Saturday, April 5, 2008

8 Hours of My Life...


8 hours of my life that I won't get back.

Today was the Snohomish County Republican Convention. Having been sort of coerced into being a delegate (to keep the Ron Paul nuts out) I went - with my much more politically active husband. I think there were 7 precincts - and the 44th precinct (ours) was by far the largest, in terms of representation. We had nearly 200 people there - out of a total of somewhat over 700 in attendance. The bad news about having a bigger precinct is that it takes forever. F-O-R-E-V-E-R to elect the delegates to go to the state convention. We were given a worksheet that had the people who had submitted their names before the convention on it, then numbers and lines to write in more. Nominations were taken - I think about 25 more people were written in. Then we had to whittle down over 80 nominees to 31. Each nominee was given 45 seconds to speak. You do the math. That process alone took over an hour, then the vote, then the wait for the tally (18 were elected in the first cut, bottom ten vote getters dropped), then making the notes for the worksheets, then voting again, waiting again, tally & notes again (no one elected this time but 20 lowest vote getters were dropped). The vote AGAIN (yes, I said AGAIN), wait, tally....you get the idea.

It was probably a good thing that I did go - I told my husband while we were there that I would rather he didn't run this year against incumbent Hans Dunshee. Dunshee has been in office for several years, and I'm 99.9% sure that he would not be beatable by a nearly unknown Republican challenger. If I hadn't been there, who knows what would have happened.

All this worrying about nutty Ron Paul disciples and I didn't hear anyone who would own up to supporting him. I did hear from 2 women who were staunch Huckabee fans - one of whom felt that she could not morally, in good conscience vote for McCain. That got a bit of a rise from the group.

As it was, we left early - a little after 4pm. After all, it is general conference and Steve had boys to take to the priesthood session this evening.

I cherish those 2 1/2 hours of solitariness. It's the time of year (along with father and sons campout) that makes having 5 boys worth it. After 8 hours of sitting on plastic high school folding chairs in crowded rooms I need a bit of solitude - on a nice comfy sofa. Now, if I can just find the remote....

1 comment:

Keira said...

I hope your tuckus goes back to its original shape. Metal chairs (or worse molded plastic ones) are an anathema.

Bummer you missed a chance to incite anarchy at the political round up: Burn the chairs!