{"id":36921,"date":"2025-08-29T10:38:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T15:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=36921"},"modified":"2025-08-31T14:13:19","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T19:13:19","slug":"preparing-to-do-something-useful-for-this-last-day-of-the-work-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=36921","title":{"rendered":"Preparing to do something useful for this last day of the work week"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=36906\">Last Post<\/a>: I knew one of these guys<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=36926\">Next post<\/a>: Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken<\/p>\n<p>A day or two ago I completed one of my standard campaign self assignments. I drew a calendric grid and laid out the campaign until the election. Sometimes I affix them to a door or a wall this time I put painters tape around it securing it to the small work table at my right. Up until I did this that corner of the four and a half by two feet table had been stacked with a to do assortment of papers I rarely to did or looked through with any immediacy. At the other end of the table there is a manilla folder spread wide. It is labeled &#8220;monthly on line charges.&#8221; Spilling out are eightyish sheets of paper with something to do with the subject all of them waiting for me to once and for all calculate how much I spend annually for my multiple presences online. Below the table on the floor are more manila folders with dozens of sheets of paper related to the same subject. They are collected like this because for the last week, since Claudia, yet again, brought mysterious online charges from our Banking statements to me to explain I decided they were the most important thing for me to sort out this week. And then I spent the week tending to other vitally important things to organize. Today is Friday. If I don&#8217;t sort it I will consider myself to have failed miserably no matter that I have miraculously sorted some other even larger distractions.<\/p>\n<p>In other corners of my room are two other collections of important tasks I have set aside for that time when I know I can concentrate on the and finish them&#8230;..One has been there for three months. It is the banking records for Welty Press, Welty for Congress and my newest account Welty for School Board. The latter is an account I set up before heading to Orlando two weeks ago and it is the easiest to comprehend. I put two hundred bucks in it that for the time being I consider a loan. I set it up because that week I decided I really did need to raise some donations from other people rather than finance this campaign all myself. At the moment I have spent under the $750 bucks I think are the trigger that requires me to give the State and the School District an accounting of my campaign financing to date.<\/p>\n<p>I have applied that same sort of thinking to Welty Press and Welty for Congress. It is not a wise policy. I have neglected to carefully read up on the state or national tax filing requirements because the amounts I have put into these accounts are so piddling I think they can be safely ignored&#8230;..with only modest fines resulting it I am caught in my incautious and lazy procrastination. I am a terrible accountant and even worse office manager. And yet I am a diligent record keeper. My office, now about a decade old, has enough paper to start fires that would consume all of Minnesota&#8217;s forests if they were placed carefully thorough out the state and lit on fire. That collection is what I spent the lion&#8217;s share of the last couple weeks organizing. It is also what Claudia has threatened to dump into an industrial dumpster should I kick the bucket before she does.<\/p>\n<p>The third pile is a modest one capped by a cardboard box with gift an employee of the school district sent me in a friendly tease. These items sit on my computer table the distance of my outstretched elbow. They are items I&#8217;ve found that stike me as interesting things to write posts about. Most are education related. One is not on the pile but a self portrait sketch I found <a href=\"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=36877\">as I was pouring through my old college notebooks<\/a> this week. This is it.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/54752526324_f78f060fb6_z.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>This is me sans feet. From the diamonds in the background I deduce that I drew this sitting on my bed in my bedroom. I had placed several &#8220;god&#8217;s eyes&#8221; on my wall. I had replaced the door to the closet with beads to copy my cousin Ellen&#8217;s cousin Michelle who our family visited in Hippy era California and who wowed me with her cool demeanor. She had strings of beads in her room. The mystery is where did the mirror come from that I would have had to have been looing into to draw the background? There might have been a full length mirror on the door but if it had had one by the time I was in college it was long gone. <\/p>\n<p>My level of sketching has not improved much since then but I will say this is a pretty good representation of me.<\/p>\n<p>As for the campaign calendar. Between the three days left of the two days left of this week and the three days left of election week I have nine full weeks to start campaigning. As I reckon it I have a full two weeks that I can be inactive without hurting my chances of winning. Abe Lincoln was said to have an unerring sense of what need to be done in campaigns and when to do it. This is my 21st campaign so I have a pretty good sense of what to do and the advantage of campaigning only in Duluth where I am well known and not the vast Eighth Congressional District where I could only achieve instant recognition by doing something notorious.<\/p>\n<p>People either like or despair of me. I supported the ornery Art Johnston when I was on the school board when his partner was unfairly targeted by the Administration and he had to take the School Board to court to make them back off. I got censured by the Board for revealing on this blog the still secret price we agreed to accept for the sale of Central to Developers with the ethics of Donald Trump who later backed out of the sale. I fought against going along with a massive reconstruction of our schools not quite twenty years ago when the voters were sidelined. Some people said the voters would only have neglected their duty to our children and thus it was the only way to do what was right. For those reasons people may have doubts about my worthiness for the election. Frankly a better objection is that I still have a fifth Congressional race in mind for next year should I become a School Board member. That&#8217;s a fair criticism although my self defense would be this. If one board member spends time challenging the greatest menace to Public Education our nation has ever faced well Golly, Is that really going to hurt a school board with six other board members who can easily out vote the lone Harry Welty for the one year he would be preoccupied in his anti Trump crusade?<\/p>\n<p>The fact is that eccentric though I may be I am one of the best known politicians in Duluth. Like Donald Trump nationally Harry Welty is a well known quantity in Duluth, Minnesota. If I can remind the smallish number of off election voters to see that I&#8217;m still someone to be reckoned with I think they will lean into a familiar name over those they do not recognize&#8230;..unless, despite my snow sculptures, I&#8217;ve managed to poison my reputation. And I&#8217;ll confess, that is possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last Post: I knew one of these guys Next post: Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken A day or two ago I completed one&#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\/36921"}],"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=36921"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36931,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36921\/revisions\/36931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}