Caucuses, Wine, Poker and Other Things

Whew! What a weekend!

TGIF for me was frantically writing a 5 minute candidate support speech for the County and LD15 Caucus in Dallesport Saturday morning. I wrote one, changed it, asked a wonderful friend for some perspectives on leadership, rewrote it, got more info late that night from my buddy, rewrote it, oh, yeah, there was a glass of wine in there, too. I finally went to bed at 1 am. You can tell I don't give speeches much! So I get up at 6:15, get stuff together to head out by 8:15 (including brewing 3 post of coffee to fill my big pump thermos), rehearsed it once for my main critic, then got in the car and started reorganizing and cutting.

It was so busy at sign in, so I didn't have a lot of time to work on it. Just a bunch of 'circles and arrows' (I wanted to add here : and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin' what each one was to be used as evidence against us...a prize to the first one who tells me who said this and the title to the song) to numbers go here 1, go here 2, etc. Then the chairman wanted the credential committee report (that was me, at least half of it was me), so NO time to fine tune. But I survived, gave a good speech, got lots of pats on the back from my Obama supporting friends as well as my fellow Clinton supporters. I never did meet Mr Obama Supporter, sender of irritating emails. But he saw me, up close and personal.

I was happy that all 28 of our delegates showed up, and most our alternates. The Other Guys were short 7, had 3 alternates available, picked up a noncommitted, net down 6 but it didn't affect the proportions allocated at the precinct caucuses. Then two of my delegates defected! A husband-wife team, the only delegates for their precinct. Glad it wasn't mine, I'd have been ticked. Fortunately, it didn't affect the proportions, either, so on we went to the subcaucus. There we elected our two delegates, one man and one woman, as per the rules. We flipped a coin for the alternate's gender, and it came up tails (heads was woman, tails....you get it). Our delegates and alternate are VERY committed, and vowed not to budge at the next level. No drama at our subcaucus, we were done and moving on before the other crowd.

The resolutions part of the caucus went on and on and on and on. I stayed long enough to vote on the couple of resolutions I really cared about, including one to abolish this insane caucus to elect our presidential candidates. I have nothing good to say about it. Except maybe it was nice to work with the County Dems to put them on, and nice to meet so many people, but hey, we could throw a BBQ and accomplish that!

So what to do once you skip out of the caucus? Play winery poker, Wind Card Wild, of course. Lloyd was designated driver and keeper of the credit card. We hit some of the east side wineries: Marshal, Cascade Cliffs, Maryhill, Waving Tree and Cor Cellars. It was a pleasant afternoon, and we even met some of our Pucker Huddle neighbors at Waving Tree, which was the furthest east winery participating. We picked up some interesting wines, and a lousy poker hand. At the end of the day I had two 5 of hearts, a queen of spades, an ace of diamond, and a 7 of clubs. That meant I HAD to go back out on Sunday.

Sunday I went up to Wind River for a quick books and procedures lesson from Kris, and drew a 7 of spades. Now I had two pair, so that was good. We stopped down at Northshore, hoping to pickup another bottle of their awesome cherry wine, but they were out. Next bottling will be on the shelves soon. I drew another useless card, and turned in my sheet. Done with that!

We ended the weekend with a nice homemade salad with shrimp, and mango salsa, and watched the last installment of John Adams on HBO. If you missed this series, catch it on reruns or something. Now I'm waiting for the ABIGAIL series.

Did I mention we had hail and snow flurries this weekend?????? We did.