Okay, She Won!

Rachel finally acknowledges that she did in fact win a seat on the Board of Education. It took a week of the numbers not really moving much for her to decide that she wasn't going to jinx it by saying she won. By today's count, the Dept. of Elections was up to more than 80% of registered voters casting ballots, and she is nearly 4,500 votes ahead of the next candidate. They have fewer than that number left to count, making it mathematically impossible for that person to overtake her. She'll be sworn in the first week in January, and I'll be there.

49,129; 48,130; 49,131...

That's the Department of Elections, counting ballots. Estimates are ranging wildly from 60,000 (Dept. of Elections) to 130,000 (Aaron Peskin in the Chronicle) of how many SF ballots are still to be counted. Here's what it says on the Dept. of Elections website as of today at 1 pm:

Last Updated: 11/5/2008 2:55 PM

Total Registration and Turnout
Registration	477,651
Total Ballots Cast	241,090	50.47 %
Election Day Reporting	191,962
Vote by Mail / Absentee Reporting	49,128

Check out that turn-out number: 50.47%. (This reflects only those ballots that have been counted.) Now go to the elections archive page and see what historic voter turn-out in SF has been: 74.3% in November 2004, the last presidential election. With Obama and Prop. 8 on the ballot, did only 63% of San Franciscans turn out (projected total if there are only 60,000 ballots left to count)? I don't think so. If there are 130,000 left to count, the total turn-out would be 77.6%. Now that sounds more like it.

I think Rachel is right in concluding that the number of outstanding ballots must be much higher than 60,000, because I can't believe that turn-out for this election was less than for the last presidential election. In Noe Valley alone, which usually has the highest voter turnout in the city, they are currently only recording a 56% turnout. And best of all, Rachel feels that these uncounted ballots will tend to go more moderate, which favors her (she is the one who tipped me off to the historical turn-out figures). The Department of Elections is now saying they should know the results by Friday. Stay tuned.

Head Space

It was a relief to get away from the post-election buzz and go take a walk on the Marin Headlands with my friend Jenny.

Tempering my pleasure at Obama's win was the inconclusive results of the Board of Ed race. It's too close to call at this point. Rachel is 898 votes ahead of the fifth place candidate, which puts her on the Board. But there are still 60,000 provisional and absentee ballots to be counted. Most likely they will fall as the already-counted ballots did, and Rachel will remain in 4th place. But we have to wait until all the ballots are counted to be sure. Today they only counted 5,000 more ballots. We may have to wait two more weeks to be sure.

Election Eve

My husband came home from work tonight and asked me if we had any large Rachel Norton for Board of Education signs. I told him yes.
"Good, because the N___ Y___ people are out on the corner with their signs and we can't let them be the only ones out there," he said.
I ran downstairs and told the boys there was a campaign emergency.
My oldest went in the garage and got some leftover posts and started taping our signs to them. My youngest got his sweatshirt on. We left Dad to finish cooking dinner and me and the boys went out to the corner with our signs. We decided we didn't want to be too confrontational so we planted ourselves across the street and started waving our Rachel Norton signs. I waved at the N___ Y___ people, who were joined by a S__ L__ F__ person. We waved our signs at each other.
One lady stopped. "You are all pretty nice to be out here for this....Rachel Norton," she said.
"Well, she's our aunt," said my son.
"So, why should I vote for her?" she asked.
I started to give her my spiel, and she waved her hand.
"If the three of you are out here for her, that's good enough for me!" she told us.
One more vote for Rachel Norton!

Happy Halloween!

We're getting trick-or-treaters in flurries. I'd say a total of around 75 by now. We're almost out of candy so we'll have to pull in our pumpkin soon. One dad had flashing lights on his "grill" (teeth). There was one Hillary Clinton mask, but no Sarah Palins. Otherwise there was the usual intergalactic villains, pirates, superheroes, witches, monsters, brides of Frankenstein, princesses, and mermaids. Oh, and a cowgirl in a pink cowgirl hat. The two most beautiful costumes of the night were a handmade peacock and a handmade Monarch butterfly, sisters, with matching bags. The most creative costume award goes to three teenagers (young adults?) with their heads covered by paper grocery bags decorated with crude faces fashioned out of paper plates, masking tape, more crumpled grocery bags, and crayons.

More Buttons

It's the last week of the campaign. Rachel is really tired but she's still out there talking to voters and passing out her flyer. We're all wearing our buttons. Think positive. Yes we can!

Goodbye to the Butterfly Zone

The Butterfly Zone exhibit over at the Conservatory of Flowers is something I’ve been meaning to go to ever since it opened last spring. Now it’s closing on Nov. 2 and I finally made it over there last week.

I was entranced, walking into the exhibit space, to see butterflies flying around me and feeding on various blooms. But as I examined them more closely I could see that most of them had tattered wings. The caterpillar and chrysalis house was closed, with a sign saying that they couldn’t raise any more butterflies because the exhibit was coming to a close. The USDA (they regulate butterflies?) would not allow the release of their “leftover” butterflies into the wild, so they were just letting the remaining species live out their lives. Note to self: do not wait to visit an exhibit until the last two weeks.

There was only one battered ID guide around that didn’t even list all the butterfly species I saw. Of course I knew the one Monarch I saw on the milkweed. With the help of the $2 official Butterfly Zone ID guide I eventually identified these species:
Julia (Dryas iulia)
Atala (Eumaeus atala)
Zebra Longwing (Heliconius charitonius)
Crimson-Patched Longwing (Heliconius erato)
Cloudless Sulphur (Phoebis sennae)
Great Southern White (Ascia monuste)
But what was the striking black one with iridescent blue stripes and white spots, the most numerous butterfly left in the exhibit? On an empty bulletin board outside the exhibit, dark squares showed where more info once hung. I asked one of the gardeners if she knew about butterflies.
“Why?” she asked, apparently tired of butterfly questions.
“There’s a butterfly that isn’t identified on any of the guides,” I said. “I just wanted to know what it was.”
“Well, the exhibit is about to close. The entomologist has been taking all her pictures down so there’s not a lot left.”
“Is she around?” I asked.
“Oh no, she’s gone. There’s only about a week left now, so …”
Even the entomologist had abandoned it.
On my way out of the Conservatory, I glanced up. Those blue-striped butterflies were clustered thickly on the skylight, like moths around my porch light.

Back home I searched for the mystery butterfly on bugguide.net. After paging through more than 100 pages of butterfly images, I found it: a Mexican Bluewing (Myscelia ethusa). One reason my search took so long was that I had no idea where this butterfly’s habitat was, or even if it lived in North America. If I had observed it in, say, my backyard, I could have looked on one of the Bay Area-specific sites and saved a lot of time. The only reason it showed up on Bugguide.net is that is also found in extreme southern Texas, since they only include insects from the U.S. and Canada.

Which is really why the Butterfly Zone didn’t grab me like I thought it would. I did see some gorgeous butterflies I probably never would have seen in their natural habitats (unless I traveled to extreme southern Texas, for example). But out of context, they were only decorative, like the orchid in my bathroom. It was more interesting to me to find the chrysalis of the lowly Cabbage White on my kale than have the exotic Mexican Bluewing land on my leg in the glass-enclosed exhibit space.

You can see gorgeous photos of all the butterflies I saw, including the Mexican Bluewing, at bugguide.net. I think I was the only adult at the Butterfly Zone without my camera.