voting is totally awesome!!

I got to the polling place at 10 after 6am, and there were 7 people already lined up ahead of me.

Once the polls opened, I took my time ensuring that each oval was perfectly filled in so as not to cause any potential for mis-reading (or mis-scanning??) by the machine. I thought there was going to be an initiative on the ballot about unionized labor but no such item was on my ballot. Oh well. I voted for the environmental funding and for the chitlins' edumacation funding increases. The back of the ballot had something like 30+ judges to vote for, most of whom were running unopposed. Admittedly, I left many of these blank but managed to fill in a handful of ovals on that side in races about which I was at least nominally aware.

Other than that it was shout-outs for Obama, that dude Keith and big Al cause it'd be sweet to see a democratically held, filibuster-proof congress. I listened to a right-wing commentator being interviewed on NPR last night; she shared her concern that such a circumstance in concert with an Obama presidency would move the US away from what she called a center-right United States over the last 20/30 years and toward a European style Social Democracy. So OK -- I will vote to make this happen crusty old lady. Thanks!