History just got made

Tuesday, November 4, the night of election day. Gas down to $2.39.

The wait is over! History just got made: Barack Obama just made his acceptance speech as President Elect. -- cool, huh? I'm relieved. It feels so optimistic. Maybe I'm just tired of overly-rich old white guys in power. I am looking forward to seeing what the international reaction is to this result. I hope Obama finds a way to stay close to the ground and attached to reality; not allow himself to be stuck up on a pedestal or pushed by the political machine into some false illusion of what's actually going on. He's sure got his work cut out for him over the next few years. Could the country possibly have come to him in a bigger mess? (Previous administration doesn't get their cleaning deposit back.)

The bummer difficulty has been trying to find a way to watch the return results -- no cable TV in my place, and no broadcast reception, so I've been trying to watch the MSNBC live feed online, over a not-wide-enough-band connection. Hic-cup-spit! Very intermittent audio and video; the speech made NO sense! I hunted for an audio-only feed with no success, and finally found a plain ole radio doing a simulcast and caught most of the speech. Hmmm. Most of the time I don't really miss having TV reception. But every once in a while...

One other sort of whiny-poor-us bummer -- for any of us out here on Nowheresville Island, where our votes are submitted in a drop box which isn't even picked up until 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time-- our votes were sort of moot. I mean, they will be counted, and the numbers will be part of the history of the election and all, but it was all over before any of us had anything to say about it. Like I said, it's whiny. I guess the same could be said for any of the "still gray" states in the middle though. I didn't quite understand how it worked, truth be told, I had the results map in front of me, and you could mouse-over any state to see how things stood there. So many states were just assuming the votes would go a certain way. With 0 precincts reporting, Washington was already counted as blue, for instance. I guess some states it IS a foregone conclusion, but... well, it just seems sort of crass. Gee, I just said politics can seem crass, aren't I making a profound observation?

In the meantime... we have a re-run of the governor's race from last time -- the same two candidates facing off -- last time was, according to the Seattle newspaper, the closest governor's race in American history. It's now 9:30, and I just checked the most recent results online -- the incumbent had a "razor's edge lead." So could go either way again.

Soooooo onward through the proverbial fog. Hope for the light.