yesterday Sen. Barack Obama was in town for a major rally at the Xcel Energy Center. The rally was very historic and exciting. if you don’t already know, last night Sen. Obama clinched the Democratic Presidential Nomination! it was very exciting to be a part of it.

we got downtown st. paul at about 4pm and the line was already very long. this map is where we started out in line.

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not a bad place to start. but after about 20 Minutes the line moved and we were in an even better location!

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That is where we stayed for the next 2 and a half hours, moving only a few feet every 20 minutes or so. the line in the end was more than a mile long…

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it was really not that bad waiting for that long. we had Miles with us and he had a really good time. we made some new friends. a couple and their son from Duluth. they cam down after he taught a class. they are both political scientists and professors at UMD. they were really fun to hang out with and talk to and that made the time go by faster.

there were plenty of vendors selling lots of t-shirts and buttons. i would have bought one, but you really don’t knwo where that money is going to go. but they sure were having a good time.

Well at about 6:30 they started to move people to the doors and explained what we could and could not bring into the arena. it was all the usual secret service stuff: no bags, not umbrellas, no professional cameras stuff like that. but at 7pm they started letting people in. they had to scan everyone and we all had to go through a metal detector and all that. but we got in and got pretty good seats. we were not far from the podium where Obama was going to speak from.

so we were in. it was great. they had MSNBC on the jumbo-tron and, of course, everyone cheered when they showed the crowd and they interviewed people from the Xcel. it really was fun. there were a massive amount of cameras and reporters there. also, a section for video bloggers and podcasters, of which there was a good number. we sat around and talked, ate some food and watched what was going on until about 9pm when Obama came out and gave his speech. it was really exciting! he had a lot of great things to say. if you have not heard the speech i’m sure you can find it. i am not goingt o talk about the speech because i just want to talk about my experience. he talked for about 35 minutes and he was very interesting to listen to.

it was really a lot of fun to be there because it was actual history in the making. it will go down in history as the day that the first African-American man got a major nomination for President of the United States. it was really something. any way check out the photos, there are a lot of them!

well i didn’t get that video archivist job i was hoping for.  its probably all for the best though.  turns out they offered it to a freshly graduated college student who was happy with $22k/yr ($10.50/hr).  honestly it would have been hard for me to live on that while supporting a family.  i do feel ripped off though.  mostly because i have a family and i have “too much experience”, which blows my mind because when i was fresh out of college i did not have enough experience and i could not have found a job like that for the life of me.  in the last interview they guy told me that i was “over qualified” for the job, which made me feel that i should have been running the place since there is no way i was more qualified than the other 2 guys working there.

that said its time to power through and trust God that there is something better out there for me, even though we have almost no money right now.  so i am going to keep going with Artvark as long as work comes in.  there is also the possibility of help out another production company in the very near future who maybe getting a contract with the Food Network for one of there shows. needless to say i am praying that they get it! there is also still a glimmer of hope for that Graphics gig at KSTP.  sounds like they are waiting till July to review the need for the position, which i know they need the help.  so now we are praying that they need someone on full time for that position because i know i will get that one since i was the one they wanted to hire before they put the job on hold.  so that is the update for now.  next post will be more fun!

this past weekend we went to my parents house for some odds and ends. one of those was going through some of my old stuff and old computers that we had sitting in the basement. there were tons of old video components and random other things, but the main attraction was my old Video toaster computer. man that thing was loaded up! (for 1993). i think it must have had at least 2GB of Hard Drive Space in it! Also the NewTek Video Toaster with which i edited video, animated with Lightwave and a few other things. i also has “personal animation recorder” in there. what that did was record my animations to the hard drive so i could watch them or record them to Video tape (imagine that). the kicker was that i was able to do all this on a 33 MHz processor! amazing!

we plugged it in to see if it would start up. it seemed to but i don’t think the hard drive was spinning properly. so we opened it up and when my dad took out his handy dandy little flashlight to look the top fell off and shorted the computer out. (this was because Miles was playing with the flashlight and has recently learned to unscrew things. needless to say he unscrewed the flashlight). so off to the recycling it went. no worries. i don’t think it worked any more any way.

ah spring. its been a long winter and i am ready for spring. we have had several days where it has been around 70 and it has been glorious! Last week my wife and i had a nice lunch outside int he back patio. that is one of our favorite things to do in the warmer months! well that and have a nice fire with an occasional adult beverage.

Since my wife works in the afternoon twice a week i get to spend time with my boy and now that is is warm out we can go explore and have fun. the other day we put up the hammock in the back patio. we had fun sitting in it. it is great to see his little personality develope and it is really fun to see that he is turning into a little me! we tend to make the same goofy faces as well as the same interests. The past few days we have started drawing and coloring together. those pieces of art are on our refrigerator for all to see.

we went to como zoo this weekend with our best friends.  it was a lot of fun.  como is a nice zoo for a free zoo.  they have monkees and giraffes and lots of animals!  we actually saw one of the gorillas up close just taking it easy.  this does not happen often.  usually they sit back and do nothing this time of year because it can still be a little too cold for them to be outside.  oh well, it was still fun.  there is also a brand new baby orangoutang named Java!  it is very cute!  (i wish that i could have gotten a photo).  it was also amazing to watch the mother orangoutang and see the parenting skills that she has.  just amazing.  

its been a few days since i posted.  oh well.  just had stuff to do.  today i had a job interview at Conus Archive for a video archivist job.  i think it went really well.  i hit it off with the guys i would be working with and we seemed to get along well.  the job would be wonderful!  it will involve archive old footage as well as putting together footage for various tv programs, movies and news stations.  hopefully i will have an update soon!

man the weather has been fantastic the past couple of days! yesterday i broke out the grill for the first time this season and made Buffalo Chicken Sandwiches! MMMmmmMMM. yesterday was really windy and i ended up haveing to get on the roof the take care of some things, like taking the Christmas lights, that normally are supposed to stay on the house, down because the wind pulled them off half the roof. While i was up there i cleaned out the gutters from winter debris. not much there but there was enough.

Also with this nice weather, the bugs come out. and since my office in the basement the spiders start to crawl around the walls because it is a little warmer in here now and i think they live in one of the corners. something will have to be done soon i think.

today was a really nice day.  you see today i got to see a few old friends that i have not seen in a while.  we all met up at our old church because a mutually favorite pastor was coming to preach.  it was a very good sermon and it was very encouraging to hear what he had to say today.  one of my favorite new quotes of his is 

“It is better to know God than to know why”

he has always been encouraging to me even when i feel nothing can go wrong.

 

any way, sometimes its just nice to see people you have not seen in a while.  hopefully now we can keep in touch more than we have in the past.