Friday, October 23, 2020

An easy trail to early voting in Alaska

 Make a plan, the TV ads and pundits say. A plan for voting? In the past we went to a local site on Election Day, cast our ballots and that was that. This year so different. As I thought about a plan I considered a mail-in ballot, a dropbox, voting early in person and waiting for Nov. 3 to go to my regular voting place.

I signed up for and received an absentee ballot which would have been good for the first two options. I even jumped through all the hoops to prepare my ballot including chasing down a friend to witness it on the sane day the courts ruled we didn't have to do that.

So here I sat wondering which of the choices would be best. With all the news and charges about voting obstructions flying around, we are faced with choosing where our ballots are safest and free from manipulation. Granted Alaska doesn't seem to have the problems many states are experiencing, but as always caution is a virtue. What I finally came up with was that the choice should be the one where the fewest number of people have access to the ballot. It might be exposed and vulnerable in a drop box. After all, drop boxes have been stolen in some places and in California Republicans were putting up false drop boxes. In the long run, I finally decided I would mail my ballot, but since it was on the way, I would check out the early voting facility, where the ballot would be exposed to the fewest people before it lands on the counting table, making it the best of the choices according to my personal criteria. My fall back solution would be waiting in line Nov. 3.

So, I drove into town yesterday, the prepared mail-in ballot in the copilot's seat, and headed first to the borough office building where the early voting station had been established. My first surprise was the number of empty parking places in the lot. I hopped out of the car and headed in. Then I spotted a guy coming out wearing his mask. Oops. Damn! Back to the truck to retrieve my forgotten one, then repeating the steps to the door.


The first things I noticed were three different places to sanitize my hands. I followed the trail of 6-foot social-distancing notices laid like stepping stones on the floor from the door into the main room. This was seemed about the size of a high school gymnasium. There must have been a couple of dozen polling enclosures at least. I swear only three of us were there to vote. I followed the directions to the tables where a masked poll worker had me sign in after checking my registration card, then gave me the correct ballot for my district, offered me a pen and off I went. Since I had already done my research and filled out a ballot it only took me a couple of minutes to mark this one. Then I went over to where my ballot was slipped into the collection machine, the pen put into a collection cup to be disinfected, I assumed, and headed out the door. I don't think I was in there even 5 minutes.

As I walked across the parking lot toward my truck I encountered a woman heading in the opposite direction. She looked at me and said "Oh, damn." I laughed and told her I had done the same thing as she turned to return to her vehicle to pick up her mask.

Oh crap, Then there's this Covid scare

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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

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“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

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The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

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A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

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Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

You can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own science.—commenter arguing on a story about polar bears and global warming

He looks at three ex wives as a good start—TV police drama

Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

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“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

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