One day to go

Well, valuable lesson with the mobile blogger app. It deletes what you write if you take a picture after you write the post.

Faj (my dad) upgraded my cell service for the month we're gone, so you can expect a daily post, and maybe a text message! Pretty excited about staying in such good touch.

I think we're both a little nervous but mostly just ready to get going. We fly to Amsterdam tomorrow and have a 24 hour layover there before continuing on to Delhi, so it'll be a nice way to ease in to traveling.

in closing

how do you sum up the last year of your life spent on a campaign? i
don't know that it's possible. my brain is still feeling mushy after
four solid days of printing lists from midnight to 2 am, waking up at
7 to be in the office for volunteers to pick them up, spending the
next 13 hours bouncing from location to location and then going back
to the office to pull and print lists for the next day. but my job was
easy compared to what our volunteer organizers were doing; training
brand new volunteers and managing 4, 12 hour, back to back phone
banks. keeping everyone on task, motivated, focused.

this is the small, window-lined office i've been working in since
june. my "desk" is the short end of a long, collapsable table, and
every day i sat wedged between a preschooler-sized sink and the table.
from there, i could see everyone who came in the door of the building,
who volunteered in my room, and a tiny sliver of our room across the
hall so i could yell directions to the person sitting near the door
when we heard someone saying something crazy or, more often,
fantastic.

i am incredibly proud and honored to have been a part of what we just
accomplished. it feels like summer camp in that i'm going to miss the
people i've met, the inside jokes, the endless tacos and lattes and
phone calls. but it isn't really like summer camp at all because at
the end of our journey, we reelected the president of the united
states.

together, volunteers in austin called more than 125,000 people the last four days of the election. we made up more than 1/5 of the state's total even though we're 1/8 of the team. as the only paid staffer in the office, there were a lot of questions that came my way in the last year. but in those final four days, each organizer was the master of their own team. they made it fun, they hit goals, and they did it without any help. 

our volunteers represented every piece of america; young, old,
wealthy, poor, every ethnicity. every day we laughed, shared crazy
phone calls, experienced frustration and forged ahead. i will never
forget their stories and their reasons for being there. at the end of
the night, no one headed to the citywide watch party because we wanted
to end the way we began; in our neighborhood teams, crowded together,
working tirelessly. i couldn't be more proud of what we did, and i
can't wait to see what we will do.

spider smile

i've never been good at cleaning. things don't feel thoroughly clean after i clean the way they do when gram or minky cleans something. really i just stack things in piles and then when it gets totally out of hand, i get rid of the irrelevant things and keep a smaller pile until it happens again.

the other morning i was in bed and thought it was sweet that my boyfriend had drawn a smiley face on his windowsill, but upon closer inspection it turned out just to be a serendipitous dust formation with a spider for an eye.

while we're here, i've uploaded a few random photos.

these are my birthday shoes from minky. they're bright purple suede. it hasn't been cold enough outside to wear suede too much yet, but they fit like a dream and are super comfy. looking forward to cold weather.

and being raised in an HPO family (hinting pays off), i suggested that if bf hadn't thought of a gift for my birthday yet, i was planning on getting one of these little fold up backpacks from baggu for india since it could fit in my bag when i didn't need it and then be a good little day pack once we got there. he picked out elephants for india.

time for bed!

you look so fine to me

top of the list of things you shouldn't say to boys: "i want to hold babies."

but i do! need a little bit of baby holding every once in a while. luckily, becca, nirav and maya will be here soon enough. very excited.

boyfriend ESP

was driving home tonight, changing around radio stations, switched to 93.3 thinking 'i never listen to this station because i don't like any of the songs they play except gomez because boyfriend and i went to a concert together when we were first dating. i hope they play a gomez song.' and literally three seconds later, what came on?


and thennn, i had to be on a conference call 20 seconds after the song ended, but i really wanted to call boyfriend to tell him about what just happened, but i was on hold waiting for the conference call to start, and the only way to talk to him is if he called me and i could swap calls. 3 seconds later i look down, and he was calling me! so i took his call quickly and told him what happened before jumping back on the call.

isn't that crazy? all in the same 6 minutes.

there are several times when we've called each other at the exact same time during the day so we both get sent to voicemail because we're calling each other.

story of the week

minky has always made our birthdays special. grandparents usually do well, but they live far away so they don't always know what your style is or what would be perfect, unless you ask for specific things. but minky always knows.

this year, she bought me lots of pretty things from j crew's fall collection. a purple down-filled vest, purple suede flats, a scarf. and a sweater. a beautiful, navy with white polka dots sweater. it fit so well. it was perfect. except! it was wool. and dry clean only.

i've shrunken three beautiful wool sweaters in my lifetime, and you would think i could learn not to. but i haven't. i've learned that i'm not ready for dry clean only yet. so i went to j crew on sunday when i had an hour of free time (in the pouring rain with no umbrella because i loaned it to a volunteer).

anyway before i left the house, i was looking at the receipt she had given me, and i noticed there were two sweaters on it. same size, same print. so i call her to ask if she bought herself one. nope. it was just a mistake.

so of course i went thinking i would let them know, but they wouldn't do anything.

i walk in the door and immediately, this woman alice greets me and asks how i'm doing. i say fine, but i'm exchanging some things and i wanted to let you know about this mistake, i'm sure there's nothing you can do, but it's just a shame to have spent money on nothing. but then alice says hmm let me see if there's anything i can do.. and she comes back and says she was the one who rung minky up that day, so she'll just fix it somehow.

i was so excited!

so then i went on a shopping spree, and like a dream, every time i went to the register to check out, i hadn't met my total yet.

i ended up exchanging one real sweater and one invisible sweater, and i left with two long sleeve soft shirts (one red, one blue), a white tank top for layering,  a navy sweater, a camel colored pullover sweater and a coral top.

was thrilled, to say the least. now i just need fall to come a bit quicker so i can wear my fall clothes! it's been beautiful during the day in the mid 80s, but not quite sweater weather.

sunrise, sunset

one of my favorite things we do to stay in touch while we're far away is sending pictures of sunsets (and sometimes sunrises. only one.). new mexico sunsets usually beat austin sunsets. mountains make everything prettier. 

34 minutes until my birthday!