Talk About Tuesday

 

In Which Today Was Very Busy!

I finished yesterday's crochet project today! I'll post photos next Monday, but suffice to say I'm stoked to have finished it. My total time working on that project, including fixing mistakes, stitching the bottom on, stuffing it, and weaving in ends, was 6 hours, 14 minutes, 56 seconds. Yes I timed it to the second. How, you may ask? By only working on it when I had a video playing. When the video would end, I'd write down how long it was before starting another video and watching that while I worked. Many ghosts were hunted, at least 3 dresses were sewn, and almost 100 baby tarantulas were wrangled in the midwest.

I worked until about midnight last night on it and got the whole body of the tree, the bottom of the tree, and 3 tiers of flocking done, then I woke up around 9:30 this morning and...

Went to go vote because it's the second week of November, and in the US, that's a voting day.

I won't talk about how I voted, because that's not the point of this blog.

Instead, I'd like to take a moment to talk about how voting works where I live.

I'm from Maine, so we have Same Day Registration. If you show up to the polls with a piece of mail with your address on it, and that address is in the town you're voting in, guess what? You can register then and there, then hop into the line corresponding to the first letter of your last name. In fact, I watched a newly minted adult do just that, today, and she was so happy to get back into her line so she could vote for the first time.

When you get to the volunteers at the head of the line, they'll ask you your surname, your first name, and then your address. If you're in the rolls (which you will be, if you've already registered once), they'll give you the go-ahead, and then you'll move to someone else who hands you your ballot(s), tells you how many sides each sheet has, and you go off to your booth, where you fill it out with a plain old ballpoint pen.

After that point, you scoop up your ballots and get into line to drop them off in the ballot boxes, which are equipped with scanners that only count how many ballots are placed in each. And just to head off any paranoia anyone may have, they are scanners and not shredders (first, shredders have a very different sound). I know this because last time I voted, one of the scanner tops got jostled and nearly fell off, and you could see the neatly stacked ballots below. It's just a fancy ballot box with a counter app on it.

There is one tiny drawback to these fancy tally boxes, though, and today I got to witness it. 

Occasionally, and this has only happened once in the 14 years I've been voting, your ballot will get stuck. And if you've already started to walk away from the box, one of the nice retirees who keep an eye on the boxes have to chase you down with a very polite "excuse me, sir! Sir!" before they have you come back the five steps you've walked to watch them very carefully take your ballot out of the tray and then put it back on there.

I dig that they make sure you see everything done to your ballot.

My own ballots went through no problem and I scooted out the door before any of the folks who have petitions could beg me for a signature. After all, my mom was waiting for me so we could go shopping afterwards.

We may have bought the cat a sweater.

Did the cat need a sweater? No. Will she wear the sweater? Maybe. Were we very, VERY excited when we bought the sweater? Oh, absolutely.

It's red and has antlers. I'm pretty sure it has white Nordic sweater designs, too...

Anywho, the rest of today was spent enjoying the heck out of the delightfully dry, breezy, bright weather. It was a brisk 44℉/6,67℃, which was a vast change from the disgustingly humid yet windy 72℉/22,22℃ weather yesterday.

It was gross. But today was fantastic and now I'm in my fluffy pajamas and a long sleeved shirt, which is a sight different from the yoga capris and tank tops I've been wearing this week.

Now, what are the plans for this week?

• Art for Thursday (if you wanna shoot me a Ko-Fi with a message telling me which category you'd like to see, that's still a thing - Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Dedbert, Location, Geometric, Word)
• By Next Monday I'll have more crochet for you, including pics of the finished tree!
• Next Tuesday I'll be back to blather some more!

As for me, I'm ready for a snuggle into my flannel sheets with Dedbert by my side, dreaming of adorable beavers like Nibi and maybe working on more manuscript stuff when I get up.

I feel much better now that it's below 60℉/15,56℃.

And now that the voting is over, I'll be able to watch tv without all those stupid, pointless, uninformative political ads.

Ugh.

Instead, I'll just go back to rolling my eyes at emus and snarking about the side effects permitted in medications.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Talk About Tuesday

 

In Which I've Been Awake Too Long

I'm not a daytime person, really. I've always skewed towards the nocturnal end of things and it's only gotten worse as I've aged, so waking up at 8AM today was... embarrassingly difficult. Part of that was how deliciously warm my thick, fluffy red blanket is, to be fair. It was 39℉ (3.9℃) when I got up, and I dressed for the weather in my thick black jeans and thickest sweatshirt. I chugged a quick cup of my morning mocha (or "gruel" as my boyfriend nicknamed it) and my mom and I headed out to do our civic duty.

Voting day is a shockingly easy affair where I live. If you haven't registered to vote yet (you only have to do it once after you're 18 - just re-register every time you move), you can bring a bill and your driver's license or state ID (they're only about five bucks and ship to you fast) and they'll sign you up right at the polls. If you have already registered, like my mother and I have, you just get into your line and wait your turn. Our wait was about five minutes, so that was pretty great. I'd have to say the only drawbacks are that the polling place is A) not the most accessible (there are stairs, though there are handicap elevators/entrances, the building is from before the ADA, so that doesn't help much...) and B) There's almost no parking. It was designed with a much smaller town in mind, after all!

They had COVID procedures in place - socially distanced lines, masks available at the door, hand sanitizer everywhere, and the poll booths were set up a good 6 feet apart from one another. The ballots were printed at about 14-16 font for the most part, and I could read everything even through my fogged-up glasses! After we filled out our ballots, we dropped them in the appropriate boxes and were immediately mobbed by the usual gaggle of Signature-Seekers. The petitions this year were pretty good, from what I recall - urge the govt to come up with a Universal Healthcare plan, encourage better utility competition with a public option, and an election fairness petition to remove the loophole that allows international and interstate funds to be used in local elections (which is apparently illegal at the national level but you could've fooled me...).

I'll confess I made the grabby-hands motion towards the Universal Healthcare and Public Utility Option petitions. Might have had a savage grin as I signed the one against dark funding as well...

Regardless, that took up maybe 15 minutes total of my morning. Then we went to the laundromat and threw in some huge sleeping bags we can't wash at home. That took about 20 minutes. We took the lumpy old things home to dry on the line. I'm super happy we could do that because Sunday was miserable.

That's right, sadly our Halloween up here was practically a bust. We had torrential rains on Saturday night, and when we woke up on Sunday morning, our basement was flooded. To be fair, pretty much everyone we knew ended up with a flooded basement, but if there's one thing you don't wanna see when you peek down into the cellar, it's a blue bucket bobbing along two inches above the floor.

We got lucky. Other people had a foot of flooding.

Even my poor guy got soggy - there was at least an inch in the basement there, too.

Fortunately, aside from a few grocery items and some already-deceased UPS's in my basement, not a ton was ruined. Some cardboard, some birdseed. Even more fortunately, nothing irreplaceable has been harmed. No one was hurt, the floodwaters have utterly vanished (unless you're walking around my yard in boots, then you'll have the mud around your ankles...) and the coast is once more at peace.

Until next weekend, of course >:( we're getting more rain.

I'm done with rain. I'd rather wake up to 39 inches of snow than three inches of rain (which is what we woke up to on Halloween).

Oh, and just in case you thought Halloween wasn't sad enough with everyone getting flooded? We got exactly one trick-or-treater here. Our next door neighbor.

On the plus side, I have more fun-size M&Ms than I know what to do with. Maybe some fun cookies are in my future...

I have some art commissions to work on, too!

And I've got a few crochet projects!

And my mom's mom wants me to make some doilies!

It looks like I'm going to be super busy with creative stuff, but don't worry, I'm also still writing.

Looks like I'm going to be participating in No-Burnout November (which I'm taking as a dare, it seems...)

Oh, and for lunch today I made some Nongshim K-Army Stew, which is very very spicy and available at Wal-Mart. I threw in a slice of American cheese for fun and it completely dissolved into the unbearably hot, delightfully spicy broth, coating the noodles in cheesy goodness.

Taken Seconds After Adding The Cheese

I think that'll about do it for me for today. My eyes are burning slightly and I've been working on my writing all afternoon, though I'm not convinced much of it's any good. My folks are recovering from colds, I've got hella allergies that might be segueing into the cold they've got, and I just want a nap lol.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC