Good-bye Athena account. You were fun while you lasted. You provided convenient storage and ubiquitous access while I needed it, social networking mechanisms until I didn't, and a short-and-sweet e-mail access that slowly gathered more and more junk mail. My user ID and Kerberos principal will probably still linger on, but those will be distant memories in my mind in a few years. So long.

Getting back to Earth, I quite literally talked to a thousand people yesterday, which means my voice was dropping out around six or seven o'clock. Voter turnout was fantastic. In the precinct that I worked there were about 1400 votes out of a voting population of about 2000. By the end of the night I was quite exhausted and non-functional, though part of that could be attributed to my waking up at two in the morning the night before and not able to get back to sleep. By five I just gave up and started my morning routine in preparation to arrive at the polls by 6:30.

And now Massachusetts has a Republican senator again. I'm not a big fan of Scott Brown, but I'm taking a wait-and-see approach. Also I don't want to sleep with Brown or Coakley, but I was amused by Brian McGrory's column in the Globe comparing the election to a bad weekend hangover. "Oh, you bad boy. You bad, bad boy."

Addendum: the cheap-ass umbrella I bought from CVS a week ago? It died in yesterday's icky-but-surely-not-windy weather. Maybe I should really go for the "Unbreakable Walking-Stick Umbrella" (video also on Youtube). But it's not foldable :(