A little over a week ago, I wrote, October Surprises talking about how October has always been a surprising and disconcerting month for me. This October is turning out to be no different.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, last Monday my mother was hospitalized with chest pains. She is home now and seems okay, although we do need to follow up on it. My wife’s opponent was arrested for DUI the same evening. Kim has been getting a fair amount of media inquiries about this. We want to keep the campaign focused on issues and not personal mistakes, and Kim has her comments about it on her campaign website. To top it off, a table blew off a passing truck and hit Kim’s car on Wednesday. She swerved to avoid the accident, and the only damage was the driver side review mirror being sheared off, and some dents in the driver side door. Kim was shaken up a little, but is fine.

Beyond this, we celebrated Fiona’s third birthday this.

As I mentioned earlier, , Christian Crumlish’s book, The Power of Many has come out. It is a good book to read to get a sense of what is going people online getting offline and involved. Jerome Armstrong just wrote about it on DailyKos. In the discussion that followed people have linked The Power of Many to what is going on with Sinclair Broadcasting. There are many articles about Sinclair Broadcasting out there, if you haven’t read them. Mitch Ratcliffe provides a good summary.

Over at Greater Democracy, Jock Gill does a good job of contrasting the Sinclair Broadcasting mess with a great post by Britt Blaser in his blog.

And for the final news, there is the sad news about Christopher Reeve’s passing. Kim had road with his brother in Pony Club. Miranda went to nursery school with his son. He lived not far from us. It struck use fairly personally.

We were driving to a family reunion when we heard the news, and a lot of time explaining it to Fiona. In particular, we talked a lot about hope, and how he symbolized hope for so many people. We talked about embryonic stem cell research and the hope that that brings. If you read my recent post about Strengthening the good, you will know that I am a big fan of bloggers promoting worthy charities. I urge everyone to do their little bit to help, and now would be a wonderful time to contribute to the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation.