What a relief!

Thank God that ended well! Am I right or am I right? I have to say that is the first time I voted for a winner. YAY ME! As I shared with you yesterday, and I know you were all sorts of jealous, I hung with the fam last night and we watched the results together.

When I got there after a hellish commute my big sis with her two little boys was already there and those boys were well on their way to creating havoc. That’s not completely true. But what is true is that when my mom asked Jared what kind of pizza he wanted he forcefully replied, “COOKIE!” Unfortunately, we were never able to convince him that there was no such thing as a “cookie pizza” regardless of how unbelievably cool that would be, so, needless to say, he was quite disappointed when the pizza came and there were no cookies on it as toppings. Travesty!

After we had chowed down on plenty of cheesy pizza and had plenty of delicious wine we started our game of election night bingo. It had typical sayings on it: voter turnout, concession speech, absentee ballots. Unfortunately, we were watching some of the Daily Show because the graphics on NBC scared us and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were talking about…well, not voter turnout. At one point (don’t ask me why) the phrase “Giant Shit Burger” was uttered. This caused my dad to scour his card only to find that it was nowhere to be found. We were not happy with that blatant oversight.

Also, I don’t think my mom really put a lot of thought into how last night would play out in terms of playing a game with my dad, my sister, and I. You see the three of us are extremely competitive and every time somebody would say a phrase that was somewhat close to one on our cards she would want to mark it off and all three of us would yell at her, “It’s not exact! It has to be the exact phrase.” I think at one point or possibly multiple times (I can’t really remember…blame it on the wine) I accused my mom of cheating. She did win after all. I would have more vehemently protested, but she was nice and shared the prize: a box of mint frangos. Nummy.

Later after we decided we’d stayed too late and couldn’t wait any longer for Obama’s speech my sis went to wake the boys and we gathered our stuff together. When she got downstairs she asked Jared which parent he wanted to go home with and he just kept staring at me causing us all to think he was on the brink of saying Auntie Megan! Which would have been the wrong answer…despite that we considered it for a second. Simply because it would have been funny for me to show up at home: Look, honey! I won election night bingo and the prize was a four year old boy. I wonder if he does any tricks.

I did my part. DID YOU DO YOURS?

I voted this morning. I was a good citizen. I was a bit freaked out last week because I thought I wouldn’t be able to vote. You see I am still registered at my parent’s house and I am supposed to be a “permanent absentee” voter, but they never received my absentee ballot. Then when I searched to see if I was still registered there King County had the gall to say I wasn’t registered at all. Wha???? It’s not like I haven’t voted before. PLUS I was active in the caucus and King County said I was registered then. I smelled something fishy. So I called them yesterday and for some unknown reason my voter status had been changed to “inactive”, but they said I could still vote. Wheee!!

So early this morning I headed to my voting place to find there was zero parking. After driving around a while I caught somebody leaving and was able to steal their spot. I headed on in to find the voting room filled to the brim – there was absolutely no room to move. None. Zilch. I was somewhat confused as to why they had it in this tiny little meeting room when in the past the voting was done in the junior high’s library. I guess they heard the voter turnout would be smaller this year? I don’t think Kenmore is very smart. Maybe that’s why we’re called Kenmorons…I went to the democratic caucus and they were far from prepared for that too. That was in the junior high cafeteria and people were so crowded together I have no doubt that is was a fire hazard. It was unbearably hot and nobody could hear you talk. Any time somebody had something to say they had to stand on top of a table and scream. Yep, not prepared at all.

Anycrap, I was finally able to get in line and, luckily for me, some crazy lady got in line right behind me. She was quite dressed up in a Christmas turtleneck and baggy sweatpants. She was also quite creepster in her insistence to speak to every small child there. You wouldn’t think there’d be a lot of small children, but, believe me, there were. In front of me was a mom with her ten year old daughter and her daughter was telling her how she thought that voting meant putting a candidate’s name on a piece of paper and putting it in a box. Creepster lady interjected here to say, excruciatingly slowly, “Well, little girl, that would work in a small election, but with millions and millions of people that would take a long time to count. Don’t you think?” It was unbearably condescending. I wanted to turn around and say she’s a kid, not retarded, but I thought that might be construed as offensive. To another little boy there she kept saying to him, “I bet you could walk right under that table! Walk under the table! Walk under it! Walk under the table!” Oh dear God, it was intolerable.

But I am happy to report that I survived without hurting creepy lady and am now at work anxiously watching the minutes tick by as I wait for the day to end so I can plop myself in front of the TV hooked to the results. I’m going to watch the coverage with my parents while we chow down on pizza and drink wine and play an exciting game of election night bingo that my very cool mom has put together for us.