Well, last Friday I headed down to the county courthouse to file paperwork for our precinct and county conventions (it is due March 4, ten days before the precinct conventions, but I wanted to make sure it was in in plenty of time). I went to the county clerk's office as instructed in the county chairman's manual (I am NOT the county chair, but the county secretary, as I can't be chair and run for partisan political office). The county clerk had never handled forms for third parties, so I was instructed to go to the county judge, who had never handled them either. Since I had never filed them before, it was pretty much the blind leading the blind; next time should be simpler since I know what needs to be done. I checked back by the courthouse late in the day to make sure the paperwork had been posted.

My bumper stickers are in (thanks to Theresa and Rick at www.bumpersticker.com for a great finished product), and they look fantastic. I have an email version of the design, but I don't think I can post it to this page, as I can't save anything to the hard drive, it being an internet computer. I am hoping to be back online full time by the end of the week; if successful in that regard, I'll post the design for all to see and hopefully begin selling signed stickers soon. My first sticker was used to grace the hard case for my guitar. If all goes well, I can also begin developing my personal website (an attempt that was aborted because most of the good tools yahoo provides need to be downloaded).

I'm gaining a little bit of momentum locally. I am starting to get responses from some of the citizenry about some of my public comments, and they have been mostly positive. I was informed that most voters in my community would vote for the incumbent, because he grew up there, as if they could singlehandedly hold me back from winning the race. While every vote counts, I'm not going to stress too much about 200 registered voters out of about 80,000 in the district.

It's a long way to November, but so far we seem to be moving in the right direction.