Like just about every other American, I’m pretty excited about the election happening today.  I have a very strong opinion about who I think should win and I feel like the stakes are very high.  I’m on pins & needles waiting to find out which way things are going to go.

But, I also feel INCREDIBLY distant from all of it.  Obviously I’m physically very far away from all the action, but I really feel the distance in time today.  I woke up, took B to school, came home, cleaned the house, took a shower and played with Liam for an hour before the polls had even opened back home — and I was already waiting anxiously to find out what was going on.  All day, I’ve been looking at Facebook, reading prognostications and examining evaluations of the Electoral College possibilities.  Even now, when dinner has been eaten, the kids have been bathed, stories have been read, children are falling asleep, and I am finishing up my day, there are about 3 more hours before the first projection will come in.  The suspense is maddening.  (Worse, I’ve been conditioned to expect a turn-around of less than 24 hours between casting my vote and finding out the results — and I voted almost a month ago, so I’ve been waiting a long time now.)

I may see some of the earliest projections from the “sure thing” states in the east that close the earliest before I go to bed, but it’s more likely that I’ll be in bed before even those states start to be called.  Hard to say whether I’ll be asleep, though — I’ll be very tempted to check the news outlets every few minutes while I try to convince myself the greater good will be served by closing my eyes.

On the plus side, I may know the result (or that there won’t be an immediate result) sooner than I would have if I were in the US — by the time the west coast polls close and get themselves sorted out, we’ll just be getting up here tomorrow morning.  I’m hoping we wake up to an answer — and a good one.

We woke up this morning to the sound of rain — big, heavy raindrops.  It rained on and off all day, and as the day went on, it got chillier outside (our high of nearly 50 was around 7 this morning).

When I went out this evening for my German lesson, it had stopped raining and the temperature had leveled out in the mid-forties — chilly but not unpleasant.  I walked the 10 minutes to my lesson wearing a jacket and a scarf, and I was very comfortable.

An hour later, I stepped out onto the sidewalk and got hit with a sharp breeze that cut right through my jacket and had me shivering before I’d gone a block.  In my fantasies of Christmas markets, gingerbread and roasted chestnuts, I’d managed to forget the biting cold of winter in Vienna.

I’ve got to crank up the radiators, put on my fuzzy slippers and dig out the gloves and hats.  I might have forgotten how cold it can get, but I’m certain I’ll be reminded of it soon enough.  Winter is coming, for sure.

We aren’t big furniture shoppers or interior decorators.  Other than shopping for (very lovely) bedroom sets for the kids when they were born, we haven’t purchased a single piece of new furniture since we moved into our condo in Virginia (in 2001).  Our bed frame is the metal one that came with the mattress.  (Sad, I know.)

But, with Jo being here with us for a while, and us not wanting her to have to sleep in the living room the entire time, a change was in order.  We’re moving the boys in together (which they are, at least in theory, very excited about) and Jo will be moving in to what is now Liam’s room.  We have a futon, where she’s sleeping now, but we had to either buy her an actual bed for her room, leaving the futon as our “couch” in the living room, or move the futon in to her room and get ourselves a new couch.  Either way, we needed to buy some new furniture.  Not wanting to spend too much, and not having any real clue about where to buy furniture in Austria, we went for the Swedish solution — IKEA.

IKEA has the plus of being equally unintelligible to us whether we’re in the US or in Austria, so although we had a language barrier, it wasn’t that much more than anyone else would have shopping there, which was a little comforting.  Plus, you can get there via public transport.  Benjamin stayed home with Jo, and Dan & I went shopping along with Liam.  It was really nice (and unusual) to have some Liam time with both parents, and it was easier to navigate getting there and getting through the store with only one child (although we missed having B with us).

We had a great time.  IKEA, apparently, has everything you ever needed (plus a lot of stuff you never realized you needed untill you got there).  We found ourselves a new couch (Jo swears she doesn’t mind continuing to sleep on the futon, and we’re kind of excited about having an actual couch for the first time in over 10 years), a bathroom cabinet, a new rug, some pillows, some duvets (and covers) for the boys’ new room, trash cans, towel hooks, coat hooks and some other fun stuff.  (Seriously, does anyone come out of there with just what they had on their list when they went in?)  And, we did the whole thing — travel there, shopping, figuring out the checkout process (that part was harder in German) and getting back, in just over 4 hours, which was pretty amazing.

And, the best part:  they’re delivering it — ALL of it, everything from the couch down to the towel hooks — on Monday morning.  We came home on the bus and the train with just ourselves and Liam, which was pretty fantastic and a lot easier than trying to carrying home a huge area rug on the subway.

So, it was a great day.  I’m an IKEA convert, and I’m really excited to be getting some much needed and long overdue stuff for our place.  I think Jo will be happy to get out of the living room, too.

I’ve said it before, but there are times when I still find it amazing:  we live in the future.  Last night, as I was checking out what my friends have been up to (via Facebook) I saw a message from a close childhood friend, asking for help.  Her 3 year old daughter had been in the hospital for 5 days with an extremely high fever.  They weren’t getting the progress or the answers they needed, so she wanted to know if anyone she knew happened to be, or could recommend, an infectious disease expert.  I’m not, and I can’t, but I did what I *could* do — I reposted the request on my Facebook wall.

Within minutes, several of my friends reposted the request (including people I haven’t spoken to in person in years as well as at least one person who I’ve never actually met) and several others responded with information and suggestions.  The posts that my friends made resulted in some very helpful responses from *their* friends, some directly to my friend who needed help, resulting in a very cool instantaneous network pooling the resources of dozens of people for the benefit of one 3 year old girl, who most of these people will never meet.  All of this, which equalled many prayers and at least 4 concrete leads for my friend to follow up on, happened in just over an hour, and didn’t require more than a few minutes of any one person’s time.  This pattern was repeated by many friends who read my friend’s initial request, and I’m sure it created a wealth of new information and ideas for her to draw upon.

I think that is fantastic, and I think it is an amazing glimpse into the power of good that can come from being able to call upon the many wonderful relationships we have in the real world by using the simple, immediate connections provided to us by technology.  God willing, it will help my friend get some answers for her daughter.

I was born and raised in Maryland, and most recently lived in Virginia.  I’ve never lived anywhere outside of those two states (before moving to Austria, of course).  My family still lives in Maryland, and most of my friends live in Maryland or Virginia.  Growing up, my grandmother had a condo on the beach in Ocean City, MD, and I have fond memories from early childhood through this past summer based on the Maryland (and Delaware, and North Carolina) shores.

So, I’d been doing my best to keep up with the information unfolding over the past few days about the “Frankenstorm” and trying to separate actual concerns from excessive hype.  As of yesterday evening, everyone I’d kept in touch with was doing fine, but the worst of the storm that had demolished and flooded several of my dearly loved beach destinations hadn’t yet reached them.

I was wondering, this morning, how things were going.  I wasn’t hearing back from anyone, but it was still the middle of the night where they were, so I wasn’t too worried — I was hoping that they were all sleeping soundly.  The reports from New York and New Jersey sounded awful, but it sounded like the more inland portions of Maryland and Virginia were spared the worst of the storm.  In fact, based on the few anecdotal reports I was seeing on Facebook, it looked like the Frankenstorm was another case of an over-hyped disaster scenario.

But, then I saw that the storm was featured on the front page of “Heute”, one of Vienna’s daily newspapers.  I haven’t seen a front-page article about something happening in the US *at all* since we’ve been here, let alone an entire front page.  As the day went on, it does, indeed, sound like the storm was very much as terrible, forceful and deadly as it was made out to be, it’s just that the people I know personally were fortunate to have avoided most of those parts of it.

I feel very distant from it, over here.  It feels like it’s happening far away, to someone else . . . because it is.  Which is obvious, but it’s different from how I would have felt a year ago.  This doesn’t feel like “my” disaster.  I feel grateful that my friends and family are safe.  I feel sad that so much damage was done, and I feel anger and frustration that people died (especially those who died unnecessarily).  I feel overwhelmed at the amount of work there will be to repair and rebuild in the wake of this storm.  I feel awed by the amount of effort that will be put forth by so many people just to make normal life happen around them in the coming days, weeks and months.  But, it all feels very far away.  And that feels very strange.