Today I realized that I am coming up on my one year of being "on my own" financially.  Which makes me sound about 19 years old.  What I mean to say is "freelancing without a net." 

After leaving the day job I was able to get unemployment and Oregon has this great program for people who want to go into business for themselves–it allowed me to receive my six months of unemployment payments while building my freelance business instead of spending all of my time searching for a job.  It's called the Self Employment Assistance Program and without it, I'd probably be a coffee pusher again by now. It also helped that for the first four months of my unemployment we were living very cheaply while Will made quite a nice living working for a water delivery company.  Think what you will about your water delivery person but Will was up to $14/hr before we moved.  That works out to quite a bit of extra money to cover expenses while I was getting started. 

I am incredibly lucky to have had the opportunities that I have had this past year and probably luckier to have had a fiance who would rather sell a kidney than see me give up this dream I've got. 

I already wrote my "oh my god its been a year" post before I did the re-launch of this site, but it hit me that holy crap I've been self sufficient for a year.  And that? Is kind of amazing. 

Now it is going to be my turn to step up and be the supporter of my little family of two (and a half if you count the cat) and I'm not afraid of the challenge.  Instead I feel like sort of maybe a little bit I can do it.

Today it is cold and stormy out and it is the perfect day for staying in pajamas and curling up with a blanket.  Which is why, as soon as our friends left to go back to Roseburg, I changed out of my wet "Hi, I trekked halfway around downtown Portland in the rain" clothes and into warm and cozy sweats. 

Oh yes, we went into downtown. On the train. In the rain.  Mostly because of me: I needed to grab some books from the library and our out of towners were craving Hot Lips and really, who can say no to Hot Lips?  Sure we got soaking wet, but still.  Hot Lips!

Also also? Here is my advice:  It is not a good idea to eat mexican food and pepperoni pizza within twenty four hours of each other.  Never before have Will and I wished so intensely for a two bathroom home. 

I just found a bunch of comments in my system that, for some reason, Typepad failed to notify me about.  My apologies to those commentors who have probably spent the last couple of weeks thinking that I was ignoring them when, in fact, I have not.  Hopefully from now on it will notify me. 

For some reason I cannot get my URL to work without the www.  It kills me to lose the readers who were used to finding me simply at snarke.net instead of www.snarke.net and I hope that they will realize the change soon.  The Typepad instructions said to set up domain masking but now all it does is send people to a page that says "this webpage is temporarily unavailable, try again later."  Arg.

I've set up my "professional" site via this typepad account and have been having some troubles getting it to work the way I want it to.  I have the domain forwarded and everything while Typepad figures out why that site isn't showing up for domain mapping.  That? Is kind of taking a while.

I realized that Typepad does not convert line breaks when it imports blogs, so if you try to read my archives it'll make you feel….um….there is an author who once wrote a sentence that was a page and a half long (and grammatically correct!).  I can't remember who it was, but I bet reading my archives will feel a little bit like that.

Also? Our friends have arrived and are now on their way to see their concert.  I like spending time with our friends but I can't help but feel a little irritated and put out and used.  We noticed today that whenever they want to ask us a favor they'll send the message to Will (who has trouble saying no).  When they want to ask us to do stuff together, they send the message to me.  Funny, I always thought that when it came time to raise teenagers they would have been birthed from my own womb. 

Today the seventh season of Scrubs is on sale at Best Buy for twenty bucks!  This has nothing to do with anything else I've written but I wanted to end this post on a positive note.

A couple of friends of ours are going to a concert in downtown Portland tomorrow night so yesterday they asked us if they could crash at our place for the night because driving to and from Roseburg in one evening would be kind of a pain.  Of course we said okay.  We like our friends and, irritation at “why do you only call us when you want to use us for something” aside, we’d hate for them to get in an accident because they were too tired to drive safely.  The concert starts at 7, so we figured they’d be back by 11 or midninght and we’d still be able to get a good night’s sleep.

Today, AFTER saying sure go ahead and crash here, we find out that–wait for it–the concert is expected to go until ONE AM which means that they won’t be back at our place until probably around two in the morning.

Seriously! What the hell?!?  Didn’t they think we would like to know that information before we decided whether or not to offer up our home as a free hotel room? In the middle of the week?  When we are both swamped with work and school? Am I being a bitch or does it just reek of someone totally taking advantage of our kindness?

The whole darkness falling by five o’clock thing? Soooo over it.  I’m absolutely a fan of the colder weather of fall, but I also like sunlight.  Also?  It makes me feel like I’ve missed my bedtime.

I’ve been in “get stuff done” mode today.  I’ve cleaned the house, worked on some paperwork for work and cleaned out the DVR.  I have a few articles to write tonight and then a big project to start tomorrow.

Now that most things are done, I’m kind of in limbo.  Somebody entertain me!

Blogapotamus.  It means a really really long blog post.

I kind of love this word.

Does my complete enjoyment of the newest P!nk CD make me uncool?  Because if it does, I’m okay with that.  Look, I know that the lyrics “I’m still a rock star, I got my rock moves” aren’t exactly high poetry but the song is so singable.  Yesterday while Will was at work I may or may not have blasted the CD and sang along while I was supposed to be working.  I haven’t done anything like that in a while and can I just say? Now I remember why I used to do it.

So.  Election Night.  What a trip huh?

I accidentally volunteered to throw an election night party and ended up having four of my best friends come over so that we could watch the results come in together.  Can I just say? My friends and I? Love a theme.  In addition to the traditional pizzas and salad that are served at every gathering (thanks for bringing that salad BTW W!) we had:

Politically Incorrect Cupcakes (yellow cake with chocolate and vanilla frosting to represent the two candidates)
Politically Sort of Incorrect Doritos (Spicy Doritos to represent McCain and his fiery temper and Cool Ranch Doritos to represent Obama’s calm collectedness)
Chocolate Elephants and Donkeys from Moonstruck Cafe
Popcorn (the official state snack food of Illinois).

I may or may not have pulled my bangs back with red and blue hair clips and then pulled the rest of my hair into a ponytail which was held in place by a purple scrunchy.

At 6:30ish Obama was already trouncing McCain in electoral votes and I was shouting at the television “Don’t call it yet! Don’t call it yet! Nobody’s here!”  because nobody could get here before 6:45 because of work and stuff.

Once everybody got here we started switching back and forth between MSNBC and regular ol’ NBC because my friend Katie has a thing for Brian Williams and I? Well, Tom Brokaw could be reading the phone book and I wouldn’t care–I’d still listen to him for hours. Katie drew a map of the US so that we could color in the states as the electoral votes were called. Together we counted down the seconds until the polls closed in our time zone and then…

All I remember is a room full of women screaming and clapping and “yeeeeaaaaaaahhhh!”‘s.  And then we all got a little bit teary and weepy.  We watched McCain’s concession speech (which was 100% class) and then watched Obama’s victory speech.

A lot of it is a blur.  A blur of happy astonishment.  I got a little misty during the victory speech and from the sounds of my friends sniffling around me I wasn’t the only one.

I spent most of Wednesday and yesterday trying to think of an eloquent way to express my reaction to this election.  I think that this win felt even better for me than Clinton’s re-election did in 1996 (which was the first Presidential election I ever got to vote in).  I want to shout out how happy I am, how proud I am of my country this week (in spite of the devastating spread of gay-marriage bans that happens in every election–Oregon’s was in 2004).  At the same time I want to respect the voters who didn’t vote for Obama.  I  don’t want to rub it in the McCain voters’ faces.

See, I remember 2004.  Vividly.  I remember lying on my living room floor and bawling because I felt like my entire country had abandoned me.  I just couldn’t wrap my head around hate winning.  And I know that there are people who are feeling that way this week.  Maybe not so much the hate part but the “I don’t recognize my country anymore” part.  It’s a terrible feeling.

For me this election wasn’t about black-v-white.  It wasn’t about right-v-left, Democrat-v-Republican, us-v-them.  For me it was about electing someone who wouldn’t bully me into keeping my opinions to myself.  It was about electing someone who would fight for us all equally.  The very reason I voted for him was in his victory speech: when he called on those who didn’t vote for him for help because he will be their president too.  For me this election was about saying “look, we don’t see this issue the same way at all, but surely we can work together to find a solution we can both live with.”

I hope that Barack Obama lives up to what I–and everyone else who voted for him–hopes to see.  I know that he will approve laws and implement policies I don’t agree with.  I’m sure there will be some things that I am completely disgusted with.  It’s politics.  It will never be disgust-free.  I don’t expect or even hope to love everything he does. What I do hope is that his decisions will be decisions I can respect, even when I don’t agree with them.

Still though–the raw emotion that has governed this week…  I am really glad that I get to live during this time.  I don’t ever want to take it for granted.

In my brain is a lengthy and eloquent post about watching the election results come in.  Right now it’s pretty content to stay there, so instead today I pose a couple of question:

Why is it that all it takes is the sighting of a single ant to cause an entire-body itch that lasts for hours?  Also, how is it that my swiffer can get mold and mildew out of a bathroom ceiling but somehow cannot pick up a teeny tiny splash of cupcake batter?

It is election day and I am not ashamed to admit that I have had CNN on all day…except for when I’d flip over to the Daily Show/Colbert Report marathon that Comedy Central has been running (sometimes too much politics makes my head asplode).  I’ve also cleaned my house, baked four dozen cupcakes and written a few articles for my clients.  I’m pretty proud of my productivity level today!  Go me!

Tonight I am hosting an election night party.  Honestly, this was not my idea.  I vividly remember the upset of 2004 and bawling on my living room floor during Kerry’s concession speech.  The last thing I wanted to do was invite a bunch of people over and then go through that again…in front of people.  But then one of my friends ended up coming through town in desperate need of a living room to park it in to watch the election results and I volunteered mine (I haven’t seen her in a while) and slowly but surely–yep, throwing a party. Oops.

I will admit, though, that if the horrendous does happen, there’s nobody I’d rather bawl with than my friends.  Will has decided to hide in the back room for the duration of the evening.  He’s not political and he likes to tease so, really, it’s better for everyone in the event that things go badly tonight.

Look, I know who I want to win.  I am proud of who I voted for (Obama Rulz).  But I don’t want to tempt fate.  I remember how excited and hopeful I was four years ago and how devastated I was by the end of the night.  I refuse to hope for my country’s future until the election has been decided and then I’ll decide what, exactly, I am going to hope for.

I hate to be a downer.  I truly am looking forward to tonight’s election coverage and experiencing the ride with my friends…especially since we’re bunch of nerds and love a “theme” like nobody’s business!  I’ll (hopefully) have photos and tales to post tomorrow.

If you haven’t yet voted here on the West Coast, the polls are still open for a few hours.  Get out there and cast your ballot!  If you don’t vote don’t bitch!