Last night, David and I covered the 2008 Presidential Election in real-time at These Stories Are True. If you’d like, you can read the entry here and then come back to get the scoop on how things rolled.

David and I got off work at 6:00 PM and went to represent, civic-duty style. After voting, we went back to David’s, where I got to work setting up our own little situation room area. It was the perfect setup as we could see David’s gigantic TV perfectly for election results and there was enough room for his computer, my laptop, and my Cintiq (the fancy drawing tablet I use). Here’s basically what it looked like:

Yes, I was drinking coffee out of a Tigger cup. You’ll be okay.

I’d gotten everything pretty well set up by 7ish when I received a phone call from Carmen, who was on the side of the interstate with a flat tire. She was only a few exits down and David and I jumped into action. By 7:45, we were back at the apartment, greasy hands pounding away at our respective keyboards in preparation for the big event.

The first hour was a blur. Between catching up on prep time lost to our being Nascar-efficient tire-changing badasses and the election results that were already cascading in, it actually got a little stressful. I was still figuring out formatting quirks as comments started coming in, so we responded to those as quickly as we could. We got some decent traffic according to our tracking thingy, so I’m happy about that. If we do something like this again, I’m not going to leave all the formatting stuff to myself, as it got a bit frustrating while I was trying to do my retarded drawings and load in David’s tidbits at the same time.

When they called the election for Barack Obama at 11PM our time, we were rather surprised. We’d intended to go on for at least another hour or two. The 11PM update reflected our genuine shock at how quickly everything happened. In retrospect, we probably should have said something about McCain’s gracious concession speech and Obama’s powerful acceptance, but we were kind of tired.

We ate pizza, consumed a lot of Diet Coke (and eventually I had coffee) and had a grand time overall. David made a good point part-way through in that neither of us were even paying attention to the race or rooting for anyone, we were just wrapped up in the absurd nonsense we were producing. And after all, isn’t that what election night is all about?

Well, no…I guess not. But it was for us. Election 2008, mothercrunkers. We…were there.

b

Filed under: Cartooning, Writing