I was held up for a while this morning preparing some letters saying different variations on “send money now!”, so instead of offering my usual thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of the futures market, I will offer some random thoughts from the weekend.
1. We are having a pizza get-together at Grotto’s on Main Street in Newark at 6:30 tonight. I think the deal is that in exchange for getting pizza and soda, you have to brush tears from your eyes and pretend to be riveted by whatever I am saying for five or ten minutes. We will soon find out if one of the core philosophical beliefs of my campaign, College Kids Will Do Anything for Pizza, is true.  (Seriously, college students have been our very best volunteers, so this is an effort to try to get a few more of them involved in the campaign.)
2. If you have never been to the First Baptist Church’s annual Patriotic Sunday in New Castle, you should definitely check it out next year. In place of the traditional Sunday morning service, the church has an enormous tribute to men and women in the armed forces, the highlight of which is a part of the service where dozens of veterans from each of the branches of the military line up along different walls of the giant church, and all of the other attendees line up to (in the words of Reverend Sears) look them in the eye, shake their hand, and thank them for their service. They even bring up the older kids from Sunday School so their parents can have them thank the veterans. It is an incredibly moving thing to watch and in which to participate.
3. The Woodlawn Library is awesome for kids. The boys and I go to the library every weekend while Mrs. Denn tries desperately to hold our household together, and this was the first time they had been to Woodlawn. Aside from being a beautiful building with very friendly staff, it is the only library we have been to with a playground right outside, a full collection of Wiggles videos (including the newest ones with the strangely off-putting new Wiggle, Sam), and a parking lot set up to minimize the amount of space that parents with kids need to spend staggering through traffic trying to balance overdue books and daredevil children.
4. Please vote for me. I have been advised by my consultants that I should return to that theme intermittently.