Frank and I found eight baby snapping turtles, over the course of a long sunny afternoon, being bounced by some very mild waves against the glacial sand beach of our local lake. This probably relates to a story we heard in July about a very large snapping turtle who unexpectedly hung out on the very same beach for a couple of days. This surprised all the locals because the sand beach is much too clean a part of the lake to harbor much food for turtles of any size.

So Frank and I gently moved our new turtle colonists, one by one, into a murkier backpond with a lot more algae and plantlife and algae, where snapping turtles have lots more to eat. And where snapping turtles abound, and have done so, all of the many years we have seen turtles around here.

To say that the turtles did not appreciate our interest would be a very big understatement. But no fingers or toes were bitten off during this rescue, to their disappointment and our satisfaction.

That’s what it took to clear up all the trees that Hurricane Irene dumped back and forth across the road that leads to our house. So now we could leave if we wanted to, but we don’t.

We charged up all our hardware before we lost power, so I sit here posting the photos from my iPhone into my Flickr account via my little Sprint wifi hotspot, by the light of a fireplace fire and one wax candle.

We’ve go plenty of food and water but come tomorrow we will probably venture out to get some more electricity.

The Northwood NH Fire and Rescue team are super people, in the best sense of the word. These men made their way down the long dirt road to our house, chopping up great big trees as they went along.

The man with the chainsaw remembered the last time they came out, after the microburst storm in 2006, when he helped to remove a truly enormous tree from my neighbor’s house. Compared to that, Hurricane Irene was not so bad.

We have no lights or fridge until (probably) tomorrow but big wooden matches will still light the propane stove. So we had hot dinner, with toasted marshmallows to follow.

And we had to eat up every bit of the ice cream melting in the freezer. I blame it all on Hurricane Irene!

Fourteen people are coming to lunch today. The entire half-salmon has already finished grilling, now it’s the turn of a marinated flank steak to join our really, truly enormous sausage.

Plenty of good things for the vegetarians too.

But I love the primordial look of this family grill. Half a big metal drum rests on NH lake rocks. Rocks and bricks inside it hold up the actual charcoal. The grid is two overlapped shelves from some long-ago stove. The chefs are people who, as children, were themselves fed food from this very grill.

I love NH.

Webster School, in Manchester, NH — I walked the half-mile here from home for 7 years of my childhood. It is, and was, a polling place for Ward 1. I came back yesterday to hold a sign for us Democrats.

Things looked pretty even when I got there. Ward 1 was solidly Republican when I was little — my family used to joke that the Devines were the only Democrats there, us on North River Road, my grandpa and Uncle Shane’s family up on Union St. Demographics have shifted it toward a more even balance, judging by the yard signs I saw nearby.

But I could tell, in the two hours I stood there, the tide was against us. When I got there, the signs were almost even, and good positions at the front had been claimed for our side by a bunch of union guys who were NH electrical workers by trade.

But as time went on, folks from our side drifted away and nobody replaced them. Their signs disappeared because the law says that the only signs allowed must be held up by people. There were a couple of campaign supporters for Carol Shea Porter who stayed the whole time, and there was Betsy Devine, who came just for two hours and then left because I had to drive people to the polls down in Cambridge.

The Republicans who were there when I came were still there when I left, and more had come out to stand with them. They were enthusiastically greeting voters they knew.

The Republicans I met there were pleasant local people, fed up with the bad economy and convinced that free enterprise solutions would make needed changes. They were not ignorant, aggressive, or hostile–people unlike them make all the headlines of course.

I hope the three Republicans now going to Washington from NH reflect the good will and good hopes of the people I met outside Webster School in my old home town.

“Nature is profligate,” said Annie Dillard. Thousands of green leaves erupt from seemingly nowhere to cover an urban wasteland gone to seed — hundreds of little frog eggs float out over the spring pond that may add no more than one new grown-up frog this season — millions more blueberries get eaten in NH summers than ever manage to sprout into new bearing bushes.

Nature is profligate not only of mass and energy, but also of entirely senseless beauty. There is so much extra beauty everywhere going to waste if we don’t take just those few minutes away from our busy lives just to stand and take heed of our own part in this world.

“Never be discouraged from being an activist because people tell you that you’ll not succeed. You have already succeeded if you’re out there representing truth or justice or compassion or fairness or love. You already have your victory because you have changed the world; you have changed the status quo by you; you have changed the chemistry of things and changes will spread from you, will be easier to happen again in others because of you, because, believe it or not, you are the center of the world.”
- Granny D, 14 May 1999

She walked across the USA at the age of 90 to promote campaign finance reform. At 94, she ran for the US Senate and gave Judd Gregg one heckuva run for his money — an indie film “Run Granny Run” resulted and can be watched on the interwebs.

She started her career as an activist rather late in life (!) and achieved a great deal in the mere ten years she gave to it. Thank you, Granny D, for the inspiration. A real New Hampshire icon has now left our planet. My thanks to Dean Barker and others at BlueHampshire.com for so many inspirational quotes from Granny.

“Don’t walk away because you are confused or because it is difficult. We have entered an amazing time, when each of us has an important role to play. That time is now. It is the best time ever to be alive on this earth, because everyone matters. Everyone is needed if we are to survive. Your creativity, your love, your courage–all of it. As the smoke of battle swirls around you, smile. It is a privilege to be alive in such a time.”
- Doris “Granny D” Haddock, 19 April 2002

You already know to watch out for poisoned teacups, but what you should have been worrying about instead …

An internet-based team of “three people from the United States, three from the Ukraine, two from China, one from Estonia and one from Belarus” (says Reuters) stole credit card numbers by millions from US retailers, and sold them “… to people in the U.S. and Europe for thousands of dollars. The buyers then withdrew tens of thousands of dollars at a time from automated teller machines, officials said.” Even so, the chief conspirator’s lawyer sounds very confident that his client will never enter a jail cell.

After all…. the guy who made possible the NH 2002 election phone-jamming got his conviction overturned because the interstate denial-of-service attack on Democrats’ phones was not covered by Federal laws against phone “harassment.”

It’s hard for the laws against doing bad stuff to keep up with human innovation in stuff we can do. Maybe that’s how it should be.

But let’s hope the US Attorney’s office works smarter on identity theft cases than they chose to do in the matter of NH phone jamming.

It won’t be in bookstores for another week but that didn’t stop two “reviewers” last week from posting low-ball reviews on Amazon. The book is How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, a colorful, profane, and surprisingly frank memoir of sleazy politics.

Media mentions of Allen Raymond’s book have mostly talked up his phone-jamming, for which his RNC pals threw him under the bus. The book details many stunts more colorful. Deceptive robocalls to Democrats from “scary black men” or “actors putting on thick Spanish accents” worked wonders at keeping them home on Election Day. Swapping soft money for hard–funneling GOP dollars to leftwing splinter candidates–engineering repeat contributions from donors who had already given their legal limit–Raymond names names and shows how each trick works.

Adam Cohen in the NYT says that this book may finally force Senate action on the long-delayed Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act. I hope it will.

I got an advance copy just a few days ago in response to my longtime phone-jamming blogging, and just posted my own review on Amazon too. It would be quite a job to track GOP lowballers around the two-way web but you may find it an interesting hobby. (On Barnes and Noble: “Pitiful and poorly written,” some prescient reviewer claimed on Christmas Day.)

Probably the biggest reason that GOP insiders want you not to read this book is not the rude first-person memories of Bush, Rove, Feather, Synhorst, et al. but the way showcases in-crowd contempt for their freeper supporters — “the Jesus-loves-guns crowd” — “the knuckle-draggers, the gunnies, and the committed ideologue nuts.” “The mouth-breathers who who decide GOP primaries might allow people to steal their money and send their children to impossible wars but they’ll cut no such slack for baby-killers.”

The book’s quite a read, and it could just make politics better.

Yes, yes, yes! And this morning on Daily Kos the top-recommended story is my expose of the latest phone-jamming news!

First, McClatchy Newspapers found an insider source to confirm that the US Department of Justice protected Republican bigwigs from their slow-walked “investigation” of the 2002 Election Day phone-jamming scandal.

Second, two advance reviews of phone-jamming tell-all How To Rig An Election are full of dark seedy details of GOP dirty tricks.

Bring on Boston’s Red Dragon Exterminating Company!

Add one former Page-Six gossip-bigwig, Ian Spiegelman. Gawker printed (I won’t even quote it) the blistering letter that got him fired from the New York Post. He’s said to describe himself as a “revenge fetishist.”

Put them together and what you get might be a real page-turner–How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Law Breaker. Coming out soon from Simon and Schuster.

More on this in Blue Hampshire. It’s quite a story