Barack Obama and Speeding

If I get a speeding ticket driving through the mountains, I’m blaming Barack Obama. First of all I’m still adjusting to driving in states where the speed limit is 70 mph. On Sunday, we were driving through some serious (by eastern U.S. standards, that is) mountains on the way from Knoxville, TN to Asheville, NC, listening to Weekend Edition on Public Radio, with lots of coverage and excitement about the upcoming presidential inauguration. So I’m getting all wrapped up and excited thinking about our new President (elect), and all of a sudden I’m speeding down some mountain at 90 mph and I have to quickly take my foot off the gas. I think there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

I still have to pinch myself when I think about President of the United States, Barack Obama. It seems like we are replacing a paradigm of “fear” with one of “hope”. How fitting that on the day before the inauguration, we are honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tomorrow, Tuesday January 20, 2009, Inauguration Day, we plan to head from Asheville, NC to Atlanta, GA, where I will be attending a national Habitat for Humanity conference. We hope to be listening to the inauguration on the radio while we are driving to Atlanta. The weather forecast is predicting 1-3 inches of snow for Asheville tomorrow, so we’ll see how everything goes.

More on Barack Obama, hope, and fear in a future blog post.

Georgia on my mind

I leave for Georgia on Saturday 1/17/09 to begin my next series of adventures as a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. I will be traveling with Stuart Barnes Jamieson and his family to Asheville, NC where we will be dropping off his daughter at college and hanging out for a couple of days. We will then head to Atlanta via Greenville, SC to attend a Habitat for Humanity conference for a few days. I will then travel to Americus, GA sometime around 1/23/09 to begin a six week stint doing volunteer work in the national office of Habitat for Humanity.