OMG, not only does the air taste like grit, but now there's a car alarm that's been going off for two hours.

I need one of my senses to be Not Under Assault.

Ooh, a side of extra hell! Lucky you.

One of my favorite memories is living near the I-Beam and a car alarm going off all night. Suddenly I hear breaking glass, the alarm was turned off... and the whole neighborhood hung out their windows and cheered.

On my honeymoon in St. Augustine the hotel was doing construction on the swimming pool and they left the sump pump on all night, well until my hero DH went down and unplugged the cord. No doubt there was cheering. The pump had long finished its work! This was March so the perfect time of year to have the balcony doors open.

Not car alarm level of annoyance but the rhythm of the sump pump is not at all as pleasant as the sound of waves crashing on the beach.

Looks like I made a good decision to go home and sleep. Hand count now set to begin at 8 this morning per the Palm Beach Post this morning.

4:10 AM SUNDAY UPDATE:

Ballot counting seemed to stop for the night at 4:10 a.m. Sunday, about 18 hours after ballots in the state House District 89 race began to be run through counting machines.

False alarm. More ballots appeared. Two boxes per counting machine. Eight counting machines in all. The work continued.

The idea was to find the ballots that registered no vote or more than one vote so they can be reviewed by humans. That hand recount of those ballots is scheduled to begin sometime between 8 and 10 a.m. Sunday but must be completed by noon for the results to count.

The recount in the race, which spanned only Palm Beach County, began at 10 a.m. Saturday. About 80,000 ballots were cast in the race leading to a 37-vote margin favoring Republican Mike Caruso.

Well, bummer. We did the manual count of the ballots rejected by the machines. 80,000 votes cast in the district and the other guy won by 37 votes. The manual look yielded 32 more for each of them so the end result was the same. I guess the lawyers are going to look at the outstanding issues with signatures and so forth, but I don't think we are going to flip this one. Closest we have managed in recent years. People gotta vote!

Wow. That is close.

Really close! I'm glad every vote is getting counted -- and I hope this will show people on all sides just how important making the voting process more robust -- such as reliable machines and paper ballots clearly laid out -- is really to the benefit of both sides.

Hear, hear, Theodosia!

Scrappy - insent

The number of no votes at all was amazing. And although the process is to draw a connecting line people circle the name, underline, check mark, and other oddness. I don't think the guy who won is a bad guy, but I really hoped to flip it blue. Oh well. It was nice meeting all the super involved civic minded people.

Catching up with my news reading...

Former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced Sunday he is giving a record $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University to support student financial aid at his alma mater and make its admissions process "forever need-blind."

Okay, that is impressive.