Well, nearly voted. She’s filled out her ballot, for sure.
It took a while. And it took a spreadsheet. This was the first election we got to experience ranked choice voting.
I had to rank six candidates for mayor (a bit difficult, due to quality of candidates) and another six for the three District 2 representatives. 22 were running, but happily some of those 22 hadn’t submitted a statement to the voter’s pamphlet, which is my lowest bar to clear.
I’m excited to see how the ranked choice voting goes. I’m noticing that by ranking six candidates, my feelings of needing ONE person to win have dissipated. I look at that as progress.
Here you can see all my accruements for hydration at work.
The embroidered landing spot, my usual water vessel, a new thermos (much too large because I bought it online and didn’t properly visualize the size), and the cute mug that Danielle got to welcome me to the library.
Too-large thermos notwithstanding, this has all come together nicely. When I leave work, I tuck it all in a two-drawer file cabinet, so others can use the space for their own beverage station.
We emptied the living room of furniture and borrowed a few folding tables and chairs to seat all the people who came to Friendsgiving. Sara and Shawn surprised me by driving up from Arcata. It was great fun.
I’ve been scanning my grandfather’s slides and he was a fan of the far away photo, so I took a few photos as he would:
The slightly out of focus table.
The back-of-the-head table.
The way-far-away table.
I then had Kelly take the official photo, but forgot to fix the camera before I passed it on to her. Here’s the no-glasses version (I was quite hot and my glasses kept fogging up, so I took them off.)
What did I do for my birthday? I made a really big cake! And then had a Friendsgiving to invite people to help me eat it. Here are some stages of this cake:
Individually wrapped and frozen layers with cardboard rounds in between to give me an idea of the final height:
With filling added. The top was fruit filling, and the bottom two layers were chocolate.
With buttercream layer after I dropped the top layer while stacking.
The final cake, fully decorated, with buttercream on the top layer repaired.
It was quite the adventure, making this cake, and honestly, I wasn’t pleased with the final results. But I think I like planning to make a large cake rather than the product of the planning. And people ate it happily, so that was good.
Thanks for the Decorette Shop in Tigard for supplying me with all the things I needed to make this cake, including those stars and candles.
There is so much discussion of cats in this election. I’d rather hear about candidates plans to improve healthcare, but since I don’t get that, this poster made me laugh.
Scares and Squares is the Rosetown Ramblers annual fly-in. While I enjoy the dancing, it usually falls on my birthday weekend, and I don’t love that. However! this year they moved the weekend of dance to the second Saturday weekend, which was great!
Aside from really fun dancing, I volunteered for check-in on Saturday morning. Ted was running the 50/50 raffle and setting up ticket packs. I don’t remember the exact breakdown, but for the raffle, your dollar gets you 10 tickets, and five dollars gets you an even bigger number. So, to save time, Ted pulls out 10 tickets, separates the keep-this-coupon ticket from the drawing tickets, tears each drawing ticket, and then stacks the whole thing in a neat pile that is held together with a rubber band. That way, when someone hands over a dollar it’s very easy to hand them their half of the tickets, and drop the entry tickets in the bucket.
As we were both sitting at the same table, I also helped set up ticket packs. While we worked, we discussed the differences between the different colored rolls of tickets (they very much varied in quality!) and techniques for quicker packaging. As I observed to Matt, it was not unlike temping, where there is a boring task, but that task can be broken down into steps and those steps improved. Plus, Ted is fun to talk to.
At the Saturday evening dance, Ted came over to show me yet another satisfying part of the process: getting to the end of a ticket roll.
When I am in the office, I sit next to the lost and found. Today I noticed that someone had lost a sticker.
It is, of course, Alfredo Linguini and Remy the rat, stars of Ratatouille and Carmy Berzatto and the bear, stars of the Bear, the series that has most of the country saying, “Yes, chef!”
