The moon looks like a waxing crescent in the shadow of the earth: brilliant as winter in a mantle of copper smoke, the new moon with the blood moon in its arms. The Pleiades stand almost directly over it. The stars have sprung out in color against the black ice of the sky. I would love to watch the seas of the moon flooding with the eclipse through the telescope, but it's so drowning and beautiful even by the naked eye. The mythical point of all such celestial events is that the light returns, which I believe astronomically: the laws of gravitation preclude that a planet should arrest its course, even a tidally locked satellite freeze in perpetual shade. Our neighbors may hate us forever if I blow the conch just to be sure.
2022-11-08
Before leaving the house this afternoon, I carefully packed several forms of potentially superfluous identification including a signed copy of our lease, because I had to apply for two different kinds of parking permit and then vote in a ward and precinct into which we had legally moved not forty-eight hours before voter registration closed in our state and it is just as well that I did because ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I arrived at our new polling place to find that the city had lost track of us. We have no idea what happened. The warden was equally confused. Despite registering to vote when he submitted his change-of-address last month, Rob is entirely absent from the alphabetical directory of voters in the City of Somerville. In my case, it merely believes that I live on a Road instead of a Street, inaccurately setting me on the other side of Somerville in a totally different ward, precinct, and zipcode. We showed her our lease and our driver's licenses and our first utility bill. I explained that I had even called the city because our timing was so close to the wire and been advised to vote according to our new address rather than our former one. She called someone further up the chain of election officers to double-check the protocols ("I'm looking at their lease right now") and we were given provisional ballots to cast as well as a phone number to call next week and make sure that our ballots have been counted and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts correctly figured out where we reside. We cast our ballots. We ordered pizza. Rob went to work and I bought a bed. I have spent a remarkable amount of this day in municipal spaces; I hope it worked.
spatch and I arrived at our new polling place to find that the city had lost track of us. We have no idea what happened. The warden was equally confused. Despite registering to vote when he submitted his change-of-address last month, Rob is entirely absent from the alphabetical directory of voters in the City of Somerville. In my case, it merely believes that I live on a Road instead of a Street, inaccurately setting me on the other side of Somerville in a totally different ward, precinct, and zipcode. We showed her our lease and our driver's licenses and our first utility bill. I explained that I had even called the city because our timing was so close to the wire and been advised to vote according to our new address rather than our former one. She called someone further up the chain of election officers to double-check the protocols ("I'm looking at their lease right now") and we were given provisional ballots to cast as well as a phone number to call next week and make sure that our ballots have been counted and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts correctly figured out where we reside. We cast our ballots. We ordered pizza. Rob went to work and I bought a bed. I have spent a remarkable amount of this day in municipal spaces; I hope it worked.