It's been a pretty good weekend. Friday night was the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica, woo! I thought it was a good episode. Not perfect, but you know, it's just a TV show. I'm lucky that I only started watching the series recently, and I just got caught up when the season 3 DVDs came out a couple of weeks ago. So I didn't have to wait a year like the folks who had been watching all along did.
Saturday morning I visited with Moses. Who was very cooperative about the whole thing. Thanks Mose-man!
Saturday afternoon Joe and I volunteered for Obama. They sent us to the bus depot in downtown Durham to register people to vote. It worked pretty much like I expected: there's a mail-in form which we ask people to fill out on the spot. We return the forms to the Obama office, which mails them to the board of elections.
The bus depot was not actually as good of a location as I had hoped. When the buses show up there's a throng of people ... who are all rushing to get a bus. And don't want me jumping in front of them with a clipboard, cheerily asking "Excuse me sir, are you registered to vote?" So the throng of rushing people rush to their buses, and then the buses leave, and then there are 6-8 people left ... for the next 20 minutes. So there was a lot of downtime.
We did have some nice conversations during the downtime. One guy told us that he used to do the same work for pay. He seemed surprised that we were doing it as volunteers! He said he had worked mainly for the Natural Law party (remember them? I did; Joe didn't), and had also worked for the Republicans and Democrats. He said that back in the early 90s the Democrats paid $8 per hour, and the Republicans paid $8 per registration! Gee, I wonder which party has more money?
That guy also saw how much time we spent just sitting around waiting for the next bus, and tried to give us helpful advice. He told us to go to Franklin Street that night because there was going to be a big event for the basketball game. I thought it was really sweet that he was trying to help us be more productive & less lame.
We were there for a little over an hour and only registered 3 people. On the bright side, those 3 people seemed really happy about it. Two of them even approached me! And one of them took an extra form for his aunt. Lots of the people I talked to said they had been registered in the past couple of days, either there at the bus stop or at the library. That was heartening.
After volunteering I was completely wiped out. (Have I ever mentioned that I'm painfully introverted? I've worked hard at overcoming it, but interacting with people still tires me out. And interacting with dozens of people who don't want to talk to me really tires me out). So I took some headache pills, then took a nap. And watched Bette Davis movies all evening.
Today I had my show, which was fun as always, and also did a couple of hours of weeding. It's kind of miserable to weed when the ground is all wet, but that's the best time to do it. The roots lift right out of the wet soil. Sometimes you can pull out a dandelion's entire tap root without any tools, just by gently tugging.
Also Georg and I had some excitement on the way home from the radio station. There was a dog wandering around in the middle of the road, and a couple of people trying to catch him. We pulled over to help as did several other people, and two cops also. The poor thing was some kind of hound, obviously terrified. He had a collar but no tag. We chased him off Main St. and made a loose circle around him on one of the side streets between Main and Hillsborough. He kept running in circles, back and forth, right past us but just out of reach. He wanted to stay near us but wouldn't get close enough for anyone to grab him. Eventually a K9 cop arrived with his dog. The stray came to the police dog, but still wouldn't let the cop close enough to touch him.
We had been there about 45 minutes when the cops announced that they were giving up. We left then too. The K9 cop was clearly an expert dog handler. If he couldn't get that dog, we sure couldn't. I appreciate their trying for so long. And I'm glad to live in a small enough town that the police would even care about a stray dog in the road. I still feel bad about the dog. I think I'm going to avoid driving on Hillsborough Road tomorrow. If he did get hit, I don't want to see the body.
1 Comments
moses says "thank-yew". he's doing scary sleep now, but that's okay, he's doing well.