Cristina and I haven't really talked much about politics since we started this blog but it seems hard to ignore the historic events that took place 2 weeks ago. It would be an understatement to say that Cristina and I are elated at Barack Obama's victory in the election to become the 44th president of the United States. I started following the presidential compaign almost from the beginning. When it became clear that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were the front runners for the Democratic nomination I started to get pretty exctied about this election. No matter the outcome, there was a very good chance that the next president would either be a woman or a black man. Just that possibility made this election exciting and historic. So for over a year I regularly checked online for the latest news to see if someone made a mistake that would take them out of the running. As a point of comparison, I didn't even watch or read about a single event from the Beijing olympics - except the opening ceremony which Cristina and I watched from a replay.

Given the direction the Republican party was going in and having lived in the US I was pretty sure only a Democrat would share my sensibilities. At first I wasn't sure whether I preferred Clinton or Obama. However, after following the compaign and listening to their speeches it started to become clear that Obama was my preferred candidate so I followed Obama through the primaries and was pretty happy to see him nominated.

After both parties held their conventions to formally announce the nominations, Cristina started to really become interested. Cristina's sudden interest in politics really surprised me because in all the years we've been together she always commented that politics was boring. Usually, elections are between one old white guy and another old white guy. Suddenly you have an old white war veteran with a clueless beauty queen against a young black guy with an old white guy. In fact, the two old white guys were just footnotes to the beauty queen and the black guy. So now Cristina and I would have the TV on CNN and MSNBC all the time to hear what people had to say. At work I was listening to NPR and reading online news sites. We were completely engrossed in the entire compaign coverage. One interesting thing I noticed was how it seemed that every Republican pundit, strategist or spokeperson that appeared on TV was suddenly a black person. Apparently, black is the new Republican. What I found disturbing was that most of the news channels didn't call out the BS being spouted (mostly by Republicans). So we watched Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to get the real news. We really enjoyed the Tina Fey impersonations of Sarah Palin.

My Facebook activity also took on a political tone in support of Obama. My contempt for Sarah Palin was pretty obvious through the videos and articles I posted on Facebook. Even though I couldn't vote in the election, I made it my mission to influence as many people as I could to vote for Obama. Washington State is a blue state with little risk of going red but I felt that each vote was symbolic. I am pretty certain I converted at least one Republican and influenced several undecided :) I even said to my friends that if Obama didn't win, we wouldn't bother moving to Canada...we'd pack up and move back to Australia.

On election day, Cristina and I came home and were glued to CNN. I even had my laptop up with several sites to get the latest state by state status. I kept trying to reassure myself that there's no way Obama could lose but I was actually very nervous. I repeatedly counted the electoral votes against the map of the US and watched as they turned red or blue. I was waiting anxiously to hear results from the battleground states. When I heard Pennsylvania went to Obama there was a moment of relief. When I heard Ohio went to Obama, I almost wanted to celebrate because the finish line was in sight. It wasn't long before CNN called it an Obama victory. I quickly switched between the networks to make sure it was the same call. Lastly, I even dared to switch to Fox to see what they had. As soon as Fox called it in for Obama, enough was said.

The moment was so powerful the people were crying and everyone recognized how historic the situation was. Cristina and I watched Obama's victory speech together and Cristina also had tears in her eyes. Watching the speech I noticed the bulletproof glass and it reminded me how far the country has come but also how far it still needs to go. Even though we didn't vote, we feel really fortunate to have gone through this election. We also congratulate the American people for making the right choice.

For halloween this year, we held a game night at our place. Being kind of a last minute thing, we thought it would be unreasonable to expect people to be dressed in costumes. As we do with most events these days, it was planned via Facebook. There was the usual crew who come to most of our game nights and there were also a few fresh faces from work. We ended the evening with a halloween themed movie, "Ringu", the Japanese original. Having already seen the Hollywood version, there were no real plot surprises watching this version though I think it would have been creepy for anyone watching it for the first time.