Handicrapping the Rs

According to Rear Clear Politics, these are the average polling numbers for the various Republican Presidential nominees:

Poll	Date		Christie	Ryan	Bush	Paul	Huckabee	Cruz	Rubio	Walker	Jindal	Spread
RCP Average	12/14 - 1/26		14.0	13.0	12.6	11.0	--	9.2	8.2	5.5	3.7	Christie +1.0

Here's my prediction with 3+ years to go:

Jindal, Walker, Rubio, and Cruz have no chance to win the nomination at this point (Rubio might someday, but not this time around, the others never will).

That leaves Huckabee, Paul, Bush, Ryan and Christie. I think this is the order of likelihood they could get nominated:

1 - Ryan
2 - Huckabee
3 - Christie (tho he would move up if he moves to the right)
4 - Paul
5 - Bush

And this is the order of likelihood they could win against a random Democrat:

1 - Christie
2 - Ryan
3 - Bush
4 - Huckabee
5 - Paul

And of those 5, I think only the top 2 have a chance to beat Hillary, tho any of the top 3 could win if they run a perfect campaign. Christie only needs to control his temper...and apparently his aides. And Ryan would need to show more international gravitas. Bush could win mostly by showing how unlike his brother he is...and he is, but most people don't know that.

So apparently, sometimes it isn't the just speaker who is doing the quaking, sometimes it's the listener.

Last week was a rough one for a lot of reasons, including the feeling that it seemed at times like my mission for the week was to upset people who mean so much to me, including Cheryl, Mike and another friend I think very highly of.

(Though as I later told Mike and Cheryl at dinner Friday night, at some point it also hit me that I may have had it backwards - that it was a week for people I love to piss me off!).

But then, in a job interview with a fellow Quaker, he told me about an encounter he had had some years back with a group, where the conversation became somewhat heated, with frank opinions being expressed with seeming little regard for the discomfort the statements may have aroused in those at whom the comments were directed.

When the group (which was a meeting of the committee to choose the winner of the very prestigious Newbury Book Award) was in the hallway taking a break from the discussion, one of the other committee people approached this Friend to apologize for the tone of her arguments and the discussion in general, to which he said:

"Don't worry about it! I'm a Quaker. We do this all the time!"

Well, not including the Republican primary voters

Recent bridge-related events remind me of something I had wanted to write about earlier in the week and now seem all the more relevant:

There is only one person who can keep Chris Christie or Hillary Clinton from becoming President and that is:

Chris Christie

I don't usually write about things like this, things that are going on in my personal life that is, even though Mike Rellahan once told me that he'd love it if this blog did only that - things that were going on in my day-to-day and that he'd way rather read about that than my stupid not-so witty observations I had on the wacky world around us. (OK, he probably said it in a nicer way than that, but that's the way I heard it.)

So here's what my week has been like:

Monday - a relatively slow start:

11am - a meeting with 5 people here at work, to discuss, among other things, all the meetings we need to have this week. Seriously. I made a list of 7 meetings we need to have. We'll end up combining many of them so we don't need to split them out separately.

Tuesday - the fun begins

10-11am - a Stewardship Meeting to discuss the meetings we need to have next month with our Conservation Biologists to discuss a whole list of issues we need to address regarding our path forward starting this year
Noon - 2:45 - lunch and an interview at the Friends School where I am Board President with a semi-finalist for the Head of School position, a very friendly, engaging likable fellow, followed by a discussion with the Search Committee about the remaining 2-3 candidates as well as a "situation" that has cropped up that depresses all of us
5:30 - 7pm - another meeting at school with an employee about a really tough personnel issue. The toughest day of my 7 years on the Board and 2.5 years as Board President - first time I've ever left the school sadder than when I got there.

Wednesday - more fun with meetings

8:20 - 9:25am - A meeting back at school with the Interim Head of School - a woman I greatly admire, who tells me a great story, almost like a parable, that she is using to illustrate a bigger point, though she doesn't come right and say so, which makes it all the cooler.
10-11:30am - a Project Meeting here at work with 7 of us to go over potential 2014 projects
Noon - 1pm - Another Meeting back at the school with: a Board member, the school Business Manager, the Associate Head of School/Director of Development, the President & CEO of the bank (originally I had the name of the bank the school uses, but I see that someone came to my site after googling the bank, so I'm removing it here) that the school uses and the Regional President too. Sounds worse that it was - they were a fun, well, fun-ish, group, talking for maybe 15 minutes about banking (they project that the number of banks in the USA will shrink by 50% in the next 3-5 years!) but more about the Eagles, Flyers and raising kids than anything else.
1:30 - 2:30 - another meeting back at work with an employee at one of our projects telling him that we are totally restructuring his responsibilities and our agreement with the HOA he and we had an arrangement with.

So, having outlined those 8 meetings in 3 days in way too much detail, I'll now mention the meeting I am most looking forward to this week. On Sunday evening, Emma came in to our bedroom, where I was lying on the bed reading the Sunday paper, plopped down next to me and said, "Dad, can we schedule some time together Thursday evening, just you and me, on the couch in the living room?"

(insert the sound of a heart melting here)

 

Oh sigh. Gawd, I love being a dad. What Buddy the Elf said about smiling, I'll say about being a dad:

 

"That's my favorite!"

Just a quickie today, since I'm so busy. There have been and continue to be so many conversations in my house through the years that I wish I'd written down, so I'm going to try to remember to post some of them here.

Here's a recent one:

Cheryl, Trev, Emma and I had just finished eating dinner one night and Cheryl and I were trying to kids to get focused on all the things they have to do every night to get ready for bed on a school night:

 - eat "D" (dessert) (somehow they don't usually forget to do this one)
 - brush teeth
 - practice their instrument - Trev the drums, Emma they trumpet
 - do their "walk-through" where they walk through the house putting all their things back in their rooms
 - put 15 things away off the floor of their rooms (15 clumps a day?!)
 - read for 30 minutes

Yeah, it's a lot. So Cheryl and I were still sitting at the dining room table after dinner and as I say, Cheryl was getting more and more frustrated trying to get the kids to stop goofing around. Emma was in the room with us and Trev was in one of the other rooms, and here is the conversation that took place:

Cheryl, with an exasperated smile on her face: "Are you kids making it your goal to annoy me? Next one of you to annoy me gets killed!"

Emma, yelling to Trev (or "Guy" as she calls him) at the other end of the house: "Hey Guy - Mom says she wants you to come spend more time with her!"

10 years old, eh?

Of politics, sex and...toilet paper holders?!

GoodLordinheavenabove, as my Mom used to say. Or maybe it's me who says that, I forget. In any case, it's now been 50+ days since I last posted anything. I blame Judy Anderson for her amazing blog which she calls Clump-a-Day. It's easily the best blog I've ever seen by an amateur, and I mean that only in the sense that she hasn't tried to monetize it, to use a popular word these days. I keep waiting for her to disappoint me just once so my blog doesn't seem just incredibly inferior by comparison. I've been so transfixed by her incredible writing and photographic talent. I am just waiting for a publisher to come across her work and turn it into a book. Or maybe a page-a-day calendar, a la Louise Hay, like the one I buy for Cheryl for Christmas every year.

But I'm going to recognize that his isn't a competition and that we all have our gifts to share, and more importantly, this blog isn't written to please anyone else necessarily. It's just for me for fun, and maybe for my kids someday if they come across it.

At least that's what I tell myself. More truthfully, even though my blogger.com analytics tell me that my weekly online page views have dropped from the 50's to only 4 last week, I also know that Laurie, Molly, Sherry and now Judy A. too, I think, and possible Kate, all get an email when I post something, and as Mike Rellahan once inadvertently warned me, one can find oneself writing through the expectant eyes of my 4-5 (!) readers instead of what I have really been thinking about writing about or want to write about, regardless of my audience and how I might upset them.

And the longer I've gone without writing anything at all, the more I am hesitant to post my latest thoughts say, on the link between the downfall of western civilization and toilet paper holders.

(insert colorful photo of one here in your mind, please)

 

Never mind, here's one so you don't have to do the work:

 

 

 

So, to counter my hesitations, I've set an automatic reminder on my outlook calendar every weekday at 4:30, hopefully after I've gotten quite a bit completed here at work for the day, to make a blog post. I have a number of ideas stored up in my leaky brain, so hopefully, I'll be spilling them out here in the days weeks months to come.

 

So you have that to look forward to...leaking posts about toilet paper holders, I mean.

My loyal reader...and equally loyal sister, Sherry, called me the other day with a few suggestions for this blog, one of which was to clarify the first half of my previous post about the basketball player, which I have since done. I had a feeling it was confusing when I wrote it, and since she read it quickly twice and didn't get it, that was enough reason for me to go back to edit it.

Her second suggestion was that I write my thoughts on the NFL bullying case that has been such a topic of conversation around the country the past few weeks.

My thought is this: ______________.

I have no thought on it for the overly simple reasons that:
a) For some reason, I just really don't care
b) I don't like to judge and
c) I am a big believer that to really be qualified to express an opinion on something, one has to gather as much evidence as possible coming to a fair conclusion. To truly understand that case, I'd need to read what the victim was alleging, what the alleged bully said about that, and then what the team owners and coaches and even his teammates had to say about it, just to see if what was alleged was true...which takes me back to a) above.

I was bullied a little in 9th grade, but not much. Enough that it was one of the reasons my parents gave to want to send me to Westtown, but I didn't have a lot of courage in those days, so antagonism of any sort seemed pretty scary to me. So yeah, I don't like bullies, and won't try to defend them. But I also know there is a certain amount of acceptable hazing that goes on in pro sports that is just team camaraderie-type stuff, which is not that big a deal to me.

In this case, it's like the situation with the Notre Dame star football player last year and something about a fake online girlfriend? I really have no idea or very little what went on there even though people were talking about it everywhere I went and on every late night talk show I watched. I just didn't care. That is personal life stuff that just doesn't concern me and I'm not comfortable judging the person/people involved or analyzing their personal choices.

So, sorry, Shez. I'm the wrong one to ask about that sort of thing. But thanks for the idea and for the editorial feedback, which is always welcome.