Voting Day 2009

On Tuesday evening, despite Wednesday being a public holiday, Varen & I had a very normal evening at home. I made Steamed Spinach-Wrapped Chicken fillets for dinner which were delish :)

On Wednesday I spent the morning with the boons, trying to get them to bond some more. Coal is definitely calmer than Bell was. Varen went climbing. Which was annoying because I would've prefered to get voting out of the way earlier in the morning. But we ended up at our polling station at just before 11am. And the place was crowded. We almost left to come back later but luckily thought better of it ... I doubt there was any let up in the queue the entire day. In the past I've mostly voted at schools and have never ever waited this long before. I put it down to discovering they had a mere 4 (increased to 5 just before I voted) voting booths. Seriously folks. It took us just under 2 hours, probably 2 if we include the drive time from & to home.

The most disappointing thing was the process. First they scanned our ID books with their zip-zip machine. Now this in itself seems smart to me. They've clearly loaded all the registered voters because it spits out a little receipt type thing with a number on it. The stupid and terrifically annoying bit was when I then had to go to the next table and someone looked me up in a pile of paper to find the number on my receipt and crossed my name out with a ruler. Hello? If I just got scanned, surely the little zip-zip machine could electronically cross me off!! To make things more annoying there were only 2 people available to cross out names ... and the other guy was only doing surnames from T - Z. That's not half, people. We had about a 5 person queue at this step :P This was my least impressed moment. C'mon people, get yourselves organised. Varen raised an awesome point, how cool would it be if they could get technologically advanced enough that you could vote at an ATM. How brilliant would that be? Obviously you'd still need polling stations for the people who don't bank or don't know how to use / don't trust ATMs. But I think that's a fabulous idea :) Obviously this would only work if we didn't have ID books, but rather had ID cards ... Since I have no firearms, I'm only actually using 2 pages of my ID book anyhow.

And then we voted. I still have lots to say about politics and how ridiculous I think a lot of it is ... but as I said, I'm still working up to that post, perhaps in time for the next election - haha! Now I just wish they'd take those dreadful party boards down off our light-poles. I'm sick of looking at all these ugly faces already and at an average of 4 posters per pole, it just looks like litter stuck up there.

(I have a thumb photo to post, but I can't seem to get it off my blackberry ... it'll be up as soon as I figure this out! haha) How awesome is that, my first blackberry email delivered the photo to my computer for upload - I'm thrilled!

After that, Varen & I took the boons out for a drive. This is what finally bonded Bell, Henna & Coal so we were hoping it'd work for Coal, Lily & Rex. It seems to have ... although they were pretty exhausted after the drive (we went to Magaliesburg via Harties and then took a wrong turn and ended up coming home via Roodepoort ... definitely a longer drive than we were planning!) Rex is still sleeping in our bath tho ... I'm not that brave yet, but they seem to be interacting fine so far.

And having barely eaten yet, Varen headed off to get us pizza from Lapa Fo - we were so not in the mood to braai a snoek as we'd planned, so we're saving that for Friday evening now :) I will say that Lapa Fo has deteriorated in my opinion. Their pizza's are far from as good as I remember them being the first time we tried them :( Don't get me wrong, they still have fantastic flavour variety (although I tend to order the same thing every time ... they don't have menu print outs for you to take home so it's hard when ordering take-aways), but I think it'll be a long while before we order from them again.