(no subject)

I just made last-minute contact with the Obama campaign to verify plans for tomorrow. They're diverting me to a "staging office," because there's no possible way the Harrisburg campaign headquarters can hold all the volunteers who are coming. My campaign contact reassured me that there will be indoor sitting-down work available as well as canvassing. (I can probably walk door-to-door for four hours or so, but not for the 8.5 hours I'm planning to be in Harrisburg.)

Harrisburg is a 90-minute trip from my house. I'm planning to leave around 7:30, arrive there at 9, stay until 5:30, and get home again around 7 or so. Then acceberskoorb, lynsaurus, and unodelman will come by for a while to watch election returns. Hopefully they will still like me after they've seen what I'm like at a high pitch of nerves. Or maybe I'll be so tired after a long day of campaigning that I'll be more bearable?

Things to do tonight: pack up a bunch of high-protein, high-calorie snacks in case it's hard to get food on the run tomorrow. Make brownies and cut up veggies for returns-watching. Get Alex's things ready so I can get her out of bed and straight out the door. Refresh fivethirtyeight.com until my fingers bleed. Fret.

Arranging for someone else to take your kid to school is more complicated in the carseat era. I looked through the nursery school directory for kids in Alex's class who (a) live close enough to walk to school, and (b) don't have parents with high-pressure jobs who need to get to work super-early. I wound up with a family I don't know terribly well - just to exchange a few sentences here and there, not someone Alex has actually had playdates with. I knew they were big Obama supporters, so I went ahead and left them a begging voicemail and got a very nice voicemail reply.

I made contact with the mom in that family this morning at school drop-off. "Bring her by any time! It's no trouble! We're up at the crack of dawn!" I explained that I would send Alex's breakfast along with her. "We've got plenty of breakfast food! Don't worry about it!"

"Thank you so, so much," I said.

"No, thank you," she said sincerely. "Thank you for going to Pennsylvania."

"I have to do something," I told her. "Otherwise the anxiety is going to kill me."

(no subject)

A little Election Eve inspiration:

And a flashback to nine months ago:

We're in the home stretch, folks. Let's do this.