It occurred to me yesterday that this is the first presidential election cycle since 1996 when I haven’t spent all day and all night in a newsroom or at a campaign watch party.

So all day I’ve just been doing … normal stuff. Is that what everyone does?

My first election as a cub was a midterm election, where I interviewed a man immediately after he found out he was elected to Congress. You could hear the excitement and hope in his voice. He would become a two-term governor. I also interviewed a man who became a senator, who told me I asked too many questions and hung up on me. I spent some time at a watch party where a mayor spent part of her evening hitting on me. (She’d had a few beverages.)

My first presidential election I spent in the studio, and at two watch parties. A woman who was running for local office, who’d spent the entire campaign deliberately not speaking to me, lost that night. It was fun to catch her eye at the end. But I was also trying to localize the Bush-Gore race. That night I took a brief nap in my car before going back inside the studio to go back on the air the next morning.

I was in the studio for the 2004 election, but I don’t really have any strong memories about the night. By 2008 I was back on campus, and I had to convince the students I was working with that it might be a good idea to talk to people on campus about their votes and hopes, and report on their reactions to a historic night. I’d been on that campus for a little over two months at that point, and it was eye-opening.

In 2012, the initiative in that same campus newsroom was better. They were also putting to bed their paper on that Tuesday night, so they were excited, and it was another long night. All of these were long nights.

In 2016, on a different campus, in brand new facilities, someone got the bright idea that we should try the new equipment, all of it, at the same time, and turn that into a showcase. And, fortunately, most of it worked.

By the time of the 2020 election, we were used to all of that new production equipment, but we were working in a Covid environment, which didn’t make the day any shorter, just still-surreal.

And now I’m filling my day in other ways, which is satisfying.

Anyway, the normal stuff was very normal. I have a lot of grading to do this week. It’s all piped into a CMS and that interface helpful tells you how many documents I have to work your way through. Seeing those numbers pile up, it feels like having a headache in a dream. It’s a disembodied feeling, and you know it is supposed to hurt, but you can’t feel it, which somehow makes it more daunting.

So I have 148 things to read and assess. Most of those 148 things require feedback. You want that to be useful. And since I’m forever saying the word “substantive” it should be feedback that has some significant use to it. In truth, the feedback is a lot of fun. You can make all sorts of connections, try to help students make the next leap, introduce a new concept or two if a student is interested in it. And if a student is interested in it, I find that the feedback might be the most fun part of running a class. It just takes time and care. This batch take three or four more days to get it all in. And then the next round will roll in Monday night.

I’ve also done the monthly cleaning of the computer, deleting a bunch of files I no longer need, updating some templates and updating some statistics.

Oh, and I also updated the images on the front page. They look a lot like this.

Go check them out. We’ll wait here for you.

Those are from Monterey Bay, California. I took those on a March afternoon, while we were waiting for our lunch order to be called. It was quiet, but busy, and the waves were also busily doing their job, and also quiet. At least in my memory, now. It was a beautiful afternoon. We’d driven up the Pacific Coast Highway a bit to be there, in that old cannery-turned-tourist town, and we were about to go visit the aquarium.

That is the third or fourth set of photos I’ve put on the front page from that trip. And, it turns out, I took more photos from that beach than I realized. I could run another set easily enough. In fact I might! I saved those photos of sand and rocks and water until now, to get us through a bit of the colder weather that will be here, eventually, though it felt like a warm summer day here today.

I also need to add some new buttons to the front page. I’ll get to it at some point, when the grading gets done.

Since we’re in a new month, I updated my chart for the year’s bike mileage. This means nothing, but I think about it a lot. After each ride I update the spreadsheets — plural, because why just look at a little data when you can consider it in more than one way. This chart is the main way I consider my progress.

And as you can see from the lines, what I’ve actually done, in that blue line, is well above where I was at the same point last year, which is the red line. That green line is just an arbitrary number I use as a linear measure.

I wonder at the end of each month how legitimate this is. On those last few days I compare the miles again, and compare it to earlier iterations of that same month in previous years. And there’s a list where I have ranked the months I’ve ridden the most. And so near the end of October I saw that the month was my most productive October ever — humble though my productivity be — and it had a real shot to become the second most productive month of all time. There was no way I was going to catch February 2024. At the same time, September 2024, January 2023 and November, 2023 were all ready to be knocked down a peg. And so I started riding with that in mind. It seems disingenuous, somehow. To my brain, that is. The parts of me doing the work would argue it’s quite real.

Like I said, this means nothing.

Anyway, I went out this afternoon for an easy 20-mile ride. And because of the time change I was racing daylight to get home.

That photo is timestamped 4:43 p.m. Bring on the solstice, so the days get longer again.

Though this day and night have been plenty long. So much grading still to do …