After a week of driving down to Virginia to pick up my daughter from college and attending the fiftieth birthday party for Mayor John DeStefano, who is running for Governor in Connecticut, and whose campaign I work for as BlogMaster, my email inbox has grown to over 350 emails behind, and I suspect it is going to get worse before it gets better.

In a few hours, I will leave for Lowell, Massachusetts, where the Massachusetts Democratic State Party will be holding their State Convention. Last year, I covered the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. There was a lot of talk about the role of bloggers at conventions and questions about what will happen at future conventions. There wasn’t a lot of talk about conventions other than national conventions, which I think is unfortunate. The state and local conventions are incredibly important. In many ways, it seems as if the state and local conventions are where the real work of party building takes place.

In conjunction with the convention, the Massachusetts Democratic Party is sponsoring a series of public policy breakout sessions this evening and tomorrow morning. Monica Palacios Boyce, who was a Dean Dozen candidate running for State Representative in Massachusetts and who is also a cell biologist will be participating in two breakouts about Stem Cell Research. I wrote a bit about what is going on with Stem Cell Research funding in Connecticut for the DeStefano Blog.. I really look forward to this breakout session. There will be other great breakout sessions on issues such as affordable housing, economic growth, education reform, health care, and the Patriot Act. I hope people make a concerted effort to attend some of these sessions.

There will be various chances to meet candidates at the convention and I hope to learn more about Deval Patrick, William Galvin, Thomas Reilly and Deborah Goldberg.

DNC Chair Howard Dean will address the convention at noon, which will be followed by debate on the proposed party platform. There are various petitions which are likely to be presented and additional information on some of these can be found at http://www.democracyforma.org/dfma/Convention/Petitions.

It looks like it should be a fun weekend. When it is all over, Kim will leave for vacation, and I will be Mr. Mom next week. This will be particularly challenging because I will also be attending the Personal Democracy Forum in New York on Monday, which should be a great event, followed by a CivicSpace Conference on Tuesday. Somehow, I imagine I my unread email count is going to climb considerably before I get a chance to catch up.