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General Update
Mar. 16th, 2018 01:52 pmLast week I became the Democratic Precinct Captain for the 10th District, which basically means I'll be kind of in charge of calling known Democrats in my area to ask them to help get out the vote and stuff. I have ambitions of knocking on doors to find more Democrats; we'll see what comes of that. My first task was to get people to come help phone bank to get out the vote for Gaile Jordan; Laura organized a phone bank for that Monday night. My friend Vonda happened to be on the list and turned out, and so did Arlene Peck, but I can't take credit for that because Arlene is much more active in the party than I am and would have come whether I'd called or not.
Our phone bank on Monday made more than 100 phone calls for Gaile, which we were pretty proud of, though alas our efforts weren't enough to turn the tide and Gaile lost. We knew it was a long shot going in, but I'm kind of disappointed that we only moved the needle by 6%. Hopefully it was a chance for Democrats to get more organized and gain more experience in that district. I know some of the info was awfully stale; when we went to knock doors in that district the 2 weekends before we had doors on our lists that hadn't EXISTED for at least 20 years. So I guess every little bit helps and the lists will now be cleaner than before.
This weekend I will be canvassing in NC-13, a swing district in North Carolina that is about 4 1/2 hours drive from here. As part of Swing Left I've been canvassing there once a month for about a year. It has mostly been just Charles and me from this area but quite a lively and growing group has sprung up there, and last month we had about half again as many people canvassing as in previous months so I think it is starting to take hold.
Music wise my band has been tapped for an upcoming funeral but we don't yet know precisely when it will be. There's this guy named Phil who comes to our Tuesday morning practices at the library, and his wife has Alzheimers and he wanted us to learn a song she wrote a long time ago, so we figured it out and worked out parts to play with it. She has been pretty frail the whole time we've known him but one day she was was well enough once to come to the library and we played it for her then and she seemed to really like it. She's on her deathbed now and we will be playing it for her funeral. We also worked up a couple of other funeral songs that we've been playing now and then for months.
My band has also been putting on a jam night on Thursday nights at a local coffee house, the Creek Cafe. We set out a sign up sheet and people sign up for a turn; the band plays 3 songs together to start with and then people take turns doing 2 songs each and people in the audience play along if they can / feel like it. This has been great practice for me for improvising and has also pushed me to learn to play closed scales (scales where you never use an open string) because they are movable and can adapt to the crazy keys that guitarists capo 1 to achieve.
The band does a lot fewer of my songs than you might think because...I'm not sure why. Most of them were written for 1 person and it's kind of hard to come up with ways for the others to contribute. When I've written parts for the fiddle player or flute player they mostly don't bother to learn them and I end up playing them on the mandolin myself. That kind of thing.
Anyway I've been signing up for a solo turn fairly often but I've been doing the same handful of songs over and over and I am concerned that people will get bored so today I went through the old Echo's Children songbook and picked out a few songs that I'm going to practice up and do at the Jam. July was in there but it was in an uncomfortable key so I worked out what key I wanted to do it in and typed it out with the new chords and was just running through it to make sure I hadn't made any errors in transposing and Kip and I got all nostalgic, because it's about when Kip and I had just started courting. I think it will be something many of the people at the Jam can relate to. And I'm going to work on Bin There Dun That, and we'll see if that is too weird for them or not.
Our phone bank on Monday made more than 100 phone calls for Gaile, which we were pretty proud of, though alas our efforts weren't enough to turn the tide and Gaile lost. We knew it was a long shot going in, but I'm kind of disappointed that we only moved the needle by 6%. Hopefully it was a chance for Democrats to get more organized and gain more experience in that district. I know some of the info was awfully stale; when we went to knock doors in that district the 2 weekends before we had doors on our lists that hadn't EXISTED for at least 20 years. So I guess every little bit helps and the lists will now be cleaner than before.
This weekend I will be canvassing in NC-13, a swing district in North Carolina that is about 4 1/2 hours drive from here. As part of Swing Left I've been canvassing there once a month for about a year. It has mostly been just Charles and me from this area but quite a lively and growing group has sprung up there, and last month we had about half again as many people canvassing as in previous months so I think it is starting to take hold.
Music wise my band has been tapped for an upcoming funeral but we don't yet know precisely when it will be. There's this guy named Phil who comes to our Tuesday morning practices at the library, and his wife has Alzheimers and he wanted us to learn a song she wrote a long time ago, so we figured it out and worked out parts to play with it. She has been pretty frail the whole time we've known him but one day she was was well enough once to come to the library and we played it for her then and she seemed to really like it. She's on her deathbed now and we will be playing it for her funeral. We also worked up a couple of other funeral songs that we've been playing now and then for months.
My band has also been putting on a jam night on Thursday nights at a local coffee house, the Creek Cafe. We set out a sign up sheet and people sign up for a turn; the band plays 3 songs together to start with and then people take turns doing 2 songs each and people in the audience play along if they can / feel like it. This has been great practice for me for improvising and has also pushed me to learn to play closed scales (scales where you never use an open string) because they are movable and can adapt to the crazy keys that guitarists capo 1 to achieve.
The band does a lot fewer of my songs than you might think because...I'm not sure why. Most of them were written for 1 person and it's kind of hard to come up with ways for the others to contribute. When I've written parts for the fiddle player or flute player they mostly don't bother to learn them and I end up playing them on the mandolin myself. That kind of thing.
Anyway I've been signing up for a solo turn fairly often but I've been doing the same handful of songs over and over and I am concerned that people will get bored so today I went through the old Echo's Children songbook and picked out a few songs that I'm going to practice up and do at the Jam. July was in there but it was in an uncomfortable key so I worked out what key I wanted to do it in and typed it out with the new chords and was just running through it to make sure I hadn't made any errors in transposing and Kip and I got all nostalgic, because it's about when Kip and I had just started courting. I think it will be something many of the people at the Jam can relate to. And I'm going to work on Bin There Dun That, and we'll see if that is too weird for them or not.
