furiousBlog

Note: I was going to just post one big entry, but I timed out of my blog software and lost a chunk that I had written. So, I'm just posting what I didn't lost as part one. Part two should be later today. --ben

On Monday, January 19th, we lucked into a pair of inauguration tickets. Elise was a contestant in an annual Martin Luther King day oratorical contest. She had won at the school level, but didn't win at the regional level. On MLK day, there was a HUGE ceremony where she represented her school and we got to hear the six finalists (3 middle schoolers & 3 from high school) give their speeches. A the ceremony, they recognized a few local dignitaries including our recently-elected congressman, Gerry Connelly, who got up and spoke for a few minutes. When he was done, he walked over to the president of the event, chatted for a moment, and then came back to the microphone. He said "There are 30 contestants in this contest, so I am giving 30 tickets to tomorrow's inauguration." Of course, the place went wild, but I was wondering if he meant 30 pairs of tickets. One ticket wouldn't do Elise much good, as we wouldn't send our 11-year-old up to DC alone, of course. When she got the ticket at the end of the ceremony, it was indeed a single ticket for a single person. So, it was a nice gesture, but not too useful.

After the ceremony, we took Elise to a celebratory lunch at Chili's. She wanted to go to Olive Garden, because they have chocolate mints, but we convinced her that the food at Chili's was better, so she agreed to go there. While sitting at the table, Elise says "look, there's the guy!" We turned and lo and behold, there was Gerry Connelly leaving Chili's. So, I jump up and run outside after him. I explained to him that Elise was a contestant at the oratorical contest, that she was so grateful for the ticket and would love to go but couldn't without a parent and asked him if he had any more tickets. He said he may have one more in the car. We walked over to his car and he gave me his last ticket.

We obviously couldn't believe it. I mean, there were no tickets to be had, so it was completely lucky that we even got one, but then to run in to him at Chili's and get another?!?! It was crazy. We were pretty giddy all through lunch. After lunch, we headed home and started planning for the next day.

On Tuesday, we were up by 4 a.m. and out the door by 4:30. Just past Newington, we hit traffic that was backing up for the Springfield Metro station. It turns out that we should've skipped the Springfield station and driven up to the Van Dorn station, which was almost empty. I assumed that all of Metro would be crazy, so we stuck it out at Springfield. We ended up parking at Springfield mall and walking about a mile to the metro; even walking a mile, we still beat the people we were driving next to by 20 or 30 minutes. We were hoping to be on the train by 5, but it was 6:30 before we took our seats in the bizarely empty last car (the middle cars were packed, but no one walked to the back except us & one other lady). We switched from the blue line to the yellow line at the National Airport stop and took the yellow in to L'enfant Plaza where we got off.

L'enfant metro was insane. They were regulating the flow of people leaving the station, stopping them at the gates to let the previous group get up the escalators. I'm not sure why a bottleneck at the gates was better than a bottleneck at the escalators, though. Here are a couple photos I found on flickr showing the L'enfant madness: Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3. Photo 3 shows the exit we used and you can see that people are stopped at the gates. This was the worst part of the day for us. It took an hour of being squished to get out of the station.


Here's a pdf showing the various ticketed sections:doc-2009-map.pdf I'll refer to this going forward.

Once outside, though, everything pretty smoothly. We walked in the general direction of the gate for silver ticket holders which was on 3rd and Independence, right next to the Native Americans Museum. As we got to the Air and Space Museum we were pointed at the line for silver ticket holders which stretched back several more blocks. It moved quickly, though and by 9 or so, we got to and through the security checkpoint. We started making our way forward to get as close as possible.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you've already seen these. I'm really just posting because I feel bad for neglecting furiousBlog and this is a quick & easy post.

I found these two fantastic pieces of Obama memorabilia in rapid succession today.

First up, the Obama Paper Plate:



Yours for only $10 (plus $2 shipping & handling) at ObamaPaperPlate.com!

Next up, the Obama Bar:



The Audacity of Soap! Genius. Available from MyObamaBar.com.

For my birthday this year, Cyndi gave me a Flip Video Camera. It's a little larger than the size of a cell phone, a couple gigs of internal storage (an hour's worth), and a flip-out usb connector so you can plug it straight into a computer. It's brain-dead simple to use. Its simplicity & small size make it ideal for actually using, as opposed to a 'real', more expensive camera that would have a good chance of sitting on the shelf most of the time.

I've had it since July, but only got around to doing anything with the videos the other day. I setup a YouTube account and uploaded a bunch of vids there. The vids are mainly just family stuff around the house, and feature a lot of the kids (both in front and behind the camera--be prepared for some motion sicknes when they're running the camera). They also feature a fair amount of me being impatient with the kids.

Annoyingly, someone had already taken the username furiousben, so on YouTube, I'm just furiousblog. You can see all the vids or subscribe via RSS on my channel:

furiousblog's youtube channel

Here are a couple of the vids:

Kids at Washington Monument:



Lori, After Crying



The last Obama rally before the election was held in Manassas, which is just about 20 minutes from our house. We went with the two older kids and my Dad:





The kids jumping in one of the five or six piles of leaves we raked on Tuesday:

Most of you have probably already seen these since Cyndi posted them up on Facebook, but I figured I'd post here, too. Here are the two pumpkins I carved for Halloween:



I didn't cut all the way through, scraping out the design instead. They took forever, but I was pretty pleased with the results. I started with McCain, because I knew there would be a learning curve . I thought McCain was a little too dark, so I removed the skin from the shadowy part. It didn't actually lighten him up at all, and just made him look messed up in the light:



On a different note, I checked my Netflix suggestions today and had this:



My guess is that 'A Walk to Beautiful' is a eco-documentary about a historical bio pic that finds comedy in the mundane.

The excellent poll analysis site FiveThirtyEight gives 10 reasons to ignore the exit polls tonight.

Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls

These include the fact that exit polls have a larger margin of error than regular polls, they tend to overstate the Democrats' share of the vote, and they miss early and late voters. But my favorite reason is #10:

10. You'll know the actual results soon enough anyway. Have patience, my friends, and consider yourselves lucky: in France, it is illegal to conduct a poll of any kind within 48 hours of the election. But exit polls are really more trouble than they're worth, at least as a predictive tool. An independent panel created by CNN in the wake of the Florida disaster in 2000 recommended that the network completely ignore exit polls when calling particular states. I suggest that you do the same.