Election Day. This is truly an exciting day for me. I cannot imagine how it is that people choose not to vote when there's an election!

It looks like there are few making that choice this year. In fact, I got together with one of the Lutheran college students yesterday over a cup of coffee, and one of his first questions was, "Have you voted yet?" A new paradigm! (I love working with college students, who startle me so often, because their assumptions are so different from mine.) He was right: with all the methods of voting early, it's no longer Election Day. It's Election Season.

Still, it's exciting, I think, to be at the polling place on the first Tuesday of November. With the forecast of big crowds, it's the first time that I've had to plan strategy: when do I have time to stand in line? I have a lunch meeting today in Yorktown which will end at 2:00, and then an appointment at 4:00 back in Williamsburg. Ordinarily, I'd swing by the polling place on the way back into town. But would I have time to wait? And then, after the 4:00 appointment, won't the lines be very long, with people voting on their way home from work?

For Patty, it's been a dilemma too. She is teaching all day, and then has play practice after school. (She's doing rehearsal music for the Walsingham Academy Upper School's production of "Bye Bye Birdie.") Her decision was to go to the polling place at 6:15 AM. She had to wait to 45 minutes. Not bad.

My strategy is to wait until people with real jobs have to be at work, and to vote at about 9:00 AM. We'll see how that works out.