Highs and Lows

The campaign trail has been tumultuous these last couple of days. Great highs and a few lows—here’s hoping they come in threes.

The highs have included reading to a grade six class at Mill Creek School as part of Read-In Week, and a grade three class at Mount Pleasant. The students sat attentively and politely as I read to them, and afterwards, truly inspired me with their knowledge of the campaign and their probing questions.

Another was meeting an incredible woman at Pleansantview Place who is 99—sharp as a tack—and who wants me to come back as her city councillor to help her blow out the candles when she turns 100 in the new year.

Oh, and Bob Layton slipped up at the Shaw forum tonight, calling me “Councillor Iveson.”

The lows have included dropping my Palm Treo in the gutter and breaking the screen, rendering it useless at a time when the bulky PDA phone was just starting to justify itself.

I also woke up yesterday with a sore throat, which has morphed into swollen glands and a runny nose today. This is a thoroughly inopportune time to be sick.

Finally, we shut down the campaign for the second half of Tuesday as a number of us attended a funeral for a colleague from the Gateway (the campus paper at the U of A). Ross was 24 years old and died suddenly. He was well known for his patriotism, and often loudly and proudly sang the national anthem—and so it was heart-wrenching when one of his many, many friends spontaneously burst forth with our nation’s anthem at the close of the ceremony. It was deeply sad, but an incredibly powerful moment.