Ramblings of a rural(ish) geek

foo. :(

There is a distinct probability that I will be co-chair of the live floor on Tuesday's election, rather than a minion in the AVCB. The person (N) who is scheduled as co-chair (with DC) has a mother-in-law in hospice as of Thursday AM. I do not approve of either of these statements. (N's MIL is a very nice lady.)

(not that I mind being competent, I just don't wanna be in charge.)

And BossClerk is starting to hunt for a replacement for DC, who has announced that she will be resigning as DC after the November election. I cannot be DC, as I do not live in that township (this is a feature, not a bug). She asked me, and I told her that I have no idea -- I haven't worked a live floor election since 2017 and I don't know the newer election workers.

(odd, that)

I missed last Tuesday's Livingston rehearsal because I was at Hill Auditorium for the Emanuel Ax/YoYo Ma/Leonadis Kavakos concert. It was worth missing a rehearsal, even though I will miss at least one more before the concert (I will be working the Election, and rehearsals are Tuesday evenings). The music in that ensemble is straightforward enough that I can miss another rehearsal and still perform well.

This week was the first week that I've been to rehearsals for both bands in the same week since the beginning of the year -- scheduled school holiday/snow days/TimeFail have wreaked havoc with my schedule, but I should be good until Election week, in which I will miss both rehearsals. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Last weekend we ran off to Capricon in Chicago. The con was good, we hung out with our friends, actually went to some programming, ate lots of restaurant meals (we walked to all of them, because the convention was downtown, so that was nice). It was good driving weather both ways, which is also nice.

I've been doing a lot of video training for working Early Voting (as mandated by the new Michigan voting laws), and there's so many things that we Just Don't Know about how it's all going to work. At the same time, I've been sending out absent voter ballots. BossClerk wants to know when the AV counting board should start, and I'm like "dunno, man. Depends on how many ballots we get back. Right now, we've got maybe three hours worth of ballots. If all of the ballots that we've sent out come back, we might have five hours of work. But some of them won't come back. And we may send out a lot of ballots next week." (again with the shrug.)

The cats are pleased by the change in weather -- they like the sun. They will be annoyed next week when it gets cloudy again.

processing of absent voter ballots continues. We convinced the county that NC needed more help than we could give her, and the county has sent over their star training crew; and the nearby town (which does not have an election this time around) has contributed trained election inspectors for election day and people to help in the office before the election. We may be done helping out there -- which is good, because we've got our own election to run. NC and her deputy are both smart and catch on fast, but there's just so much that they don't know....

The daffodils in the front garden are beginning to bloom today -- the sun is out and it's not very windy, so they're quite happy. We got a lot of rain last week/early this week, and it's still too wet for me to go work in the gardens. Maybe tomorrow, but probably not until Sunday.

Today I am doing laundry. I'd like to change the sheets on the bed, but there is currently a black hole on the bed, and I'd rather have him there than grumping at me because he'd rather be on the other side of the door. At some point, he'll wander out for food and I will both notice him *and* remember that I wanted to change the sheets....

The Washtenaw County portion of the partial recount of MI 22-3 was finished in one day. 28 teams counted 44 precincts worth of ballots in one day. Teams started being released at 4pm as they finished up a precinct because there were no more precincts to be counted. Ann Arbor voters have really embraced Absent Voting -- for every precinct there were two units of ballots to be counted, In Person and Absent, and other than the campus precincts the AV unit was usually double the In Person unit. The team I was on did four units, two In Person and two AV, 450/370/500/750. The process was easy, but required paying attention at all stages. Make sure the seal number on the ballot container matches the number that the poll workers put in the book when they finished on Election Night; count the ballots in the container to make sure that all the ballots are there; sort ballots into piles (Yes/No/Other); count the piles; put the ballots back in the container; reseal the container. There were theoretically challengers at the recount, but we only had one pair at our table ever, and one of them had no idea what she was looking at or what we were doing. "why is this seal number crossed out?" "because that's the seal that was on the ballot container when we got it. we put a new seal on the container after we counted the ballots and the new number is in the book. you watched us do it." The challengers were only authorized to challenge votes, not the recount procedure, although she really wanted to make it about the procedure.

I spent a couple of hours on the phone with ATT last week, trying to figure out why we couldn't make long distance phone calls. I talked to people at ATT local, at Ameritech, at ATT longdistance. The most annoying was the person at Ameritech who tried to tell me that the reason I couldn't call out is because we're still on copper lines. "why is this my fault?" I asked her. "I pay for telephone service, I expect it to work. If it doesn't work, I expect you to fix it." She didn't want to answer that question, and was very glad to shift me off to Ameritech repair, who slotted us in at their next available appointment. Tuesday. When I expected to be off counting ballots, and J had to be at work for meetings. "Can I change it?" "sure, how's Jan 2" "never mind. we'll make Tuesday work" Then the tech showed up (at 8:30), opened the tombstone, fiddled a connector, and viola! long distance telephone service. He was gone by 9am, which is about when J left for work. The tech is based out of Chelsea, and has given us the direct line to the local dispatcher, so the next time it happens we can skip the whole rigamarole and get it fixed the next business day. Apparently, the connector is somewhat susceptible to mice/snakes using it to climb inside the tombstone, and it literally takes longer to open and close the tombstone than to make the fix.

The FCB Christmas concert is Sunday. We'd reserved the stage at NFHS for a stage rehearsal on Friday night. GM found out yesterday that the choir had shifted their concert to Friday. Apparently, the choir director looked at the Music Department calendar to find an open date, rather than the Facilities Usage calendar. So now we have to compete with a basketball game and a choir concert for parking, and we don't have the stage for soundcheck. mutter. And DC wanted to rehearse in the bandroom last night, so we had to move chairs/stands/percussion from the stage into the bandroom and back again. whee?

I have begun looking at new saxophones. sigh. Not gonna be cheap, but J says "go for it". The biggest problem is that nobody has baris in stock. I'll be going out later this week to take the tenor into the shop, and I'll ask them. There's another music store about 10 miles further down the street, and I'll stop by there as well. I'd rather not buy online, but I may have to.

got a phone call yesterday from the township clerk where I work elections. "Can you second the deputy clerk? the R who's been deputy clerk for previous elections has retired, the D who was her second is now deputy clerk, and I *might* be going in for surgery later this month." "You do remember that I don't live in the township?" "yes, that doesn't matter for deputy clerk." So now I get to see the sausage behind running elections. We're stuffing absentee ballots today, and tomorrow is a meeting of the Twp Election Commission. A couple of weeks ago I went in and helped with the preliminary accuracy test -- there was an error in the program, so we have to run the preliminary test again with the new software before we can run the public test. (MI's straight-ticket voting has some quirks that the program did not handle correctly.)

The concert yesterday went pretty well. The space is long and shallow which makes it hard for us to set up. We had kids and dogs trying to pick up the toys we used as spot markers before we actually chalked spots - it's a lot easier to move a toy than erase a chalk mark. It was warm in the sun, and when I was working, but by the time we started to play, I was in the shade. I had flung a white jacket in at the last minute, so that was good. The concert went pretty well, especially allowing for the fact that it was a long way from one side of the band to the other.

Saturday's funeral meal went well - I did get a blister on the top of a toe where the seam in the sock rubbed. I need to remember that I can't wear those socks with those shoes! People kept asking me where things were, and I'm like "it's been years since I worked out of this kitchen, and stuff's been moved at least once since then. Poke around!" Many cupboards and drawers are labeled, mostly correctly, but there's a few things that 'everybody knows' where they are. (to be fair, they're large items that could only be in a couple of places anyway.) There were 160 people at the memorial service, and we got about 100 of them for the meal. We can seat about 90 in the hall, but there were some people who felt more comfortable at the tables outside, and the littles ate in the children's room. We did not run out of food, although we could have used another batch of cookies and another fruit salad. Way oversupplied on coleslaw and pasta salad, just about right on jello and tossed salads.

Another long day at the polls. We counted over 1300 ballots in a precinct of about 2000 registered voters. Another 500 or so voted in person. There was a line for voting. Usually, 500 in-person voters is easy and a nice steady day, but with COVID halving the number of voting stations, things got slow. And there was a challenger - I wasn't working the live floor, so I don't know what pretext he was challenging voters on. But the chairs said that he was very polite about it all, unlike the ones they had in August. They really need a larger space to hold elections in, but there isn't one in the precinct.... :( (theoretically, the hall at the Rod & Gun club is bigger, but it's down about five miles of dirt road, and there are a lot of people who don't even know where it is. There are probably a lot of people who don't even know it exists!)

Also, donated blood last week, for four donations on the year, all since March. COVID sero-test is negative.

I told them it was a bad idea. I asked them if it was something they really wanted to do. But they went and did it anyway, and so it took an extra four hours to close out the absentee board yesterday. A really stupid procedural error that didn't affect anything except the election workers. And I'm leaving it at that because I'm still fucking annoyed by it. Getting home at 1:30am is not my idea of fun. Worse off were the township clerk and deputy clerk who still had to take the USB sticks into A2 for the Board of Canvassers to verify before they could go home.

Apparently, the live floor was worse in many ways. Lotsa people are publicly worried about what the Board of Elections can do to make it safe for voters, but the biggest problem they had was other voters, not the facility or the voting procedures. People who think that policies (masks please; if you're not wearing a mask, use this booth over here, out of the main path; etc) are great for other people, but not them. And people who don't care that the workers are following the book, the rules should be different for them Right Now. And entitled parents who blame the election chairs when their teenager's first election experience isn't what they wanted for him (but they didn't care enough to come with him, but complained after he got home and they asked him). And then there was the election worker whose abrasive entitled partisanship has gotten the clerk to say that she won't ever ask zie to work an election again - zie'd said that zie wouldn't work the election if there was no way to make voters wear masks (in bold text, even), yet there zie was on election day, insisting that zie'd never said that to anyone. The floor chair had cc'd us all on her reply to zie (in which she included the official policy on masks), so we'd all seen it.

And I haven't worked live floor in an election for years, and the site chairs called me upstairs three separate times to help with the electronic poll book. Two of them for really simple shit that should have been obvious and one of them a user error that probably would have taken me about five minutes to back out and repair if I could sit down with the machine. But I couldn't touch the machine because I wasn't working floor, and there was nobody on floor whom I could trust to walk through it; not that I could have anyway because they still had voters coming in. It didn't affect anything except ease of recordkeeping, so I told them to document the hell out of it, and deal with it after.

(edited for pronouns and clarity.)

This time actual PT, not just evaluations. It took about two weeks, but the cortisone injection finally seems to have gotten the last of the inflammation in the shoulder joint to go away. Now there's just the joint instability and lowered range of motion and strength to deal with. "Just", she says.

Today's PT (not the same one I saw last time, but they're a team) did some actual joint manipulation and gave me a couple of new exercises. And a couple more that were just variants on what I got in the prior round of PT. Which is only to be expected, as it's all intended to stabilise and strengthen the joint, now with a bit more attention paid to the known location of the damage.

Then errands after. Still weird holes in the distribution system, and there were a couple of things that I couldn't get. Some of that, I think, is because those deliveries are early in the week and I was shopping on Friday.

In annoying shit that I can't find - cotton t-shirts without graphics, men's or women's. Boxer briefs in plain cotton. Plain cotton women's tank tops. Glass storage containers in 1-cup size. Will have to see if the less usual online stores have them.

The election worker schedule has been mailed out, and we should get those next week. Actual mail, rather than emailed PDFs. (They tried that last time, and too many workers complained. I don't care, as long as I get it.)

The hardware cloth for the rill has been obtained, but as I expected, nothing has been done with it. Next week, after the heat breaks, I suspect I'll just start dealing with it. There are at least 9 frogs in the pond - six actual froggies and three moving streaks in the water. Many of them are tiny-frog size (< 1"), so new froggies!

Ji seems to be over his intestinal blockage -- still don't know what caused it. He gets a third of a can of the special food per day until it's gone. The vet keeps calling and asking how his litter box usage is, and I have no idea because he's spent most of the last four days outside. Some of that is because he was confined to the house for four days, some because the weather's been terrific for cats to lurk about outside, and some because J went away for the weekend and he was sulking. I've been able to get him to come in so I can run errands, but then when I get back he sits and mews plaintively at the door until I let him back out.

I've resumed weeding, but have limited it to just weeding -- no shovel cutting of new edges, no pulling sod or heavy weeds. Back is still annoyed, but better.

There's an election tomorrow, and I'm not working this one either. Township clerk says there are three reasons for that -- they've got a new voting space, and need four fewer people per election than they used to; she's got a bunch of new poll workers that she wants to get experienced before the big elections next year; and she's full up on Ds. Unfortunately, by the time she got back to me on whether she'd need me (I was on the alternate list), the township I live in didn't need any more poll workers either. :shrug:

I haven't worked the August election in years because I've been going to band camp at Interlochen, but due to the tendinitis/thumb instability, I have to take a year off. The OT says I might be able to go back next summer.

Ji was just outside, trying to ignore the sandhill cranes, but they kept dancing and noising and flapping their wings at each other, and he kept looking back at them to make sure they weren't coming after him. They haven't come after him ever, but you can never be too careful....

(I know, I missed Day 1. DB was on my computer when I got home, and he went to bed after I did.)

Our township clerk asked about half of her "usuals" if we'd be willing/available to do the recount. Five of us said yes. We started yesterday morning, and will go until all the ballots are either hand-counted or the precinct is declared "un-recountable" (due either to improper seals or incorrect pollbooks). I'm working with a random-guy-off-the-street who called his township clerk and asked if he could help count. He's quite competent, if unfamiliar with some of the voting floor procedures, but since there are very few people there who've done any sort of recount, he's not too far behind; and he learns quickly. Yesterday we got out 'early' as we finished off a precinct at 4:40pm and the county people stop handing out new ones at 4pm (the average is 2.5 hours/precinct). Today we ran over, and left the building at 6:50pm. I have not been tracking all the results, but the tabulators that Washtenaw uses are good -- the only changes we've had are when people write in an invalid write-in candidate and also vote straight ticket. (MI allows for a modified straight ticket - a straight ticket vote is assumed to include president unless otherwise indicated. When handcounting, an invalid write in vote is ignored and the straight ticket vote is counted. The tabulator has no way of knowing whether it's a valid write in or not, and doesn't count the straight-ticket presidential vote).

Many election workers are taking advantage of all the observers (at least two, sometimes six) to do some civic education about how elections work, and how much work it actually is to keep track of the metadata (who voted in which precinct using which ballot) and keep both the metadata and the ballots secure and unassociated with each other.

There are things going on at church this weekend, and people keep asking me to do things. "I can't. I'm working the recount until they tell me not to." "but This" "no" "this Other Thing" "no" "What about Yet Another Thing?" "I make no promises, but I'll try to be there."

Grrr. What part of "I'm doing this thing, I don't know when it'll be done. I have to leave space for it through Saturday for sure, maybe into Sunday." is hard to understand? I'm actually on the program for a keyboard dedication concert on Saturday, and I told them "put the duet late in the program, and note that it may be a solo depending on the recount". (the concert was on the schedule before the recount, but I didn't know I was playing until after the recount was announced. yeah, it's a bit free-form.)