Stop #2

I arrived in Amsterdam last weekend. It's such a pleasant, quiet little city compared to London (or NY of course). It feels good to be back. My days have been very full: lots of projects to work on, then drinks and dinner with colleagues after work, then more work from the hotel (the New York workday continues to about midnight CET). I haven't had any opportunity for tourist activities this trip.

It's been a good trip, but I'm really missing my wife! Good thing I'll see her tonight!

Stop #1

I flew into London on Thursday and had meetings in the City of London. This was my first time in our London office meeting with this particular group. These folks live on an island in so many ways :)

And I finally got a chance to see the Gherkin up close (see the pic). But the highlight of my stay was getting to spend the evening with a beautiful pregnant Katherine and her husband Alex. They took me to a pub for drinks and then a great Indian dinner. Thanks guys!

He's on a roll (and She's earning her reputation)

Obama is on a roll! He's now won 23 of 34 contests, including the last 8 in a row!

I'm incredibly optimistic that we're going to pull this thing out and I could not be more proud of the manner in which we're winning -- with integrity and a positive, hopeful message.

ON THE OTHER HAND, Hillary has been embarrassing herself since South Carolina. The Clinton campaign has mentioned race at every turn in this campaign. She pledged, along with all of the democratic candidates, not to campaign in Michigan and Florida. But when it came down to it, she was the only candidate not to remove her name from the ballot. When she "won", she actually held a victory celebration! And now her legal team is calling for "every vote to be counted" and for the Michigan and Florida delegates to be assigned to her.

Last Wednesday, the Clinton campaign finally announced their contribution total for January -- $13 million -- and acknowledged that $5 million was on loan from the Clintons themselves. Her problem, according to many articles, was that she had already raised the maximum allowed ($2300) from many of her donors. Her solution to this problem was to ask those donors to give another $2300 to her general election campaign! Apparently this is legal; however, if she does not make it to November, her campaign will have to refund all of that money. How irresponsible can you be? By contrast, Obama's huge number of donors (418,000 so far in 2008) have given only $25-100 each, permitting them to make many more donations before reaching the limit. Speaking of which: please donate to the campaign if you can; we have Texas and Ohio coming up in a couple weeks and we're going to need the money.

And finally, Hillary has refused to even acknowledge that she has lost the last 8 contests. It's customary to congratulate your opponent on their victories, as Obama has done each time. Clinton is in denial now, but I don't think it will be long before she has to face reality.

It was a super Tuesday for me

For the first time in my life, I became a campaigner! Last Saturday, Beth and I paid a visit to our local Obama 08 campaign office, picked up some materials, and attended a rally in East Harlem. Last Sunday, I campaigned in front of markets and churches on the Upper West Side. There were several meeting places to choose from; I went to the Starbucks on 103rd. I couldn't believe that at 9:00am on a Sunday morning that there were FIFTY volunteers assembled and ready to go. It was a cold day, but I spent about four hours standing on the sidewalk, holding an Obama sign, handing out flyers, and asking people to "Vote Obama!" It was one of my best New York days ever! It was amazing to talk and interact with so many people -- the other volunteers, the Obama supporters who were ecstatic to see us, and some folks who were not happy to see us. It was amazing and strange to be proclaiming my politics so publicly. People would just stop and ask 'so why do you support Obama' and I'd have a chance to tell them.

It was such a good experience that Beth and I spent another hour Monday evening handing out flyers and talking to people as they exited the subway. Then, on Super Tuesday, I campaigned from 7 to 9 in the morning and 5 to 9 in the evening. The Obama volunteers were amazing! We had someone on nearly every street corner up and down the UWS. During the evening shift, I campaigned 100 feet from a polling place adjacent to a small group of Hillary supporters (the only Hillary supporters I had seen all weekend). We talked to each other about our candidates, the issues, our predictions for the night, and the (un)likelihood of an Obama/Clinton ticket in November. I campaigned with an old gentleman who is a former NY State Senator and with a lovely woman who campaigned for Bobby Kennedy in 1968. She said that this is the first campaign she has seen since that 1968 campaign that has inspired so much grassroots enthusiasm and participation.

My efforts on that Tuesday may or may not have won many votes for Obama, but I was rewarded to come home exhausted and hear Obama deliver this great speech:

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."

Keep Hope Alive

Went to an Obama rally today with supporters of all ages!

Super Tuesday -- Yes We Can

A huge win!

Even after the huge misinformation campaign, the Clinton/Edwards tag teaming in the SC debate, and repeated attacks from Bill Clinton, Obama is unstoppable!!! Not only did Obama win, he pulled in more than twice as many votes as Clinton!

It's tough to maintain a positive message of hope in the face of everything that was thrown at him in South Carolina, but Obama managed to finish even stronger than he started. We're almost there, folks! -- 22 states go to the polls on February 5th. If you haven't had a chance to make up your mind about the field of candidates, learn more about Barack at his website and donate to make sure we get the right person into the White House!

OBAMA

About three years ago when presidential candidates started campaigning (okay, maybe it hasn’t been quite that long), I began to take an increased interest in Barack Obama. I was mesmerized by his presence and his message of hope at the Democratic Convention in 2004. That night, I talked to my mom on the phone and she said “I want to vote for that guy!” I was one of many who were privately wishing for Obama to enter the 2008 race. When he did, I was cautiously optimistic.


When he joined the race, I began to pay attention to his news coverage, subscribed to his podcast, and generally did everything I could to keep track of him. The more I listened and the more I learned, the more I believed Obama was unlike any presidential candidate I’d ever seen. He spoke about issues in such a reasoned and rational way, without any of the sensationalism that is typical of a congressman trying to get his or her name in the paper. Obama is older than I am, but for the first time I felt like I was hearing the voice of my generation: someone who wants to address the issues that I care about, who really appreciates the complexity of these issues, and doesn’t just treat them as a prop in his sound bites. In short, I believed that he must be completely unelectable!

Last Tuesday, the day of the New Hampshire primary, after Obama had won the Iowa caucus, the front page of the Wall Street Journal had an article about how Obama had double-digit leads over Hillary in NH polls. I was beyond ecstatic. I literally felt the same way that I felt on Election Day 2004 when exit polls showed John Kerry way ahead of Bush. I now completely despise pollsters, by the way. When Obama was edged out in the NH primary, I felt motivated like never before: This is too big an opportunity at too critical a time for our country. On Wednesday, along with more than 20,000 others similarly motivated, Beth and I donated to Obama’s campaign. We later discovered that our brother- and sister-in-law (registered Republicans, for the record) had also donated to Obama on Wednesday.

This is the first of many ways we hope to be able to support the campaign. I’ll post more about that later, but for now let me encourage you to go to the Barack Obama website. It’s a fantastic site and if you don’t know anything about Obama it’s a great place to see where he stands on the issues and watch some of his speeches. If you come away with as much hope as I have, then make a donation.

Going Under the Scope

I hadn't planned to write again so soon after my last post. Two posts within such a short period of time only calls attention to the long span of nothing between July and November. But I decided to post anyway, since I will be "going away" for a while.

A few weeks ago I finished the job on my ACL while playing soccer (the only way I would have it). Tomorrow afternoon I will go in for surgery. Dr. Schell will cut out part of my kneecap tendon and use it as a new ACL. I'm planning to remain conscious during the procedure and hope that the experience will be very educational. I learned a lot by staying awake during my knee surgery five years ago.

I am glad to have the surgery scheduled for a Friday, so that I can have the weekend to begin my recovery. And I blocked out my meeting schedule on Monday and Tuesday in case I need to work from home, and I expected to be back in the office on Wednesday, even if it was on crutches. This seemed reasonable based on my experience with my previous ankle surgery and two previous knee surgeries. However, I spoke to Dr. Schell today and he told me this was going to be a completely different type of recovery. Gulp.

So now I'm scrambling to prepare for what may possibly be a week or more of being very doped up and/or in quite a bit of pain. Today they delivered a "knee bending machine" to the apartment. I haven't seen it yet, but I am supposed to use it for FOUR HOURS A DAY every day after surgery. From what I've heard, it basically just bends my leg back and forth over and over. I'm sure I'll come to hate it.

Thanks for your good wishes. Please send DVDs in lieu of flowers. Comedies. I don't think I'll be in the mood for deep meaningful art films.

Busy days

When I finished school in May I felt like I had an abundance of free time. No need to sit in class for six hours a week; No need to put in countless hours of reading during my weeknights; No dreaded group projects to suffer through on my weekends. Of course, we tend to fill whatever time we have available, don't we? So part of my newfound free time was given over to teaching a Financial Peace class on Sunday mornings as well as becoming more active in my role as Shiloh board member. (I also tried to rejoin my soccer team, but that had a swift and painful conclusion).

For a while, my work started to fill up that time as well. My trips to Amsterdam created a great deal of work for me to do, and for a few weeks this fall I would leave work, get home, eat dinner, pull out the laptop, and get right back to work. This obviously wasn't any fun for me or for Beth. So I started enforcing a no-work-from-home rule. I assumed this meant one of two things had to happen: stay late to get everything done, or leave without finishing everything. But what I found was something in between. By setting a deadline for myself each day to leave work on time and refrain from doing any work at home, I have been able to do a better job of addressing the more important tasks and finding other ways to deal with the less important things (which could mean delegating to someone else or letting them remain undone for some period of time). I have since learned that this is in line with Parkinson's Law which states that "work will fill the time available for its completion."

I am now able to finish everything that I need to accomplish and still get home at a reasonable hour and have a nice evening with Beth. There are still a number of projects that I would like to do and simply don't have time for, but I'm hopeful that I'll find a solution that doesn't involve working longer hours. I think I know a good place to start: Yesterday afternoon I was looking through my Sent Items on my email program at work, trying to find a message I had sent in the morning. It wasn't a particularly busy day for me, but there seemed to be a lot of sent messages to look through. It turns out that I sent 112 work-related emails yesterday. Over a 10 hour workday, that averages out to one email every 5 1/2 minutes. Considering the hours spent in meetings each day, the rate of emailing is even higher (not to mention all of the IMs and phone calls). There must be a better way...