Snoskred – Life in the Country

Mean Girl Sarah Palin was sent packing yesterday when millions of voters chose to say no to mean and yes to hope.

I still am not able to find the exact words to express how I feel about President Elect Barack Obama.  Thrilled would be in there. Relieved, also.

On the day Barack Obama was elected President, I made the difficult decision to resign from a local association here. I thought this morning that I might have some regrets but actually it is the exact opposite. I just feel relief and happiness. I will have a lot more time for me and my stuff.

WordPress 2.7 is due out soon, and I am looking forward to spending some time testing it out in the hope it will work a lot better than recent versions. So far I have heard good things.

Dexter Season 3 is in full swing in the US, and as Showcase chose not to show it here until January, I have been finding the episodes on the web. The season is a lot slower paced than season 2, but of course season 2 was the equivalent of hooking every rollercoaster in the world up to each other and riding it for 12 hours solid.

I hope to have some extra time to blog now.

So you may recall I mentioned Mudflats the other day. It’s been a cool place to hang out since the end of August, when Governor Sarah Palin from Alaska was chosen to be the running mate for John “I tell lies more often than the truth” McCain.

WordPress.com isn’t exactly supportive of a site that finds itself as popular as Mudflats. When you have comments threads which are over 1,000 posts long and no way to subscribe to comments or even have the site remember where you were at when you hit shift and reload… there was a couple of weeks there where I had to copy the name of the last commentor and then hit find in page.

Eventually I got in touch with AKMuckraker and offered to host a blog and forum for her, for free. And that was because I truly believe in the community that has grown up there.

When Sephy and I set up Aussie Bloggers originally, I believe it took us two weeks. We set up The Mudflats Forums in two days. It would have been even quicker if we had installed the same version of Tiny Portal as we use on Aussie Bloggers, but for some reason it refused to install for us, so we had to go with the latest release and they’d changed some fairly important stuff.

So given Mudflats on wordpress.com was the number one site, I was expecting a busy few days once the forums were live – especially as we had no moderators at all when we opened. It was just Sephyroth and I (and AKMuckraker but of course she is very busy with the blog and Admin-ing a forum is a bit of a learning curve at the best of times!) and we intended to add moderators during the first day. I had a list of names that had stood out while reading the comments area. By the end of the first day I believe we were up to 7 mods. We now have 15 and we could do with at least another 7. A huge thanks to all those who are helping out with Modly duties.

We had absolutely no idea just how busy it would be. On the first day the forums were open, over 550 people registered. There were hundreds of posts – so many I could not read them all, and I am a quick reader.. That night my sleep was broken into one hour chunks, worrying that things would go haywire while I slept, I kept waking up – and so I got up to check on things.

There’s currently – as I type this – 778 members. It is a wonderful community.  And it has Moose. Drop by and check it out. If you’re interested in the election, it is the place to be for the next 42 days. I’ll be there, and I won’t be getting a huge amount of sleep – there’s a lot to do!

And I must give a massive amount of thanks to Sephyroth for helping me out with this. I couldn’t have done it on my own. And he found the great moose pic.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

Recently, a group of women had an idea over coffee. This is how a lot of things begin. The idea was to hold an Anti- Sarah Palin rally in Alaska. So they got to organising.

One of the things they did was to send out a press release. A conservative talk radio host known as Eddie Burke chose to call them some very nasty names on air – and then gave out their home telephone numbers which had been included on the release in case the press wished to get in touch for interviews – and encouraged his listeners to call and harass these women. And they did get harassed, in a big way.

For some, this would be the point at which you maybe think of giving up – or perhaps not showing up at your own rally. Not these women.  They did show up – and so did 1400 other people. They did not expect that kind of turn out.

Congratulations, brave Alaskan women (and men, and teenagers) for standing up for what you believe in peacefully and with grace.

You can read more about this at Mudflats – ‘Alaska Women Reject Palin’ Rally is HUGE! – you can also watch the following you tube clip.

Eddie has been suspended for a week, by the way.  He is just lucky that nobody took things too far – anything could have happened to these ladies, it isn’t hard to find out an address from a phone number in the USA.

Have you ever protested? I did once, against Pauline Hanson. I have to be honest, I find Sarah Palin just as scary as I found Pauline, back in the day..

Courtesy of Mudflats, one of the best Alaskan blogs on the interwebz..

Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator

I shall no longer be known as Snoskred. You can call me Turbine Yukon Palin.