This week has been busy...And it didn't help that I was still feeling sick until Wednesday, when I pretty much recovered from whatever had made me sick. And now Mom's feeling sick, though I'm not sure what it's from this time (it's not what I had, as she was already sick from that)...

My daily schedule for the job is as follows:

• 6:30 AM: Get up and get ready for work.
• 7:30 AM: Mom gets home, and drives me to work.
• 8:00 AM - 12:05 PM: Do work at the courthouse.
• 12:05 PM - 1:05 PM: Eat lunch.
• 1:05 PM - 4:30 PM: Continue doing work at the courthouse.
• 4:30 PM: Go home.

I get home around 4:45 PM, and usually feel pretty tired from working the whole day, so I'm not on the computer that much...And as a result, I can't keep up with some of the things I do (forum visiting, comment posting, etc.), so I won't be doing much online, except on weekends.

My work at the courthouse has consisted of the following so far:

• Checked ballot pages for typographical errors, people in the wrong positions, or people on the wrong ballot (there's two types - a Democratic one, and a Republican one). If something wrong was found, I had to contact my boss and get a fixed copy of the ballot page printed out.
• Photocopied ballot pages and letters to candidates. For letters to candidates, I just made a large number of copies, and headed back to the copier if I ran out. For ballots, it's a bit harder: there's 74 districts to take into account, and a ballot page has to be copied for each candidate listed on a particular page. Most had two or three, some had five to seven, some had none (all positions listed were write-ins, so I didn't need to photocopy those pages =) ), and one had ten. There was a lot of copying going on that day - I'd say there were at least 400 candidates in total to make copies for.
• Checked envelopes to make sure the name and address listed on them are correct, and retyped them (on an electric typewriter) if they were wrong.
• For each candidate, I folded up a copy of the letter to them, along with the ballot page(s) containing their name, and placed it in their envelope. The envelopes didn't have to be licked shut, as there's a machine for sealing them...And since I finished all of them before lunch one day, one of the ladies in the courthouse was nice enough to do that for me while I was gone =D
• And currently, the job I'm doing is actually meant to be done in between other tasks...But since I finished all the tasks I was supposed to do, and my boss wasn't around on Thursday or Friday to give me a new task to do, I'm going through all the boxes of absentee ballot envelopes, rubber-banding them in sets of 100, and putting them back in their boxes. I first count out a set of 100, and weigh it on a small digital scale. I then use the weight listed on that scale to (quickly) count out 100 envelopes by weight (give or take an envelope or two [which I was told was OK], since there's different styles of envelopes, and they have slightly different weights as a result), rubber-band them, and put them (neatly) back in the box.
  There were about seven or eight big boxes, with envelopes not stacked very well, that took a long time to get done (about 45 minutes per box) - At one point, I tried lifting one box up from the floor to put it on the desk (so I wouldn't be standing up and bending over constantly while moving the ballots back and forth), but dropped the box after a few seconds (fortunately, nothing was damaged or fell out of the box). I decided to leave these boxes on the floor, and just pull and push them as necessary to get the envelopes taken care of.
  The smaller boxes (about the size of shoeboxes) are much easier to manage - I can actually pick them up (two at a time), so that means I can put them on the table; the envelopes they have are stacked better (they're all in line), and there's only enough ballots to make between five and six sets per box. These things allow me to get the ballots sorted much faster (about 5-7 minutes per box). I already went through over 25 of these boxes (taking some time out to tape the damaged ones so they wouldn't break open), and I have somewhere between 25-30 to go.

That was week one. I wonder what I'll be doing for next week?