It’s been quite a weekend for the Wallins.

Firstly, we moved from our apartment in Muscle Shoals (where I proposed to Cassie in fact… Attached picture is the spot where it happened after the furniture was moved) to a 3-bedroom apartment in Florence. Unfortunately no one was available to help so the bulk of it was moved by us and Cassie’s poor, poor Dad. We started Friday afternoon and didn’t “finish” until like 10pm Sunday night.

On the gadget side, Overstock.com had a price mistake on this great device called a “LocationFree” base station. Basically you hook it up to your Tivo and you can access it and watch your recorded shows from anywhere with Wi-Fi. It was supposed to be $154.50 but they left the zero off so I got two for $15.45 each. Hehehe FedEx delivers today.

Yesterday several executives from my company, Murphy Oil, arrived at my store on their “Customer Service Tour” in a giant tour bus. They stayed for about half an hour handing out beads and free drinks to customers and gave me a signed mug, plaque, and tools pictures and video to be shown at our managers meeting in Orlando in January. I worked from 4am to 5pm straight getting ready for it. Blah.

As soon as I was freed from that I went to vote in my first Presidential election. I didn’t vote in the last two because I never registered and always missed the deadline to.

I had been a rock solid Obama supporter the whole election, which netted me much flak from folks (especially my Fantasy Football league where I’ve been called such things as “Baby Killer” *sigh*). However here at the end I was a little conflicted as to who I was going to cast my vote for.

In a jaded sense I knew it didn’t really matter because McCain was going to carry Alabama no matter what. The night before I read a great essay by Derek Webb that talked about Christians and voting responsibility and how Christians should not feel required to vote, especially if it caused them to violate their conscience by voting “the lesser of two evils”. (EDIT:  LINK HERE )

Because of the Murphy bus I didn’t think I’d have time to vote anyway. I was then informed that polls were open until 7 so I met my wife at Highland Church as soon as I left work and decided to cast my vote. (side note: I think it’s funny that we vote in churches. Seperation of church and state?)

In the end, I did vote Obama. As much as I like some of McCains ideals I ultimately decided that Obama has the best chance of making positive change in our country (especially with the new Democratic monopoly in Washington). I hope he can be flexible with some of his ideas to change some of them that may not work so well if they don’t. I think he will.

I cooked dinner (Shake & Bake!) Ironically linked to that meal, the wife and I then watched “Step Brothers” and a little election coverage before going to bed around 9.

My alarm went off at 3am this morning and I immediatly opened Yahoo! News on my iPhone to see that I’d woken up to a new country that had just elected it’s first (half) African American president. I got up, made some coffee, and watched a little CNN.

It’s a new era America.

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