Code Neon Blue!

My current words: I’m still alive.

You’ve all been to those events where you introduce yourself by standing up and saying three words that illustrate why you’re there, who you are, and so on, right? I used to point to my hair and say, “Turning Colorado blue!” (And whaddaya know, it worked!)

I managed to survive my county wide Voter Reg project, and to be brutally honest I was planning to pretty much coast from October 6 through the election, because I really didn’t think there would be much left to do. (I know, clearly I was deranged.) But everyone had caught fire, and new projects kept being proposed, new events kept being set up, and so for the last month my Three Words were a snarly “God, what NOW?!?!”

But here we all are. We not only survived, we did a whole lot of winning! Here in Prowers, our voter turnout was 72.61%, and 58 percent of that was Early or Mail-In voting, so NO ONE got disenfranchised this year because the lines were so long they couldn’t get in. The county still went roughly 2 to 1 in favor of the GOP, but we can work on that over the next two years. :)

I think it may take just a little while to adjust to semi-normal life, but I’ll do my best. For now, here is a really great song that helped get me through. It’s called “I Approve This Message", although a good alternate title would be “We, The People".

Hey, any song that mentions St. Molly of Austin and has lyrics like these:

“I am the precinct walker
I am the polling place volunteer
I am the statistician and 4 out of 5 of me approve this message….”

is a good song.

Les MisObamas!

This video was the capper on a really good day. I bought a new t-shirt:

I got a lot of organizing done for our local New Voter Reg/Switch to Vote By Mail project, and in the mail I got two BIG packets of voter application forms from the SoS office!

I am prepared to be Unstoppable come Monday.

Wow, I really need to order some of those special days with the extra hours…I keep falling behind as new deadlines erupt!

Here’s a bit of cool news I ran across today. A rancher from the endangered Pinon Canyon region, Cathy Mullins, has donated an acre of land on her historic ranch to help raise funds to keep fighting the threatened expansion of the Army’s Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site. If you don’t recall the details on this horrible plan, no worries. Just click through HERE and browse through the tabs that explain what’s at stake.

Then go buy your square inch of land, a bargain at only $10! Hey, maybe you will get one near mine!

Not that I was there to see it. Keep reading, that event is today’s exciting ending.

As you may recall, on Wednesday I ended up sticking to The Big Tent rather than going out in search of excitement because I broke a wheel on the cart I was using to haul my ancient and heavy laptop around. I tried for a duct tape fix, but only managed to make it stable for standing still. Luckily, this was the last day I needed it for this trip. I have plans to cannibalize an old lawn mower for better, stronger wheels, so Cart-y WILL roll again someday!

Checking my email in The Big Tent, I found a message from Mendi C back home, asking me to send out a reminder about the Prowers County Democratic Service Project event, a food drive for our homeless shelter and food bank. (It was a big success, and I will be posting more about it soon.) Doing this was another reminder for me to do something about switching our county party e-newsletter away from the LAME MSN interface we currently use. It is a gigantic pain in the patoo and I hate it like poison.

A couple of big names stopped to give interviews next to where I was sitting that morning. Joe Trippi and The Kos His Ownself were two of them, and I saw several people with hefty entourages, so no doubt they were celebripols of some type. But check out who was blogging RIGHT ACROSS FROM ME!

Yes, Rich from MichiganLiberal! I first met him at Frankenoid’s Garden Party on Sunday, before he had acquired BobbleObama. One of the sights from Denver I wish I had captured for posterity was Rich at the party, trying to hula hoop with a big string of glow sticks. Sadly, the necklace attachers do not hold up against the force of such awesomeness.

At 3, I returned for another stint of volunteering in the Battery Sauna. I don’t have any notes about this shift — I think my main accomplishment was getting caught up on my email and usual online reading. It was a less hectic day than Monday, as well. Probably most of the bloggers had worked out their own systems for staying powered up. We were still doing a land office business in those giant wheeled batteries, though.

Happily, I didn’t have to stay as late Wednesday. I begged off, using the excellent excuse that I was supposed to be coming in the next morning at 7. Between the heat in the room and my dwindling ratio of sleep time to activity, I was starting to feel a touch of nausea, one of the warning signs of an impending CFS crash. Balancing my cart on its one good wheel, I started heading to the 16th Street Mall lightrail stop.

Even in my weary haze, I could see something was going on. I ran into a highly annoyed Jen Caltrider in the outdoor bench area of the Tattered Cover, who explained they had cordoned off the Union Station parking lot because someone had spotted a suspicious-looking abandoned package. So all the poor people who had been lucky enough to score the good parking were now stuck for who knew how long!

It turned out later to have been a box of some kind of campaign literature. They found that out after they blew it up. Maybe the canine that reacted to it as though it was a threat was a Republidog?

You know me, I hate mornings like McSame hates nosy reporters investigative journalists. But when sufficiently motivated I can grit my teeth and lurch out of bed, and that’s what I did at 5:45 am Tuesday, hoping to contact someone at the head office of the Daily Show and get my tickets re-instated.

Because that’s just how my life goes, it took me about an hour and a half to manage this simple phone call. The number, you see, was on the web page. But I couldn’t access the web page, since now that I was away from the downtown area, the AT&T based wireless dealie I was renting claimed it could not connect me. Something to do with the Big Brother-esque filtering program in place for the DNC. Nice, huh?

After an un-install/re-install, I did get online, and was able to phone New York and…leave a voice mail. Sigh.

Carol K and I decided that the best plan would be to arrive extra early to the taping site at DU and beg the person in charge there for help. In the meantime, we turned to our next project, scrubs sewing.

In case I haven’t mentioned it, the awesome Carol K’s resume includes ‘pro seamstress’. She’s the one who made the CUSTOM FITTED scrubs I wore all week to promote my NeonNurse/CodeNeonBlue persona. She was almost done with another one, black with shiny foil hearts in neon rainbow colors, which I thought would be perfect for going to see Jon Stewart…IF WE GOT TO GO.

Carol K often listens to audio books while she works. Today I stood in for the tape player, reading a book I’d brought for the purpose, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, by a Denver author, Mario Acevedo.

Yes, it’s THAT Rocky Flats. The novel was actually sent to, and cleared by, the Department of Energy before publication — I have spent many a bemused moment trying to imagine the reaction of whoever was given the job of assessing it for its intel threat level.

It’s about a soldier who gets turned into a vampire in Iraq, and comes home to become a private eye. To me, that’s a premise begging for comedic treatment, but the author seemed to be trying hard to be dead, you should excuse the expression, serious. It’s pretty obviously a first novel, but the Denver/Colorado references were fun, and if you like a little military realism and steamy but not QUITE explicit sex mixed in with your urban fantasy, you’d probably like this series.

We got through the first four chapters while Carol K finished my top. Then, nervous but determined, we set out for our battle with the forces of witless auto-responders. First, to gather strength, we stopped for a delicious lunch at J’s Noodles and New Thai, a tiny restaurant on S. Federal near Mississippi that has justifiably won all kinds of awards. It was sort of like insurance — by eating here we guaranteed at least ONE awesome experience for the day.

We found the parking area and proper building at DU (University of Denver) with no trouble. The line was already long, so I sent Carol K ahead to stand in for us, while I took my print-outs to go find someone to fall on the mercy of. Luckily, the people in charge were SUPER nice and understanding. They said to go ahead and get in line, and so long as we made the cut (the show always overbooks tickets, to ensure a full audience), we could attend!

I went outside and followed the line back. When I found Carol K, some people sitting beside her started yelling, “Hey! Susan!” It was their turn to be surprised when Carol K did the same thing. In one of those weird coincidences I should really be used to by now, the next people to join the line behind her were some folks from ProgressNow I had spent much of Saturday volunteering with: Stacey, her partner Jill, and Peter, the adorable 17 year old Hungarian intern! I would have taken a pic, but cameras were on the Can Not Haz list for the show. OH WELL.

As you can imagine, this made the long wait in line actually fun and jolly! The first hour we were in the shade on the grassy lawn. Then we had to stand up and start inching towards the entrance. That part took two hours. Towards the end, when we were THIS CLOSE to being admitted, Carol K held our spot in the line while I went to sit down because a muscle in my back was threatening to go out on strike.

I don’t think I was sitting down for more than 20 minutes tops, but when they suddenly called for our section of the line to come in, my right leg had gone to sleep. Not the tingly kind, either, but the completely numb, ‘hey, where’s my leg!’ kind, so that when I tried to stand up, it sort of folded sideways like one of the noodles we’d had at lunch, and random strangers had to jump to catch me as I tipped over! The leg and I had a little mental battle over who was actually in charge here, and the weird nerve reactions made it swing forward like I was channeling John Cleese for a couple of steps. But I managed to lurch through the security checkpoint, and then we were IN! We were the last batch admitted. It felt like winning the tickets TWICE!

The Daily Show people did a fantastic job setting up the Byron stage at the Newman Center at DU. I just now Googled it to get the name right, and I see why they picked this venue. It’s a very modern theater designed specifically to be versatile and easy to arrange in several dozen configurations, which you can see HERE, if you are interested in such details.

Our seats were in the upper section, right where we could hang over the railing for an excellent view. A little before the taping was to start, a guy came out whose name I did not catch. His job was to warm up the audience by picking people to mock/have fun with. Later in the week, someone I know from SquareState.net as BCo Gal asked me, “Book Lady — was that you?” Yes. Yes it was. :)

Another interesting person I got to talk with was the volunteer usher. She did not have a name on her tag, but she is a retired librarian who gets to see all kinds of great shows there at DU by helping out. We bonded because the Clone got her Masters in Library Science at DU. Small academic world, eh?

The show was their first one in Denver, and I thought it was hilarious. If you missed it, you can judge for yourself by watching it HERE. If you know my trademark hoot, you can hear me every once in a while.

Carol K and I ended the day worn out (from laughing, plus the standing in line) and I was slightly sunburned, but it was SO WORTH IT.

When I got home and checked my email, there was a note from someone at the Daily Show, commiserating with me because I was stone out of luck, re the tickets. They were gone, baby, gone.

I won’t tell them any different if you don’t.