Hooray for Vote-by-Mail

While I do enjoy aspects of traveling to my local polling place to vote in person, it is tricky enough to manage logistically with rowing and work* that I've failed to do my civic duty and vote in more than one election in recent years.

For those who haven't followed things all that closely in New York, during the pandemic, vote-by-mail options were made available to everyone, justified by the point that it was unwise to mingle in public spaces with a bunch of other people. That was great and I signed up immediately. I was sad when that ended.

Sometime after that in 2021, New Yorkers then had the opportunity to vote on a ballot measure that would have made no-excuse absentee voting a thing. It still kind of boggles my mind that the ballot measure failed, but I suspect that might have to do with a certain political party doing its darndest to retain a voting structure that helps favor their candidates. I think I might not have managed to vote in that particular election.

But then finally in 2023, legislation was passed to allow for mail-in ballots for all. Hooray! I've now gotten signed up, did the remaining learning I wanted to do before voting for the primary election next Tuesday, and once George finally got up off of the envelopes, got my ballot in the envelope and in the mailbox this morning.

And now I kind of want to make a sign for the front porch that says something like, "Already voted" so we can maybe, hopefully, get the canvassers to just leave us alone? They are aggressively persistent around here.


Edited to add... Also, I would like to point out that the political party that has protested against the expansion of mail-in voting, partially over supposed concerns about voter fraud, is the same political party that has been found to have engaged in voting fraud in this very region. To the best of my knowledge, the other major political party has at least not been found doing that, at this time.

And I will also note that I didn't really care for either local candidate for District Attorney, so neither of them got my vote.


*I leave home for rowing at ~4:45 am. I go directly from rowing to work, because home is in the opposite direction from work at that point, and often I can't afford the time or energy it takes to backtrack, especially on Tuesdays. I often don't get home until after polls close.

Weather like this... [status, work]

...inevitably reminds me of the collection of Useless Latin Phrases a friend had hanging up in college:

Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat.

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.

I'm thinking I might finally understand something about the basement where my office is located. Today, the dewpoint is at 69 degrees F. Whatever HVAC system our building has, I don't think it's set up very well to manage humidity. The floor in the hallway is wet with condensation. Aha - is it because the floor temperature is below the dewpoint, then?

It all feels a bit like being back in Costa Rica or Panama, where most of the time I kept my laptop stored in a bag with some desiccant.

It's hard to have coherent thoughts in this weather. But I am at least tackling some other lab tasks.