I mentioned recently  that I had been roped in as a Booth Captain at a polling booth during the election, so I thought I'd tell you how my day went...

Slowly... agonisingly slowly, actually. The polling booth they put me one was one of the most insignificant and least frequented polling booths in the whole damn country. We got 414 voters. In 10 hours. You to do math.

So, I had to find a way to entertain myself, which I'm happy to report I managed quite nicely.  There was one great moment when they brought in an old Aborignal elder to vote, who was so frail she could barely walk, but who was a bright as a button, which got us all wondering how much she must have seen over the years. That  reminded someone else of an old traditional man they knew who could remember seeing his first white man when he was a child in the 1930s, and it just happened to be Harold Lasseter. *

But highlights like that were few and far between. And you know how it is when you're bored. You have to make your own fun. So I did.

Fun things to do on a slow day at a polling booth:

• Finish the first pages proofread of The Palace of Impossible Dreams
• Get the socially responsible volunteer minion representing the environmentalists to admit it's too late, we're all doomed anyway, so there's not much point doing anything about global warming. (Even more hysterical when you remember that I drive a hybrid and she was driving an SUV...tee hee)
• Get into a theological discussion with a devout AEC official. Within 30 minutes, have them agreeing that God is the source of all evil in the universe.
• Get the environmentalist - who argues loudly that science is going to save us from climate change - to agree that scientists are the source of all evil in the universe.
• Corrupt the environmentalist so completely that by the end of the day she's standing there holding "How to Vote" cards for the conservatives.

• After making her drive across town to fetch coffee for me and then telling her I'd promised Dace one of Dakota's kittens, get my daughter to agree that, in fact, I am the source of all evil in the universe.

My ultimate evil-overlord triumph, however, had to do with the actual voting. As I stated in my post on Saturday, my clever (if somewhat shallow and cynical) plan, was to encourage people to vote for our guy, because he was the prettiest and the others all looked like serial killers.

Apparently, my tactic worked. On my booth, and only my booth, (because we didn't actually win the seat, you see) our boy polled 62% of the primary vote.

Muwahahahahahaha...

*The fence behind Lasseter's Grave in the picture is the back fence on my house. Seriously.