Happy birthday, notthatedburke and probably_lost!

Remember that Democratic Congress I got you for your birthday back in 2006?

Well this year, a health care bill showed up for your birthday! Only, I didn't order it -- honestly, I mean, I looked at it in the catalog and I thought, "oooh! they would totally like that!" Only instead of "ships in 24 hours" it said "coming soon!" but with no date and I was pretty skeptical that it would arrive in time.

So someone else must have gotten it for you! Which is pretty awesome -- I mean, it's clearly a beta version and it doesn't have all the features the order page mentioned BUT it's actually much more fully featured than I was expecting. Happy birthday!

(It still doesn't beat the present that arrived one day too late for your actual birthday, twenty years ago. I mean, srsly. That's got to be the best one ever.)

I wrote/salvaged a whopping 198 words today.

The problem is that this is a work scene and I don't know what CNAs doooooooooo. Well, actually, after spending most of my productive time today googling and reading stuff about CNAs, I actually have at least some sense of it: they bring meals, they feed patients who can't feed themselves, they check blood glucose for diabetic patients, they bathe patients, they move patients to prevent bedsores, they help patients go to the bathroom if they need help and change diapers if they're incontinent, they change sheets, they act as general gofers for the nurses, and they respond to people's call bells, among other things. When I started actually trying to incorporate that info into the work scene, I hit a whole new layer of stuff I don't know. She's just arrived at work in the morning; does she have some back room where she can hang up her coat? Does she get to work right off delivering people's breakfasts or is there more to it than that? If a patient required bathing, how often would she be doing it? I want for her to have some times when she can chat with (or listen to) patients; what tasks could she plausibly be doing in those scenes? Presumably personal care stuff for people too sick/weak/shaky to do these things for themselves... If she's sitting and feeding a patient and some other patient rings their call bell, is she supposed to hop up and respond, or does someone else do it? Do CNAs get assigned to particular rooms or are they supposed to just jump for whichever nurse needs them to jump at any given moment? Etc., etc., etc.

One of the things that was clearly wrong with the book as it stood was that it got started much too slowly. So, I pretty much scrapped the opening and wrote a fresh version that kicked things into gear a lot more quickly. For example, Heike no longer has to drive down to Chicago to get the Ark; it shows up at her door via UPS. (Actually, I need to check and make sure UPS is plausible and it wouldn't necessarily be the USPS or FedEx.)

Yesterday was fabulously productive; I wrote 3,000 words.

Today was less so. I sat down to at least poke at it a little and was going to knock off for the day with a token effort; then I checked to see how many words I'd written and it was 97. That was only three words short of 100, so I went back to add at least a few more, and wound up writing 443 total for the day. Since that's only 57 words short of my standard daily minimum goal when I'm being self-disciplined, I suppose I should go back and keep working, but I've reached the end of a scene and the new scene is going to require a bunch of rewriting instead of writing fresh, although when I look at it tomorrow I may decide it needs to be written fresh, too. We'll see.

I'm 5,871 words / 21 pages into the new version of the novel, and it currently stands at 92,410 words total.

I'd rather see my city elect the Lauraist as Mayor than see Question 1 pass in Maine.

I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but if you're a voter in Maine, GO VOTE NO.

I have never done NaNoWriMo and I'm not doing it this year, but I have decided I'm going to try to revise the Ark of the Covenant novel (because I re-read it yet again, decided it was better than I'd thought when I decided it was hopelessly flawed, but that the first section needs to be completely thrown out and re-done) by November 30th.

I have no idea how to log progress on something like this, nor do I know where people go to get those fancy ticker bars, but whatever. I may not post updates anyway, although being cheered on is always a pleasant distraction from real work nice and encouraging.

Also -- and this is entirely related to the novel, FYI -- back when I first moved to Minneapolis, there was this church in a sort of a quonset hut right at Lake Street and the river; it had a ginormous billboard that said PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD Wednesday 7 p.m. Saturday 7 p.m. Sunday 9 a.m. 11 a.m., or something like that. (I remember the PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD part but not the precise schedule.) It was torn down to make way for the (much, much nicer) building that now includes both apartments and the Longfellow Grill. Although during the construction of the building, just after they'd finished most of it and literally days before the sprinkler system was to be turned on, it was struck by lightening and burned to the ground.

When the church was being leveled, I remember reading about a local controversy regarding whether to mark the site, because there had been a church (I think it may have even been in the quonset hut) that was noteworthy for being an early adopter of radio broadcasts....however they used their radio show to spew anti-Semitic vitriol for years and years, and contributed to what was at the time the extremely anti-Semitic atmosphere of Minneapolis.

I would really, really love to know the name of the church and its minister. My attempts to Google the info led me repeatedly to this guy, and that's not right. First of all, he was based in Michigan, and second, I could have sworn the church in question was Protestant.

Does anyone know this info, or do any of you have better skills with google?

Also, a nursing question: is there a difference between a "ward" and a "unit" or is it just that once upon a time, everything was a ward, and now it's always a unit, at least to staff? Heike no longer works at a hospice; part of the storyline is going to be her discovering that she wants to do hospice work. She's also she's much younger, a CNA instead of an RN, and working in the oncology {ward/unit/whatever} at a hospital in downtown St. Paul.

I live in Ward 12, so although I have some opinions about other wards, they tend to be vague and uninformed. Here's who's running:

Brent Perry (Socialist Action)
Rick L. Nyhlen (Independent)
Charley Underwood (DFL)
Sandy Colvin Roy (DFL) (incumbent)

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I am pretty sure that is IT for my ballot. Hurray! All Minneapolis voters can use the Precinct Finder on the city website to (a) figure out where they'll go to vote and (b) see a sample ballot so they can find out now which offices they'll be voting for. My primary tools here were the list of Candidate Filings plus Google. If you're not registered, don't forget Minnesota has same-day voter registration.

I've done roundups of local candidates in previous years, but I think I did it right before Election Day. This year, I started these posts way further in advance. As a result, I've gotten all sorts of responses from the candidates themselves, which has been interesting but then makes me feel obligated to do follow-up posts.

On with the follow up:

1. Jason Stone responded here, basically just to add a little more information.

2. Dave Wahlstedt complained that I dismissed him too quickly, and said that he was misquoted in the SouthWest article I linked to. On looking at his website and some other information, I'm convinced that he's right I was too offhand with him based on that article. However, I am not going to vote for him because I feel a profound nervousness about putting the parks into the hands of someone who describes himself as a "Liberty Candidate" in any forum -- quite often, that's code for "Libertarian in all but name." Moreover, he talks about how the parks should be offering a "return on investment." And -- to some extent he's right; one of the things that impresses me so much about Erwin is his desire to look for outside funding sources. And in his TV interview (local access cable), Wahlstedt gives the example of Sea Salt as an example of how the parks could raise money; it's a private business that pays rent, but it's also a totally AWESOME asset to the park. I guess what it boils down to is that I have a lot of trouble trusting Republicans. This hasn't always been the case; I have, in the past, voted for Republican candidates on a couple of occasions. (Not many! But some.) But the more damage they do to the state I live in, the less inclined I am to trust anything any of them say.

3. Speaking of Republicans, that Republican party site with links to interviews has some links to Michael Martens, the BAT candidate. I was disturbed to see that one of them is from a Ron Paul/Michele Bachmann forum. I have some inherent prejudices against Republicans running for office, but I do not usually assume they're all as batshit crazy as Michele, or support her batshit craziness. Unless they go to rallies for her, in which case... he didn't SAY anything crazy in that interview but it definitely raised my wariness of him. (Michele, if your google alert turns this post up, please feel free to drop by and tell me how totally crazy you aren't, oh you woman who hid in the bushes to spy on a gay rally, which I think may have been the very first time I read your name and thought, "wow, she is NUTS.")

4. John Charles Wilson, who wants a sovereign communist nation for the Lauraist movement, stopped by to complain that I characterized him (and others) as joke candidates and loonies. For the record: I consider pretty much all current secessionist movements in the U.S. to be made up of nuts and/or complete lunatics. When in addition to being a separatist movement a group bases itself on a religious ideology AND demands as its territory a circular piece of land defined by a 240-mile radius surrounding Minneapolis (which for the record appears to include most but not all of the state of Minnesota, a huge chunk of Wisconsin, a good sized piece of Iowa, and small bits of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Illinois) I really don't feel an obligation to take it seriously.

That said, I think Wilson is less of a lunatic (and certainly less of an embarrassment to the state, not to mention doing far less damage) than Michele Bachmann.

If I get around to it (and my Internet connection speeds up) I will do Ward 12 City Council. I don't think that one should take long.

Carol Kummer wrote back to me two days after I e-mailed her, which is a respectably prompt response, I think. I asked her about her endorsements, first off, and here's who she listed:

AFSCME Council 5
Mpls Fire Fighters #82
Police Officers Federation of Mpls
Stonewall DFL "A" rating
WomenWinning

FWIW, I tend to view a Police Officers Federation endorsement as a substantial minus. Our PD has a lot of problems -- really ugly, awful problems. (A news story about that arrest, if you'd prefer not to watch the video footage.) I don't have a lot of faith in the Minneapolis Police Department, though to be fair, my personal interactions with them have all been neutral or positive. (But I am a middle-aged white woman. Very few of the people who get the crap beaten out of them by the police in Minneapolis are in my particular demographic.)

(And if you're wondering why I said I wanted a well-trained police department in my previous post -- I would like our police officers to be trained not to use the minimum force, rather than kicking the shit out of a guy who's down and subdued.)

Back to Carol Kummer.

She's also supported or endorsed by Sen. Linda Berglin, Rep. Jeff Hayden, County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin, City Council Member Sandy Colvin Roy, andformer State Senator Wes Skoglund.  She says she only seeks endorsement of elected officials who live in the district. So, fair enough.

I asked her what she considered to be the biggest difference between her and Jason Stone. She didn't really answer that question, but instead listed her experience and some of the projects the board has accomplished during her tenure. (Which includes some really great stuff.) (Come to think of it, this may be why it's usually so hard to dislodge Park Board incumbents: practically anyone on the park board can type of a list of accomplishments and it's guaranteed to be full of things that will fill people with warm, positive feelings. The restoration of the WPA walls along the creek! The gorgeous new Wabun picnic area near the falls, with its fabulous wading pool! The restored walking/biking trails on the river! There's nothing there not to like.)

I asked her if there was any local politician that she particularly admired or aspired to be like. She responded with a list of attributes she thought were shared by effective public servants:

- Most decide to run because of a desire to serve people and/or to correct an injustice;
- Once elected, their focus is to learn and do the best possible job for their constituents;
- Deep roots in their communities and a sense of commonality, ability to relate and to communicate and 'play nice' with their colleagues;
- Stick-to-ativeness and ability to work with others to accomplish goals.

I tend to agree with her on these.

Here's the big issue with Carol, honestly. In the various infighting over money and the Park Board in the city this year, there was a group that wanted to give the Park Board independent authority to levy taxes; I thought this sounded like a really bad idea, but it didn't wind up on the ballot anyway so I didn't do a ton of research on it. Anyway, Carol Kummer favored the idea; the whole incumbent board favored it, according to a friend, though he may have been speaking a little hyperbolically. At any rate, after spending the entire damn afternoon reading arguments about how finances are done in Minneapolis, I actually think the way we do them NOW is pretty reasonable: we have a couple of finance wonks, plus three council members and a park board rep who set property taxes and allocate the money. It seems like this is a situation that provides for some balance.

So, I'm probably going to vote for Stone.

So, in addition to two City Councillors, the Mayor, and a Park Board commissioner, there are two at-large members of the BET.

Here's who's running:

Carol Becker
DeWayne Townsend
Phil Wilkie
David Wheeler
James Elliot Swartwood
R. Michael Martens

So, who's battling for the money and glory of a seat on the BET? Analysis below the cut.

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Incidentally, if you're curious what my ballot will look like, a sample is available here as a PDF.

Minnesota's ballots usually switch up the order, to minimize the advantage of having your name at the top, so my guess is that not everyone will get RT at the top. However, if state law doesn't require it, it's possible they will not be changing the order this time, because everything has to be counted by hand, and uniform ballots are easier to count. (In our paper today, they noted that the results, especially of the three-seat races, are not guaranteed to be in until December 21st.) Apparently no one has yet written software that works with both our machines and our procedure, so hand-counting it is.

There are two elections this year related to the BET: one is the election for candidates to serve on it, and the other is the referendum on whether to abolish it entirely and have the City Council take over its job.

There are two at-large seats on the BET. (Also on it: the Mayor, the City Council President, the City Councillor who is Chair of the Ways and Means Committee, and a representative from the Park Board.) The BET is in charge of three things:

* They set property tax rates.
* They decide when and whether to borrow money.
* They oversee an internal auditor to ensure clean government.

I initially thought the pay for BET members was $35/year, which made me bug out my eyes and say, "why even bother?" On looking at web pages, I think I may have been wrong and it's $35/meeting. They appear to meet once or twice a month, depending on the month, so maybe a whole $630 to $840 a year, which at least is enough to pay for parking during the meetings, and coffee to keep them awake. Still, as government bodies go, this is a pretty cheap one, and no one running is doing it for money. Or fame and glory, for that matter, since many regular voters never even cast a vote in that election since they don't pay enough attention to it to know what the BET does, let alone who to vote for.

Analysis of the charter proposal follows below the cut. I'll be back later with candidates.

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Oh, and I got a reply from Carol Kummer, Park Board district 5, but I haven't had time to post about it.