E???

Have I mentioned that I hate the alphabet. I was always terrible at crossword puzzles, but I love sudoku (because it is numbers or random letters). An E. Hmmmm. I guess I will have to go with the obvious, Erika's posts. [Don't misquote me, I love my sister Erika in the extreme, but I'm trying not to make this about people that we love and more about things I am grateful for. Otherwise, whatever would I do when I got to the M's.]

I do so love to blog, but I'm sure that it would have gone the way of mass e-mails, if not for Erika's diligence and dedication to the form. I love having a guaranteed new post every morning and I love receiving a comment or two to my posts. Between Uncle Marcel, Sean and most importantly Erika, blogging has continued to be a constant and a wonderful addition to my everyday. I love, love, love seeing Jackson everyday. So that's my E--Erika's posts.

Speaking of elections, however, I am recuperating today from yesterday's election. I must be getting old and much less physically fit, because I was wiped out yesterday. When we closed the polls at 8, I didn't take any care packing up the supplies, which I am usually quite good about. I didn't check the election signs (until we were practically driving away--I found a bunch of tape left on the windows). I let all the others count the ballots and the signatures for me, which I usually do myself and then have them check them. This time I was so exhausted I didn't trust myself to count and had two other people verify the count. I was still off by one. My fault.

We only had a few problems this time and the lines were really not that bad. We had a line of about 40 people at the very beginning, but we moved them quickly through and even though we had two hundred voters in the first couple of hours, after the initial rush, there really were no lines all day long. We figured out that our precinct had about an 80% turn out and later the news said that the turn out for the county was about 82%. Wow.

The biggest problem I had were the couple of voters who realized that they made a mistake after their vote was in the box. One lady was so distraught, I thought she was going to cry. I promised her that her mistake would be statistically insignificant (which really made me feel bad when I voted) to try to make her feel better. She could not be consoled and I really couldn't do anything to fix it. We had quite a few provisional voters--they were not in the book which means that they registered too late or that they weren't registered. It was clear that some of them were simply not registered, but even as I told them their vote would probably not count, I was so glad that I was allowed to let them vote provisionally. It was just so important to them.

We were pretty isolated from the news all day, but at my dinner break I turned on CNN. It was early enough that they weren't calling a winner and there were so many red states that I confess I allowed my tired old self to get pretty depressed. Luckily, Erika twittered to Adrienne and we were informed as soon as the election was called for Obama. Last night, as tired as I was, I was pretty happy and hopeful too.

This morning, I looked up the propositions on line and was less excited. We have a constitutional amendment baning gay marriage--how ridiculous. A completely social issue forcing conflicting ideals in the constitution to allow institutionalized discrimination. Prop 9, victims rights is another ridiculous constitutional amendment that passed, which will get this state into further hot water under the U.S. constitutional rights, but hey, that crazy U.S. supreme court might just not care.

No one at the office was talking about the election at all. I guess we have a lot of republicans. It was a quiet, almost surreal day. I'm getting over a very tiring day, I'm excited by Obama's election, but nervous about all the problems he'll take on for our country and I'm so disappointed in the proposition process that allows voters to amend the state constitution willy nilly.

Oh well, back to the real world. Today was Glendale Beautiful--its time to get the flyer out on Casa Adobe Luminiars. Tonight is ABWA board--sees candy, non-profit tax returns, lots of stuff to do there. Tomorrow is my class--two of my students came to the polling place for extra credit. I'm so disgusted with how disrespectful my students are in that class, I couldn't even muster the energy to let them cast a sample ballot on the test machine. I'm very disappointed in my performance, but I have no enthusiasm. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. I'm going to start them on a motion regarding the constitutionality of right to counsel. I like my constitution in the abstract. It's just too depressing in reality.