Harry’s diary August 27, 2019

School has started. The days are cooler. I think today will be the real last day that our summer’s long kitchen remolding will finally wrap up. If it is then I’ll paint one side of our dining room tonight where a new wall is bare white. I was so sure the mess was over that yesterday, in the adjoining dining room, I cleaned off the chandelier hanging over the table. This is a tedious task that I put off for as long as three years. It requires removing hundreds of small glass bobbles and washing and drying them and replacing them. Its a little complicated and just like when my buddy used to take his bicycle apart and puzzled over a few pieces that weren’t put back together I had four crystals left over. The chandelier looks fine but golly, What did I do differently?

In part the chandelier cleaning was a way for me not to fret over writing my book. I’ve only nibbled at the writing for the last week. I’ve got 42 orders but still need 158 more to go before I will be prepared to have them printed once the book is complete. In my early fantasies the printing was to occur next Tuesday. I began to realize that was pushing it over a month ago. Now I’d like it to be done about the time of the election. I reported in the last post that I got a big mailing sent out offering the book to my fans. But, due to the Post Office’s demand that Duluth mail be sent to Minneapolis first today is the very earliest I should expect any returns. I’ll head over to my PO box in half and hour to see if I got any strikes. If so, by the end of the week I’ll post a new thermometer to show how close I’m getting to 200 orders. Whether I’ve struck gold or panned out I’ll turn my attention to the book afterwards. Its going to get written one way or the other.

I am a unique candidate in one respect. Only newbies to Duluth have not heard of me before so name ID is not a big deal. I honestly don’t know what the majority of people make of me. That’s why I spend so much time writing but even telling all may simply confuse people. Only novelists do that, right?

The fellow who is challenging my friend and former student, Alanna Oswald, told the DFL endorsing convention that did not endorse either candidate that he planned to spend $12,000 on his election. Maybe he was counting on DFL money to do that. I just know its not easy to raise money like that unless you are an incumbent Congressman like Pete Stauber with the NRA and the Koch Brother’s cabal throwing money at you. So much is at stake nationally. The Koch’s feel much safer with wackos like Jair Bolsonaro coming out of the Facebook Wilderness and despoiling the Amazon than with Scandinavian school girls sailing to America like the Vikings of yore with the heretical message that we ought to make the Earth livable for our grandchildren.

I’ll need a significant war chest to send out my mailings to the next 10,000 voters in my District. It may not be quite that big a mailing. I came home Friday and found two envelopes from my campaign in my mailbox. One was for Claudia the other was for me. I thought I had assured that only one envelope would be sent per household at fifty cents each total mailing and printing cost. I spent double that on my home. Thankfully future mailings, at least seven more of them, will be sorted more carefully to avoid that waste. Because of this it may end up costing a little less than the $5,000 I anticipated. If I can’t afford new ones I have old lawnsigns that I can use and the only advertising I’m doing is in the Reader. That may come to an end too if this mailing is a bust. The mailings and my blog and related campaign Internet sites are my principle means of communication.

If I don’t post much in the next week its because I’ve returned to my book with a fury. There’s not a lot about education that I haven’t said before in the last 25,000 Lincolndemocrat posts. And by the way for new visitors, if you wonder what I’ve said before there is a search function you can use to type in subjects you are curious about. For instance, I suspect I’ve written a little about Denfeld’s new principal Laurie Knapp before. I like Laurie. She got a story in today’s DNT about her appointment to the post. Wish her luck. I am concerned that her predecessor on administrative leave left her with lots of unfinished work with classes about to start. That would be one more unfair hard knock on Western school kids.

Well, its 10:31. I’m off to the PO Box. You can wish me luck too.

UPDATE: NADA…….time to write.

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