It's Snowing!

We woke up this morning to snow.

I LOVE living in Minnesota. (Seriously.) It's beautiful. And, since it's Novemember, it's not too cold.

The Morning After the Morning After

I apparently forgot to blog yesterday... but, honestly, the whole day was kind of a blur.

My partner and I were invited to a returns party at the house of a rather promenent Democratic family here in Saint Paul. We went for a little while, but, since it was sort of spur of the moment and we didn't have a babysitter, we left well before the returns really started coming in. In fact, when I left the party the electoral college score was McCain 13, Obama 3.

It was my turn to put Mason to sleep and I think the stress of the day go to me. I fell sound asleep at 8:00 pm (CST), when many of the Western polls hadn't even closed.

Somewhere around midnight, a cat puked in the sun room. I stumbled out of bed to clean it up, and heard fireworks going off. I looked up and over our Capitol someone was shooting off big huge fireworks, and I just KNEW. We'd done it. Obama had won.

I ran to the computer room and logged on. Believe it or not, I still have only dial-up, and while I was waiting for the electoral college map to come up a headline slowly materialized. It read: HISTORY IS MADE. I ran to tell Shawn. Who startled awake at my exicted news, "Shawn, Shawn," I said: "Barack Obama is president of the United States!" She murmurred, "Wha..?" Then, more awake, "Seriously??"

Yes, I told her. We did.

You KNOW What You Need to Do Today...

VOTE.

My family and I were up at the crack of dawn (actually, it was still dark out, thanks to daylight savings time,) and at our polling place by 6:30 am. I'm happy to say there was already a long line forming.

However, Minnesota is pretty practiced at this high turn out thing (we routinely get 75-80% voter turn out), so once the doors actually opened, we probably only had to wait about fifteen minutes tops. For some reason, it took Shawn a lot longer (more people with last names that start with "S"?), but, even so, we were on the road to work by 7:30 am, an hour later.

The other nice thing about Minnesota is that we vote on paper. We don't have to wait for people in booths or at machines. At our polling place, if we were okay with not having a privacy screen, they let us vote sitting on the floor using clip boards and a ball point pen. Our ballots look a lot like those SAT tests you took in school, except instead of using a number two pencil, they have special markers for you to fill in your circles with. I think that also helped with the expediency, because most of us would sacrifice a little privacy for maximum efficency.

Can I just say, I'm really proud that I'm going to be able to tell my grandchildren that I voted for Obama.

We're All Fine Here... How Are You?

It's Monday, so I'm blogging over at Something Wicked, of course, but I'm not going to give you the link to that today, because I'm basically going to repeat here what I said there.

Over at Wyrdsmiths, it's traditional on Monday morning to ask the readers of our blog what they're working on today (and for the week.) So, what are you doing today? What's on your agenda for the week? It doesn't have to be writing related, just tell me what you're up to!

For myself, I'm at home today watching over a sick kid. Mason had the stomach bug again this weekend, complete with a LOT of trips to the bathroom. So, even though he seems recovered, we're keeping him home from school just to make sure. He's watching (rewatching) EMPIRE STRIKES BACK at the moment, and I'm going to join him on the couch in a moment. After that, I have a ton of stuff I need to do to get ready for the week. I have to blurb two different books: one romance (for me) and one science fiction book (for my alter ego). On Wednesday, I have my class at the Loft and I need to read and comment on my student's submission as well as come up with something clever (and hopefully useful) to lecture about for an hour. Thursday is Wyrdsmiths, so I have to read my peers' work as well as get my own submission ready to be handed out.

Plus, there's a ton of yard work that still needs doing, although we did manage to get all the Halloween decorations in over the weekend. I woke up this morning with a bit of a sore back thanks to all the raking I did on Sunday. We have two ginormous maple trees -- one in front, and one in back -- which dropped all their leaves quite suddenly, and the neighbors two oaks shed everything, plus the silver maple on the boulevard. Rake, rake, rake... that's kind of all I did. And there still more to do! I'm going to put up the Christmas lights on the lilac bushes and maybe try to trim the hedges.

You?