I had my six month evaluation at work today. I had a 3 (exceptional) in everything except Knowledge (2) and Attendance (4). It was a very positive evaluation. This apparently was good enough to give me a 50 cent raise. (In another three and a half years, maybe I’ll actually be able to meet our expenses!) It affects my paycheck on Monday, which is great since we worked a good six hours of overtime this week. We came in early (six a.m.) three days.

That included Tuesday so we could be sure to leave at four p.m. so everyone would have time to vote. I offered to print out a voter registration form for Berck, but he has said that he isn’t going to vote until he can do it from home. Our polling place happens to be the “clubhouse” attached to our apartment complex’s office. That’s about as close to voting from home as you can do in Oklahoma. But Berck changed his stance to only voting when there’s someone worth voting for.

Oklahoma apparently doesn’t have voting booths with little privacy curtains or individual voting machines. You have to use the marker they give you to complete the arrows next to the candidates you want. Then you feed your ballot into a voting machine that whirs and pulls your sheet into itself. I didn’t know which way to insert mine, so it probably went in upside down and was invalidated. The person who was supposedly manning it stepped up to take my marker after I had already watched my ballot gobbled up.

Berck and I stayed up pretty late, listening to NPR’s coverage and constantly hitting refresh on CNN’s website. The one thing we shared in this election was the excitement of watching the results come in on such a tight, tight race. Berck did some calculations and scribbled on a pad of paper until he came to the conclusion that it was all coming down to Ohio…before anyone else on the air did. And he was right.

I had learned my lesson four years ago about waiting up all night for the results, and I was glad I did when I got up in the morning and saw that it was still up in the air. I didn’t find out who had won until I was driving home from work that night.

I couldn’t celebrate with Berck, Mom and Dad are in Highlands this week, and the chalet doesn’t have very good cell phone service, so the only person I could call before nine was my brother, who also has Verizon. So I called Ben and said, “You’re the only person I can talk to!”

“Why?” he asked, “Where’s Berck?”

“You’re the only person I can share the exciting news with.”

“Why? What happened? Tell me!”

“The election!”

“Oh, yeah.”

Of course, he’d stayed up till two, when Fox called Ohio for Bush, so it was pretty old news by then. But it was new for me.

Okay, I think I’ll post the story about how we got our new telephone in another post.