Election over, Obama President, Julie happy.

Well, of course I'm thrilled. Tuesday was an amazing night, people were honking horns, cheering in the streets for Obama. The race was called so early in California that we didnt even get to any of our planned election night game activities like "pin the gun on the palin" where we would try to get the gun as close to her hands in a helicopter as possible, or election bingo, or the wheel of countries to move to if Mccain won. Taiwan would be high on the list of course ;) Oh well, clearly we were too busy being excited. I mean, I voted for Obama because I think his policies are the more Christ-like of the two candidates (except for abortion, of course), and I wouldn't have voted for him otherwise. But I have to say, after just being happy my candidate won, the history of it, the civil rights movement, everything heroes of the civil rights movement endured, all came forcefully to mind and I was crying. I can tell my nieces and nephews, kids, grandkids, that I voted for the first black American president! The civil rights movement was such a Godly movement, grounded in churches, that I feel in a way I am a small part of that glorious part of church history as well, part of the fulfilment of many years of battling for equality. wonderful.

This isn't a great quality picture because I took it with my phone, but it's a picture from when Corinne and I went to the Obama field office in San Diego and did some phone banking, so this is the outside of the SD headquarters, and what you can very faintly see is an ethiopian woman on the left, a white dude in the middle, an Asian woman to the right and then a Latina woman at the far right. It was such a quintessential American moment to have people from all these different backgrounds sitting on their cell phones and trying to get out the vote for Obama and arrange rides to polls for people in Florida.



Newsweek has this totally fascinating behind-the-scenes report on the election. Their reporters got access to a bunch of moments and information, but were sworn not to publish until the elections were over. I gave the link to the highlights, but there are links at the top to the 7 chapters. Looks like the McCain campaign is cutting loose on Sarah Palin. yikes. I have been vocal about how much I disliked her and thought she was a moron, but I'm surprised at how they are just exposing her idiocy intentionally.

And now I have my biannual turn-of-the-season cold. It's a very mild cold, just bad enough to make me feel crummy, but not to significantly limit any life activities or, say, stay home from work. And I ran out of DayQuil, my go-to OTC medicine. Am drinking chamomile tea and trying to gather up enough thoughts to turn them into a work action. we'll see how that goes.

Now that the election is finally over--and as excited as i am about the results, i was so ready to just be done with it--I can turn my attention to the next event of worldwide importance. And that would be the next James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace

This is, needless to say, a Hartle family event. I sometimes feel the Broccoli family produces these movies just for us. We all download and judge the theme song--still evaluating the Alicia Keys/Jack White theme for this year. I don't know how great it is, but I know that Corinne gave us a false alarm and downloaded the wrong song and played it for us, and that song was TERRIBLE! So when we heard the real theme we were comparing it to such crap that we thought it was VERY good. And it may be, but a few more listens will determine this.

Feeling waves of love for ye olde United States,
Julie