Let's ditch the van.

Up at 3:15 to have enough time to get ready to go to work the polls. The day starts at 5AM to set everything up for the polls to open at 6, with the cut-off being 9PM, at which point - assuming all voters have been processed - the site gets broken down, cleared up, counted out, and packed away.

4:45 AM to 9:45PM, officially the longest working day of my life.

The first voter showed up at 5:56AM and the last ballot was counted at 8:57PM. It might not have been on the dot, and it was close enough to those times as not to matter.

We processed over 1300 people. Not much, but enough. The consensus is early voting got rid of the lines, especially since every single poll worker in our group had voted early, all of us in October, and it made things a lot easier for the people who'd waited for the day itself.

I was a line clerk, so I welcomed people, told them where to go, and answered some of their questions - sometimes by telling them who to ask for a better answer than what I could give them. I made sure to be as genuinely welcoming as I could, saying hello, telling people I was happy to see them and that we were happy to have them, thanking them for coming out and coming to vote, and save for a couple of grumps, they put on genuine smiles.

I didn't have internet access on my phone, so the day was spent on site, except for two one-hour coffee-and-meal breaks that I spent in the park two blocks away. In the afternoon, I listened to breezes in the dry leaves overhead, and in the evening, I watched the last light go out of the sky and spotted a low, bright crescent moon off the horizon.

I spent the day doing something, and for that, I'm grateful for every single minute.