omg it's a hugeass wall of text!! =O
First order of business:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY KATHY!!
Hope you have an awesome day, and I should have your gift to you sometime this weekend :3 NO HINTS, AND GUESSING IS NOT ALLOWED.
And now for the regular crap I usually write about! *copies Jess because this is going to be a long update*
POLITICS IS SRS BSNS part 1: My Job
Okay so as most of you probably know, on October 28th I began working for my county, counting ballots in the election. It WAS pretty serious business, they made you sign an oath and everything to make sure you wouldn't cheat or something. I worked almost every day from the 28th until November 4th. If you've ever wondered how ballots are counted, and whether or not your vote still counts if you mess up the ballot, well I'm going to tell you! If you've never wondered any of this, I'm going to tell you anyway! 8D
So we were split into teams of two every day; Democrats had to be paired with Republicans, and Unaffiliateds were paired with anyone. For most of the week, I had an Unaffiliated badge since I that was what I was supposed to be registered as, however I later discovered that I had TWO voter cards and the most recent one said 'Democrat' on it (because when I requested my mail-in ballot I checked off 'Democrat' thinking that I had to in order to vote for Obama *lol n00b!*) so anyway, the last few days I wore a Democrat badge and was paired with Republicans. Somebody also told me that you had to be in a party in order to vote in the primaries, so maybe it's better this way...?
Anyway, moving on! So each team would either go and count ballots, or prep the ballots for counting. Prepping the ballots consisted of taking the envelopes out of these black boxes that UPS would bring in every now and then, removing the ballots from the secrecy sleeves, unfolding & flattening them, and putting stacks of them into white boxes.
Then the counting teams would take a white box, and bring to to their station to count them. Basically, one person would feed each ballot into an Accuvote machine, which read the filled ovals on the ballot, and then another person would catch the ballot as it came out, and record the data onto a worksheet that each box had.
The machines were pretty sensitive; when I filled out my own ballot, I had been careful to fill in EVERY SINGLE MINUTE SPOT OF WHITE inside the oval, but come to find out, the machine will read even the tiniest little mark. Even smudges where people using pencil had erased their choice, which caused problems because it would read more than one oval for the candidate in question. When that happened, we had to stick the ballot into a separate box so that it could be duplicated in order for that person's vote to count. Sometimes people would COMPLETELY fill in two or more of the ovals so that there was no way to tell which choice they wanted, so we had no choice but to invalidate their vote for that particular category; all of their other votes counted, though.
Most of the partners I was paired with were pretty nice people. The first day, another person commented that my partner looked like Lorraine from Mad TV XDDD SHE WAS RIGHT!! LOLOL. She was nice though. We weren't really supposed to talk politics, and for the most part I was with people who had no problem adhering to that rule, but there was this one guy I worked with on election night who was...err...making it quite obvious just how far he leaned to the right.
Don't get me wrong, I mean he was a very nice guy. He taught me how to play Sudoku, and he bought me a soda when he went to a Seven Eleven over lunch break. He was just EXTREMELY conservative to the point where it made me uncomfortable to talk about certain things.
He started asking me about my lifestyle. Did I go to church? I said no, that I hadn't gone in years, and he answered by telling me there were many good churches in Fort Collins and I should find one I liked. I...didn't have the heart to tell him that I'm not religious.
Then, when he found out that I was living with a guy I am not married to...OMG. He asked if I was married, I said no, then asked if I was engaged/planned on getting married, to which I answered something like "Oh, we're not gonna go that far just yet." And he couldn't understand why we weren't getting married if we had moved across the country together. I guess I can see his point, but I didn't know how to make him understand that we're just not READY to do something like that. I can't imagine being a Mrs., LOL OMG THAT SOUNDS SO WEIRD!
And he kept bringing it back up! It was almost as if he was BOTHERED by the fact that Kevin and I aren't married, and I can't understand that. He was asking what Kevin did in college, and I told him, and he was all, "So he's gonna be a doctor someday, and he'll be Dr. Whitcomb and you'll be MRS. Whitcomb!" And I was like, ".............. >__> Uhh, sure?"
The topic eventually moved on to my parents, and he made a comment about how my mom must be heartbroken because I "ran away" with my boyfriend. @__@ WTF I'M 23! I didn't run away! LOL my mom loves Kevin! She misses me, but she's still happy for me, and just OMG IT'S NOTHING LIKE THAT! I had to tell him that it's not like that because he seemed determined to convince himself otherwise o_O (Later when I was telling my mom this, she was like, "Well you should've said, 'I'm just following in my mom's footsteps!'" Because my mom moved in with my dad when she was 19 and they weren't married either XDD)
LOL and the look on his face when he found out that not only did I have a tattoo, but also that MY MOM PAID FOR IT FOR MY BIRTHDAY...just, wow! He made a comment about how my mom "is definitely a liberal!" and I had to explain to him that my family is not into politics. I dunno, if felt like with him there could be no gray areas, everything was either black or white, liberal or conservative, you know? It's such a different view than what I grew up knowing.
As we were leaving and saying goodbye, he was like, "Tell that boy to marry you!" LOL, I was just like, "Yeah I'm sure we will someday..." I sort of felt like I wanted to make him feel better about it o_o I mean it doesn't bother ME that Kevin and I aren't married, sheesh, why would it bother somebody who barely knows me???
Man, he must've thought I was some hippie sinner or something @__@
But anyway, back to the ballot stuff! People...OMG. I have some tips for you voters after seeing everything that people did:
1. DON'T USE PENCIL. The machine can read pencil, but the problem is, as I mentioned before, the machines are extremely sensitive and pick up the smudges left by erasers as well. Plus, what if somebody is dishonest and erases your vote to mark in a different candidate? You wouldn't want that! I mean, we would've gotten in huuuuuge amounts of trouble for doing that, but you never know who is scanning in your ballots.
2. DON'T VOTE FOR MORE THAN ONE CANDIDATE. OMG I don't know why so many people were doing this! One person even voted for EVERY CANDIDATE ON THE LIST. Why?? LOL! Your vote won't count if you do that!
3. WHITE-OUT DOESN'T HELP. If you mess up your ballot and use white-out on it, the scanner still rejects it because it can't read white-out XD
4. IF YOU DO MESS UP, WRITE A SMALL LOVE-NOTE TO EXPLAIN IT. It really does help, because sometimes we couldn't decide which choice the person wanted, and if it was impossible for us to tell, we had to scan it through while invalidating that particular vote.
So that's about it...on Tuesday I worked for 14 hours, from 9 AM until 11 PM, and now I'm out of work for now. I just have to go back to Express Employment and see if they can find something else for me, hopefully something more permanent.
POLITICS IS SRS BSNS part 2: The Election
So with a few more hours to go on my shift on Tuesday, my very Republican counting partner got off the phone with his wife and told me that she had said Obama had already won, but I didn't want to get my hopes up until I saw for myself.
Lo and behold, I get home and people are partying across the street, girls are screaming, and apparently there had even been fireworks! Kevin and I watched Obama's acceptance speech (the man is an AMAZING speaker, and one of the things I like most about him is that he speaks to EVERYONE and not just people in his party) and McCain's concession speech, which was actually quite nice.
Needless to say, I am VERY happy about the results! PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, doesn't that sound EFFING AWESOME?! And the most awesome thing about this is that not only are people in America celebrating, but people ALL AROUND THE WORLD are happy too! And I actually feel proud to be an American for the first time in my life. I just hope that things continue to go well.
There are still people who grossly misinterpret Obama's tax plan and think that he's going to increase taxes for ordinary people. GUYS. STOP LISTENING TO McCAIN! OBAMA IS NOT A GODDAMN SOCIALIST, OR A MUSLIM, OR A TERRORIST, OR AN ANGRY BLACK GUY BENT ON DOMINATING THE WHITE PEOPLE. Man, people! LOL.
ILU WEB DESIGN
So I'm still working on my web stuff, just not much going on with it until recently. I have two more fanlistings to build! On the 4th I got the approval notice for Akutagawa Jirou (Prince of Tennis), which I was pretty happy about considering I had major doubts about getting it, but had decided to submit an application anyway because I figured I should at least TRY. The other is Episode 18 of Samurai Champloo, War of the Words, because I wanted SOMETHING for Samurai Champloo! I'm starting to think that I mostly like fanlistings because I have an excuse to design a web site, LOL. Although I don't want to apply for fanlistings in which I only SORT OF like the subject, otherwise it wouldn't interest me enough XD
I wish FireFTP would stop having a conniption every time I try logging in! It's not letting meeeeee and I don't like using my host's WebFTP client =P Maybe I'll try re-downloading it or something @_@
Ahaha oh yeah, and I should probably finish coding my LJ layout >_> I started it over a month ago, but halfway through I got bored with it and I haven't touched it since, so my layout looks pretty bad right now! Sorry to anyone who's stumbled across the terror that is my LJ layout, I've been too lazy and uninspired to go back and finish it XD;; I also need to make a new layout for Jess, since I hadn't realized it was going to look so warped on a laptop @_@ FAIL XD
NANOWRIMO FAIL
As I've said before, I'm doing NaNo this month for the first time EVER OMG I'M A NANO VIRGIN!!! I'm already slightly behind though, I'm a little bit stuck right now ARGH! Hopefully I'll figure something out tonight and catch up over the weekend, because I definitely want to 'win' LOL.
Annnd that's all I can think to write about. I've been meaning to post about my work experience, and knowing that I'd have to write about all that made me not want to do it...LOL. Anyway, I know this is a huge entry so I don't expect people to read it all, but I appreciate it if anyone actually did XDDD COOKIES FOR YOU!
Okay, time to get back to work. I have two fanlistings to build and a NaNo to tend to, among another thing that will remain unsaid x3
*disappears in a puff of smoke*
HAPPY BIRTHDAY KATHY!!
Hope you have an awesome day, and I should have your gift to you sometime this weekend :3 NO HINTS, AND GUESSING IS NOT ALLOWED.
And now for the regular crap I usually write about! *copies Jess because this is going to be a long update*
POLITICS IS SRS BSNS part 1: My Job
Okay so as most of you probably know, on October 28th I began working for my county, counting ballots in the election. It WAS pretty serious business, they made you sign an oath and everything to make sure you wouldn't cheat or something. I worked almost every day from the 28th until November 4th. If you've ever wondered how ballots are counted, and whether or not your vote still counts if you mess up the ballot, well I'm going to tell you! If you've never wondered any of this, I'm going to tell you anyway! 8D
So we were split into teams of two every day; Democrats had to be paired with Republicans, and Unaffiliateds were paired with anyone. For most of the week, I had an Unaffiliated badge since I that was what I was supposed to be registered as, however I later discovered that I had TWO voter cards and the most recent one said 'Democrat' on it (because when I requested my mail-in ballot I checked off 'Democrat' thinking that I had to in order to vote for Obama *lol n00b!*) so anyway, the last few days I wore a Democrat badge and was paired with Republicans. Somebody also told me that you had to be in a party in order to vote in the primaries, so maybe it's better this way...?
Anyway, moving on! So each team would either go and count ballots, or prep the ballots for counting. Prepping the ballots consisted of taking the envelopes out of these black boxes that UPS would bring in every now and then, removing the ballots from the secrecy sleeves, unfolding & flattening them, and putting stacks of them into white boxes.
Then the counting teams would take a white box, and bring to to their station to count them. Basically, one person would feed each ballot into an Accuvote machine, which read the filled ovals on the ballot, and then another person would catch the ballot as it came out, and record the data onto a worksheet that each box had.
The machines were pretty sensitive; when I filled out my own ballot, I had been careful to fill in EVERY SINGLE MINUTE SPOT OF WHITE inside the oval, but come to find out, the machine will read even the tiniest little mark. Even smudges where people using pencil had erased their choice, which caused problems because it would read more than one oval for the candidate in question. When that happened, we had to stick the ballot into a separate box so that it could be duplicated in order for that person's vote to count. Sometimes people would COMPLETELY fill in two or more of the ovals so that there was no way to tell which choice they wanted, so we had no choice but to invalidate their vote for that particular category; all of their other votes counted, though.
Most of the partners I was paired with were pretty nice people. The first day, another person commented that my partner looked like Lorraine from Mad TV XDDD SHE WAS RIGHT!! LOLOL. She was nice though. We weren't really supposed to talk politics, and for the most part I was with people who had no problem adhering to that rule, but there was this one guy I worked with on election night who was...err...making it quite obvious just how far he leaned to the right.
Don't get me wrong, I mean he was a very nice guy. He taught me how to play Sudoku, and he bought me a soda when he went to a Seven Eleven over lunch break. He was just EXTREMELY conservative to the point where it made me uncomfortable to talk about certain things.
He started asking me about my lifestyle. Did I go to church? I said no, that I hadn't gone in years, and he answered by telling me there were many good churches in Fort Collins and I should find one I liked. I...didn't have the heart to tell him that I'm not religious.
Then, when he found out that I was living with a guy I am not married to...OMG. He asked if I was married, I said no, then asked if I was engaged/planned on getting married, to which I answered something like "Oh, we're not gonna go that far just yet." And he couldn't understand why we weren't getting married if we had moved across the country together. I guess I can see his point, but I didn't know how to make him understand that we're just not READY to do something like that. I can't imagine being a Mrs., LOL OMG THAT SOUNDS SO WEIRD!
And he kept bringing it back up! It was almost as if he was BOTHERED by the fact that Kevin and I aren't married, and I can't understand that. He was asking what Kevin did in college, and I told him, and he was all, "So he's gonna be a doctor someday, and he'll be Dr. Whitcomb and you'll be MRS. Whitcomb!" And I was like, ".............. >__> Uhh, sure?"
The topic eventually moved on to my parents, and he made a comment about how my mom must be heartbroken because I "ran away" with my boyfriend. @__@ WTF I'M 23! I didn't run away! LOL my mom loves Kevin! She misses me, but she's still happy for me, and just OMG IT'S NOTHING LIKE THAT! I had to tell him that it's not like that because he seemed determined to convince himself otherwise o_O (Later when I was telling my mom this, she was like, "Well you should've said, 'I'm just following in my mom's footsteps!'" Because my mom moved in with my dad when she was 19 and they weren't married either XDD)
LOL and the look on his face when he found out that not only did I have a tattoo, but also that MY MOM PAID FOR IT FOR MY BIRTHDAY...just, wow! He made a comment about how my mom "is definitely a liberal!" and I had to explain to him that my family is not into politics. I dunno, if felt like with him there could be no gray areas, everything was either black or white, liberal or conservative, you know? It's such a different view than what I grew up knowing.
As we were leaving and saying goodbye, he was like, "Tell that boy to marry you!" LOL, I was just like, "Yeah I'm sure we will someday..." I sort of felt like I wanted to make him feel better about it o_o I mean it doesn't bother ME that Kevin and I aren't married, sheesh, why would it bother somebody who barely knows me???
Man, he must've thought I was some hippie sinner or something @__@
But anyway, back to the ballot stuff! People...OMG. I have some tips for you voters after seeing everything that people did:
1. DON'T USE PENCIL. The machine can read pencil, but the problem is, as I mentioned before, the machines are extremely sensitive and pick up the smudges left by erasers as well. Plus, what if somebody is dishonest and erases your vote to mark in a different candidate? You wouldn't want that! I mean, we would've gotten in huuuuuge amounts of trouble for doing that, but you never know who is scanning in your ballots.
2. DON'T VOTE FOR MORE THAN ONE CANDIDATE. OMG I don't know why so many people were doing this! One person even voted for EVERY CANDIDATE ON THE LIST. Why?? LOL! Your vote won't count if you do that!
3. WHITE-OUT DOESN'T HELP. If you mess up your ballot and use white-out on it, the scanner still rejects it because it can't read white-out XD
4. IF YOU DO MESS UP, WRITE A SMALL LOVE-NOTE TO EXPLAIN IT. It really does help, because sometimes we couldn't decide which choice the person wanted, and if it was impossible for us to tell, we had to scan it through while invalidating that particular vote.
So that's about it...on Tuesday I worked for 14 hours, from 9 AM until 11 PM, and now I'm out of work for now. I just have to go back to Express Employment and see if they can find something else for me, hopefully something more permanent.
POLITICS IS SRS BSNS part 2: The Election
So with a few more hours to go on my shift on Tuesday, my very Republican counting partner got off the phone with his wife and told me that she had said Obama had already won, but I didn't want to get my hopes up until I saw for myself.
Lo and behold, I get home and people are partying across the street, girls are screaming, and apparently there had even been fireworks! Kevin and I watched Obama's acceptance speech (the man is an AMAZING speaker, and one of the things I like most about him is that he speaks to EVERYONE and not just people in his party) and McCain's concession speech, which was actually quite nice.
Needless to say, I am VERY happy about the results! PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, doesn't that sound EFFING AWESOME?! And the most awesome thing about this is that not only are people in America celebrating, but people ALL AROUND THE WORLD are happy too! And I actually feel proud to be an American for the first time in my life. I just hope that things continue to go well.
There are still people who grossly misinterpret Obama's tax plan and think that he's going to increase taxes for ordinary people. GUYS. STOP LISTENING TO McCAIN! OBAMA IS NOT A GODDAMN SOCIALIST, OR A MUSLIM, OR A TERRORIST, OR AN ANGRY BLACK GUY BENT ON DOMINATING THE WHITE PEOPLE. Man, people! LOL.
ILU WEB DESIGN
So I'm still working on my web stuff, just not much going on with it until recently. I have two more fanlistings to build! On the 4th I got the approval notice for Akutagawa Jirou (Prince of Tennis), which I was pretty happy about considering I had major doubts about getting it, but had decided to submit an application anyway because I figured I should at least TRY. The other is Episode 18 of Samurai Champloo, War of the Words, because I wanted SOMETHING for Samurai Champloo! I'm starting to think that I mostly like fanlistings because I have an excuse to design a web site, LOL. Although I don't want to apply for fanlistings in which I only SORT OF like the subject, otherwise it wouldn't interest me enough XD
I wish FireFTP would stop having a conniption every time I try logging in! It's not letting meeeeee and I don't like using my host's WebFTP client =P Maybe I'll try re-downloading it or something @_@
Ahaha oh yeah, and I should probably finish coding my LJ layout >_> I started it over a month ago, but halfway through I got bored with it and I haven't touched it since, so my layout looks pretty bad right now! Sorry to anyone who's stumbled across the terror that is my LJ layout, I've been too lazy and uninspired to go back and finish it XD;; I also need to make a new layout for Jess, since I hadn't realized it was going to look so warped on a laptop @_@ FAIL XD
NANOWRIMO FAIL
As I've said before, I'm doing NaNo this month for the first time EVER OMG I'M A NANO VIRGIN!!! I'm already slightly behind though, I'm a little bit stuck right now ARGH! Hopefully I'll figure something out tonight and catch up over the weekend, because I definitely want to 'win' LOL.
Annnd that's all I can think to write about. I've been meaning to post about my work experience, and knowing that I'd have to write about all that made me not want to do it...LOL. Anyway, I know this is a huge entry so I don't expect people to read it all, but I appreciate it if anyone actually did XDDD COOKIES FOR YOU!
Okay, time to get back to work. I have two fanlistings to build and a NaNo to tend to, among another thing that will remain unsaid x3
*disappears in a puff of smoke*