Yay for Democracy!

Mace started Pre-K 3 today. I drove him to school in the pouring rain (even though I could have waited fifteen minutes or so and the downpour might have let up a smidge), because you only get 3 hours of preschool. By the time you drop off your pre-schooler, wait in the 1/2 mile long line to turn left out of the parking lot and get home, you've already burned 1/2 an hour of your precious time without the pre-schooler. You have to leave the house 15 to 20 minutes before preschool ends for the day to get there in time for pick-up and not be charged for leaving your kid past pick-up time. So that means, tops, you've got like 2 hours 15 minutes to file motions and object to claims before you have to get back in the car and drive back down to pick the preschooler up. That being said . . . I was not waiting for the rain to let up before dropping him off.

When I dropped him off a few minutes after 9:00, only two of his eleven classmates had arrived. Apparently, the other 9 were waiting out the rain.

And not to bore you with it . . . but let's talk a little about the rain. As of this morning, Tampa has had 6.76 inches of rain this month. Forecasters were expecting another inch of rain today, so now we're up to 7.76 inches of rain. That's a lot of water. Most of it is standing in our driveway and creating a most excellent mud bogging adventure for people who are brave enough to drive down our way:

After I dropped Mace off at preschool, which also happened to be a polling place today, I remembered that I needed to vote. So I called Grandma and asked her if she wanted me to come back by the house and pick her up so she could go with me to vote -- I was worried her little Volkswagon Bug wouldn't make it out of the driveway if she tried to go by herself later in the day. She said yes, so I swung by, slid down the drive, picked her up and we headed out to vote. We got to the library and the nice senior citizen behind the desk in the absolutely deserted room designated for voting took a look at Grandma's drivers license and said, "You don't vote here." I said, "Yes, we do -- we've been voting here for the past four years!" He said, "You may have voted early here for the past four years, but your actual polling place is at that tiny little Baptist Church you attended for the past year but that you quite recently stopped attending, and were, quite frankly, hoping to only reflect on in quiet moments when pondering the ways in which the Holy Spirit works, and not actually have to physically visit again for quite some time." He knew an awful lot about me for being a poll worker.

So we left this polling place, where we could park on pavement, immediately adjacent to a covered walkway, safely arriving, dry and happy, to vote . . .

. . . and drove to the church where we held Coffeehouses all last summer and had to park 100 feet from the door in a foot of water because the senior citizen guarding the door waited for me to park five feet from him (and the door), get out of the car, pull on my raincoat, lock the doors and walk up the steps before informing me that I could not park within 100 feet of the polling place. Could he not have motioned to me to roll down my window while the car was still running and inform me of this as soon as I pulled up? Of course he could. Between Risse Brothers, the polls, and a few other places that will remain nameless, I am encountering way way way too many passive-aggressive senior adults these past few weeks and would prefer that they just take the aggressive-aggressive approach with me from now on -- or even better, the passive-passive approach. It was probably not worth the trouble for me to vote in the 3 races in which I actually voted. We arrived home wet and irritated for having made the effort at all -- and yet, I do still prefer democracy and really would walk to the polling place if I had to.

I think democracy should be preserved so that urchins like this one can grow up in a free society and decide for themselves whether or not they feel like wearing underwear:

I'll just let you ponder on your own whether you believe democracy was at work under that shirt.