Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

Remember, remember the Fifth of November…

Unlike the rest of my family, I waited until Election Day to vote, mostly because the closest early voting location to my house was the library, where in 2008, I got mobbed by Obama supporters wielding plywood signs. I thanked my lucky stars when my polling place relocated in 2010, and I haven’t been back to that godforsaken library since.

Besides, I couldn’t put shoes on last week, and driving barefoot and walking barefoot into a polling place is probably verboten.

Anyroad.

I left the house at 6:08 a.m. to vote despite the horrifying eye infection that has swollen my upper eyelid so much that it looks like Lisa Rinna’s lips. I’m sure I made for quite a sight. Fortunately, I was one of only a handful of voters at my polling place at the buttcrack of dawn, so I was in and out of there and home again by 6:38 a.m.

As I left to return home, a man walking back to his car said he was told that his polling location had moved back down to that dreaded library. Then, to signal that he was an “ally” of a strong woman like me, he told me that he took it as a good sign since the library was where he voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

Rather than come out and say, “Honey, I just voted for Trump,” I recounted being mobbed by Obama supporters carrying plywood signs in 2008. His smile slipped from his face like he’d been slapped.

I think he got the message.

I don’t know how this election will shake out. I doubt I’m the only one who feels that way. The only thing I do know is that New York is not in play. New York is so solidly Democrat that I didn’t even know Kirsten Gillibrand was running for reelection to the Senate until I saw my ballot. I voted for the Republican challenger whom I never heard of.

After the 2020 debacle, I don’t plan to stay up all night to watch the election returns. It isn’t that I don’t care. I just don’t want to deprive myself of sleep only to discover at three in the morning that we won’t know who won the election until next week.

I miss the good old days when we knew who the winner was right away.

As I headed to the polls this morning, I remembered it was Guy Fawkes Day. Is it significant that Americans will choose a new president on the same day the Brits hold bonfires and set off fireworks to commemorate the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605? Probably not. I just found it ironic.

I plan to spend election day doing laundry and binge-watching episodes of the Swedish series “Vår tid är nu” (AKA “The Restaurant”) while intermittently applying a warm compress to my Lisa Rinna-lipped eye.

Here’s hoping the election is decided by the time I wake up on Wednesday.

What? A girl can dream.