eye contact with Obama!

Yes it's true, Obama came to Roseburg, Oregon yesterday!! We so lucked out. No one knew he was coming until Friday. Well actually one woman I met at the event said she heard Thursday because her husband was a fireman and they called on them for security. As soon as I found out I called our democratic party who said they had nothing to do with the tickets. Great. But they did tell me where downtown you could get them. I called my office downtown and asked my co-worker to run down and get tickets. I was still in Myrtle Creek, half hour away. Right after I called him I saw on the Internet that people had been waiting all night for tickets and they were all sold out. Seth did get us on the waiting list.

We drove into Roseburg at 9 AM and when we got to the high school, the line was 1/2 a mile long! We decided to go and do some errands. He was not speaking until 11:30. We got back to the school and there was no line, in fact when we were in the parking lot we heard the pa announce that there were some extra seats.

When we got inside it was packed. I could not believe there were that many democrats in Roseburg! There were no seats and not much standing room. We went to the side and back thinking we could stand. We ran into several of our friends as we made our way to the other side of the room. Lo and behold there were 2 chairs for us when we got there.

It was not long before Barack came out - right next to us!! I couldn't believe it we could not have been in a better place than if we got there at 6 am!! We both got to shake his hand!

His speech was very inspiring. It is the first time a candidate has said what we were waiting to hear. He talked first about the war - he will end this war now, not some date in the future. (John McCain 2013!) He then talked about health care. Those are my big issues.

The crowd was excited, we cheered, whistled and clapped until our hands hurt. We jumped up from out seats and threw our hands in the air in agreement. There was so much energy in the room and so much hope, it was heartening to see.

After he was done answering questions, he left the same way he came in and we got to shake his hand all over again. William held his hand for an extra second, Barak looked at him questioningly, William said, "We are counting on you". And they looked at each other for a minute and then he was gone.