I'm 53, I have a 28 year old son and, yesterday, my daughter turned 25. Damn I'm getting old! Of course many people my age have grandchildren already (and I do look forward to that) but at least I'm not a grandmother yet. One thing at a time.

I do feel sad right now because this is the first year I haven't had one of my children to spend my birthday with, but life is like that. It keeps changing. Birthdays are nice but somehow they just don't mean as much. I don't have that excitement at being a year older. I got excited about 40 and even 50, but now it just seems to be same old, same old.

The other news of the day is voting. Yes, I voted. I usually do except on rare occasions when I am just bored beyond belief by the whole campaign. Usually I'm bored with much of it, but it takes bored beyond belief to stop me from voting. It's rather nice that every few years it falls on my birthday. I suppose that theoretically it's every seven years, but it seems more often than that.

The big issue this year, at least in Tucson, is the water issue. Should or should we not have to drink the pipe corroding, nasty colored, fish and bird killing water that is brought from the Colorado River. This is know as CAP water. That Colorado Authority Something or something like that, but everyone just calls it CAP and tempers are high on it.

Water is always a big issue in the west because there is always too much or not enough, usually not enough. The Colorado River is green with chemicals by the time it reaches Yuma after being used over and over for irrigation and carrying the chemical runoff from all the agriculture along it's banks. They want us to drink this.

We told the city two years ago that we didn't want to after the first try destroyed the pipes in hundreds of home. Now they're trying again. As far as I'm concerned we need to write off the millions it cost to build the canals and try something else.

The other issue I consider to be of interest is the Rio Nuevo initiative. This is to build a cute little commercial development along the Santa Cruz which I would just as soon they left relatively undeveloped, but it will be developed and I would rather they protected the archeological sites in the area, as the Rio Nuevo plan is suppose to, than some hot shop developer just throwing up buildings everywhere. Archeology is one place where my libertarian sympathies take a back seat, far back. I just cannot approve of people who destroy archeological sites so they can make a quick buck, be it pot hunters or developers. They aren't just destroying artifacts, but knowledge and I consider that to be unconscionable.

So far the Proposition 200, to not allow CAP in our drinking water, is losing, which I am surprised at and the Rio Nuevo initiative is winning. The big surprise is that the Republican mayoral candidate is way ahead which is unusual in a city that has a large Democrat majority. We'll see. Only about half the votes are in.

.