Now that the election is over the header of our blog is going back to its original form. I changed it on January 10th, 2008.

What a great day, what a great night. I’ve been following the events of this election cycle for a year extremely closely and today came the culmination that I’ve been waiting and hoping for. Barack Obama will be 44th President of the United States of America with a landslide win.

I woke up at 7:30am and got a call from my parents. They were already at the polling place casting their votes for Obama. There were no lines. Our polling place was right across the street from us. I was there at 7:55am and was out of there in 5 minutes. No lines, no problems. My sister voted soon after.

I drove to work and everyone there voted as well, for Obama, and just couldn’t wait for the resolution. The waiting started. I don’t think anyone was very productive today. The election was on everyone’s mind. We discussed and talked and thought about it from any possible angle. Then everyone ran home.

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At home Maruk and Sag joined Alena and I. We ordered a pizza, I grabbed the laptop and opened up all my news sites and we started watching — NBC, CBS, ABC, start over.

I expected Virginia to set the tone for the rest of the night early on. But it came so close that nobody would call it. PA got called early on and that wasn’t really a big surprise for anyone. Why McCain spent so much time there is unclear. Obama won it easily with 11% margin!

The first real excitement came around when suddenly OH was called for Obama. That pretty much was “game over” for John McCain right there. We all understood it, and started jumping. The rest of the night was just to see how big the win is going to be. More and more states was falling into the blue column.

What a great night after all. The final results are still not ready, but Obama not just won, but won in a landslide victory, at least per Wikipedia definition. We even dug up some beer and did some toasting. Here is some for the great future of our great country.

P.S. Of course only the future will tell how President Obama handled the huge mountain of problems that he will inherit from George Bush. And of course there are still a lot of people out there who are scared because his skin color is different and he didn’t come from the Washington establishment. But hopefully as the time goes on the country will again become the United States of America.

The election was just the beginning and it was the easy part. Now he has a lot of hard work ahead of him and only time will tell how well he fares as a president.

It’s hard to believe that the election day is finally upon us. The votes have been cast and now it’s on to waiting. About 4 more hours before the news start to appear. Keeping the fingers crossed.

There are 2 things that I’m paying attention to that scare me a lot lately. The U.S. presidential election and the stock market.

The election seems to be going in the right direction. There are still 3 weeks to go and a lot can happen, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. However if you haven’t donated anything yet, or can spare something, please be sure to do it. This is too important to ignore. McCain campaign has managed to beat all the records of pathetic and low.

With respect to the stock market — just this Sunday Alena and I were talking and were wondering if Dow Jones is going to go below 10,000 mark. Well, today it hit 8,579. 52 weeks high is at 14,279. That’s a 40% drop in less the a year. I don’t know what this is going to lead to, but whatever it is it’s not going to be good.

Yesterday we drove out to Floyd Bennett Field to give Alena some driving lessons. She’s got her Learner’s Permit this Monday.

Just two random photos from the series. “Get out of my way, I don’t care to know where my brake pedal is.” And “Get out of my way, I don’t know where my brake pedal is.”

Then it started raining. And it keeps taking breaks and then resuming again. And it keeps going still. I want to publish a photo, but there is already one posted that represents the mood just right.

And on a different topic we ordered a pair of Obama t-shirts with Alena. The site advised to get one size bigger then you normally get and while that works fine for me it was a mistake for Alena. We’ll see if it shrinks after a wash.

P.S. Yes, I know. Car wash. Must take car to.