It's all over now but the voting

We've done what we came here to do. We identified voters, we encouraged voters, we recruited volunteers and raised money and raised awareness and took the high road and didn't hit (that's my own special rule. Apparently I needed that rule.).

We called and pestered and knocked on doors and put up yard signs and worked and worked and worked. We ate a ton of pizza and goldfish crackers and veggies and dip and potato chips and nachos and salsa. We ate moosemeat chili and egg salad sandwiches and gourmet preparations.

We did our best to treat our volunteers well and to make the shift enjoyable enough for them to agree to come back. (I think that's where the no hitting rule came in.)

I gave pitches and talked on the radio and answered questions about the same things over and over and over again. I wrote a newspaper column and blog posts and even delivered a sermon before it was done.

I am toast.

I have given all that I had to give. That's it, I'm done.

Tomorrow is voting day here in Maine, and the polls will close state-wide at 8 p.m., which means that in 25 hours of me sitting here writing this, it will be decided whether Laura and I can be legally married in the state we call home.

We've just spent four days in Portland, some 150 miles from home, staying with a friend who is more gracious than I could ever be, because Laura's mother was in the intensive care unit at Maine Medical Center. Friday morning she was unresponsive and her kidneys had stopped functioning. She had surgery earlier last week, and apparently it was all too much for some of her organs to handle, so they had a little lie-down-take-a-nap-kind-of-break. Fortunately, the doctors managed to coax them back into action without having to do dialysis, but Laura had to be nearby in order to make whatever medical decisions needed making. She's the eldest daughter, and thus next of kin. I cannot imagine how stressful this must have been for her. I have been watching her negotiate the myriad of bureaucratic levels at the hospital and run interference between the doctors and the rest of her family, and well, let's just say she's done it all with a lot more patience and grace than I think I would have been able to muster in similar circumstances. Tonight, she is my hero.

We are exhausted. We won't be doing the election-day running around get-out-the-vote madness that happens. We are on orders from the campaign team to lay low and recover a bit. I had the flu for nine days before we went to Portland, so we're both pretty wiped out. I expect we'll go to bed tonight and not set an alarm. We'll wake up when we wake up and forage in the house for breakfast. I may or may not make some cookies to bring to the party tomorrow night. We'll head up to Ellsworth in the late afternoon to set up for the party that we're having when the polls close at 8. It's at a local Internet cafe. They're letting us have the place for free and bring in our own snacks. They'll make their money on the cash bar. Laura and I will do what we can to make the place spiffy and prepared for the invasion of multitudes of election geeks and their laptops.

See, there are no big candidate races in Maine this year, so the television news people will be doing very little in the way of coverage. We had considered getting a big TV for the event, but it seemed silly if there isn't going to be live coverage through the evening. So we'll do it all on our laptops. I'll post all the links and stuff tomorrow. For tonight, I need to eat my spaghetti-o's with meatballs and snuggle my sweetie and head to bed. We've earned this night's rest.