I woke up this morning with a mad-on. This is not the usual for me. Normally I get up early before the family, and do all my girly stuff before all of the stinky boys wake up. But the boys didn’t have school today, so I was off kilter. I putzed around on the computer for entirely too long. And then I saw some stuff that made me mad. Before I even had a shower or any caffeine. Not really the best combination.
And then the man sent me a quick morning e-mail full of happiness and have a nice days. How annoying. And then 2 freaking seconds later he sends another one. And I’m all grumpy and thinking, what? Now the man is so important he has to reply to his own e-mails? Damn the man. Save the empire.

WARNING: My blog is now about to delve into that abyss called politics. Run away if you must. It won’t happen often, and I’ll nearly always warn you. But now is the time to go. And if you try to say something nasty about my kids and their political preferences… well bad things will happen to you, because karma is a bitch.

So back to the man’s self-important e-mail replying to himself. It actually was important. It was to tell me that Barack Obama was speaking downtown this morning. And the boys are Obama’s biggest fans. So here was chance to do something good with the day.

We rushed around like crazy people. I washed my face and did my best dirty hair hair-do and got the boys ready to go. We got downtown, and the crazy grumpy woman (that would be me) was given the run-around at the first parking garage we hit. Which made us miss half of Obama’s speech. They are lucky I was in such a good mood when I left. Otherwise I would have gone back and given them what for. But after some nice people helped us find parking, we finally got there, and you see some very sweaty boys (from all the running) giving Obama the thumbs up:

And here you have our initial view:

Can you see him? Yeah, neither could we. So we moved to the other side.

This view isn’t really that much better. The people down on the floor apparently arrived at like 2am to get in line for those seats. But the boys were happy. And they were so good and listened so intently to everything he said. And they clapped and they cheered. And I cried. I was not prepared for how moving it would be to see him in person. I was not prepared for the pride I felt in my boys, who had chosen their candidate completely independently of me (honest!) and who were the reason I was there. I told the boys they could tell their grandchildren about this. That they saw the first Black President of the United States the day before he was elected.

I pray that he is elected. We need something better, something different. Do I think he’s perfect? No. But no man is. But I think he could do things that could make this country, and quite possibly this world, a better place.

If you haven’t voted yet, even if you think I’m a blathering idiot – please vote tomorrow. Don’t take for granted the thing people still fight for all over the world. Vote.