January 2, 2009 | Filed under: It's Called "Having a Life." You Should Try It., People I Like Even More Than My Job

This pretty well sums up my night: ten hours of champagne. No, I have no idea how many glasses that is. Yes, my “night” started mid-afternoon. Stop looking at me like that.

I somehow ended up with zero group shots on my camera, despite having posed for many, many of them. But I totally won the battle of dueling cameras — Neal’s picture was my blurry hand holding the camera.

This is the drink of choice for my drinking buddy running partner Scott. I won’t touch it, but I can order one like a pro. (Bombay martini, dirty, up. Unspecified number of olives, unless the first drink comes with too many, and then the proper number is one.)

There I am. In a funny hat. My work here is done.

And as long as I’m showing you pictures, here’s the collage of photos from Prague I put in my Christmas New Year’s letter. Which reminds me, I’ve got roughly 345,762,303,957 more pics from that trip to edit and upload before I take another vacation. Drat.

December 22, 2008 | Filed under: It's Called "Having a Life." You Should Try It., People I Like Even More Than My Job, The Fam

Every weekday morning I wake up and think, “Fuck.”  It’s either “fuck, I can’t believe how tired I still am” or “fuck, I can’t believe how much work I have to do today.”  During these first few minutes, I have a crucial decision to make:  get up and go into work early (thus reducing some of my stress) or get up and go to the gym (a more effective stress-reducer, but less productive on the work front)?  Or say screw it, and go back to bed for another hour?  (I can tell you which choice hasn’t been selected much lately.)

On the weekends, I’m presented with a slightly different challenge. I generally don’t set the alarm, so I don’t generally complain about how tired I am on those days.  Instead, I lie in bed plotting what I’m going to do first. Go for a run! Clean the house! Go to church! Do laundry before other people are up! Go to Target before other people get there! Go to work before other people park near there! I’m a morning person, you see, and I know that prioritizing something at the beginning of my day means it absolutely, 100% will get done, which is why I’m up this morning telling you this – because my evening is already booked.

I don’t think I’ve been this excited to go home for Christmas since freshman year of college when Christmas break meant clean laundry and no homework and lots of time spent catching up with my high school friends. I’ve probably packed as many clothes for the game tonight as for the entire rest of the time I’ll be home over the holidays. Look, it’s an OUTDOOR EVENT in CHICAGO in DECEMBER — not exactly a balmy proposition. Not to mention that it’ll be NIGHTTIME and therefore even colder. The good news is, Emily and I went to the Ravens-Redskins game in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago and froze our asses off had a great time, so I’m well prepared for this endeavor. Sort of. If anything can prepare one for four hours in single degree temperatures mere feet from an inland ocean.  Look for me on ESPN — I’ll be the girl in the pink ski jacket trying everything she can think of to avoid turning into an icicle, including but not limited to dreaming about her nice, warm bed.

Yes, we are wearing two hats each. And two shirts. And two jackets.

November 4, 2008 | Filed under: It's Called "Having a Life." You Should Try It.

Nothing pithy or enlightening today, just a final reminder to go vote on Tuesday and get yourself one of those fancy “I Voted” stickers. You know, unless you were planning on voting for candidates with an (R) next to their names. In which case, nevermind.

(No, seriously, everyone please exercise your Constitutional right, regardless of whom you support.)

November 2, 2008 | Filed under: Is She Still Talking?, It's Called "Having a Life." You Should Try It.

Oh, you knew I’d use that line at least once this week.

Things are going well.  I have managed to not look like a complete idiot this time around, with the exception of getting my rental car stuck in the mud yesterday afternoon. Um, yeah.

(The short version: Google sent me down a “road” that was not so much a road as ooky-gooky-mud-and-maybe-cow-manure-covered-by-leaves. Between a campaign staffer pushing the car and my forward/reverse/turn the wheels magic, we managed to unstick the car. Then I asked the local farmer for better directions, ones which involved driving on a paved state highway to get to our destination.)

At any rate, the people here are great, the volunteers are numerous and dedicated, and I’ve managed to find a good niche, doing whatever needs to be done that the regular campaign staff can’t get to. Today that was running a satelite location from whence canvassers were dispatched.

New Hampshire itself (or this part of it) is ridiculously pretty, with shining blue lakes, evergreens and deciduous trees decked out in golds and oranges and rusty, firey reds. It’s certainly not a wealthy part of the state and much of the county is rural, which is supremely comfortable for me, as it’s reminiscent of where I grew up.

(Please excuse the shoddy pictures; it was the best I could do in 60 seconds of fine quality photography on my cell phone.)

The craziness of the campaign has set in — in my house I’m the first one out the door in the morning and the last one to come in at night. I eat handfuls of dry Frosted Mini Wheats for breakfast on my drive in. I’ve managed to spend time chatting with the other volunteers crashing there, but I have yet to meet the owners. (Four of us are staying in their “guest house,” which used to be a family’s real house until the current owners purchased it, as it was the property adjacent to their real — and even larger — house.)

Despite the 12- to 15-hour days, I find myself mentally toying with the idea of doing a campaign — like, really working, not volunteering. It appears I have the required qualities — supreme organizational skills, constant enthusiasm for mundane tasks, and the ability to accept whatever the volunteers produce, even though it’s often less than perfect. Also, a car I’m willing to chuck miscellaneous campaign literature, food and signage into. And drive through the mud in.

Yes, I am crazy, thanks for asking.

October 30, 2008 | Filed under: Good Things Come to Those Who Are Impatient Whiners, It's Called "Having a Life." You Should Try It.

You know that commercial for Comfort Inn, I think, with that baritone guy Johnny Cash singing “I’ve been to Reno, Chicago, Fargo…”? That’s pretty much me these days, except that I stay in much nicer hotels. (Like this one, where, I kid you not, the bathroom was at least half the size of my living room.)

I’ve managed to experience three seasons in one week, as DC was resplendent in fall colors when I left town last weekend. Yesterday featured a 60-degree swing, as I got on a plane in Arizona, where it was 87 degrees out, and landed after midnight in New Hampshire, where it snowed Tuesday and felt like 29 degrees around the time I took off from Phoenix. TWENTY-NINE. With SNOW. (No, really, together we’ll conserve body heat.)

Thankfully, in my suitcase right next to my swimsuit and flip flops are a down jacket, hat, scarf and gloves. I thought I might be going a little overboard with the winter packing, but as it turns out, nope. I’ll need ‘em.

In similarly shocking-to-the-system news, 2008 is the year of identity politics, and apparently I did not escape its pervasive reach. While the Phoenix trip was for work, spending the next week in New Hampshire is entirely my own doing. As with the last election, I took a look around for exciting races where candidates could really use the help. Unlike last time, the candidates that really spoke to me were all women. Yes, of course I’m helping with the Presidential contest, too, but the big draw for me was down-ticket races in a place where the Presidential race was also competitive. My motivation is pretty straight-forward: the more women there are in the House and the Senate, the more likely it is that one of them will eventually be elected President. While we’ve made great strides in the last four years increasing the female membership of Congress, a paltry 32% of Senators wear suits by Donna Karan, not the Brooks Brothers.

It is this sentiment that led me to New Hampshire, a state I’ve never been to and where I know exactly zero people. But, in the way that DC is the biggest small town around, a friend of a friend is working on my front-runner campaign, so an e-mail introduction and one phone conversation later, I was slated to spend the week leading up to the election on the ground in New Hampshire. Snow and freezing temperatures notwithstanding, I’m super excited to be here. I just hope I brought warm enough clothes.