A belated post

I suppose that I have to start this post by explaining the lack of recent activity on the blog. Not that this post is that late, but given the political theme of my earlier posts, I suppose that my dedicated (sic) readers have been waiting for my insightful (sic) comments about the election.

Alas, illness prevented me from being more active in my recent blogging. It started with Margaret on the weekend before Halloween, then moved to Abby, and then passed to me. Margaret was knocked out for a couple of days, while Abby seemed to be ok as it wasn't clear that she was really sick until she noted that her sore throat was accompanied by a 102 degree fever. Once it hit Papa, however, around Wednesday before Halloween or so, he was in bed for 3 days straight with a sore throat, body aches, head ache, and high fever. So I suppose that we know who the tough people are in this family.

As for Halloween, Margaret was a dinosaur, while Teddy wore Margaret's pumpkin costume from the year before. We had some conflict as Margaret initially wanted to be a pumpkin again, but she ended up being happy with her dinosaur costume. I was pleased with that outcome as I'm shooting for gender neutral costumes for as long as I can so that Teddy can wear them in the future (next year: Teddy the dinosaur). Some people noted that Margaret looked more like a dragon than a dinosaur, but that didn't seem to throw her off. Instead, she collected lots of candy as part of the mayhem that occurs in our neighborhood during Halloween. Notably, she didn't appear to understand what she got from her trick-or-treating. When she got home, she spent most of her time sorting her treats by size, shape and color without actually eating any of it. By the next day, her treats were hidden away and, beyond an occasional request for her "trick or treat pumpkin," she didn't seem to miss anything. And I'm fine with that.

Here are some pics from the time around Halloween.



As for the election, we spent the evening watching the news with a bottle of wine. Early on, I texted some friends in Chicago to see if they were heading to Grant Park for the celebration. None of them were devoted enough to brave the crowd, although it turns out that my brother from Minneapolis was in Chicago and was young, idealistic and energetic enough to head down to Grant Park.



Around the time that they called Pennsylvania for Obama, I started sending texts saying "I think it's over." "Not so fast," my cautious friends replied. Then they called Ohio for Obama. "IT'S OVAH," I sent. Some agreed with me. Other's, perhaps remembering 2000, were more hesitant. Then 11:00 PM rolled around, at which point California and Washington closed, and BOOM, there it was. Done. Over. Nothing left to discuss. President Barack Obama.

And my initial reaction was subdued. Apparently, people were dancing around all over DC at that point. As a colleague who lives in DC Chinatown said, "I can't recall people being this excited about the outcome of an election." To which I responded, "Yeah, but what recent outcome would've excited people in DC? Or any other city? But think about those people in Alabama or Oklahoma. For better or worse, they're probably not dancing on cars." I thought about taking Maddie out to find some of those people dancing on cars, but decided that it was too late to do so.

My second reaction was one of panic. "Oh my god," I thought, "What have we done? We've put an incredibly inexperienced person in the most important position in the world at the worst possible time. Based on what? Hope? Change? What the hell?" My attempts to communicate this sentiment to Abby received little sympathy. After taking a few deep breaths, I realized that the next president was facing a world of sh*t no matter who he or she was, and Obama was preferable, from my point of view, to anyone else who could face that world of sh*t.

So, at the end of the day, where does that leave us? I dunno, but we did wander down to the "Obama Wall" at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. A pretty cool scene, although I was still disturbed by the somewhat naive idealism reflected in many of the posts. At the end of the day, I signed the wall, as you can see in the following pics.



As for the big picture, Margaret sums it up better than I ever could in the following video: