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Notes from a crabby CNN addict
Jul. 16th, 2022 10:02 pmThings are REALLY busy this month. Holy freakin' moley.
Let's start with this week. (Well, technically last week...) I had thought I'd be serving as a Prince George's County election judge only for the July 19 primary, but then I received a call asking me to work on the even-numbered days of the early voting period (July 7-14). No big deal, right? Easy money! Except ... I'm also madly working on my science-writing assignments (and not as far along as I'd wanted to be). AND we started a new church year, so the Board of Trustees (to which I belong, remember) must make some crazy-big decisions. AND Storvik's signature Novice and Unbelt Tourney was scheduled for July 9 instead of sometime in June.
AND my condo's HVAC system is on the fritz, and I won't have the money to get it repaired until after all this work is done.
AND there was a storm on the way.
July 8 and July 10 were OK days at the College Park early-voting site, the gymnasium at a recreation center. As the same-day-registration judge, I sat under an A/C vent and was really glad I brought a sweater. Brrr. July 12 was like that until dinnertime, when I heard a loud roar like a rainstorm of BB pellets on the roof, and then the lights went out. I was in the middle of updating a woman's address in the database when that happened, so I had to ask her to sit and wait about 15 minutes until the backup batteries kicked in and synchronized things. Some of us stepped outside and saw that trees were down everywhere and political signs outside the no-electioneering zone had gone flying. It turned out that the neighborhood had been one of the places where winds had gusted up to 85 mph, which is basically hurricane force. It wasn't a tornado or a derecho, though, but some other kind of meteorological phenomenon ("bow front" or something like that). Even the air smelled like fresh wood, filled with essence of living trees suddenly ripped apart.
I texted the boy toy at home and he said that we didn't have power either. So I grabbed a couple of bags of ice and some fast-food dinner on the way home from the early-voting site. (The commercial strip where I bought these items was chaos -- some of the businesses had power, some didn't, but the traffic lights were out, and people were driving every which way. Scary!)
Apparently the power came back on for my building in the early-morning hours of the 13th, but the College Park neighborhood mentioned above still was a disaster area. Somehow the polls opened, with a generator and two industrial-sized fans going. When I worked on the 14th, the last day of early voting, we had regular electricity until about 2:30 p.m., when the grid conked out for no apparent reason (the weather was sunny). The generator and fans had to come out again after it got stuffy in that gym. The ceiling had a big translucent skylight in it, but I started to worry that the light (both from the skylight and the little emergency lights) would fade just as we would be starting to break down the equipment and box everything up. Fortunately, the lights came back on around 7:30 p.m. Whew! But the last few voters took their sweet time to fill out their ballots and didn't leave until about 50 minutes after the polls closed. Aargh!
On top of all of this, I cut the cable-TV cord because it's just so damned expensive. I miss my CNN.
Let's start with this week. (Well, technically last week...) I had thought I'd be serving as a Prince George's County election judge only for the July 19 primary, but then I received a call asking me to work on the even-numbered days of the early voting period (July 7-14). No big deal, right? Easy money! Except ... I'm also madly working on my science-writing assignments (and not as far along as I'd wanted to be). AND we started a new church year, so the Board of Trustees (to which I belong, remember) must make some crazy-big decisions. AND Storvik's signature Novice and Unbelt Tourney was scheduled for July 9 instead of sometime in June.
AND my condo's HVAC system is on the fritz, and I won't have the money to get it repaired until after all this work is done.
AND there was a storm on the way.
July 8 and July 10 were OK days at the College Park early-voting site, the gymnasium at a recreation center. As the same-day-registration judge, I sat under an A/C vent and was really glad I brought a sweater. Brrr. July 12 was like that until dinnertime, when I heard a loud roar like a rainstorm of BB pellets on the roof, and then the lights went out. I was in the middle of updating a woman's address in the database when that happened, so I had to ask her to sit and wait about 15 minutes until the backup batteries kicked in and synchronized things. Some of us stepped outside and saw that trees were down everywhere and political signs outside the no-electioneering zone had gone flying. It turned out that the neighborhood had been one of the places where winds had gusted up to 85 mph, which is basically hurricane force. It wasn't a tornado or a derecho, though, but some other kind of meteorological phenomenon ("bow front" or something like that). Even the air smelled like fresh wood, filled with essence of living trees suddenly ripped apart.
I texted the boy toy at home and he said that we didn't have power either. So I grabbed a couple of bags of ice and some fast-food dinner on the way home from the early-voting site. (The commercial strip where I bought these items was chaos -- some of the businesses had power, some didn't, but the traffic lights were out, and people were driving every which way. Scary!)
Apparently the power came back on for my building in the early-morning hours of the 13th, but the College Park neighborhood mentioned above still was a disaster area. Somehow the polls opened, with a generator and two industrial-sized fans going. When I worked on the 14th, the last day of early voting, we had regular electricity until about 2:30 p.m., when the grid conked out for no apparent reason (the weather was sunny). The generator and fans had to come out again after it got stuffy in that gym. The ceiling had a big translucent skylight in it, but I started to worry that the light (both from the skylight and the little emergency lights) would fade just as we would be starting to break down the equipment and box everything up. Fortunately, the lights came back on around 7:30 p.m. Whew! But the last few voters took their sweet time to fill out their ballots and didn't leave until about 50 minutes after the polls closed. Aargh!
On top of all of this, I cut the cable-TV cord because it's just so damned expensive. I miss my CNN.
