Yesterday, I received the e-mail reply from Dr. Vanveldhuizen.  He still wants to consider the surgery and is arranging a consultation with us and Dr. Holzbeierlein, I hope this Friday.  Although there was no real news, since I assumed that would be the next step, I was relieved to have a progress report; I'm not always a patient person, and I'm afraid I'd gotten a little testy the previous two days, though I shouldn't have been as we had nice visits with Doug and Raylene, who brought a delicious Italian stew (they had recently spent three weeks in Italy) and an equally delicious almond bread, and with Virginia, who brought two containers of DQ ice milk.

Tomorrow I'll go vote and, insha'allah, the interminable election will be over.  I have to add the qualification since there are several "nightmare scenarios," as CNN puts it, that could throw everything into confusion.  I could have voted early, but one thing that Kansas does right is to have a sufficient number of polling places so that there are rarely long lines, and I'm old-fashioned enough to enjoy the ritual of election day.  Neither the governor nor either of our two senators is up for re-election, so I'm unpatriotically hoping for a low turnout in Kansas--both to diminish a tad Romney's total vote and to give the few Democrats who have any chance a possible edge.  For U.S. Representative our Democratic candidate is named Tobias Schlingensiepen.  When I was a small child, I went to vote with my mother, a Democrat (unlike my father).  One of Iowa's Senators was a Republican named Burke Hickenlooper, and I was so enamored by his name that I wanted to vote for him.  At the polling place, in those more relaxed days, they gave me a ballot, and I duly checked his name.  But in the no-good-deed-goes-unpunished column, I saw the election official throw my ballot away and began crying and yelling.  Now the Republicans would probably have me arrested for voter fraud. 

There are some statehouse races here that could be close.  In the last legislative session, the moderate Republicans blocked the Republican-controlled house and senate from passing a gerrymandered redistricting scheme for Congressional representatives, for all state house and senate representatives, and for the always controversial state board of education.  The Republican party got revenge on the moderates who dared to buck the governor, and all but one were defeated in the primary.  All the redistricting went to the courts, and they actually got it right.  What the legislature couldn't do in three months, they did in 48 hours, creating compact districts with low population variance and ignoring political considerations: incumbents were thrown together in the same districts, other districts were left without incumbents.  Republicans will, of course, retain control of the Kansas House and Senate, but there are least some competitive races in the bigger cities, including Topeka, which counts as a "bigger city" in Kansas. 

After 25 years of voting in the same place, a fundamentalist church that gave me the shpilkes, I'll now vote in the state headquarters of the Seventh Day Adventists.  And this time I'll have to show a photo ID. 

Vanveldhuizen, Holzbeierlein, Schlingensiepen--these are the names running through my head these days.  They're a mouthful!