Election day recap, a million years later

Election day has come and gone. As Joe pointed out, this means the end of the political commercials and the start of the cheesy holiday jewelry ads.

Yay.

Eliminating all "He went to Jared's!" commercials is going to be top of my Santa list this year. Say it with me: "Yes, we can!"

Back to election day. This was my first year working the polls and I'm glad I did, though my stomach and thighs may not agree. If you ever want to volunteer, I highly recommend bringing lots of nutritious snacks, otherwise you might end up eating like this:

1. one Krispy Kreme doughnut
2. three dark chocolate Hershey nuggets
3. one apple
4. two mini Heath bars
5. one Chick-Fil-A chicken sandwich
6. 87 peanut M&M's
7. one large Mcdonald's sweet tea (my drug of choice)
   
8. then finally, Breakdown Enchiladas
9. one ginormous glob of gooey chocolate brownies
   

Add in exhaustion and the fear of losing your mental sanity and you might end up like me: sick with a head cold and napping 17 extra hours by the weekend. Let me take this opportunity to say I love my husband who takes care of me.

I also love Joe because he volunteered with me, even though unlike me, he did not dreamed of working the polls since he was a little boy.

Boggle and working the polls. Acts of love, people. Acts of love.

But I really really do recommend working the polls at least once. It was pretty amazing to watch democracy in action.

Like the man who arrived by 5:15 a.m., still didn't vote by 6:45 a.m., left for work and returned at 5:30 p.m. to cast his vote.

Or the woman whose eyesight was so bad, God bless her, she spoiled three ballots before getting it right. But her vote counts just as much as anybody else who got their ballot right the first time.

Or the 18-year-old girl who was so excited to vote for the first time but was incredibly nervous about messing it up. Which, I assured her, would be difficult to do after 4-ballot lady.

But I would like to share two things I learned last Tuesday:

1. It is possible to go to a college preparatory high school, graduate with an undergraduate degree in journalism, consider yourself a spelling fanatic, but by 9 a.m. on election day, begin questioning everything you thought you knew about the English alphabet. Like, if "S" maybe comes before "R" and "MY WORD, doesn't 'U' go after 'W'?!".
2. Make sure you have a really good handle on counting to 100. Repeatedly. It will happen so many times that your head might explode if it thinks, "67, 68, 69, 60 - shooooot!!!" one more time. Trust me, counting becomes easier said than done.

I'm just sayin'.