Except for an occasional jab at Trump, I rarely bring up politics in my weekly blogs. Today I am making an exception, although even in this blog, the subject is more about me than about any candidate or political position.

Last Tuesday was Wisconsin’s primary election.* The key race was to choose the Democratic candidate for governor. Pollsters had predicted that the race was a done deal, so I voted for a candidate who had zero chance of winning.  Kelda Roys was running well behind Francesca Hong and David Crowley, but I liked her the best, so I voted with my heart instead of my brain. By that evening, I was already regretting my choice.

It turned out that my vote might have mattered. Only a week before the election, Hong had a 20-point lead in the polls. Still, when I checked the election results just before going to bed on election night, Crowley was actually in the lead by a few thousand votes. A good share of the votes yet to be counted were from Hong’s stomping grounds (Dane County and the city of Madison), so I fell asleep assuming that Hong would eventually squeak out a victory. The next morning I found out that Crowley had maintained his lead throughout the night and would be the Democratic candidate in November. Still I was left thinking that I’d wasted a vote when it might have made a difference.

The last time I made any kind of protest vote was when I voted for John Anderson in the 1980 Presidential election. I regretted that vote soon after I made it, and I promised myself to never do it again. It took forty-six years for me to break my promise and, just as in 1980, I regretted my choice. In my defense, my vote for Roys was not a protest vote, so much as a statement that I didn’t care too much who won the primary. Crowley and Hong are very different from each other, but both are okay. This left me free to “waste” my vote. It was not until the race was neck and neck that I realized that I did have a preference.

Of Crowley and Hong, Hong is the more interesting candidate, but she also is the most slippery. Slippery did not cut it with me. Fortunately it also did not cut it with a sizable share of voters. The election results allowed me to get away with having made a mistake.

The most interesting part of voting last Tuesday was not any race, but the polling place itself. I vote in a church. In the past, I could enter the church from any of three doors, then wander my way to the community room where voting was taking place. This time, two of the doors were locked, and I had to enter and leave through a specific door. That door had a sign that stated all unauthorized observers had to stay so many feet (I forgot the exact distance) away from the polls. There are people who’d like to mess with open elections, but the La Crosse City Clerk is doing everything that she can to keep those jerks away. 

* In Wisconsin, voters in a primary do not need to declare their political party until they step into the voting booth. At that point, they must choose a party for that specific election and then vote only for candidates in that party. On each ballot, there is Democratic column, a Republican column, a Green Party column, etc… If I vote Democrat in one race, then I must vote for a Democrat in all of the races. I cannot jump from party to party like I might in a general election. If I do, my ballot is invalid.

The summer of ’26 has been an odd one for me. That fact hadn’t hit me until I went fishing yesterday and realized that it was the first time I’d been on the river all year. It is early August, and ordinarily I would have been out a dozen times by now. Part of the reason for not getting out has been the poor air quality because of the fires. Part of it has been because I bought a new car and have yet to furnish it with a car top carrier for my boats. Part of it has been life happening.

Whatever the reasons, it took only one afternoon of fishing to remind me that I need to get on the water more often. Buzz, Dennis, and I went to our favorite backwater secret spot. It is a fairly long paddle to get there, but worth it. We saw only one other boat once we left the main channel, and we caught seven different species of fish (blue gill, crappie, largemouth, rock bass, dogfish, channel cat, and perch). I usually don’t keep fish caught in the middle of the summer, as I think that the fillets are less firm than those from fish caught in the autumn and winter, but my friends wanted to bring home a meal of blue gills and perch.

We’ve already planned to go out again next week.

While I haven’t done much fishing this summer, I have been riding my bike on any day that the air quality allows me to exercise outdoors. Recently I did something I’d never done before and that was to pedal my usual loop route in the opposite direction. It was more interesting than I would have guessed.

Usually when I start my rides from home, I immediately head for the marsh trails. That way I still get to bike the best part of my route even on days I cut my ride short. Last Wednesday, however, a friend called me just as I was about to leave. He asked me to swing by his house to pick up some festival tickets that he had promised to give me. He lives within a block of the last leg of my normal route, so I biked to his place first and then continued on in reverse direction.

The trip “backwards” felt different enough that I sometimes became disoriented. I even got lost once. I was in the“Robin Hood” subdivision on the far south end of town, and I found myself on Marion Road when I should have been on Nottingham Avenue. These are the actual names of the streets. In addition to Marion Road and Nottingham Avenue, there is Scarlett Drive, Richard Drive, and Robin Hood Drive. The neighborhood green space is called Sherwood Park. (Maybe the guy who named the streets in the subdivision was himself named after his father and has always been known as Little John.)

Biking in the opposite direction meant that all of uphills were down and all of the downhills were up. The last three miles of my usual bike ride have always been hard for me, and I thought it was because I tire toward the end of my workout. I do get tired, but on Wednesday I also discovered that the last stretch of my route is slightly uphill when I do it in the normal direction.