I Need a Vacation!

For the past week, I have had something going on from dusk to dawn and it's not stopping anytime soon!

Monday was my birthday - I wasn't particularly excited about it, but I guess I'm not going to get any younger so I'd better appreciate my age now. I spent Sunday and Monday with my parents visiting my grandmother in Flushing.

All I can say is I'm on a health bandwagon now - I don't ever want to be in a nursing home, even if it's to recover from surgery. The place my grandmother is in was gross - it smelled like pee and the staff seemed like they were from the island of misfit toys. Plus, there were a lot of crazy senior citizens who reminded me of goldfish trapped in a bowl, spinning around in circles. My grandmother is supposed to be out this week - I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

On Monday, I went blueberry picking with my mom. It was so fun - except now I have to figure out how to make jam. I guess tonight when I get home at 9, 9:30, I'll whip up a crock!

Saturday: I Was 30 Feet from Barack Obama!

On Saturday, my favorite Obama field organizer called me with extra tickets to the Obama/Biden rally in Dublin. My friend Liz went with me and I gave a ticket to my friend Tara and her brother-in-law. We supposedly had actual seats and the doors opened at 4:30. I drove by around 2:45 to see what was happening - I have never seen so many people in one place before. I called my friends and told them to get their booties in action.

I had a yellow ticket, which meant I could stand in the long volunteer line instead of the insanely long pink line that was reserved for the common folk. When we got in, I figured we'd be herded to a special section of the bleachers. Nope - they told us we were in the VIP section so we got to be right by the podium. I was 30 feet away from the stage! We heard from Mary Jo Kilroy, Richard Cordray, Sherrod Brown (awesome!), Ted Strickland (fantastic!), John Glenn (boring - but really inspirational!) and of course...Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

We had 19,000 people crammed into this tiny high school football stadium. The sun was beating down on us and some people had been in line since 7 a.m. The crowd was amazing - enthusiastic, warm, friendly. These were just average folk gathered together to hear what he had to say.

It was right after the Palin VP announcement so Sherrod Brown talked about how Sarah Palin had been governor of a state half the size of Franklin County, Ohio for two years and how she had been mayor of a city about the size of Bexley (one of our smallish suburbs.) It's scary that McCain is putting her a heartbeat away from the presidency - not to slam her experience, but it just isn't as broad and globally focused as Barack's!

Barack and Joe were amazing. A woman passed out because of the heat and Barack gave her his own bottle of water - passing it back through the crowd. That simple act epitomized why I'm a supporter. He'll give you a bottle of water when you're passed out from too much heat!

Just One Brief Republican Convention Mention

I have to say - I'm not impressed. I've yet to hear a real idea from any of the Republicans - or an understanding that we have major problems in this country. All they do is attack Barack and talk about John's POW experience and war. We need someone to fix our economy and help take some of the burden off the middle class. Dubya cut taxes in a time of war - which should never have been done - and we're trillions of dollars in debt.

Yes, Sarah Palin gave an excellent speech (it was written before she was selected and tweaked to be less 'manly'.) If you're going to tout your hockey mom/ PTA mom cred and family values, it'd be nice to have family friendly policies. Instead, she supports creationism (do people actually believe in that still?), abstinence-only education, no support for teen pregnancy programs, consumer-driven health care and she was caught on tape saying the Iraq War was 'a task from God.' These are the same policies as Dubya - we don't need 4 more years of them!

And if executive experience is so vital, why doesn't John McCain have any and why was Dubya so terrible? A spokesperson said Palin had more executive experience than the Democratic ticket combined - she IS the "executive experience." No one else has any - and frankly, I don't care.