It has been nearly a week since I’ve put anything up on the blog, and a lot has gone on. It has been pretty busy. So, let me talk a little bit about the blog posts and other stuff I didn’t get written that I wanted to, and may yet show up in some format or another.

“Driving my eldest daughter to college” As many of you know, my eldest daughter is a sophomore at Mary Baldwin College. She is fifteen and participating in their Program for the Exceptionally Gifted. I wanted to talk with her advisors and professors to see that we set things up so that she can get the most out of the experience. One of the problems is that she looks at the college catalog and says, “I want to take all the courses”. So, we may juggle things so she can stay an extra year and do something like a double major and a triple minor, or something like that and fit in more of the courses she wants.

As we drove down, we listened to some report on National Public Radio about the No Child Left Behind act. Unfortunately, children who are ‘different’ are the ones that get left behind. The ones that come to school hungry or without proper health care coverage are getting left behind, because NCLB is focusing on testing and not on what really gets in the way of people coming to school ready to learn. And, students like my daughter are also left behind. The teachers love them, they bring up the averages on the standardized tests, and unless they get so bored that they become a discipline problem, they don’t require any special attention. Yet they, like their physically hungry fellow students also don’t get chances to learn as much as they can.

Another post that didn’t get written the way it should is my review of the grassroots activist training that took place in Branford on Saturday. About 100 people showed up to here Jim Dean, Executive Director of Democracy for America speak, as well as congressional candidatesDiane Farrell and Joe Courtney. However, the important part was training in campaigning, house meetings and online activism.

I led the discussion on online activism, which went quite well. You can see the links I referred to in my talk here. We shall see if anyone walks away from the training session and sets up a new blog or mailing list. I know that several campaigns walked away with a lot of new volunteers.

Related to this is the blog post I should write about setting up websites for town committees. There have been some interesting discussions about this on different blogs. Unfortunately, my notes are scattered because of the next thing I need to write about, so I’ll write more about this later.

“The ice storm” Saturday night, Kim and I went out to a party. We were tired after the grassroots training, so we didn’t stay out that late and got home safely. I strong wind was blowing, and the lights went out a few times in the evening. In the morning, I found the PC had shutdown. Apparently, one of the power outages lasted longer than the UPS. When I powered up the computer, I found that our internet connection was down. We use a cable modem, and our cable has been down for a day and a half now.

So, I’m working from the offices of TCM. I can get through to some of my emails through webmail interfaces, so I’m getting a little done. I’m also way behind in my blog reading, so I’m trying to get a little bit of that done today.

Meanwhile, I’m getting a little work done for various projects, trying to take a little time off for Martin Luther King, Jr. day and hoping to have an interesting post up tomorrow.