Special 1000

We're going to reach our goals! It's official, we're working on our day off, but it looks like we'll actually hit the very lofty goals that we set for ourselves at the beginning of the summer:

• knock on 20,000 doors for candidates
  
• ID 5,500 voters
  
• register 4,000 new voters
  
• of these 4,000, register 1,000 voters from "underrepresented" communities.
  
• knock on 5,300 doors to fight a mandatory minimums ballot initiative
  

Save one, I think we'll meet them all. We will not be able to register 1000 "underrepresented" voters. There was quite the discussion about this the other day, and the conclusion that I came to was that it's not possible because we didn't define what underrepresented actually means. Turns out it's hard to measure something you don't define, and that it's hard to target some ambiguous thing that you can't measure (see also: terror). When we were in the committee to work that definition out, I was the one trying to come up with a hard definition but it didn't happen and now that goal is up Fucked Creek. I hate to say it (sort of), but I told you so and I wish we could have done better.

This weekend we went to Bend, OR to canvass for Judy Steigler. She's going to win that seat.

It was a bazillion degrees out this weekend. Bend is a high desert like SLC, but not half as bad ass. That city is pretty damn lame. However, they do have the Deschutes River which runs right through the middle town. We went tubing and I jumped off a bridge into the water. The water is like glacial run off, so it's a bit chilly even when it is a hundred degrees outside. But fun. 

We spent the night in the Deschutes County Dems office. It was nice. Interestingly it was probably a nicer homestay than is the Latin Quarter. I stole everyone else's sleeping stuff because I don't own a sleeping bag and didn't bring a pillow. That might have been why it was so nice.

On the ride home from Bend the new bus was sucking wind in the Cascades. We stopped at one point and got to go swimming in Tridium Lake. It was beautiful up there, but then a lightening storm started to come on so the park people made us leave. We made it home with as much in-the-aisle dancing and silliness as possible. I tried to tune out.