Voting

No - I didn't vote for anything in Canada. I don't live there. If I did, I'd vote & live with the results.

Lee always votes early. We have the mail-in ballot, and he goes thru everything in the pamphlet and does his thing. He doesn't usually discuss it with me. Fine with me.

Diana is pretty stressed at school, and was really very busy with writing essays, studying Japanese, and the rest of what comes with carrying 18 units & doing 10 hours work-study a week. She told me she was just able to vote for president, since she didn't have the time to go through everything and try to figure it out her first go around with voting. I just said, hey, do what you've got to do.

Trevor spent a good six hours going over EVERYTHING in the pamphlets for every measure on the ballot for our area. He was reading ALL the measures for the entire county until we told him he couldn't vote on issue for cities outside our own anyway.

He had to most trouble trying to vote for a position on a Land Management board. There were three candidates, and none of them had taken the time to write a little about themselves for the voter pamphlet. So all he had were three names, and no information. In a case like that, what do you do? Eeny meeny miny mo?

He did have a good laugh about one of the candidates for the Senate that was on the ballot. The guy had qualifications like "painted a sign" and his occupation included "being there for my mother." The guy looks about 60. I guess his mom will vote for him. Trevor did not.

The whole afternoon, Trevor kept coming in to ask Lee questions about the issues. Lee explained about fiscal impact and the terms of the measures, and to see who was backing what. If you don't agree with the organization backing the measure, you probably want to vote no.

Lee was very careful not to tell Trevor what to vote for - but hopefully Trevor learned about finding the information and coming to his own conclusions.

We have one measure I hope passes - that home improvements less than $35,000 would not require you to go through all the permit processes currently in place. You still need to have all the information in case you want to sell your house, and the electrical still needs to be signed off, but you don't have to wait for inspectors throughout the whole process, like we did with our addon bedroom (which would have qualified and gone faster, probably).

We hope to do a carport, add on a new room, and extend the living room out a bit eventually. All those would be under the new guidelines if the measure passes. :)