Coming up for air

So I don't know what I've been doing really, but somehow I have been ungodly busy all week - I started by cooking a brunch last Sunday for a group of about 18 adults, and 6 or 7 little kids - made that kickass breakfast pizza again.

It's not that I haven't been cooking - Monday was a normal workday, I guess, and I seem to remember making a big batch of quesadillas, to use up all the red peppers I'd been getting in my veggie box - Tipi grew these red frying peppers that are delish.

But Tuesday I worked at the polls, as a paid, non-partisan city employee, and it's taken me all week to recover. 6:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at one polling place (the chief inspector there was a librarian who works in the engineering library on campus), and then 2:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the one where I vote myself. We registered over 100 new voters in the morning shift at the first place. The busiest time everywhere was 7:00 to about 9:30 a.m. - everyone was trying to vote before work. At my polling place, I was checking people in to vote - 2 election officials have to look each person up and make sure they're on the rolls. We got slammed from 2:00 to 4:30 p.m. - we decided that so many people must've heard it was going to be busy after work, they took off early - and things were pretty quiet from 5:30 to closing at 8:00 p.m.

There were observers at both voting places - here in WI our attorney general sued the Government Accountability Board, to get them to jive their voter database with the DMV, in the interests of tightening up just who exactly can register to vote; he also threatened to get off-duty but in-uniform police officers to observe at the polls. I didn't see anyone like that, just ordinary people with dayglo "observer" name stickers, who were supposed to be strictly non-partisan. During my morning shift they were on pretty good behavior, but late in the day their liberalness started showing through - by then I was stepping out (no cell phone calls in the polling place for election officials) when I could to get word; John called me when they called PA for Obama.

Election night I came home and sat up and watched the returns, drank a few beers and a few fingers of the Makers Mark, so I was pretty toasted on Wednesday when I had to get up, pick up the stuff for the library school's booth at our state librarians' conference, and be out at the hotel on the far west side where the convention was by 8:30 a.m. And I taught a class that evening.

In between times, I have been trying to use up all my CSA box veggies - I got a ginormous bunch of kale, mustard greens, squash, cauliflower, parsnips, spinach ...

Friday I made curried cauliflower & greens, and today I made a sausage and kale soup from Anne Bramley's Eat Feed Autumn Winter, that I tested recipes for last year - she sent me a complimentary copy, and I was pleasantly surprised to see what a big beautiful book it is - and I got mentioned in the acknowledgements - that hasn't happened since Pleasant Co., where I got mentioned for the picture research in a bunch of titles.

Tonight I am at last getting to the green tomatoes David gave me; they are supposed to be cooking down into chutney right now. Davey's apples made applesauce, I think it was last weekend. Oh, yeah, and I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies last night, too.