Say what you will about Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. Love him or hate him, he’s always interesting.

I think it’s because of his passion. I’ll never forget his House floor speech last year blasting President Bush in a sprawling stem-winder drawing an odd thread from the World Trade Center Tower bombings of 1993 with the Oklahoma City blast and the until-then ignored pleas to free border patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and José Compean. I spent most of it slack-jawed as he unloaded on his fellow Republican. It’s not something that happens every day, and certainly not since Tom DeLay’s or Newt Gingrich’s reign over the GOP, political machines that prided themselves on keeping the representatives in line to the extent that they sounded mostly like robots to me. Rohrabacher’s no shrinking violet, that’s for sure.

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Assemblyman Chuck DeVore launched his longshot bid to unseat U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer back in November. Back then he made a lot of noise about how he planned to emulate Barack Obama’s sophisticated cyber path to the White House.

So how’s that going so far?

Not bad.

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Now that I’m back from DC it’s time for a redesign of the blog. The Inauguration is over and the “special” coverage is finished.

So what’s my new look? It’s a hard act to follow. Dewey Quach, our magician of all things on the Intertubes, created a brilliant design for the Inauguration coverage and I’d like to emulate it somehow.

But first I’ll probably go back to a design element I had thought of long ago — a caricature of myself. I love how king blogger Andrew Sullivan has a tremendously whimsical yet enigmatic cartoon of himself on his blog.

It’d be cool to emulate that somehow. So I did this sketch of myself tonight. Let me know what you think. Should I  make that one of the main elements in the redesign?

P.S. I have so many people I need to thank for making my trip possible. But the most prominent among them are: Mary Butler and Dave Tainer (for the lodging in DC and so much more), Robyn Piper (for emergency Internet access, encouragement and showing me how to get to Whole Foods!), and Congressman Campbell’s office.

I should clarify that I paid my own way to get to the Capitol as some folks thought I was sent there on the company’s dime. I decided to go on my own because I wanted to be part of what would likely be one of the biggest stories of my life. I’ve covered presidential appearances before, but never anything even remotely of this magnitude. I thought our readers might enjoy a closer look at the DC goings-on from our local perspective, and I just wanted to report on a majorly historic event. I hope you enjoyed what I did.