I went to Uprise Bakery/Ragtag Cinemacafe to watch the events on CNN.  Ragtag had a theater open and it got pretty crowded in there for a Tuesday morning, especially after 11am (CST) when the real shit was happening.  It was a very pro-Obama crowd, of course.  I enjoyed it, even though I was clicking away on my iPhone nearly the whole time.

I’m kinda sorta half sorry that I didn’t go to DC for the event, but only in wish-I-could-say-I’d-been-there type way.  I mean, I didn’t make the plans to go because we were supposed to head to Denver this weekend, but after that was cancelled I guess I still could have thrown some suitcases in the car and headed to DC in my car, stayed with family, done all of that.  But that would have been a motherload of driving for a cold morning in a crowd.  Only a few of the people that I know in DC actually went down there this morning- the rest avoided it like the plague.  I like to think I would have gone if I was still there.

But we’ll be in DC at the end of March for Tracy’s sister’s wedding!  Woo!  All of a sudden I feel the need to start making plans for that, deciding what to wear, etc.  I haven’t been to DC for more than a year, so we are DEFINITELY going to Soul Vegetarian for brunch.  That is a must.  The rest of it will fall into place.

We’re also going to Orlando next month.  I’m going to end up traveling just as much this year as I would have if our travel budget had stayed in place, I think!

It was a nice long weekend, though we did very little.  Wait, not true: we cleaned the house, really cleaned it, and I did laundry (of course) and did a bunch of necessary shopping and watched some movies, most of which sucked.  I processed some pictures.  Tracy did some reading and started to freak out a little about renting a place in Kansas City, so we now have tentative plans to drive up to KC on Saturday just to give her an idea of what the neighborhoods look like.

Tonight I am going to the Jeff City Photo Club for the first time since September (I missed two meetings, and then the December one was cancelled for the weather).  

And today I am wearing my hair up, in public, for the first time since I was in college (at least).  Okay, I wore it up on New Year’s Day, but that doesn’t count as that was just with family.  And I wear it in a ponytail to the gym all the time now, and maybe once or twice to the store, and lots of times at home.  But this is the first time to work.  And it’s not a ponytail- it’s one of those weird fake buns with the messy ends.  Still, though.  I think my hair is officially getting Longer.  It’s not Long, but it’s Longer than it’s been in a long long time.

Link: Obama victory, by the numbers.  (He really did win.  He really did.  There’s no question about it.)

Link: Reactions in Harlem After Obama Victory, by a Guardian UK writer

Link: Celebrations and some skepticism by the world

Video: Children in Indonesia, at the school that Obama attended, celebrate the victory:

Link: Victory starts a Barack Obama naming spree in Kenya.

Video: Mosaic Intelligence Report from LinkTV, showing how the Obama victory was telecast across the Middle East, and some reaction.  I really like Mosaic- it’s very cool:

Link: Reporting of Obama Victory by Guardian UK

Video: Global Celebrations Over Obama Victory (from CNN, and mostly showing Americans abroad):

Video: Celebration in Berkeley, California, After Obama Victory:

Link: Obama Aides Tamp Down Expectations

Photo Slideshow: Global Reaction to Obama Victory

Whew. Awesome.

Because we won everything else, baby!  God, it’s a good day.  A brilliantly beautiful day, and it looks like the Obama White House isn’t screwing around with this transition team stuff, and life is going to be better.  It already is.

Not that I’m complaining.  I have a big meeting in the morning, and I wasn’t looking forward to getting up after just a little bit of sleep, should it have come to that.  But it didn’t.

Barack Obama is our next President.

Virginia hasn’t elected a Democrat since 1964, and they voted for a black man.  That shit is crazy.

John McCain is giving a concession speech right now, and it’s a nice one.  I don’t hate the man.  I feel bad for him, because he’s lost, and he lost because he made some bad choices.  Sarah Palin is the most obvious terrible choice, but also he also agreed to the Bush 2000 campaign team, and I think it ultimately lost him the election.  If he’d run as himself, I think it might have been a longer night.

I’m glad to see the last of Sarah Palin on the national level.  No way will she be clean enough for 2012.  Fox News, fine, but not 2012.  If Obama can beat McCain and the Bushies 2000, he can sweep the floor with Palin, and the Republicans know that.  I’m not saying we won’t see someone similar in 4 years, as they obviously learned how to create some excitement with the base, but it won’t be Palin.

Damn, it feels good to be an American right now.  It’s been some time since I’ve said that.

I’m currently watching Obama speak on stage at my campus in Columbia, live, on CNN.  He’s less than three miles from my house.  I could probably stake out the road to the airport (there’s only one) and see his motorcade if I got up and went out to do it.  But I won’t.  I figure if I’m that desperate, I can always wait until 2012 and see him in Iowa.  Or not!  He’d be the incumbant, right, so there won’t be much of this giant crowd campaign stop kind of thing.

Anyway, Tracy and I went down there to get in line.  And we found the line, three blocks from the South Quad.  So we followed it… and found the end about 1.2 miles later.  That line was 6 people deep throughout.  My guess is that is about 15,000 people in total. 

So after we waited about forty minutes in line, we did the math, cut our losses, and went home.

Watching this video is making me seasick.  I don’t know what kind of poor setup they gave CNN for their live feed, but clearly it’s vibrating under the feet of fifty thousand camerapeople.  Not good, Missouri J School!  Way to show them how to put on a newsworthy event.

We might have stood in line longer if we hadn’t been surrounded by some surly, smoking college kids who were mad that they were waiting in line for the event.  I guess they thought they could just wander in.  I think my experience with DC events taught me that it’s never that easy.  It’s always lines and security and wands and more lines, and then you want to march, do you?  Well, it’s not really a march so much as a long line with placards involved.

Anyway, when we left the line, I don’t think that either of us was too disappointed.  I had already set our expectations for the event pretty low.  When we finally reached the end of the line, I told her, “This is it!  Here is your Obama experience!  Wait in this line until long after Obama starts speaking!”

So that was it, our Obama experience.  We did try, then we managed our expectations.  Now I have a great view of the event from right here in my flannel sheets.

I use flannel sheets from fall through spring, and they are delicious.  Cotton sheets are cool to the touch and necessary in the summer, but on Monday night this week it was very apparent that I should have switched back to flannel for the winter, because they’re just not workable for cold weather.  So I pulled out the flannel sheets and put them on the bed last night, and what a difference!  They’re so warm and cozy and comfortable… I love sleeping in them.  They make such a huge difference.  I prefer keeping the house at cool temperatures (mid or low 60s overnight in the winter, so the heater doesn’t run constantly) but piling some big warm blankets on the bed.  Cold air on the face, warm toes.  Perfect.  So I am singing the praises of flannel sheets today!

And garages!  I am a total convert to the garage lifestyle.  Sure, I’d love to live in a more urban environment, maybe be able to walk to work while still having plenty of space for my dog, but having a garage is one of the greatest things about living in the suburbs.  I don’t know why people own garages but then fill them with so much junk that they can’t park their cars inside.  And people do that!  Why?  Garages are so wonderful!  Today I had parked my car on the street and had to spend an extra ten minutes warming it up and defrosting it so that I could see through the windows.  And I got to think about twenty-eight years of my life where a garage was not part of my lifestyle.  Cold cars, hot cars, shoveling out a car parked parallel on the street after the snowplows had come through and pushed more snow on top of it… running through the rain, remembering to lock it every time I got home, slipping on the ice, scraping off the ice… Now all I do is open the garage door and back out the driveway, unless it’s one of the once-a-year snow events where I have to actually shovel the driveway first.  My car stays a comfortable forty degrees even when the temperature is around zero, just from the inefficiency of my home heating (because the garage sure as shit isn’t heated), and I can always run out and grab something without putting on shoes.  Lovely.  Garages are wonderful.  I sing the praises of my garage!

Don’t think I don’t count my blessings, name them, name them one by one!  I just named two!

The temperatures are supposed to be higher tomorrow, possibly a high of 70 degrees tomorrow, which will make it very comfortable for Tracy and I when we go to stand around for hours on the University of Missouri Quad, waiting to hear Barack Obama!  Yes!  An Obama rally in town tomorrow night!  We are very excited.  It doesn’t even start until 9:30pm, and we will likely be far, far from the stage (we will probably not even see him, like the time we went to the March for Women’s Lives with 700,000 other people, including Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem and a bunch of other major female luminaries, but all we could see was their images on giant television screens set up on the Washington Mall- we couldn’t even see the stage, let alone the speakers) but it will still be cool and one of those I-was-there-and-it-was-awesome kinds of events.  Worth staying out late on a work night!

The Obama Variety Show airs tonight on the major networks (except ABC).  Unfortunately, the roofers replaced my satellite dish when they finished the roof on Friday, but they did not connect it up right so although I can get all of the obscure cable channels, I can’t get any local channels at all, including the networks.  My hope is that CNN or CSPAN will run it.  Of course, I would have probably watched it on CNN anyway.  I watched network news last week for the first time in awhile, and I was pretty stunned at the number of political ads.  You see some on CNN, but not near the number as on network news.  I really do live in a swing state; we get all the political ads PLUS big rallies by major Presidential candidates!  I definitely didn’t see that in blue-state Maryland.

My boss has been out of town for the past couple of weeks.  I admit, I’ve been slacking a little.  Just a little!  I have to get back up to speed on some things and get a couple of projects done.  So I gotta get on that.

Round one of the debates is over, and next week we’ll start round two.  Sarah Palin proved that she could just about manage to clear that bar of expectations last night.  Good thing it had been lowered so far that she wouldn’t even need to worry about jumping over it in her heels.  With all the bullshit about Gwen Ifill over the past few days (trying to obscure some of that Katie Couric footage… seriously, is there more of that interview still?  What else does CBS have in their pocketses?), I believe the McCain campaign actually got out bulldozers to bury that bar even further below ground level.  All Palin had to do was show up, throw around some folksy bullshit, and WHAMMO!  Palin for President!  Er, Veep!  Whatevers!

No, really, not joking: I have a neighbor around the corner who proudly hung a banner from his fence that says “Pro God, Pro Guns, Pro Life- Palin for Vice President” on it.  No mention of John McCain anywhere, not even a McCain/Palin yard sign elsewhere.  I haven’t seen that Palin sign anywhere else.  Do you think my neighbor went and had it made up specially?

Speaking of the folksyisms, one subject that seems to get a lot of play on my favorite librul, eleetest blogs is the Palin pronounciation of the word ‘nuclear’, which mirrors Bush’s pronounciation.  I have to say that I grew up hearing and saying it the way that Palin and Bush say it: ‘new-cue-lur’.  I have to FIGHT myself to say it correctly (‘new-clear’, not three syllables but two), and still Tracy catches me sometimes.  It’s not my FAULT.  I had to teach myself to say strange words like ‘soda’ instead of ‘pop’ when I got to college, and I drop lots of g’s all over the damn place.  On the other hand, I can speak for the effectiveness of folksyism.  I know that people in rural areas all over the country react to me better when I speak with my natural flat Midwestern twang, so why should I hide it?  If I walk door-to-door in my own neighborhood on those Obama canvasses, I always end up spilling g’s all over the sidewalk, talking with a ‘howdy’ this and a ‘y’all’ that, and although I can’t really help it, I do feel like people are friendly, friendlier than if I showed up with a clean, Eastern liberal-arts-college accent.

Reacting badly to a simple difference in pronounciation is the kind of thing that gets the red staters all pissed off at the blue staters in the first place, which leads to the left losing elections.  So maybe those of us who are true blue but speak all folksy should wear it with pride, maybe change some minds.  Right?

I’m still digging the ‘Smart People for Obama’ sign I saw last night on MSNBC during the pre-game show.  I mean, how can you argue with that one?

I wanted Biden to be an attack dog last night.  I would have really enjoyed watching another woman go into that debate with Sarah Palin, and I think it is sexist that he wasn’t really allowed to go off the leash, tear into her, and beat her to a pulp with the podium, you know, metaphorically speaking.  I mean, it was sexist that the McCain campaign would call ‘sexist’ on that, that’s what I mean.  Obviously, Biden is a smart guy and wasn’t going to go out there calling her a ‘nice broad’ or whatever; that would really indicate actual sexism.  But the McCain campaign is all about real sexism in this election, with the soft bigotry of low expectations as an actual strategy, as long as it can keep Palin under wraps for the rest of the election, except when she’s trotted out to do Republican fundraisers and answer no questions from the press.  Because, seriously, they won’t let her do any more interviews now.  There’s no reason to do them, and they have everything to lose from it.

I did hear someone on CNN last night suggest that Palin was giving a 2012 speech, which, like, ok, but I don’t think Palin’s going to leave this race clean enough for 2012, no way.  When has a losing Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate (in modern times- in the last thirty years) been strong enough to handle the next primary?  Edwards came closest, which is about how close he was in 2004 before he was picked for the Veep nod.  Palin would have to do some major proving of herself over the next few years.  Obama beat the Clintons, and he’s about to beat McCain (who’s backed by Karl Rove and the rest of the Bush 2000/2004 team).  I think he could wipe the floor with Palin. 

Generally, I do think this race is Obama’s to lose at this point.  McCain will get a small bump from last night’s non-trainwreck, but there’s still several weeks to go, and we know he’ll try pulling out a couple more bullshit maneuvers (sucker punches, punk moves) from his arsenal as a way to say, “hey, I’m the Maverick!  You know, the nickname I gave myself!”, but as long as Obama keeps his cool and doesn’t take any of the bait, I just don’t think that he’s going to lose.

That doesn’t really mean that I’m letting myself believe that Obama will win.  I just can’t let myself believe that yet.  If McCain wins, I’ll be disappointed, but maybe not as bitterly disappointed as I was in 2000 and 2004.  I still believe that there’s something reasonable about McCain, and I would hold out hope that he would be a reasonable President, even if he’s a Republican.  I would hope that he certainly couldn’t be as bad as the last eight years, even if he did put a bunch of Bushies into office.  So though I might want to think that I could move to Canada if Obama doesn’t get into office, I won’t do it.

But what will I do if Obama wins?  I can’t get through ten pages of his book Dreams From My Father without crying a little (and I’m not usually a crier).  It just fills me with pride and joy that we’ve managed to pick a Presidential candidate who comes very close to speaking to the realistic ideals that I hold as a person who believes in the need for progress.  I think that if Obama wins, I’ll have to bite my tongue from wanting to scream with excitement, cry with relief, and just generally dance around like a lunatic.  Oh, and also, I’ll have to keep myself from driving to DC on January 20 to join the party in the streets on Inauguration Day.  Seriously. 

But I can’t believe yet that this will happen.  We’ve been burned too many times before!

I am enjoying the election year so far.  It has been a wild ride.  If it didn’t mean everything, absolutely everything, I would say that it’s been fun.

Sure, Obama doesn’t have that much national experience, other than four years as a Senator and six years as a state Senator, plus a couple of years on the campaign trail.  I wasn’t a fan of Hillary counting her years as First Lady of Arkansas and the U.S. as actual experience, but Hillary and Obama are light years ahead of a one-term Governor from Alaska, who actually hasn’t even been in office for two years yet, and, also, Alaska has a population of less than a million people.  That’s like picking the mayor of Omaha to be a Vice Presidential candidate.

It’s even worse that she’s female, because it’s clear that she’s been picked solely because of her gender.  How can it be anything else?  It’s like the Harriet Myers Supreme Court bullshit.  Exactly the opposite of what Hillary supporters were about.

What nonsense.  What a step backwards.

I don’t know what I would do in that situation, if I lived there.  I guess if I knew that it was a possibility that my house would be threatened, I’d pack up anything of sentimental value, put the animals in the car, and hightail it the fuck out of there.  But that’s easy for me to say and probably not so easy to do, to leave your house and possessions behind.  Thinking about it, I can pretty much determine what I’d want to take with me (computers, photographs and albums, important identification and insurance paperwork) and what I could always buy again (nearly everything else).  I suppose I should think ahead and separate out the important stuff so that if it ever came to it, I would be able to make those choices quickly.  I am glad that I long ago made backups to keep offsite in case of burglary or tornados.  (You know all about me and my tornado worries.) 

We’ve had quite the opposite here- several inches of rain over the past week and thunderstorms almost every night.  It’s been quite a wet summer, though the first few weeks of July were dry enough that I did get out my sprinkler to keep the new grass in the backyard from dying off.  But the rain has returned.  Some say that should make for pretty fall color in the bluffs.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  You just never know, but personally I’m going to save some weekends for road trips this autumn.  Looking forward to it!

Columbia is near the Missouri River, but it’s on a plateau and is not really terribly affected by the flooding.  Many of the small communities nearby are affected, and some of the people who commute to Columbia for work at the University are affected by it.  Some come from Boonville, and pass through the river bottoms and over the river on their way to work every day.  But Columbia itself is several miles away from the river itself (unusual, I think, for a mid-sized Midwestern town that was settled in the 1800s, but it’s all about the location of the land-grant university).

I remember the Great Flood of 1993 (referred to as such, with the capital letters, in this part of the world).  I had had my driver’s license for several months, and since we lived in a very rural area, I took in a lot of territory in my car.  I’m not sure I had permission to be in Chillicothe on the evening that they closed the bridges on Highway 36 between Chillicothe and Brookfield, but I was in Chillicothe and I was one of the last over the bridge on my way home.  After that, traffic had to be diverted about an hour out of the way to get through.  I think my parents were on a school bus that was coming back from Kansas City that night, and they didn’t make it.  They had to take the detour.

Anyway, I had an ex-boyfriend who lived in St. Louis at the time, and he spent lots of weekends sandbagging in St. Charles and around the river areas at the time.  Very intense efforts.

There’s been a lot of talk about the floods this year and the similarities to the floods of 1993, but I certainly hope it doesn’t end up being like that.  That was quite a year.