Wednesday, November 03, 2004
My Day In History
OK, here I am, back home in a quiet house, caught up on email. Thought I would post some scattered observations of the day. BE WARNED, I am slurping down Fuzzy Navels like there's no tomorrow!
You probably know by now that I am not a morning person. All the kind responses to my pic of Dreamcloud in his Election Day costume pleased me muchly, and in large part because that was HARD WORK! Coloring the signs took me a long time because my markers kept freezing up, and also I fell down the steps on one trip outside. Oh, yeah, baby, I suffered for my art!
For the record, I drove 112 miles in my prayer-wheel circuit around town, in a little over eight hours. Some of that time involved poll watching, but the folks running my precinct's set-up were very good and didn't require much watching.
I never did give anyone a ride, but I DID get someone out to vote in Florida. I'd sent that pic link around, and an acquaintance on an email list wrote back to say she didn't know where to go vote (in Florida!). Needless to say I Googled her up an answer fast, and she popped off to her local library!
I also pointed some people to the appropriate polling places here in Lamar. So my day was not poorly spent, in my view.
I drove to the middle school when it let out to pick Mike up, per his request. He is, especially considering his handicaps, more deeply interested in this election and the political process than many supposedly normal adults.
He spent some time encouraging me to shanghai any pedestrians we saw off to the polls. I think I eventually explained that this was not our actual mission. Instead, I tried to get across to him exactly what voting was, and why it was important.
In the end, what I hope he got was that the "other side" was not our enemy. They were just good people with different ideas.
The enemies are people who are just bone lazy, who can't be bothered to get off their butts and vote.
Later in the day, our county chair asked me if I wanted to volunteer to help count some oddball votes, as a Dem rep. I said sure, and volunteered Damaris as well.
So she and I turned up at Dem headquarters at about 6:30, and after snogging up some really good homemade snacks, we walked over to the courthouse, a block away.
It was pretty busy, with the County Clerk and her best minions putting in overtime like mad, while candidates for office and local news personages slavered for Official Details.
We got to see how the local votes were counted (on equipment that would have been state of the art in 1968, though still quite reliable). Three of us Dems were paired with three Repubs, and we went through a few ballots that had a very minor error which affected under 200 people in our county. We carefully made sure that all votes were properly counted, as we also made jokes featuring lines like, "Yes, YES, OH BABY YES!!!--No." And when an error cropped up and we were joking about us all going to jail, I offered to let them all be my bitches and defend them against the other hardened female prisoners, and they all accepted gratefully.
That was possibly the high point of my day.
You probably know by now that I am not a morning person. All the kind responses to my pic of Dreamcloud in his Election Day costume pleased me muchly, and in large part because that was HARD WORK! Coloring the signs took me a long time because my markers kept freezing up, and also I fell down the steps on one trip outside. Oh, yeah, baby, I suffered for my art!
For the record, I drove 112 miles in my prayer-wheel circuit around town, in a little over eight hours. Some of that time involved poll watching, but the folks running my precinct's set-up were very good and didn't require much watching.
I never did give anyone a ride, but I DID get someone out to vote in Florida. I'd sent that pic link around, and an acquaintance on an email list wrote back to say she didn't know where to go vote (in Florida!). Needless to say I Googled her up an answer fast, and she popped off to her local library!
I also pointed some people to the appropriate polling places here in Lamar. So my day was not poorly spent, in my view.
I drove to the middle school when it let out to pick Mike up, per his request. He is, especially considering his handicaps, more deeply interested in this election and the political process than many supposedly normal adults.
He spent some time encouraging me to shanghai any pedestrians we saw off to the polls. I think I eventually explained that this was not our actual mission. Instead, I tried to get across to him exactly what voting was, and why it was important.
In the end, what I hope he got was that the "other side" was not our enemy. They were just good people with different ideas.
The enemies are people who are just bone lazy, who can't be bothered to get off their butts and vote.
Later in the day, our county chair asked me if I wanted to volunteer to help count some oddball votes, as a Dem rep. I said sure, and volunteered Damaris as well.
So she and I turned up at Dem headquarters at about 6:30, and after snogging up some really good homemade snacks, we walked over to the courthouse, a block away.
It was pretty busy, with the County Clerk and her best minions putting in overtime like mad, while candidates for office and local news personages slavered for Official Details.
We got to see how the local votes were counted (on equipment that would have been state of the art in 1968, though still quite reliable). Three of us Dems were paired with three Repubs, and we went through a few ballots that had a very minor error which affected under 200 people in our county. We carefully made sure that all votes were properly counted, as we also made jokes featuring lines like, "Yes, YES, OH BABY YES!!!--No." And when an error cropped up and we were joking about us all going to jail, I offered to let them all be my bitches and defend them against the other hardened female prisoners, and they all accepted gratefully.
That was possibly the high point of my day.
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