Emily asked what happened to today’s entry and the answer is, a migraine. I ended up leaving work early and passing out for a few hours and then flopped around on the couch like a beached whale for the rest of the night. Not much interested in staring at the dots and pixels.

So another back-dated entry will have to do.

I went to the polls yesterday and discovered that my voter registration had apparently not been updated at the BMV when I moved to Grandview. Therefore I had to vote provisionally. That was a bit frustrating but I voted nevertheless. A big year for Ohio elections and for the most part, a year of results that didn’t make me want to claw my eyes out. The only big disappointment was Mary Jo Kilroy’s loss to Deborah Price in our congressional district. Serious bummer.

I’m scanning the national results this morning and see that gay marriage bans were passed by Virginia, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Idaho and Colorado, which also voted against extending workplace benefits to domestic partners. Meanwhile South Dakota voters rejected the toughest abortion law in the land — a measure that would have outlawed the procedure under almost any circumstances, and Missouri voted to allow limited stem cell research.

The margins in the marriage votes were not encouraging. I don’t feel like jumping on a gay marriage soapbox today but I will say that when you see your sister and her partner lose a child they’ve struggled to bring into the world together, and you get smacked in the face with the fact that said partner cannot go to the funeral home to sign paperwork for the release of the body, which then has to be delayed for a week before the grieving mother, who is recovering from a c-section, has to be uncomfortably driven across town to face the worst possible thing she’s ever gone through at a pretty horrible time–you get a little bit pissy about this country’s inability to separate the civil and legal covenants that people are lovingly trying to enter into, from the so-called church-sanctioned, Jesus-approved Marriage with a capital M.

People, it makes my head hurt all over again thinking about it.

But the Democrats, for better or for worse, took back control of the House. I want to feel more hopeful about that than I probably do. But I’ll keep voting. I’ll keep hoping.