Day 6

Today started out with more visibility again – this time it was much warmer and a little humid, so it wasn’t unbearable to stand outside for an hour. We got a lot of honks and thumbs up and I only had one guy point a finger to his head and pretend to pull the trigger. Such is the like of a campaign worker… We stopped by the Dunkin’ again, which was hilarious, because they remembered us from the last time we were in. Good news, because we’ll be in there tomorrow too. Visibility is getting pretty important, with a lot of people saying that they won’t make their decision until the day of. That statement still seems ridiculous to me, because I just don’t know how a person in their right mind could do that, but oh well.

I spent the rest of the morning canvassing with a kid from around the area, Zach, which was really fun. He put in this awesome CD, so we at least had some good music to jam to as we hit up the senior population of our area. It went surprisingly well – we made a really good team. Zach got kudos because we were brave in the face of both strange seniors and attack Pekinese.

This afternoon, I went out with the state representative again. Somehow, the two of us wind up assigned to shanty town, New England every time, so I wasn’t about to go tromping off by myself anyways, so I guess it wasn’t all bad. At one point, we wound up way far back in this lake village with strange houses, some from corrugated steel, some pink trailers with seven sliding glass doors on the front. We did happen upon a little island on a lake, however, which was pretty cute. The word island was stretching it, but it was a peninsula, as it was surrounded by water on about 3.5 sides.

After making it back from that, we enjoyed more volunteer made lasagna, which was amazing tonight, and I again tried to eat my weight in coffee cake and lemon bars. I think I really needed some sugar energy after this afternoon though. I’m getting really run down again, and everyone around is getting pretty snippy, save for the wonderful young couple that is doing the volunteer coordinating. They’re absolutely wonderful – they came down from DC to stay with the husband’s parents for a week or two to help with the election. Our director made us come make phone calls for a while before she sent us to the Derry office, which we just tried to do as slowly as possible. Marc and I were just in bad moods from the day and we both hate phone calls anyways. Luckily, we watched some MSNBC for a while and swapped horror stories from the day (Some highlights: Marc was attacked by a donkey, I ran into a guy that was weeping blood, Marc ran into a guy with no eye, and one of our volunteers called a fellow volunteer Ted Nugent all day, even though the poor man’s name was Phil).

Tonight involved Marc and I getting sent to the Derry office to do door hangers, which was ridiculous for any and all reasons you could ever think of. We wound up in a trailer park outside of Derry with no one to direct us where to go. At that point of the night, I hated pretty much everyone that I had talked to within the past five days. Thus, we finally decided to screw it and headed home (Streets and Trips is a lifesaver…). All I’m focused on right now is getting through the next 24 hours…

- Amanda