majkia

On a personal note, rather than book issue, I work Early Voting as well as run a precinct during Florida elections. This year we opened a new site in my town, Niceville.

The first day was a major challenge as we had all sorts of hardware issues. Luckily our hardware guru was there nearly the second we yelled for help, as was the county Supervisor of Elections, who before he got elected was our hardware guru. So between them we were up on time, even if we still had a few glitches going on.

Voters though were wonderful. They smiled and laughed when we said they were Guinea Pigs as we tried to fix the problems. They were all delighted to have a site in their own town and one that should cut down on the lines we had for the last couple of major elections.  I love our voters! 

Today is day tree of Early Voting and I heard we still have a few issues to iron out.  Help will be on hand. So glad we are doing this now, before the madness of a presidential election in November. At this one it is only Republicans voting so we have only about half our electorate coming in anyway (this county is heavily Republican, with Democrats and Independents far behind in numbers).

Early Voting for Florida runs through Saturday the 28th and the Presidential Preference Primary main election day is January 31st. I’ll need a vacation once this is over!

We’ve been busy as heck getting ready for the Republican presidential primary here in Florida. It is scheduled for the 31st of January. I’ve already spent last week and most of this week in class – being trained, and training poll workers. Also for early voting which begins on the 21st here and ends on the 28th.

There are some horrible horrible changes our elected lunatics have pushed through, supposedly to cut down on voter fraud, that non-existent thing they keep harping on. So what do they do?  They end up making voter fraud easier!  And not only that, making life harder for their voters, the fools. I honestly don’t know how their pea little brains work.  Sheesh.

The worst moment so far came in training on Tuesday when one of our folks dropped down dead. And that was pretty much how it happened. He was walking across the room, collapsed, and we had paramedics in the class who immediately came to his assistance. They revived him once, but they lost him again.

His wife was there for training and had to stand and watch all of this, horrified, needless to say. To make matters even more horrible, if they can be, the couple had only just lost their son two months ago.  Argh.

So here we were, several hundred people, watching all of this happening in front of us. I do have to say I am so proud of our poll workers. They sat pretty much silent and no one tried to gawk and everyone just remained at their tables until the paramedics took him out. The room was nearly totally silent, the only sound the equipment they were using on our worker and the paramedics on their radios and talking to each other.

You just never know, do you?

I'm trying something different this year. Usually I prefer to read one book at a time. But since I have difficulty sometimes with dead tree books because of arthritis in my hands, I tend to lag when I'm reading Them.

So the plan is to have one e-reader book going, one dead-tree book going, and an audio book as well, since I'm horrible about keeping up with them.

At the moment this means:

Iago: A Novel by David Snodin -  which I got as an Early Reviewer book through LibraryThing.com is the dead tree
Black Lung Captain by Chris Wooding (The Ketty Jay sci fi/steampunk series) is going on the e-reader
and am going to start Oryx and Crake  by Margaret Atwood  audio sometime today.  That’s a group read on LT.

We'll see how well I do. I'm hoping if the books are different enough I won't mind this plan.

“Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely! In broad daylight! Openly wearing the symbols of their religion... perhaps around their necks? And maybe -- dare I dream it? -- maybe one day there can be an openly Christian President. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively.”
― Jon Stewart

UhOh

I wonder how many of these I could find so I could do a 12in12 category for Victorian Hugos.

HAHAHAHA!  A comic review of Reamde by Neal Stephenson… SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO true!

The Kintari Chronicles  A Space Opera, with pirates!

Just home from Magnolia Fest, a music festival held yearly at the Suwannee (yes that Suwannee) River Music Park in Live Oak, Florida.

I’m uploading photos we took.  The early morning ones show how smoky it was in the campgrounds area when everyone was having camp fires every night.  Also, that’s our Fleetwood Bounder motorhome that is featured in the shots, and that is Jim in front of his campfire. His sweatshirt reads:  Hunter, Gatherer, Griller.

A shame how low the Suwannee River is still. It was incredibly low in summer when we camped out near here, and it is still horribly low as you can see.

There were three stages for the music fest, and Jim got pictures of two of them, the Meadow and the Arena. He missed The Front Porch which, alas, I didn’t get a picture of either.

Groups included: Donna the Buffalo, moe, 7 Walkers and Jim’s favorite Railroad Earth.

Here’s a link to the shots we got loaded on Flickr:  http://tinyurl.com/6lxewpd

For me it is, anyway.  Alas. Today is our first meeting for Supervisor of Election training.  We’ll hear about all the horrible changes our new governor made to make voting more difficult and how we’ll manage to implement the changes so we can train our workers how to deal with irate voters.

One change, the worst one, I think, is that no longer can a voter come in on election day and change his/her residence, even if it is only across the street and vote. Now they have to have come in to the SOE office to change their address beforehand. A LOT of voters are going to be furious and guess who they’ll be furious at. I guess I’d better take tranquilizers so I can keep my cool, eh?

At least their providing us with lunch! 

Also, not sure when our presidential primary will be. Last I heard the Republicans wanted to move it to January which means we’ll be training and having meetings in December!  Ugh.  Let’s hope they moved it back to a more reasonable date.

More when I learn it.

The second book of the series The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel

I confess to having some major issues with this book. Firstly, this guy is supposed to be brilliant. Uhm, right. He heads off to Paris with the bad guys on his tail, and he HAS NO PLAN.  He wanders around Paris, not knowing or recognizing anything (he’s not been back for years) and didn’t even have an idea who he’d contact for help. Excuse me?

And don’t even get me started on the incompetence of the bad guys. Sheesh. What a bunch of clowns.

And my biggest beef?  The author turns the genius of Niccolo Machiavelli into farce. Seriously???

Granted, it’s a children’s book, but still…  I doubt I’ll read the rest of the series.