We had a snow day today, and I worked from home.
At 10:00, I logged into cnn.com‘s live coverage of the inauguration, and I was glued there until about 1:00. I was watching the event on my PC (wired connection), and I was following Twitter on my laptop (wireless connection).
I found the commenter on cnn.com a little annoying. I’m sure she must be one of the “lower on the totem pole” type people, being assigned to the Internet, and what was annoying was that she made comments like, “Right now we’re going to show you what you’re seeing.” (HUH?????? REALLY???? NOT WHAT WE’RE SEEING!!! THAT’S THE WORST!!!)
And once again, at the risk of sounding like, “Oh here he goes again, about not having a TV,” but really, my tolerance for inaneness has just dissipated. At one point she asked “Elizabeth,” who was covering The Mall, “So Elizabeth, since it’s drawing close to the start of the ceremony now, can you feel the difference in the crowd there now?”
I wanted so badly for Elizabeth to come on and say, “No. Back to you.” Ridiculous questions to fill time.
At some point well into the official start of the event, I started getting tweets such as, “Joseph Biden was just sworn in,” and then a little later, “Aretha is forgetting some of the words of My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” What was weird about those comments was that when I read each of them, their corresponding event hadn’t yet happened on my cnn.com live feed. Eventually it dawned on me that I was somehow connected to a delayed feed.
Is it live or is it Memorex, or just a damned delayed feed!?! How weird.
At any rate, I didn’t let it bother me, as I just looked for all the things people had tweeted about to see if they were true. 🙂
I was quite moved by the whole thing, and just so, so, so, so, so glad I won’t have to see that smirking-shit-eating-grin face of Bush’s any more.
Probably the biggest thing I’m glad about, as a technical communicator, is that we now have a president who can string two or three coherent thoughts together to form a meaningful sentence, and then string three or four sentences together to articulate a complete thought or idea.
Joe’s flights back from Erie have been a disaster. It has taken him two days to get home, and due to the snow today, his plane was diverted to Charlotte since it couldn’t land at RDU. He got there at around noon, and the next flight available to Raleigh was going to be at 6PM, so he rented a car and drove back.
Late afternoon, I went outside to see if I could move his and my car off this precarious (in the snow, especially) hill I live on, around to Kaplan Street. I usually move my car ’round there whenever there’s a forecast for snow that I believe actually has a chance of coming about.
I was able to do that successfully, so later drove his car out to RDU when he got there with a car he’d rented in Charlotte and drove back to Raleigh in.
We met at Flex at 9:00 to find karaoke canceled, which didn’t bother us in the least, since we really only went there to drink and play some pool. Since it was so dead in there (about 8 people), Richard opened up the pool table to play free, and Joe and I played three or four games.
All of a sudden there was this huge ruckus and this straight guy who was in there with his girlfriend, swung his arms and moved fast away from the bar. Being as shit-faced as he was, he tripped over his girlfriend and went screaming and flying down to the cement floor, where he just lay there still.
The other seven of us there just looked at the scene in disbelief. The girlfriend got down on the floor and cradled his head, and none of us could tell if he was moving or anything.
Finally, someone uttered, “Is he okay?” And then the bartender came around from the bar to first see if he was okay, and then to get him out of there. Suddenly the guy got up, pushed his girlfriend and everyone else out of his way and went totally stumbling and screaming toward the restrooms.
They eventually got a hold of him and escorted him outside. Drama.
Joe and I were thinking about going to The Borough, as Richard (the bartender) was closing Flex down around 11:30-12:00. Richard, and this guy named Jonathan were going to go over to Legends and wanted us to go with them. “I’ll get you in for free,” Richard said. (He works over there part time, too.)
We knew the show had been canceled, but we said, “What the hell,” and walked over there with them. There were a few more people in there, and Joe and I played another couple games of pool, there.
I’m not sure what time we left there, but I think it was close to 1:00.