Election day

Election day
Originally uploaded by teenmachine.

Today was election day back home. Everyone here has been checking the internet all day, waiting for the electoral votes to come in. No TV to watch, we just hit "reload" minute after minute on cnn.com. Even that was only available until about 3pm, though, when the satellites went down. Then we all just figured we'd wait until morning to find out who our new President was. Some people said they would call home on the highly controlled Iridium phone, which is our 24 hour emergency satellite phone line. Surprisingly, though, someone must be getting through to McMurdo on some kind of radio, because the electoral vote count has been available to us on our internal intranet, which is also put on the TV's in the galley. We have no idea which states have been counted, though, and which ones are still up for grabs. We only know what someone is typing in after hearing numbers over the radio. More than once, the numbers have been wrong...maybe there was too much static over the air. It's strange to be experiencing something so big from such an isolated place. We get used to the idea of being able to find anything out at any time, but down here, when the satellites go down, we really can't get live information. I can only imagine how the people felt who experienced 9/11 here. I keep having the urge for a split second to just call home to find out what's really going on...before I realize it's impossible. By now, most folks have finally wandered out of the galley, where many of us were waiting for new counts to come in. I guess I'll just wait for tomorrow morning too.