Civic mucous

Christ, I forgot what it was like to REALLY have a cold. I've had some mini-colds this year, some colds-manqué, if you will, but this is my first kick-you-in-the-ass cold in a while, and it SUCKS. I'm slowly recovering, but yesterday I pretty much felt like I was going to die all day long, and you know what's AWESOME when you feel like death warmed over? Watching a toddler! No, I kid: it really is no fun whatsoever. Fortunately (?) she's sick, too, so we were both pretty low key. By which I mean we spent a shocking percentage of the day slumped over on the sofa watching Elmo's World and Teletubbies. Well: the Hatchling watched them and I kind of dozed. Qualitee parenting is my watchword!

Today I felt semi-human, so at 6:30 pm I trekked on over to my polling place and holy CRAP were there a lot of people there! It was pretty cool standing in line with this array of races, classes, ages, backgrounds (I live in a very diverse district), many of whom were caucusing for the first time. Everyone seemed excited to be there, to be participating. The people running the caucus were completely unprepared for the numbers that showed up - they ran out of ballots and had to hand people slips of torn-off paper; they had people signing in on notebooks; they had to quickly move the caucus itself to a larger room to accommodate the crowds. Over 500 people showed up at my caucusing place, and overwhelmingly voted for Obama. (I voted for Clinton, but will very happily vote for Obama in the national election should that be my option.) About 100 people stuck around for the actual caucus, where it was nice (but not too surprising) to see that I live in a pretty progressive district: we passed resolutions in favor of universal health care, increased funding for education, civil unions for gay couples, and abolishing the electoral college (!). All in all, a very satisfying experience in civic duty.