory’s ALL CAPS TWEETS are increasingly looking like the mad ramblings of someone that’s lost the plot, and I’m looking forward to seeing reality start to bite lumps out of him in the coming months. Once he’s lost immunity from prosecution the FBI and IRS will be circling, and Twitter will no longer have to give him special treatment, so he’ll lose the ability to gaslight his followers with unsubstantiated bullshit.

Whether Biden will prove to be an effective leader — or even, given the ongoing risk of Covid not to mention old age — lasts the next four years is yet to be seen. He’s not been voted in due to his charisma or by offering compelling policies – just simply that he’s not Trump. I’m more excited to see what Kamala Harris offers as a potential future (whisper it quietly in case the mid-west start spontaneously combusting) female President.

I’ve been more gripped by the US elections than the NZ ones, as there’s far more at stake than our little corner of the World. It’s crunch time for the current push to establish a new far-right, populist style of politics. A stark choice between accepting or rejecting the breakdown of democracy and reality.

I can understand blue-collar Americans, suffering the hangover of globalisation, letting their fear and anger fall for the lies and false promises offered by Trump once, but to fall for it a second time would be unforgivable; they’d had to willingly choose to ignore the past 4 years of a President stoking civil unrest and racial prejudice, gaslighting its own people and dumbing down politics to the level of a reality TV show.

Although the final whistle is yet to blow it’s becoming more certain that Biden is going to cross the finishing line, as the democrats have been mailing in their ballots rather than visiting the polling booths so the late counting states are leaning towards turning blue.

The key new story that’s getting me excited is that the Republicans, like the Roman senators around Caesar, are sharpening their knives ready to dispatch the Tango Bullshitter. When Karl Rove issues a statement criticising his leader you know they’ve smelt what’s cookin’ (TM The Rock) and getting ready to sacrifice their tiny-handed orange tweetmonkey at the first opportunity.

The question now is how long Trump will drag things out before he finally concedes, and whether the Democrat win is large enough to avoid having to make a deal to give him immunity from prosecution. Because Trump’s biggest fear will be once he loses his protection all the corruption will start coming to the surface and he’ll be joining most of his previous advisers behind bars. Maybe Jeffrey Epstein’s cell is still free? Wherever, at least we know Orange is his favourite colour…