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In Maryland I was told that absentee ballots are not counted, unless a race is so close that the absentee ballots might change the outcome.

Is this true in North Carolina? If so, is it also true of early voting, aka "One Stop Absentee Ballots"?

If it's true of early voting, then I'm very unhappy, because that's what I've done for the past 2 elections. Even if it's only true of mail-in absentee ballots, that deeply undercuts the argument that we should all vote absentee to create a paper record of our vote. Because in effect, instead of risking that our votes might not be counted, we would be ensuring that they will not be counted. I think this would be especially problematic if you were voting for a third party candidate which needed a certain percent of the vote for ballot access next time around.

The drive back to NC was not too bad. The rain slowed me down but there was hardly any traffic. I stopped at Ikea for a few things. They are the best deal going on crazy cool fabric. Also got a new bed for Jane, which she refuses to lie on. I guess she misses her flattened down dirty old bed.

In future political volunteering I'd like to do a few things differently. For one thing, this is the second election day I've spent knocking on doors, and have accomplished absolutely zero. Everyone says they've already voted and it ends up feeling like a waste of time. In my limited experience, knocking on doors before election day seems more effective. Although the people at the party office seemed really worked up about it. I may try to read up on how much it really helps, and maybe look into other options for election day activities.

Also I'm not sure about the phone bank. People seemed so angry about the flood of calls.
It seems like it would be better to start earlier and try to establish a connection with people, rather than hammering them with a dozen phone calls in the days before the election. But again, the people in charge were convinced it was the best approach. And Cardin won, so who am I to argue?

Back home it's a bad day to be extremely conservative, extremely nuts, or both.

All the candidates I liked won, and all the candidates I loathed lost. What is this strange emotion I'm experiencing? Could it be .. optimism? Like any good high, it won't last long, but damn it feels good right now.

This morning I was obsessing over the last minute polls, the alarming stories of "tightening" in many races, most especially the Cardin-Steele race, and wondering if disrupting my life for a week was even accomplishing anything. Yes, as it turns out, it was worth it.

I think I made the right call to work for the Cardin campaign rather than the Casey campaign. Casey clobbered Santorum, he clearly didn't need help. But the margin for Cardin was close enough that I can feel like I made a difference. In reality, I probably didn't. How much difference can any one person make, especially someone at the lowest level of volunteering? But still, I feel better about working for a close campaign than an overwhelming victory.

Today was much better than yesterday. Mainly because they sent me out partnered with other people. So even though I spent all day canvassing, everything went fast and I didn't get nearly as tired. It's harder to be by yourself: I would park the car at one end of the neighborhood and then walk the whole route. But with someone else, you can start at one end of the street, have them drive to the other end, and meet in the middle.

I spent the afternoon in Havre de Grace -- beautiful little historic town -- with Tom,* an interesting guy who works at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. It was good to hear the perspective of a career military man on the war. (In short, he thinks it's been criminally mismanaged.) At one point we were walking around and heard a loud booming sound. I looked up, thinking "oh no, a thunderstorm is rolling in!" He chuckled and told me it was a gun from over at Aberdeen. He even knew what it was by the sound; I think he said a "155" but don't quote me on that.

*not his real name, as he said they never discuss politics at work so I don't want to post statements about his political opinions on the internets.

After Havre de Grace I took a quick break for lunch and then they sent me out with a woman named Peg, to a neighborhood in Bel Air. We got about halfway through the neighborhood when we ran into another team doing the exact same packet! It was kind of embarrassing; we walked up to the same house at the same time as they did. I think they were supposed to do them earlier in the day, leaving hang-tags on doors, and then we were supposed to come back through and make sure people had voted. But they were several hours behind. I don't know if they were just slow, or if the coordinators had overloaded them. Based on my experience, probably the latter.

The other team told us that they had just finished the neighborhood, and we decided it would be pointless to knock on the same doors 10 minutes after them, so we went back to the party office. Peg called it a night, saying she didn't want to drive in the rain, but it was only 5:30 so I stayed to do more. Sam, one of the volunteer coordinators, tried to get me to go with him to Edgewood, which I had heard of as a bad neighborhood, and I didn't like that idea at all. Luckily Marc, the other volunteer coordinator, ran in just then and told me he had a woman who needed a partner. Her name was Joan and she was a hoot. She was a teacher and we were in a neighborhood where her students lived, so she knew everyone. We'd get to a street and she'd run down the list crossing people off: "he moved, she's not home tonight, he's out volunteering, she definitely already voted..." It made things go a lot faster.

We had only been out for about a half hour when Marc called and asked us to come back, so we could go to another district that was showing low turnout. I thought he said Baltimore City, at which Joan was irate, because that would be a 45 minute drive away from us. She called her daughter who was working at the Cardin campaign, and reassured us that "they pay canvassers to go where they might get killed" and no one was going to send volunteers like us to Baltimore City. Turns out Marc actually said Baltimore County, much closer to Bel Air. Except that when we got back to the party office, Marc announced that they would be sending us, along with 3 other people, to Towson. Which is apparently also 45 minutes away.

Seeing as it was already 6:30 by that point, no one had much enthusiasm. In fatc I'd describe the reaction as "trying to calm Marc down long enough to explain why we aren't going." I simply said no, I lived a hour north of there and no way was I going to go another 45 minutes south. The others convinced Marc that we didn't lack dedication, but by the time we got there it would be too late to accomplish anything. So he called the Cardin people back and told them that we would be sent to a low turnout district in Harford County instead.

By some cool coincidence, he sent us to the exact same neighborhood in Aberdeen where I had been on Sunday afternoon. I had kind of mixed feelings about that actually. On the one hand, I knew where we were going and I remembered people as being really nice. On the other, I was disappointed that turnout had been low there. Had I done a bad job of canvassing on Sunday? I left there thinking that everyone was really enthusiastic about voting. Then again, each district comprises several neighborhoods so maybe the folks I talked to did vote like they said they were going to.

I was walking with a really nice fellow named Pat. He had a somewhat different style of approaching people than I did. My style was "short and sweet" -- keep it fast so as to impose on people as little as possible. By Tuesday afternoon it was just "Hi, have you voted yet today? Great, have a good day!" Pat liked to establish a connection by addressing the person by name, introducing himself and me, and talking at more length. I think his approach was maybe less efficient when we're down to the wire, but probably more effective earlier in the GOTV campaign. Next time I do this, I'll try to adopt more of his way of connecting with people.

Unfortunately, all the back-and-forth wrangling about where we were going to go had taken so much time, that we didn't get there until almost 7:30. Which was too late to visit even half the packet. We walked a few blocks, talked to a few people, and then realized that even if we found someone who admitted to not having voted yet, we might not being able to get them to the polls in time. So we bailed.

On the way home I treated myself to dinner at the Charcoal Pit. Dang that is a good burger. According to the menu they grind their own beef. I probably should have skipped dessert, but who can resist the hot fudge ice cream cake?

It's weird to think that it's all over. No more driving up route 155 on my way to Bel Air. No more "Hi, my name is Sarah and I'm a volunteer with the Maryland Democratic Party." No more of that stupid $5 toll bridge. Tomorrow I drive back to Durham, and then back to work on Thursday.

So, 2008, the campaign of whoever is running against Dole. Who's with me?

One funny thing that I forgot to mention. This afternoon while I was on phone bank duty, two teenage girls came in to help. The older sister was pretty good at it, picked up pretty quickly on how to sound natural and engage the person on the line. But the younger sister ... well her heart was in the right place. She would plunge into the script in a breathless monotone with absolutely no pauses or changes in intonation. It was like she was giving a speech while running through a graveyard and holding her breath.

"hello - my - name - is - alison* - and - i - am - a - volunteer - with - the - maryland - democractic - party - i - am - calling - to - make - sure - you - get - out - and - vote - this - tuesday - november - 7th - this - election - is - extremely - close - and - your - vote - is - crucial - can - we - count - on - you - to - vote - for - democrats - ben - cardin - and - martin - o'malley"

It's hard to express tone in writing, but imagine the above spoken very fast by a 12 year old girl robot. I thought it was adorable but I can see how it would be weird to actually get a call like that. Keep in mind that by now, the rest of us had talked to so many irate voters that we'd shortened our scripts to about half that length. That poor girl read the whole thing, word for word. She even read out the "this Tuesday, November 7th," even though that's tomorrow.

Unfortunately she didn't last long. I'm not surprised really. A girl her age probably has way too thin a skin to deal with cold calling. I hope they found something more fun for her to do.

*not her real name.

Today was a craptacular day, which turned out to be worth it in the end.

The main thing I learned today is that Monday morning is a much worse time for canvassing than Sunday afternoon. No one is home, and the few people who are home are in no mood to come to the door.

One woman stands out in particular: she got to the door after I had given up, stuck a flyer in the door and walked away, back to the sidewalk. I was already in front of the next house when the door opened. She stood in the open door and waited for me to walk back up to her door, then thrust the flyer at me, snapped "I don't vote!" and slammed the door on my apology. Think about that. She stood in the open door and waited for me to walk all the way back so she could slam the door in my face. You know, I realize that I'm intruding in people's lives and I try not to resent the ones who are rude to me. But I have to say, what a miserable bitch. She couldn't just throw the flyer away and get on with her life? I hope that someday, if she ever has to do something that she really doesn't enjoy, but she's doing it anyway because she believes in it, that no one treats her the way she treated me.

That was the worst rude person I encountered but not the only one. Also, they gave me way too much canvassing for one person -- almost 150 addresses that I was supposed to get through by myself in just a couple of hours. And one of the packets was for a sketchy neighborhood, where I was really uncomfortable being alone. It's funny because when I got there and got out of my car, I heard two young women talking about me, but not in a nice way like the two girls yesterday. They said "she's in the wrong place, she'll be sorry if she goes up there!" I wondered what was their problem, and I actually doubled back to make sure they left my car alone. Which they did. Then when I got a couple of blocks away, I realized that she was right. I was sorry to be up there by myself. I wish I could say her warning was kindly meant, but I don't think it was. It had a kind of smirky schadenfreude sound to it.

Anyway, just when I was feeling tired and sorry for myself and wondering what I was doing out there, the phone bank volunteer coordinator called to ask why I hadn't shown up for my shift. I confess, I kind of snapped at her. I apologized when I got back to the party office, and she was really nice about it. She seems much more understanding than the other guy, at least about putting limits on what you ask of a volunteer. The other guy seems to feel like whatever you can strong-arm someone into accepting, that must be a reasonable amount of work for them to do.

So then in the afternoon I did phone bank. The people on the receiving end of our calls seemed so annoyed that I spent much of the time wondering if we were doing more harm than good. One of the other volunteers actually got up and left in the middle of the shift for exactly that reason. She said she couldn't do it anymore because she didn't think it was accomplishing anything positive.

I asked the people in charge about this, and one guy told me the craziest thing: He said it's a deliberate strategy to overwhelm people with calls. Because it means they're getting the message. Sure, if the message is "we're annoying and we don't respect your time." He said that it would be bad if the call volume and frustration level had peaked on Thursday, but to have it peaking today was exactly what we want.

I must say, I do not agree with this logic at all. But then again, I'm not the expert. I guess we'll know tomorrow whether it worked.

Here's the funniest part: That volunteer coordinator who told me about this policy, walked through the phone bank while several of us were having the same conversation. It went like this: "Hi, I'm a volunteer with the Maryland Democratic Party.... Oh, I'm so sorry. I'll tell the system to take your phone number off the list. Sorry to take up your time." (Over half the calls I took went like that, if I even got that far before they hung up on me.) His response was to chide us that it was okay to promise to take people off the call list, but that we should still finish the call by reminding them to vote Democrat! Sheesh! He happened to be standing right next to me, and I told him that if I had a person say "For god's sake, I keep telling you that I'm voting for the Democrats, please stop calling me," I was not going to close the call with "Don't forget to vote Democrat!" It reminded me of the mayor on The Simpsons blurting out "Vote Quimby!" at every opportunity, no matter how inopportune. (Then again Quimby does get re-elected every time.)

I kept track of the numbers during the afternoon, to pass the time. Note: these number don't add up because some people were in more than 1 column. Also, I didn't count calls where I had nothing but dead air or an answering machine. If I could hear the "click" of someone hanging up on me, I counted that call.

105 calls (for 3 hours, this was a pretty low call volume. I spent many idle minutes waiting for the phone to give me a call)
46 "yes I will vote Democrat" (some of these sounded like they were just saying anything to get me off the phone)
59 people I punched in "rude" to get them off the phone list
9 actively rude people (not including people who simply hung up on me; these were the people who took the extra effort to say something rude)
2 "I'm voting Republican"
2 "undecided"
3 "not voting"
7 "already voted"
10 non-English speakers
1 fax line
1 "needs ride to poll"
4 nice people

There were also a few calls that didn't fit into any categories, like the poor woman who told me she couldn't vote because she had fallen down. I asked her if she meant right now, and she said yes, she had just fallen down. I kept asking her if she needed me to call an ambulance and she was a little incoherent, but eventually she got across that her nephew was with her and she didn't need a doctor, but she wasn't going to be leaving the house tomorrow. I hope she's okay.

I found that 1 nice person got me through 10 rude people or hang-ups. Which meant that there were almost enough nice people to make the afternoon go okay. The nice people were really, really nice though. One of them told me that she knew how hard cold calling was and thanked me for doing it. I swear, after the day I'd had, I almost cried when she said that.

The best call was the woman who needed a ride to the poll. It was a sad story: she told me her husband had died in May, and that he had done all the driving, and the two of them had voted together every year. She seemd really happy and grateful that I had called. I told her that I was going to punch in a code and then someone would call her back to arrange her ride, but since I didn't know when that would happen, she insisted on giving me her name and phone number. I gave it to the nice volunteer coordinator who promised to call party headquarters in the woman's area (Baltimore City) and arrange her ride. Now I know that one person is going to vote because of me, who wouldn't have otherwise. That makes the whole miserable day worthwhile.

Tomorrow they did have me scheduled for 12 hours of canvassing, but I told the nice coordinator that wasn't going to work, and she cut it down to 8 hours. So I don't have to be there until noon. I also told her that if they sent me to another bad neighborhood, especially after dark, I was going to leave. She promised me that she would be on top of that tomorrow. She didn't say it explicitly but I think she meant that the two guys hadn't been thinking about canvasser safety, but that she was & wouldn't let it happen again.

Spent all day knocking on doors today. Mostly in Aberdeen, which you've probably heard of if you ever drive up I-95. It was the perfect day for it: sunny, crisp but not cold; in a nice neighborhood where I felt safe being by myself, not ritzy but comfortable and homey, with nice gardens; the houses were close enough together that I could walk the whole route; and the people were friendly and mostly home. When the guy sent me out he told me "this neighborhood is critical," and when I got there I realized that by "critical" he meant "brown." About 3/4 of the people who answered their doors were African American.

Unlike phone bank duty, where I shortened the script, while knocking on doors I abandoned the script. It sounds so canned, and I hate to make people stand there while I recite my stupid prepared statement. Instead I just said hi, I'm with the Democratic Party, just here to make sure you're going to vote on Tuesday. If they said yes then I thanked them very much, chatted if they wanted to, and then moved on. If they said no then I found out why, thanked them for their time, and moved on. The few people who said they were not going to vote never provided a reason with which I could argue. Mostly it was vaguely angry men who didn't like any of the choices available to them. If I were speaking on my own behalf, at that point I would ask them if they had considered a third party. But I don't feel comfortable doing that when I'm there as a representative of the Democratic Party. And besides, I don't even know the name of the Libertarian Senate candidate in Maryland. There was also one woman who had just become a citizen but not in time to register to vote. She seemed bummed about it and I felt very bad for her. She told me she would definitely register before the election next year.

One really funny thing happened: while I was walking around knocking on doors, two girls passed me, maybe 10-12 years old. They were laughing and talking ostensibly to each other, but loud enough that they clearly wanted me to hear. One of them said "She better not come to my house if she's a Jehovah's Witness! Better not come to [address redacted]! Better not bother my daddy saying 'have a blessed day!'" It sounds hostile written down like that, but it really wasn't. They were laughing good-naturedly, joking about whether or not I was a Jehovah's Witness. They rounded the corner ahead of me, since of course they weren't stopping to knock on doors like I was.

I followed them around the corner, and coincidentally I had just finished a circuit of the neighborhood and my car was right there. They went gaga over it, screaming about how cool it was and how it was "the shit" and whose car could it be. They looked up and saw me, and the one girl yelled "It must be her car; she looks just like it!" I hasten to add that I did not in fact look just like my car. I have several outfits that match my car, for art car events, but I wasn't wearing one today. I was wearing a plain dark sweater and skirt, my striped Sock Dreams knee socks over white tights, and my red striped hat and matching scarf. But I guess she meant that I had the same colorful aesthetic as my car. Which, I must say, is the nicest thing anyone's said to me in a long time.

When I got up to the girls I told them that yes, it was my car, but no, I was not a Jehovah's Witness. The more talkative girl asked me, "Well then what are you?" "A Democrat," I replied. (Not true, but it served the purpose.) "What does that mean?" she asked. More truthfully I said "It means the Democratic Party sent me here to make sure people vote." She told me that her parents were Democrats, at least she thought so, and they vote every year. I asked her where she lived and she told me the address, which was not on my list. She asked if that meant they weren't Democrats, and I said "no, it just means you're not on my list. And," I added, "it means I won't be bothering your dad."

We chatted for a few minutes more, mostly about the car of course. The other girl, who didn't say much, complimented my socks. So I told her they came from SockDreams.com. She's probably too young to be shopping online but I'm happy to recommend Sock Dreams to anyone who asks.

So that was pretty much my day. I really liked that neighborhood and as it turns out, I'll be going back there tomorrow. Because they didn't give me enough flyers and I ran out before I finished the neighborhood. They gave me another packet for the next neighborhood over, and a huge stack of flyers. I'll go back to Aberdeen first thing tomorrow, finish that neighborhood and do the next one, and then head in to the party office in Bel Air to switch over to phone duty. That will save me a lot of time since Aberdeen is right off I-95, but a good 20 minutes from Bel Air.

Oh, I forgot to mention that on the way to Aberdeen I stumbled onto a cool looking shiny diner called The New Ideal Diner. I had to stop there, no question about it. So I saved my sandwich for tomorrow and had a cheese steak. It was made of hamburger, which is a big no-no for a "real" cheese steak. But it was still tasty. The place was full of older people who seemed to know the staff very well. I very much agree with this review that the food was pleasant but nothing to write home about. Still, it was a good experience, what with the cool building and very nice staff. I'd stop there again if I were on a road trip, around that part of I-95, and hungry. Well actually, I'd probably just wait an hour and go to the Charcoal Pit on Concord Pike in Delaware. But if there were some reason why I couldn't wait an hour, or if the Charcoal Pit were closed or if I were going the other direction.

Now, I am very tired. Especially my feet. Tomorrow is going to be a much longer day. Time to rest now.

Before this morning, I had no idea how a phone bank worked. Now that I've used one, here's my marginally helpful advice on stopping those annoying phone calls:

• First the most effective preventative: do not register with a political party. They generally only call people from their own party. Georg and I are both registered independant and we've only gotten 1 phone call this election cycle. Of course, in some states this prevents you from voting in a primary. In NC we can choose which primary to vote in each year. So registering independant is the ideal solution for us.

• If you're registered with a party and you're getting inundated with calls, do not hang up on the caller. I'm sure every system is different, but in Maryland one response code covers "hangup," "answering machine" and "phone answered by child." In all cases, you will be called again.

• Definitely do not say you haven't decided who to vote for, if you don't want to be called again.

• In fact the sad news is that, in Maryland at least, there is only one response code that guarantees you will not be called back: "rude." I'm not suggesting that you should be rude. (Especially not if I'm the poor sap who calls you!) I realize even as I make these calls that they are rude by their nature, but as Miss Manners would say, it's not okay to respond to rudeness with rudeness. The trick is to get the caller to punch in "rude" without actually being rude.

As you can probably tell, I was a little ambivalent about spending hours rudely interrupting people's Saturday morning to nag them about voting. I tried to minimize the hassle as much as I could: first, I added "do you have a moment?" to the beginning of my call, where the script wanted me to go right into my questions without giving them a chance to stop me. About 75% of people said no, they didn't have a moment, and so I apologized for taking up their time and ended the call immediately. (Actually a good percentage of people said "no" and then hung up on me before I could apologize and end the call, which bummed me out, but I tried not to take it personally. For all they knew, I was going to ignore them and launch into my script anyway, so I can't really blame them for cutting me off.)

Also I punched in "rude" for everyone who seemed like they didn't want to be called again: people who sounded exasperated, people who said they'd been called before, people who hung up on me, people who said they didn't have time to talk, etc. I probably had the highest percentage of "rudes" of anyone on the phone bank, but at least I got those people off the phone list. At least, I hope I did! It's hard to know for sure, but that's how they told me it worked.

I thought we would be sitting there with a list, calling phone numbers and then crossing them off, but it wasn't like that at all. We just held the phone nonstop, while a computer called people's numbers. Every time it got someone, my phone would beep. Sometimes I would hear the person say "hello" and sometimes I wouldn't. Either way I was supposed to start my script as soon as I heard the beep. It was a little disconcerting at first, but I got used to it pretty quick.

When the call was over we weren't supposed to hang up; that would disconnect the computer and you'd have to log back in again. Instead you pressed star to disconnect, and then the computer would prompt you to type in a number to indicate how the call had gone. The codes were "yes" (is going to vote Democrat), "undecided," "no," "needs ride to poll" (I never got any of these), "needs to know polling location" (I only had one of these), "rude," and "hangup, answering machine, answered by child."

During my lunch break they added codes for "split ticket" and "already voted," but they confusingly added them in the middle and then changed the codes for several existing options. Which led to me punching in "needs ride to poll" for three people for whom I meant to punch "rude"! Whoops! I'm so sorry, you three people who hung up on me. I tried to stop future calls for you, but instead I made things worse.

I wish they would have added a code for "Spanish speaker," so that a Spanish speaking volunteer could call those people back. Although now that I think about it, you have to speak English to become a citizen, right? So maybe it's not worth their time to pursue people who can't have a phone conversation in English, since they probably can't vote. In any case I punched in "rude" on those folks so they wouldn't be bothered again.

Since the computer made all the calls, you literally never put the phone down. Just sit and wait while it dials numbers -- sometimes a few seconds, sometimes a couple of minutes -- and then start talking as soon as it beeps. They gave us stacks of flyers to sort into piles of 25 in between calls. If you had to go to the bathroom, you were supposed to get someone to take over for you while you were gone. After about an hour my ear hurt!

Like I said most people blew me off, but there were a few interesting calls. One lady actually offered to volunteer, which kind of blew my mind. I told her to look up her county Democratic party office in the phone book, and I also punched in "needs to know polling location" for her to make sure someone would call her back. One lady said she wasn't going to vote, and when I asked her why, she said that she sometimes voted, but then she felt guilty if she voted for the wrong person, so it was easier not to vote at all. I couldn't really answer that logic. And don't they always turn out to be the wrong person?

I also talked to a few registered Republicans, who were all very amused and good-natured. In each case we had a good laugh about it, I apologized for taking up their time, and then let them go. Only one guy was truly rude to me: before I had even finished the sentence "Hi, I'm a volunteer with the Maryland Democratic Party," he shouted "I'm not voting, I'm not voting, I'm not voting!" about 5 times and then hung up. Again, that kind of bummed me out but since I have no idea how many times he'd been called, I can't really blame him for being so annoyed.

In the afternoon I went door to door. Which was a little depressing because it showed me concretely how deeply Republican Harford county is. (I had already guessed by the signage, almost all Republican, I had seen on the way in.) I was driving from house to house because the density of Democratic households was so low, it was too far to walk. On the bright side, they sent me out by myself and I listened to my audio book in the car.

I heard the guy in charge of canvassing say that for every household they've identified as a supporter, they want to knock on that door four times before the election. Four times? Is that really effective? Wouldn't it be a better use of resources to broaden the contacts to independants and undecideds, instead of annoying the faithful with repeated visits? Then again, what do I know? I'm not the expert on "get out the vote." Maybe hammering people with visit after visit does encourage them to vote.

I'm in Wilmington. The drive was uneventful, except for bad construction-related traffic in southern Delaware. I'm a little concerned about having to drive through that every day while I'm here. My hope is that the worst traffic will be heading towards Wilmington in the morning and away from it in the evening, which is the opposite of the way I'll be going.

Not to mention $9 worth of tolls a day. Sheesh! I may try to find an alternate route to avoid that bridge in northeastern Maryland. Another route would take longer, but the toll is only on the northbound side. I could stay on 95 on my way down in the morning, then find another route going home in the evening. That would save me $5 every day.

Tonight I'm just chilling. I didn't get to bed until late last night, and the dogs woke me early, and I am tired! Tomorrow morning I have to leave bright and early to get to Bel Air by 9:30. I saw the 95 exit on my way up, and it's going to be a a good hour plus whatever delays the construction traffic may cause. I'll split my time tomorrow between phone calls and door-to-door. I hear that registered Democrats in some areas are on the receiving end of an onslaught of phone calls. Starting tomorrow it looks like I'll be part of the problem! If you live in Harford County, Maryland, I apologize in advance.

Got another phone call from Maryland tonight. This one was to confirm that I would be there tomorrow afternoon for my 4 hour canvassing shift. No, I won't; I'll be driving up tomorrow. Good thing she called!

While I had her on the phone I asked her about my Saturday schedule. They had asked me to work 12 to 8, and to be there at 10:30 for training. I asked her if she really thought the training was going to take an hour and a half. She said that it wouldn't, and changed my schedule to 10-4, with training at 9:30.

I'm much happier about this schedule. I have to admit I was kind of dreading working from 10:30 - 8, with an hour+ drive each way. Maybe I can talk them into scheduling me earlier on Sunday too.

I said before that the Maryland people seemed less organized than the Pennsylvania people, but I realized today that the Casey people seem to have forgotten about me. I faxed them a volunteer form and emailed them a couple of times, and they called me once, but I didn't call back and I never heard from them again. Totally unlike the Maryland people, who have been burning up the phone lines to call me over and over. I didn't tell the Casey people I changed my mind about going up there, but they never followed up. I guess they're either so overwhelmed with volunteers that they don't need me. Or maybe they're killing Santorum so badly that they don't need me. Or maybe they're just disorganized.

In other news, it turns out I'll be in Delaware during the punkin chunkin, but of course I won't be able to attend. Ah well, timing is everything.