{"id":16861,"date":"2016-05-20T07:41:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T12:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=16861"},"modified":"2016-05-20T15:53:41","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T20:53:41","slug":"delaying-the-big-objective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=16861","title":{"rendered":"Delaying the Big Objective"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Winston sniffed me awake this morning in his sleeping quarters, my Son&#8217;s sunroom. I had to sleep diagonally in the guest bed but being a guest in his house for the first time worked out well. Hosting your parents at your new home is a right of passage.  Winston and Clementine are my son&#8217;s cats. You British History nuts will know who they are named after. (Clemmie&#8217;s naming was my suggestion and I&#8217;m very proud of it)<\/p>\n<p>After eleven hours on the road and a few stops I made it to St. Louis on my solo drive. Last month I traveled to the other side of Missouri, Kansas City. (I seem barely <a href=\"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=16005\">to have mentioned<\/a> it in my blog) Geez, I see I&#8217;ve only mentioned <a href=\"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?s=jeffery+sammons\">Jeffrey Sammons<\/a> once in my blog and that was last year. Gosh, I&#8217;ve been preoccupied with ISD 709.<\/p>\n<p>Even today the first thing I did after rolling over from Winston&#8217;s attention was check my cell phone to see what the Trib had about the schools. There was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.duluthnewstribune.com\/opinion\/readers-views\/4037031-readers-view-tenure-unions-hinder-education-students\">a letter beating up teacher&#8217;s unions<\/a> and a story about how <a href=\"http:\/\/www.duluthnewstribune.com\/news\/education\/4036910-licensing-staff-crunch-blamed-shortage-teachers-minnesota\">teacher relicensure<\/a> in Minnesota is underfunded. Oh yeah, and after the MPR expos\u00e9 I see that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.duluthnewstribune.com\/news\/4036630-mesabi-academy-close-end-june\">Mesabi Academy<\/a> is done for. <\/p>\n<p>I parked the Big Objective here two days ago to make myself write it but I don&#8217;t feel like attacking it at the moment. So I&#8217;ll ignore it in preference to a little <a href=\"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?cat=47\">Harry&#8217;s Diary<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Not wanting to waste my drive time (and to stay awake) I asked Claudia to download an audio reading of a <a href=\"http:\/\/expos\u00e9\">Jon Meacham book<\/a> about Andrew Jackson on my cell phone to listen to while traveling. The book was available from the Duluth Library although I&#8217;d bought it a couple years ago and hadn&#8217;t started it.  This may become a habit. I finished listening to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Wright-Brothers-McCullough-May-2015-Hardcover\/dp\/B00XTDIC5U\/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&#038;ie=UTF8&#038;qid=1463747119&#038;sr=1-2&#038;keywords=the+wright+brothers+david+mccullough\">McCullough&#8217;s Wright Brothers<\/a> in March when I visited Kansas City &#8211; a ten hour trip one way.<\/p>\n<p>Damn, I can&#8217;t believe I didn&#8217;t write more about that KC trip.<\/p>\n<p>Well, anyway, this trip is to watch my niece and God Daughter get her high school diploma. That will be tonight and we will gather at my Brother&#8217;s home afterwards. That will be part of three days in a row with both my son and his girl friend and my Brother&#8217;s family. I&#8217;ll leave for home Saturday after a pancake breakfast.<\/p>\n<p>Last night I took my son out to dinner and afterwards we scoped out my Brother&#8217;s new home. I called that get together to an end after my son, A Bernie Sander&#8217;s supporter, got into a heated discussion with my sister-in-law who supports Hillary. Its a good thing we didn&#8217;t have a brace of pistols handy or there could have been some Jacksonian fireworks.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and I don&#8217;t know why this popped up in my computer this morning but I found it interesting. In 2009 I posted this to my blog to show how many people were visiting it as I railed against the Red Plan:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/c1.staticflickr.com\/3\/2441\/3762991565_cd3fbfb74a_o.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Last month, by comparison, I had 6,157 &#8220;unique visitors,&#8221; 14,814 visits viewing 47,829 pages with 78,924 hits using a bandwidth of 2.02 Gigabytes.<\/p>\n<p>I ain&#8217;t Andrew Sullivan but I ain&#8217;t retired from blogging yet either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Winston sniffed me awake this morning in his sleeping quarters, my Son&#8217;s sunroom. I had to sleep diagonally in the guest bed but being&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-duluth-schools","category-harrys-diary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16861"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16872,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16861\/revisions\/16872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}