In bed with a cold, taking calls from friends, laptop in lap and TV on across the room so I can watch the excellent coverage on the various cable channels without sound (Elgar's Enigma Variations playing instead).  You can read people's lips more easily without the commentators' voice-over chatter to distract.  At the moment everyone's getting into limousines, or finding their seats.  Ted Kennedy just said, "Good to see you, good to see you," to someone off camera and in another shot Mrs. Biden, looking ravishing in a red coat, just said "Thank you," to the young Marine escort and then indicated she'd go around and get in the limo from the other side instead of following Lynn Cheney and making her slide across the back seat.

Plenty of great images will come from all of this.  Why would I want to add to what's already being recorded and documented and commented upon for posterity?  Because the urge to mark and remember is genuine.  History while it's happening is so hard to get your head around, you want something you can turn to later, when Time has done the work for you by putting it all in perspective and you can say, "I was there," like the We Were There books when I was young [We Were There at Valley Forge, We Were There at Yorktown, We Were There At Hiroshima].   I even tried taking pictures out the window, as if to say, "This is how the sky looked when Barack Obama came out of the church with Michelle." Or, "This is what my bedside table looked like on Inauguration Day, this is what I was reading -- Duncan Fallowell's To Noto, Olivier Pauvert's Noir, and Richard Yates's Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.  I don't know about you, but what I am reading at the time always helps me place important moments.  I suppose a commemorative plate does the same thing for some people, or a copy of today's newspaper.  I'm not sure how, but I get the idea. 

To frame the occasion from another perspective, I note that Enolia Pettigen McMillan (1904-2006), was the first female national president of the NAACP from 1984-1990.  She did not live to see this day, but she came close.