Merry Christmas (late)

Ooh, it sure has been a while since I blogged last. Sorry about that. First I was shopping, etc. Then, a bunch of other stuff happened. Jeffy has not been feeling well and he had stuff done with his teeth on December 15 (really expensive stuff). I hope he feels better soon. He just looks so sad. Our Christmas tree fell over on December 17 at 5:30 in the morning. Only 5 ornaments broke, but it's not a nice way to be awoken. It took 5 hours to put it back up. It looks better now, since I could rotate a bad spot to the back, but I didn't need that to happen then.

I hope everyone had a nice Christmas and holiday season. I will not be sad to see 2008 leave us, as it has been a bad year since June for a lot of us. The hits just keep coming.

Deja vu?

Okay, the weathermen better stop saying that the almost record snow we had last year couldn't happen twice in a row. I think Mother Nature is taking that commentary as a personal challenge to see if we can break the old record. Today we received 11.5 inches of snow in Oshkosh. It wasn't really bad shovelling it, but I must confess we had help from the nice neighbor guy, Scott, who dug out the driveway and shovelled the front walk. Paulette and I both called in to work today because of the snow. It was a fun day, except for the shovelling part. I got to button hole #2 on my right sweater front. Yippee.

Here are pictures:

Here's a picture of Mother Nature's good start to try and beat last winter's tunnel of snow in the driveway. That picture is from February 2008. The snow in this picture looks eerily similar--and it's only December. Yikes.

Here's the start of one of the giant snowpiles at the end of the driveway. How big will it get this year?

I gotta go now-the dryer is calling me and that means my Christmas jammies are dry. I want to put them on and knit some more. More from snowland soon......

Welcome to Christmasland

Well, we got our tree on Friday. Here are pictures:

Here is Paulette being eaten by our Christmas tree (she is actually cutting it down).

Here's a much cuter picture of her.

Eek! Who is that?



We have a good time going to the tree farm. I didn't go sledding this year with the sled they give you for the tree. We could have used our snowshoes, though. Holy cow, what a lot of snow. We have been going to the same tree farm for 19 years, Heritage Christmas Tree Farm in Wild Rose. Robin, the owner, told us that next year is their 20th year owning the farm!



Here is the finished product:







On the knitting front, St. Nicholas (aka Paulette) got me this yarn from the Loopy Ewe:

It is Lorna's Laces "Team Spirit" sport weight. Hmm, whose team colors could those be? Maybe I need to knit it into something to help our team.

Back to normal

Well, it's day 2 back at work and it feels pretty good to be normal again. The cats are liking it. I can actually think about other things besides election stuff. Yippee.

Knitters are good people. Paula, one of our fellow recounters, is a knitter. She sent me the following items in the mail:

Felted acorns. Aren't they cool? (Sorry about the bad picture)

Handspun yarn she bought. It is fingering weight--there are 500 yards of it!

This beautiful sparkly yarn from the Great Adirondak Yarn Co. There are 100 yards of it in worsted weight. The picture doesn't do it justice.

Winter (which isn't even officially here yet) sure is starting off with a bang. We had 4.5 inches of snow last week, a couple more the other day and now we are supposed to get 5 more tonight and tomorrow. My snowshoes are feeling happy. I better go down and check the bindings on them to make sure they are ready for fun.

Last night Jeffy (see picture below) decided he wanted turkey from Thanksgiving. He stood up and removed a couple of items from the refrigerator while I was putting water in there. I gave him some of course, since he put in all that effort. Yes, he is looking really old in the picture below. He is 15 years old, which is 74 in people years. He has taken to sleeping behind his chair. I think he's waiting for the Christmas tree which we are getting on Friday.

The end!

The recount in Winnebago county ended at about 3:00 this afternoon. I'm free!! Unfortunately, Jess didn't win, but the margin went from 182 to around 150. Randy will be reminded of that the next time we are down in Madison to talk to our legislators. I actually can't wait to try to make him toe the line. It could be fun.


Here is a picture of our tireless ballot box stuffer, Joe, putting the very last ballot into the voting machine:





Everyone cheered!!

Here's Joe telling the machine that the election is finished. It is running the final totals tape of the votes cast on the machine.

Here's a picture of the Democratic crew who was there for the whole thing:

Pictured left to right are: Attorney Brian, Paulette, Summer, Kory, me, Brandon, and Ian.

Not pictured are Paula and Amanda. We found out Paula is a fellow knitter (so is our city clerk, Pam). Paula sent me yarn and felted acorns that I received in the mail today. I'll put a picture of all of it on here soon. Thanks so much, Paula. We missed you today! Amanda has been sick, so she was not there for the last few days. We missed you as well, Amanda.

I just want to say thanks for coming here to help you guys. You are the best!! I'll miss those of you who don't live in Oshkosh. We will be visiting most of you the next time we come down to the capital.

Recount captivity day 6

Yippee, we probably only have one more day of recounting left. Tomorrow we tackle the town of Algoma and the city of Omro. The rest is finished.

The atmosphere is definately becoming more partisan as the recount goes on. Some of the Republicans are becoming kind of insufferable in their annoying qualities. I think it's kind of rude to start trying to tell the county clerk how to do her job and telling the poor guy who's feeding ballots through a balky optical scan reader to do it faster. Who does he think he is?

In a nutshell, here's how a recount of a district usually goes down:

Reconcile tag numbers on zip ties of bags containing ballots with paper record.

Open bags and start to sort ballots to check for clerk signature on absentee ballots and poll inspector signatures on polling place ballots. Sort out ones without signatures or anything else weird on them.

Open boxes containing absentee ballot envelopes and count and check for all signatures. Sort out ones without signatures.

Get lawyers involved in fighting about ballots and envelopes that are not signed correctly, etc.
This step might take a while and involve phone calls to the Government Accountability Board in Madison.

When everything above is sorted out, go through piles of ballots with observers from each side telling canvass members which ballots they would like to be hand counted because of weird stuff on them.

Run ballots through machine to count them, with observers from both sides watching.

While this is going on, count numbers of votes on touch screen voting machine tapes. If there is a problem, get lawyers involved again to fight some more.

Hand count ballots that cannot be run through machine.

Make sure numbers match up with what happened on election night. Sometimes more disagreements with lawyers present will happen here.

Start over with another district.

Just imagine being one of the people on the canvass board who suddenly have 20 or more supervisors. Ugh. I give those folks a lot of credit for hanging in there. We have made friends with a lot of them and even try to help them, without touching any of the election materials, of course. That's the most frustrating part. I really want to help some of them, but I can't just hand them a poll book or pile of ballots. It's almost embarrassing in a way.

Recount captivity day 5

The best part about today is...I don't have to count any ballots tomorrow!! We start again on Monday. We finished the city of Oshkosh today and Monday we do the town of Algoma.

Today was very tense at times. In one of the wards, they were off by 100 ballots. They hauled yet another chairperson of a polling place into the firing squad and questioned her for at least a couple of hours. In the end, someone (and they're not telling who) wrote down the wrong number on one of the sheets they were keeping track on. They were never off by 100 ballots at all. I felt a little sorry for the woman they pulled in there. However, the rest of her stuff was kind of in a mess also. They also had to get the city's attorney in there as well, which was kind of a chore since the guy doesn't know how to use a cellphone.

Since a lot of the Republican campaign people were deer hunting, they had called in reinforcements to the ballot counting for their side. Unfortunately, one of the reinforcements was Gregg Underheim. Ugh. I got stuck sitting with him for at least an hour watching them feed ballots into a machine. Not fun. He was describing to me how he got tennis elbow in college playing foosball.

Paulette and the rest of our people were getting a kick out of watching the Repubs and their Blackberrys. When one of the guys phone rang this afternoon it was just really funny the way he whipped his phone out of the holster on his belt, kind of like the way they pull their guns out of a holster in those wild west movies.

At one other point in the afternoon, there was some question on what it said on two absentee envelopes. To some of the canvassers, it looked like it said "deceased" which was then crossed out. This of course started a whole bunch of funny jokes. The county clerk looked at it and said maybe the guy was Jesus. When one of us said maybe it was entered in error, one of the older ladies who was counting ballots wanted to know if his name was entered or interred, which made me almost fall off my chair laughing.

We'll see what kind of a mess the town of Algoma is in. Hopefully they have stuff straightened out since the last presidential election when people were in line until midnight to cast their ballot.

I have gotten pretty much knitting done this week while watching ballots run through the machine.