If you live in Maine, and you haven’t voted yet (or if you were smart enough to save your sticker — Sutswana, I noticed M. still has your “I Voted!” sticker on her coat!): bring in your “I Voted” sticker to Freaky Bean and they’ll give you a free small cup of coffee.
It makes me very happy that whoever runs the coffee shop I can walk to appears to be as much of a voting geek as I am.
(Oh my goodness, and I just noticed on their website that it says it’s a “flavored coffee free zone” which makes me love them even more, though there clearly needs to be a hyphen in that phrase somewhere.)
(Note that I am talking about coffee rather than talking about the election, because I literally cannot think about it any more lest I implode. I am so anxious about the thought of Obama possibly not winning that I can barely breathe, and so I must divert myself with thoughts of coffee.)
Update: apparently you can’t give away something for free to people for voting. So everyone gets free coffee at Freaky Bean today. More reason to love this place: here’s what their update email said: “We think you should vote. If you do, there will be a free 12oz drip coffee waiting for you. If you don’t, there will be one waiting for you too. The voting one will taste like democracy though. Delicious democracy.”
I went to get my free coffee and the guy next to me in line was nice enough to give me his “I Voted!” sticker (looking back, I’m not entirely sure how that all happened, with him giving me his sticker, but it did). So I got to have the happy voting geekiness of wearing the sticker on election day. I surprised myself by how gleeful I got just to be wearing the sticker. Short-lived glee, since I wore it for about five minutes before Eli wanted to wear it. I gave it to him (because my life has certainly not sunk to the level where I am going to fight my kid over a STICKER), and asked who he was going to say he voted for. He said, “I’m going to tell people I voted for Henry.” Good answer.
Starbucks too!
I am so agitated about the election. So, coffee seems fitting. It is just after one and I have already driven past the Obama headquarters three times so that I can blow the horn, pump my fist in the air and roll down the window to hear the grandmother with her megaphone and the Aretha Franklin blasting and see the schoolchildren with their American flags. I am hoping to be engaging in the same sorts of activities tomorrow, rather than planning a move to another country.
Dave called me at around 11 and said, “Did you see the early polls?” I just about screamed, “No! WHY?” and then it turned out he was just wanting to know if there were any early polls, and what they said. So you could say I’m agitated about the election as well.
This election has restored my faith in humanity — or at least, in the ability of the American people to elect the right guy! I actually sat there crying like a baby last night when Obama gave his speech…I still get chills now just thinking about it. And how cool for our kids to experience this election? (My first memory of any presidency was of Nixon getting impeached. I couldn’t understand how something that sounded so delicious was related to something so heinous. And I’m so glad my son gets to mark this as his first real election. He said, “Mommy, I knew Obama was going to win because he won in my kindergarten class.” Mommy was a little more paranoid, but maybe that’s because of the horror of the last 2 elections.)
But man. We did it.