Yes, I voted. But this story's not about me.

When I reached the table where they were checking bona fides, a family of three who were in the other line were discovered to have been in the wrong line. (Where my polling site is, they had two lines--one for those who live on the south side of the community, and one for those who live on the east side.) The checkers found the two younger people's names easily enough, and handed them their confirmation cards, but the third, the eldest (I would have put his age at about 70, maybe a bit younger but not much) had a slight problem. Apparently he had not registered, somehow, and was not on the "alpha list." So they gave him a different card and told him he could fill out a registration form and vote provisionally.

At this point I was pretty impressed. It was indeed heartening to see that they wanted everyone who could have a vote actually get to vote.

Then the shoe dropped. The gentleman said, in a very soft voice, "I can't read." My first thought was, He's 60-something and never learned to read? I hear about people like that but never did I actually meet someone who really couldn't. Oh, I've known poor readers, yes, but no one has ever admitted, in my presence, that they could not read at all. The lady at the table led him to a woman who's job it was, apparently, to serve as an interpreter (many semi-skilled English speakers at our place) and she helped him fill out his registration form.

Do we live in a great country or what?

On another front, it has always amused me that our ballots are printed in both English and Spanish, but the many indigenous peoples' languages are not represented.

On the NaNoWriMo front, I fell a little behind yesterday, but I fully intend to make up for that and still get in today's quota. It's my unofficial quota, since for NaNo all you really need is 1667 words a day, but I want to try for 2000. So far, after three days, I'm just shy of 5,000. So all I really need to catch up is a tad more than 3000 words. I can do it! I can! And I will!

Okay, I think I've cheered myself along enough...time to get writing.