VOTE!

It's hard to get excited about a Presidential election in Utah, as we've been the reddest state in the Union for decades.  (Seriously, our electoral college people would vote Republican even if no one showed up at the polls.)  Most of the time, the best we can do here is to hope and pray that people in the swing states have a good deal of common sense.
But I vote anyway.  I even voted in the 2004 election -- when I was living in Scotland, had to request an absentee vote, and then found out later that they blew all those off anyway, so my voted mattered even less than usual that time.
I haven't always bothered to vote.  Most candidates didn't interest me, and the lines were long.

My grandfather (whom my mother describes as "the original Archie Bunker") had hated my grandmother to vote.  He complained that her vote would just cancel out his.  He badgered her to tell him for whom she'd voted, but she never would, insisting that was her own private business.  Voting was so important to Grandma that she even voted while she was in labor with my mother.
One year all this finally meshed in my mind.  My grandmother cherished her right to vote because she could remember well a time when no woman had that right.  She was an adult by the time the 19th Amendment passed. (Click through and watch that video; it's awesome.) And, come hell or high water -- or a new baby -- NO ONE was going to stop her from voting.  No one.

I don't care if you did get hit by hurricane Sandy; get to the polls.
And if you're nowhere near in that much of a mess, you're a wuss if you don't vote -- especially if you're a woman.
Don't make my grandmother ashamed of you.  Read up on the issues, choose wisely (don't just vote a straight party ticket, people; that shows you don't care enough to think about anything), and get your hindquarters to the nearest polling area tomorrow.
Grandma's been gone for years.  But let's do her proud anyway.
Vote.