We have had the perfect storm on the Denn campaign in the last few days, of a busy candidate and a lazy blogger. So let’s get started.

First let’s dispense with the mandatory travelogue portion of the candidate blog, where the political candidate breathlessly tells you about where he has been over the last several days as you ponder whether to clean out the vegetable bin in your refrigerator. I just can’t help myself. Last Saturday I started at 8 in the morning with the Interdenominational Ministers Action Council in Wilmington, asking them to help my office sign more kids up for the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program. The good news is that the ministers are eager to help; the bad news is that Reverend Greer, the hard-working chair of IMAC, had no coffee for his colleagues who he had hauled out of bed early on a Saturday morning, and they all stared mournfully at the Starbucks cup I had brought with me. I thought there was something in the bible about providing coffee for any weekend meeting before 10 a.m. At noon, with the boys in tow (and after a trip to the library), I spoke to a group of child care providers about my efforts to get the Delaware House of Representatives to pass legislation I have proposed to control the cost of health insurance for families and small businesses. (If you haven’t yet signed the new on-line petition to get these bills heard in the House, please sign it today by clicking here.) And then at 3:30 I embarked on the type of statewide jaunt that has earned my Ford Focus gold card status at the Winner Ford service department: to Gumboro to visit with the 41st District Democratic Committee’s annual Charlie West dinner, then on to Smyrna to visit with Smyrna area Democrats for their annual dinner, and finally on to the Greenville Country Club for the Delaware Autism Society’s annual dinner.

Sunday, after visiting the inaugural 5K run for Variety—the Delaware Children’s Charity (chaired by the IBEW’s own Doug Drummond), the boys and I had bagels at Dunkin Donuts and then played at home and settled in with Mrs. Denn to watch the Eagles pathetically self-destruct against the Chicago Bears. I am pretty sure I heard Adam tossing and turning after he went to bed saying “don’t give them the pass over the middle!”.

Now, on to this week. Among various other campaign events, we have two Halloween Parades scheduled this week. They each present special challenges. First is the Milford Halloween Parade (which I believe has been given a name other than “Halloween Parade” this year to satisfy some Halloween Objectors). My first and only time in this parade was in 2004 (it has been cancelled the last two years). In 2004, Lenny was still a puppy, the parade was much longer than I thought it was, and it was so big that it took us 90 minutes just to get to the starting line. So Lenny was dragging, and because a good 2 ½ hours had passed from the beginning of the parade to the time that we got to the reviewing stand, many of the children watching the parade had gone home and a small number of the remaining adults (all of them, I am sure, from Maryland) had been warming themselves with pints of Jack Daniels. The end result was a gauntlet of people screaming “pick up your dog!” This year, Lenny is bigger and stronger, the parade is supposedly smaller, and I am supposedly closer to the beginning than the end. But I am still working on a snappy comeback for “pick up your dog.” Suggestions are welcome (“Pick up your mother” has already been rejected).

The second parade is the Newark Halloween Parade this weekend. This is a great parade, most of the marchers are in costume and it isn’t too long. The distinguishing feature of the Newark parade is that everyone tosses hard candy at the kids watching the parade and the kids frantically run into the street to retrieve the candy. I am lobbying to have parade participants next year throw whole wheat toast. Look for us in the parade: Adam will be dressed as Winnie the Pooh, Zach will be Tigger, and I will be Christopher Robin of the Future (i.e. with less hair and long pants).

As we get ready for the General Assembly’s return in January, we are trying to let the House Insurance Committee know that we want a fair, up or down vote on the two bills to help make health insurance more affordable that I proposed and that the State Senate passed by an overwhelming bi-partisan majority. Click http://www.thepetitionsite.com/3/health-care-for-delaware to sign the petition today!

My first boss Christine McDermott passed away this year from breast cancer. It was in honor of her that the boys and I joined “Team McDermott” at the breast cancer walk last weekend.

Christine was the director of Delaware Volunteer Legal Services when I came back to Delaware after law school in 1991. My job was to travel around to churches, senior centers, homeless shelters, and state service centers and offer free legal services to Delawareans who couldn’t afford lawyers. Christine was my supervisor.

I had a sense of what I was in for even before the job started. Christine came up to my law school in early 1991 for a national conference on Women and the Law, and she saw posters in the law school advertising a birthday party that my friends were throwing for me. She came to the party, and promptly took it over—reprimanding my friends on the quality of the “punch” and teaching them how to fix it, volunteering to stair dive if it would help liven the party up, and ultimately teaching my then-girlfriend how to do some type of ‘60s style dance. I wasn’t aware of the dancing—for the good of all Americans, I avoid it—but some time around 11:00 one of my friends came up to me and said “Matt, your boss is doing the Batusi with your girlfriend. You have kind of lost control of the social situation here.”

Christine was a great boss. She taught by example, and what I respected most about her was her unmitigated passion for the people and causes she believed in. A lot of what we did at Volunteer Legal Services was domestic law—protecting children or spouses who were stuck in bad home situations. It was emotionally draining work, and although I always did my very best legal work for my clients, it was sometimes hard for me to get as upset about the 30th domestic abuse case of the month as I had about the first. Christine would have none of it—any time someone was treated unfairly, she was outraged and wanted it fixed.

Christine also inspired me by the confidence she had in me as a brand new lawyer. Normally first year lawyers are kept on a very short leash. Christine told me that she knew I could handle myself and to go out and do some good. One day in my first couple of months in the office I had been up most of the night working on a brief for a group of tenants who were being unfairly evicted, and I accidentally overslept and missed a meeting that was scheduled first thing the next morning. My first major screw-up as a new lawyer, for which I deserved to get dressed down. I came into the office at 9:30 frantically looking for Christine to tell her what had happened, and pulled up short outside her office because I heard her yelling over the phone at the man with whom I had missed the meeting. By the time the conversation—which I shamelessly eavesdropped on—was over, I could tell from Christine’s end of it that the guy was somehow apologizing for having had the audacity to complain about my standing him up. Then she came down to my office, asked me what had happened, and laughed about it. A small thing, but I never forgot how she stood up for me.

After I left DVLS, I would see Christine from time to time at bar association events or when I just happened to be around the law school and dropped in on her. She never changed. She loved her students, she loved her clients, and she would crawl through glass for either one of them. She finally retired and moved down to North Carolina with some of her family for some much-deserved peace and quiet, and instead somehow ended up running a battered women’s shelter in rural North Carolina because no one else was doing it and it needed to be done.

I am not sure how Christine is going to deal with heaven—she seemed happiest when she was fighting against injustice, and my limited understanding is that there isn’t supposed to be too much of that there. One thing I do know is that here on earth, better than anyone I have known, she lived out Micah’s edict to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God.

Today is Michele’s birthday. Happy birthday, honey! To celebrate, I will be making her dinner tonight. With apologies to the Governor, Lt. Governor, Treasurer, Oprah, and everyone else who scolds me for leading an insufficiently healthy lifestyle, the menu for tonight is Sear Roasted Rib Steak with Garlic Butter, Vegetable Penne with Pesto, and Key Lime Pie, with a glass of red wine recommended by my friend Ciro Poppiti.

Under normal circumstances, I would go run frantically on the treadmill at lunchtime to prepare my heart for the onslaught planned for this evening. But instead I am going to be running the gauntlet at Carl Schnee’s class at the Academy of Lifelong Learning. I have been to his class three or four times now–it is 250 or 300 people, many of them retirees, all of them news junkies, and they ask the toughest questions of any audience I face. I will file a report later, along with an update on the past weekend’s trips to the Ennis campaign in Middletown, the breast cancer walk, and the Pulaski Day Parade. For now, I need to get this key lime pie out of the oven. How am I supposed to know if the center has “just gelled” without sticking my finger in it?

Last night, the boys and I attended a celebration at the Riverfront for my friend and former law partner Bill Bowser, who was being presented with an award from the National Governors Association for his work in fighting cancer incidence and mortality in Delaware. Bill would be the first to tell you that we have a long, long way to go in the fight against cancer in Delaware, but since being appointed chair of the Governor’s cancer task force when it was created in 2001, Bill has been a leader on a variety of fronts, from improved screening for colorectal cancer to helping ‘navigate’ new cancer patients through the maze of services they encounter, to some issues that I have been directly involved in such as cancer care for the uninsured and trying to track environmental causes of cancer.

The event was not just nice for honoring Bill, but it was also a chance for me to catch up with some of my colleagues on the cancer task force and with a lot of my former law firm colleagues. Unfortunately I did not get much of a chance to talk to them, as Michele had to work last night and the boys therefore needed to accompany me. Goaded on by Delaware Superior Court Judge Jan Jurden, the boys decided to remove several hundred paper napkins from the dessert table, rip them into shreds, toss them into the air, and dance wildly among the napkin shrapnel as it floated down. I would have stopped them, but it did keep them quiet during the program–it was kind of like an ’80s music video with the sound turned off. This also allowed me an opportunity to crawl around on the floor scooping up paper so that the Riverfront staff wouldn’t have to do it. Just another day in the life of a would-be Lieutenant Governor.