A political volunteer and a certain kind of fictional heroine

Can't resist. This is Morgan, my 5-year-old granddaughter from the Houston area, with her first project for kindergarten. Mom tells me she cut the letters of her name out freehand and chose the other images. She looks very proud, as rightfully she should.
There was an obituary for a fairly prominent gentlemen in the community in the paper this morning. He died at the age of ninety, and, God bless him, among his survivors, his fiancee was listed. That's the way to grow old!
I spent my first two-hour morning stint at the Bill White campaign headquarters this morning, working the phone bank. I can't tell you how many messages I left, finally got my spiel down pretty well. I accused the workers of giving me the geriatric list because they were all people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. Got one woman who was listed as 110 and I was in awe--Willard Scott should be talking to her!--but it turns out that's a code they use when they don't know the age. Actually called six people I knew, which was fun. Most people were polite, several told me they were voting for White, even two or three who said they generally vote Republican. Only one man was firm but he was polite, sort of. Said he wouldnt vote for him for dogcatcher and added, "I'm a good Republican." I wanted to ask him to define that but I refrained. I'll go back once a week until the election. I could hear the staff laughing and cheering after some of my calls--they were eavesdropping!--and they told me I made many more calls than most volunteers.
I'm reading a mystery that will go unnamed. Actually I'm enjoying it, but it has the kind of heroine who drives me bananas. She refuses to level with the guy in her life (who is of course also involved in the mystery). Instead she keeps digging herself a deeper and deeper hole, while all she longs for is to recapture his love--and its obvious he wants that too. But she throws up these barriers, with the feeble excuse (to the reader) that she's not good at talking about feelings or lying to him because she's afraid she'll be accused of murder if she tells the truth. I know why it's done, of course--it spins out the plot, which otherwise would be solved in 50 pages. But you want to shake that girl and say, "Tell the truth, just this once!" It makes her a kind of transparent heroine.
Peter, Paul and Mary retrospective on public TV night--oh my, does that take me back in time, a happy trip.