Pretty much an up and down

day today. Worked on my lesson plan for tomorrow, cleaned and backwashed the pool, spent an hour looking for the charger for my A100 (never found it) and then went up to an anti-I.C.E. raid protest. Took forever to get there because TX-DOT is using all of their money for lobbying in DC and didn’t have enough left over to mark out a detour at the I10/610 eastside interchange. Idiots.

Anyways, once I got there, around 1:45 pm, there were 18 protesters. After an hour or so, I became bored and started to leave, by then there were 73 protesters. Finally, as I was leaving, the counter-protesters arrived, seems they’d been tricked and were on the wrong side of the detention center. I had no idea that there was a full out prison style detention center in Houston, complete with concertina wire. It’s run by CCA for the Feds.

The counter-protesters were nasty, had bull horns, a “cheerleader”, a sweaty fat chick, a token Mexican (I asked him what he was doing there, he said that he was a third gen American) and an assortment of ordinary people. They were there strictly for the media, nothing else. Well, maybe to provoke the other guys but honestly, the other side was just normal people. They didn’t even have a sweaty fat chick.

It was, all in all, pretty interesting. I talked to a lot of people on both sides and there is much fear on each. I also learned that when you act like you are supposed to be there, the cops don’t bug you. I was able to go back and forth between the groups and had full access to the cops. One lady on the pro-immigrant side kept taking my picture, I think she thought I was some sort of “spy”. I just grinned and posed for her each time. Finally, she got frustrated enough to ask me why I was taking pictures of everyone. I just told her I liked to take pictures and to come see bigjolly.com. So, lady if you’re there, HI!

Came home and made a couple of composite photo’s for the web, one for there, one for here. All in all, I snapped 188 pics, the composites only show 32. Cooked fajitas and watched The Birds with SU. Major headache, hope it’s gone when I wake up. Late.