After that cranky Friday, there was a whole weekend, during which I spent a good bit of time preparing for Tuesday’s election. Saturday we biked to the Farmers Market in a hurry so I could get back in time to drive to the City County Building to pick up the supply tote. See Mark’s cat guarding the tote as the featured image. I went through the materials and logged in for a zoom Q&A for election officials, so about 2 hours Saturday. For dinner, we had leftover pork enchilada casserole and a chopped salad with all the leftover veggies I could find in the fridge in it, and (after cheerios & peaches for breakfast) peach cobbler.
Sunday morning I went with Mark for his long loop that’s almost 10,000 steps, and then we had scrambled eggs with cheese and tomatoes and bacon and toast and tater tots! and melon (although I didn’t get the melon in the picture) for breakfast. Then I spent about two hours calling all the people on the roster to work at the polls on Tuesday.
I bought a holder to put my iPhone on my tabletop tripod, to take food pics – you can see a bit of one of the tripods feet lower left
We ate more cobbler with the last of the creme caramel and watched the season finale of The Alienist. I would like to have another set-in-the-19th-century cable show to watch … suggestions?
Monday morning there was another of those online town halls to hear about how instruction is going to go at UW this fall. Almost 300 people logged in, about a dozen upper admins giving short spiels, questions in advance, questions and side conversations scrolling in the chat, websites we’re supposed to go look at later … and then it kept getting darker and stormier looking, and there was a lot of thunder, but the derecho missed us. I finally got out for a little walk at about 5:30 wearing a raincoat. It helped.
I made whole wheat sourdough, and it’s a giant, moist in the middle loaf. It got kinda dark, too – like Josey Baker bread.
I finished the peach cobbler with vanilla yogurt on top for breakfast. For dinner, I made kind of a chicken basil rice pilaf, and we had salad with sesame vinaigrette and chopped peanuts.
Then I tabbed the poll books, and tried to go to bed early, so I could get up at 4:45 and be out the door by 5:30 to get to the polls by 6:00. I made myself a cheese sandwich on a hunk of the sourdough, buttered, sliced a tomato to go with and packed it up with a Cliff bar, and a can of lemon fizzy.
And I think it went OK – but I’m still waiting for the email from the Clerk’s office that will show how many mistakes we made.
And starting by working at the polls made for a nice birthday. I got home, showered and changed, and the cleaners came so we took off for our now-traditional 5K walk in a county park, to be out of the house while they were here.
We stopped for coffee and then got delivered wood-fired pizza, and finally ate blueberry icebox cake, that I guess I also made in 2018, for dessert, in front of two episodes of Watchman.
Novanta pizza
2020 blueberry icebox cake
Wednesday morning I ate the last of the blueberry compote with yogurt for breakfast.
I ordered myself some Liberty of London cotton fabric for making masks and patchworks as a kind of early birthday – free shipping to the US – and now every time I open up a browser or go on facebook, there’re Liberty ads. I want this dishtowel but at £19 it seems kinda spendy.
And what else – I can’t tell if things are getting worse or better. I heard Kamau Bell on Colbert one night saying he felt like right now is like right before the apocalypse in a disaster movie. I’ve got melancholy and somewhat dopey ’90s songs stuck in my head, like Counting Crows’ Long December. The only reason I can think of is that the kind of lonely I am now is sort of like the kind of lonely I was in the early-mid ’90s, when I lived in the west suburbs of Chicago, and had little kids and no really close friends around, no girlfriends to talk to, kind of like now. I had a long drive to work, and I listened to WXRT in the car. At least then I had work friends, but I was kind of on tenterhooks at work all the time, never sure I was doing the right thing, because it was the first few years of my new professional career. Kind of like now, the tenterhooks not the newness.
Thursday they turned off the power for a couple of hours to replace the telephone poles on our street, so I went for a bike ride, and damn if I didn’t make the same mistake as I wrote about in 2018, finding myself going ever deeper into Fitchburg. But it was a nice long ride, even though I was on the sidewalk and in the bike Lane on County PD for awhile. We had pasta pesto and garlic toast and salad – I figured we might as well eat the rich stuff for dinner tonight – I did the bike ride, and Mark runs on Mondays & Thursdays.
I still have lots of grading to do – let’s see if I can grade 24 5-page papers in one day – Friday. I do have till Monday at midnight, though. And I still have to apply for Medicare. But the the hard stuff should be done and I can relax a bit. Riiight. So just to add to the stress level, I am going to go get a Covid test tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed it’s good news. So many people to call if I’m positive and was at the polls.
Oh, and my Jerry Garcia Keens came, and this time they fit.
