{"id":27613,"date":"2019-06-14T11:01:54","date_gmt":"2019-06-14T16:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=27613"},"modified":"2019-06-14T11:02:33","modified_gmt":"2019-06-14T16:02:33","slug":"wish-me-luck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=27613","title":{"rendered":"Wish me luck . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>CLeaning up my &#8220;one step back.&#8221; Or, if you&#8217;re not my fan wish me ill. No matter which it is for you today I hope to get a good grip on my near daily &#8220;one step back&#8221; which always seem to seriously deduct from my &#8220;two steps forward.&#8221; Ms Kondo has a point. Clutter is mentally distracting, inefficient and sometimes a hazard. Since I made use of the inheritance from my Mother to transform our dingy attic into an office where I could put 68 years and more of the documents I&#8217;ve been unwilling to dispose of I&#8217;ve been trying to organize them. I know now that I&#8217;ll be doing it until I die&#8230;..roughly thirty years from now. I&#8217;ve always planned to live to be 100. My biggest long term challenge will be to fend off Alzheimers which took my Mother fifteen years after creeping into <a href=\"http:\/\/www.snowbizz.com\/MomsArtPage\/Mom%27sArt.htm\">her creativity<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Like many people I have so many projects its hard to put them away before I start the next. I&#8217;ve been fighting various piles of paper for years in my office and tucked them away only to pull out more papers from what has been filed to create more clutter. A year ago <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I began a final (first of more yet to come no doubt) to clean up what existed in preparation to write some books that I&#8217;ve long threatened to compose. Through that year I&#8217;ve also harbored the desire to tie them to yet campaigns for public office both the School Board and the Congress. Poor Claudia. <\/p>\n<p>If I am elected to serve in November on the Duluth School Board I have several goals the first of which will be to find a trustworthy as well as competent Superintendent. I fully expect to serve a full four year term&#8230;&#8230;.because my next campaign will be very unlikely to elevate me to a higher office. But, as anyone recalling my last year&#8217;s campaign will recall, I ran against Pete Stauber only because some Republican who saw Donald Trump for the danger that he was needed to run if for no other reason than to prevent such a stain on the Party of Lincoln. I am tempted to do the same thing next year in the 2020 election only far more vigorously than I did last year with my French studies and plans to visit he battlefields my Grandfather fought over 100 years after he was shot to hell.<\/p>\n<p>Both this school board and my putitive 4th Congressional campaign will be unorthodox. For each I plan to write a book. The first of these for the School Board will be written to raise money for my campaign. It will be a book about what 68 years has taught me about education. It will be eccentric, personal and hopefully remind people that I still consider myself a teacher&#8230;..of the public if not of students in the classroom. BUT i&#8217;VE GOT TO CLEAN UP THIS CLUTTER IF i&#8217;M GOING TO DO THAT AND START ON A SECOND BOOK FOR A CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN.<\/p>\n<p>So here is today&#8217;s task. I&#8217;ve just repiled my clutter on the floor and moved it around to vacuum. These are the miscellaneous piles with a brief description of what they are to me:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/48061717137_09105ded29.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><br \/>\nThis is the easiest pile. Its mostly books which I&#8217;ve been perusing. The difficulty is that I&#8217;m running out of book shelf space.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/48061720862_e6b0d0a705.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><br \/>\nThis is the debris that has accumulated around my computer over the last few months. I should be able to toss a lot of it after combing through it for a few precious gems.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/48061666213_acc80cc554.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><br \/>\nThese are mostly long term writing projects for me that are on hold. They need more careful filing so that, if I resume them, I can find them when I need to.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/48061620266_f6822481dc.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>This collection sits on my Mother&#8217;s old file cabinet for her Art work and materials. Its mostly got materials related to the story of my Grandfather that I&#8217;ve been wanting to write for years. His example would be a good one to tell a troubled America &#8211; the poor little rich kid of nations about how to reorient itself to play a part in saving the world from turning into a massive Red Tide of human destruction.<\/p>\n<p>If I get past my first book and turn toward Congress next year this will be brought back out. <\/p>\n<p>Finally there is this little collection which is not litter.<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/48061720102_08dffaa1b4.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><br \/>\nIt is French materials which I&#8217;ve collected to help me learn French. Over the past 475 days I&#8217;ve only taken a break from my studies of the language for the 30 days I was actually in France. Like my politics I&#8217;m being stubborn about it. Its dratted hard to learn to read AND speak and understand it being spoken. Its also a reminder to me of how I value both dedication and education. Its also a goad to me to fight off Alzheimers as two languages seem to be a good defense against it as well as constant learning and brain flexing. There&#8217;s just not enough of that going on among some elected officials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CLeaning up my &#8220;one step back.&#8221; Or, if you&#8217;re not my fan wish me ill. No matter which it is for you today I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27613"}],"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=27613"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27619,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27613\/revisions\/27619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}