Rachael

So California’s having this special election on November 8th. I hadn’t been paying attention, I was just waiting for my absentee ballot to show up in the mail (in California you can register permanent-absentee, and there is NO excuse not to. Laziness at its finest. Your ballot shows up a few weeks prior to the election, you read it in bed, you vote using the pen you find by rummaging in the nightstand drawer, and pop it in the mailbox. No driving to the ballot-box, no dealing with traffic and lines, just you and your mailbox).

It wasn’t until this week that I realized how close the election was to being here, and that I hadn’t seen my ballot yet. Then I realized the awful truth – I had moved at this time last year, having already mailed my ballot right before the move. So when I did move, it didn’t register (heh) that I should update my mailing address. Mail forwarding has, of course, been halted a year later, and I realized that I wouldn’t be getting my absentee form, and because I’m permanent absentee, I have no polling place.

Here’s my admission:

I had decided I wouldn’t vote.

For the first time in my adult voting life, fifteen or so years, I wouldn’t vote. It was only a little state election, no one would notice. I felt twangs of guilt that I tamped down by walking into another room and forgetting what I’d been thinking about. That’s not hard for me to do. Wait. What were we talking about?

But it was niggling, and then I was made aware (thanks, MC!) of what exactly Prop 73 was about – it proposes to force teen girls to tell parents/guardians before gaining the permission to get an abortion. Guess what? It sounds like a fine idea – it would be right and good if a scared girl felt comfortable talking to her mother, telling Mom that not only was she sexually active, but she was also pregnant. But it won’t happen. Girls WON’T talk to their parents, they’ll go online and find ways out, and California will be facing a coat-hanger epidemic. Young girls get pregnant. They have abortions. No matter how you feel about the rightness or wrongness of that, those two facts won’t change. What will change is their level of safety in California if this passes.

According to polls, it’s a close one, and it’s GOING to pass, tragically, with only six percent separation. You know it’s not the liberals who get out there to vote on things like this, it’s the conservatives that get off their butts and get out there to the polling place.

And I was almost one of the liberals who couldn’t be bothered. THIS close. I called the registrar of voters in my county this afternoon (phone number easily found online) and screamed at the startled office worker, "HELP ME! Can I still vote? Please please please?" They said sure, come on down to the office and you can vote here.

If you don’t know where to go, call your registrar. Unless your state/city isn’t having a November election, in which case, just make sure you’re registered for next time and then get yourself some ice cream and pat yourself on the back. Me, I’m going down to the office on Friday afternoon, and I’m voting.

It was so close! I was almost a non-voting loser! Whew.

CROMARTY! (More pics here.) The wonderful Threadbear Boys gave me the yarn (Koigu Kersti, some of it hand-dyed to order because I ran OUT of the dyelot) in return for displaying it for some months in their shop. I’ve worn it two or three times, max, I think. I wore it last year when I first entered my new home for the first time, remember?

Now she’s back and in my arms, and I have to say, she’s what I’ve been waiting for. Soemtimes I just stand in front of my many sweaters and wonder how it is that I have so many, and I don’t have one I want to wear, nothing’s perfect. Well, Cromarty’s perfect. She fits, and she looks good, and she feels good. (Lala’s gonna be jealous.)

It’s weird that I forgot that I made her, that the gap wasn’t obvious when I looked at the shelf. But she’s back! I might wear her for a week.

(I’m sorry – it’s really like a second blog post on the same sweater, isn’t it? But come on, it’s Starmore. It’s okay, right?)

Boy, I’m sleepy. Yawn. Enjoy sleeping today/tonight, all right? It’s a nice thing. 

Not to go all product placement, but I think I mentioned the Starbucks I was in last week, didn’t I? All the outside doors made it look like a bank, although I knew there was a Starbucks nearby, since there was a rooftop sign. I opened the door, thinking the bank might know where the coffee was, and this is what I found. The Wells Fargo part is off to the right, a full-sized bank. The coffee area is on the left, also larger than most. Incredibly weird. Someday I’ll be able to pick up my dry-cleaning at the vet’s office and buy an ice cream sundae at the steak/Chinese/Ethiopian restaurant on the corner.

I am, I admit, able to do way more than I’d ever have thought, right here, right now. I’m sitting at a small round table in a nice little coffee shop close to my new work. I’m online (seamlessly – god, I love my new Mac), and if I wanted to , I could download a new CD’s worth of music, or I could pay any bill that I wanted to (I do all my banking online). I’ve got my iShuffle’s earbuds stuck into the computer on one end, the other ends in my ears, playing an iTune party shuffle so that I don’t have to listen to the nineteen year old at the end of the place blather on about what a brilliant lawyer she’s going to be. My cell phone is to one side, and my knitting is next to me.

See, this is going to be my new routine. For the next few months of training, I’ll be working 6pm-6am, and my new job is on the worst commute corridor in the Bay Area. Normally a thirty minute drive from my house, if I left at 5pm, it would take an hour and a half to get here. You do the math. So I’ve figured it out. I leave at 4pm, make it in the getting-heavy traffic in about forty-five minutes, and then I sit here at the coffee shop (locally owned, thank you) and do what I’d be doing at home, if I had the extra time: drinking coffee, and writing. And all the while I’m only ten minutes on surface streets from the job. Hooray for computer time!

It feels really good to be back on midnights, also. Last night was my first "real" shift, with the trainer I’ll be with for a while, and I was on the radio all night, really dispatching. I hadn’t realized how strange it had felt to be doing a month of theoretical training with no application until I started talking on the radio last night, sending rigs to where they needed to go (badly – the identifiers and new streets are so foreign to me). But I was working! Felt good.

Man, this is a hip place to hang out, if you’re cool and seventeen. I’m neither. Huh. No wonder they’re staring. Or maybe it’s because I’m not wearing a costume, and they all are. Oh, Halloween. (I dressed all in orange to go my sister’s party on the weekend, and when Lala came over I said, "I’m the Great Pumpkin!" She said, "You look great, pumpkin.")

https://rachaelherron.com/_not_to_go_all/

If I pick up and put away all the laundry, and if I sweep the house and de-fur the couch and bedroom chair, then I get to come back to the computer and hit the button at the top of Bloglines (where it shows how many feeds you have) and read all 1194 unread posts by you all. Yes, I will skim, and no, I probably won’t leave comments (what else is new? I can barely catch up with email right now). But at least I’ll feel more connected to my gang….

Tonight, Halloween party at the sister’s house. Dude. I don’t like dressing up. Okay, not true. I like dressing up for real, not for Halloween. I know this is wrong, and bad, but Halloween just doesn’t do it for me. Whereas sister Bethany, she lives for it. So I at least have to make some sort of effort. Or I should. Hey! I think I’ll go as a knitter. Ha! They’ll never recognize me!

Cleaning now. Loud music required….

Welp, I have been knitting. But it’s been in fits and starts, and only in short bursts, when I can grab the time. I don’t usually have more than one project going at a time, not including little things like socks. But look:

[Ack. I’m not enjoying iPhoto right now. Is there an easy way to shrink photos down to 320pixel-width? Sheesh.]

The left is a sock out of the wonderful Interlacements Little Feet, which I believe they stopped making? Is that right? Anyway, because that’s true, or maybe it’s not, I had to snatch up a skein I found last week while shopping with Jon.

Next to that is a lace scarf/shawl, my own design, my own yarn (silk/merino). How I love that last sentence.

Next to that, a determined stash-buster, inspired by the purchase of the software that ArtFibers uses to design their knitwear, called Knitware. You can buy it through ArtFibers (tell ’em I sent you!), and even though there’s no Mac base right now, it’s totally worth keeping my old PC clunker around for, just to fire it up and run this program. My favorite-fitting sweaters have been made using this design, and I swear I’m not getting a cut of any of the sales. You just knit a swatch, in what size needles you like, plug in the gauge and then drag and drop things around until you have a schematic of a sweater you like, and then it spits out the pattern for you. You can even rip out and measure the amount of yarn you used in your swatch and it will tell you REALLY darn close whether you have enough yarn to make the swater or not. I heart it.

It makes it so dern fun (too much fun, actually) to design a sweater. Print out the pattern. Put it in a plastic sleeve and pretend like you did all that math by yourself. Of course, I only got about two sleeves into that Chunky Wool-Ease (you know you have some in your stash, too) sweater before getting bored and casting on that luscious purple/green Malbrigo merino sweater. A little cardie, I think, with crochet trim on the edges. Yep, I designed it. Heh. Love it.

I am not forgetting the other bloggers! I met Karen (who captured a psychotic pic of me – lets blame ArtFibers’s back sale room on that photo) and non-blogger but very talented M.C. this weekend while shopping, and then the lovely Silvia and her equally lovely sister Claudia came to a Whoreshoes show at McNally’s in Oakland. Claudia, apparently, shares Karen’s talent at capturing the side of me that escapes just before I get out the machete, so let me show you my rockabilly hairstyle taken by ME before you look at the picture she got. I’m not that frikken crazy, swear.

And tonight I got to see Marie, which was fabulous. She and her husband are just the sort you want to hang out with. No, really. I didn’t even have to try to be funny or witty, I just let them be those things, and I got to relax. Good people. Of course, it’s reached the point in blogland where I just don’t think about taking pictures. We all got out our Treos and showed each other pictures of our adorable, wonderful cats (three Treos at one table!), but not one of us snapped a shot. Just as well. I’m sleepy and I’m sure in whatever shot was taken I’d look more psychotic than ever.

I’m a little overwhelmed with all I’ve been doing, as busy as I’ve been, and not being home, 26 stories up in the air overlooking the city, but it’s true that feeling like a tourist so close to home is nice. There’s nothing like the humming quiet of a big hotel, with the elevator whooshing right next to the room. Somehow comforting. (Unless you go underwater in the bathtub, when that whooshing sounds like the rumbling beginnings of The Big One. See how fast YOU pop out of the water.)

One more day of training and then I get to go home. Hooray! I feel like spinning.

https://rachaelherron.com/i_am_not_forget/