My teenaged daughter wants to go out canvassing with me on Election Day. She’s playing in a Veteran’s Day assembly at school, so when that’s over (after 2nd period), I’ll sign her out for the day. I don’t know what the excuse will read – I’ll probably put down “Family Activity” and hope that’ll fly. She’ll have to get all her teachers to sign off on it, but since she’s an A student, I think they’ll all be OK with it, especially Mr. Perlmann, her social studies teacher.

If nothing else, she’ll have the stamina for this. At the 2004 election, I was completely limp by the end of the day, even though all I did the last two hours was monitor our local polling place for irregularities. I was so exhausted, I couldn’t make it to the “victory party” downtown.

We live in what used to be Republican district that is becoming more Democratic every year. We have one of the few competitive House races, with Democrat Darcy Burner giving Republican David Reichert a run, literally, for the money. I used to be completely represented in the state house by Republicans. Now, I have a state rep who is a Democrat, and two up-for-grabs-by-the-polls House and Senate seats. We’ll see who we’ll be sending down to Olympia for the legislative session in January!

Edited to add: my daughter said that she wanted to go to the Victory Party because she wanted “to drink from the Fountain of Glory”. I thought that phrase was pretty funny.