I love election day! I love it!

It’s so exciting. I love the possibility. The chance to vote the good guys in and get the bad guys out. I’ve voted in all but one election since I turned 18. That first election was great — everyone I voted for won. I remember when I called my parents to share my excitement my mom said, “Don’t get used to it.” Ha ha. She was right, of course. There have been many, many disappointing, depressing elections since then.The last eight years have been particularly bad.

I haven’t voted yet today. We are waiting to vote until after we pick Wyatt up from preschool. I want him to go with us, to see us vote.  I think it’s a very important lesson to teach kids — voting is important. It’s a right, but it’s also a duty. There are many people in the world who don’t have the right to vote or who have great difficulty exercising their right so we have to be very diligent about making sure we do it in every election. It’s one of our family values.

One final note that goes out to any Californians reading this. Please vote no on Prop 8! No matter how you feel about gay marriage — and for the record, I am very PRO gay marriage — it is wrong to single out a group of people for discrimination. This proposition would write discrimination into the California constitution. It’s unfair, shameful and wrong.

This is what downtown Cedar Rapids — where my parents live and where I grew up — looked like yesterday morning. Those straight lines crossing the river are the railings of the bridges. They are completely under water now. The water is expected to crest early this afternoon, so things will get a bit worse before they get any better.

My family is fine — high but only dry in comparison to others in town. Neither they nor any of my other relatives are in any danger of losing their homes. I’m pretty thankful for this.

My hometown however is in bad, bad shape. Most of the downtown is under water up to the roofs or second stories. All the important civic buildings are flooded out: the water is up to the second story of City Hall, police and fire stations are flooded to the roofs. The library is flooded with most of the books still in it. Several museums and a beautiful, historic theater are flooded to the second floor too. The river runs right through the center of town and all of the bridges across it, with the exception of only the freeway, are under water. One of the hospitals was evacuated last night because the water had reached the generator in the basement.

Thousands of people have lost power and the water system is operating at only 25% of capacity. Residents are under orders to use water for drinking only and they expect this order will stay in effect for up to three weeks.

24,000+ people have been evacuated from their homes.

Cedar Rapids is not the only city that has been been effected by the flooding. Iowa City, where my brother lives, is already starting to flood and the river there isn’t expected to crest for another week. (My brother and his family also live far from the flood plane and are safe.) All but 16 of Iowa’s 99 counties have been declared disaster areas.

It’s really devastating.

Please, if you’re inclined to do so, take a moment to think some positive thoughts or send some prayers to the many people who are suffering, who have lost their homes, and who have lost their towns.

You can read articles and see many pictures of the flood at the Cedar Rapids Gazette website: http://gazetteonline.com

You can also check out photos people have uploaded to Flickr.

Wyatt and I drew this chalk drawing together. I drew the cake, he put the candles on.

I’m totally cheating on this one because I sort of obviously didn’t take this picture. Somehow the entire day went by and I didn’t take a single photo. I don’t even remember touching a camera. So I’m stealing this photo from my husband’s Flickr photostream and posting it here.

This is my with my friend Evan at Recent Changes Camp in Palo Alto. RCC is a wiki “unconference” and our whole family when down for the day to learn about wikis, talk about wikis, network and to promote the wiki we’re working on, http://kei.ki. It kind of sounds like a drag, I think, but we all actually had a lot of fun.

I had to give a big presentation in front of my entire company today, complete with a Power Point slide show. The topic I was discussing was how we are planning to meet our goal of doubling our site conversion rate.

Total yawn fest.

My strategy for keeping people interested was to put as many amusing photos into the Power Point as I could  fit. I actually managed to get something funny on almost every slide. Most of the photos were of the people in my department making funny faces and those were a big hit. I also had a slide about 1996 (not worth explaining why) so I put a bunch of photos from 1996 on it, including these two of Jennifer Aniston and myself.

Th following slide was this one here that I photoshopped.

I figure that since I went to the trouble of making it, I may as well put it up on my blog for the entire internet to see.