Left In Lowell

(Le bump. Rainy weekends are GREAT for spaghetti, music, great company, great products, and a great cause!)

This Saturday, I am putting on a fundraiser for my friend Carrie Little, who has Cystic Fibrosis and just underwent a double lung transplant. The costs of this are in large part covered (to the tune of up to a quarter mil) but a lot of the costs are not, and I’m grateful that I can do a little bit (pun intended) to help out a friend.

Some of you might remember Carrie from the 2006 Patrick campaign. She was an enthusiastic supporter and volunteer. Due to her health, she hadn’t been as active in politics as of late, but she knows that now she has new lungs she WILL be recruited again! So let’s celebrate her good fortune, and ours, in having Carrie around and active to light up our lives. If you don’t know her, you should!

The event is a spaghetti supper, $10/$5 for kids suggested donation. There will be a silent auction, live music and Carrie-oke (get it? Karaoke?), and a vendor bazaar, with at least five excellent vendors. And if you cannot make the event, you can still buy from these vendors online and have it go towards the fundraiser! (Details below.)

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You know that tired old story plot where someone gets to go to their own funeral and listen to people talk about them? Yup, this is that plot. (Dead Like Me did it best in recent years.)

No, we’re not going anywhere (at least not yet), though I meant most of what I said in the previous post anyway. The parts about our readers and the reason we do what we do. We might do it less frequently than we used to (maybe that will change, maybe it won’t). I especially loved the person who left a comment without a nickname (which is a big no-no around here as most of you know) yelling at me. Like old times. I feel like it was just yesterday that we were getting slathered with nasty anonymous driveby commenters during the era of the Cox ousting. *sniffle*

Anyway, since what we have on our hands this year appears to be a very interesting local election season, whyever in hell would I give up blogging now?? And a LOT more on that later…of course.

Now, I gotta figure out what to give Jen Meyers as a prize for figuring it out first. Mambo Grill lunch on me, Jen?

I guess this was inevitable, as neither I nor Mimi have had the time this last year or so to keep up blogging, so we are officially ceasing operations at Left in Lowell starting today. This has been a hard decision, as we’ve been blogging here since May of 2005 - in internet years, that’s about 18 full years. Heh. But I’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time now, and with even fewer minutes in my day now, not to mention Mimi’s, we came down to deciding this course of action.

It’s been a great run, and we’ve seen a lot of the changes we’ve advocated for since those halcyon, heady days. We’ve been blamed for everything from Cox’s self-destruction, to being a shill for candidates we like (as opposed to picking candidates for the right reasons and advocating for them) to causing the Mother’s Day flood (OK, kidding on that last one). I take credit for none of these, except perhaps the Hayden loss in the GLT SC race to O’Hare - I gladly accept the blame for losing Hayden a few hundred votes when I exposed his reprehensible website and showcased his known but under-the-radar attitudes towards immigrant children, given the number of people who were planning on bullet voting only for Fred Bahou who told me they decided to also vote O’Hare.

The credit for everything else really belongs to you, the readers, the voters who went out there and took a critical look at the information in front of you - whether from the Lowell Sun, from the candidates, or from this blog. I can’t thank our readers enough for the time you have spent reading, commenting, and participating. You have made all the blood sweat and tears - even those hurtful personal attacks spun by certain radio/TV/newspaper/political operatives - worthwhile. I could stand it all because I knew what we were building was about better local governing, more transparency, and a technocratic approach to spending our taxpayer dollars on services.

You all make me proud, and I will continue to participate in many ways that do not include spending hours a week writing a blog, but probably hours a week doing other things. Now, I recommend you stop and listen to the collective sigh of relief from some quarters of the city as they learn third hand (since they don’t read the blog) that we’ve decided to stop bugging them.

Greg Page, fellow blogger at The New Englander and Lowell resident, is on his way to Afghanistan. He was deployed today along with the rest of the Massachusetts National Guard’s 26th “Yankee” Brigade.

Greg is a career military officer who has served in Iraq; I think twice. He loves politics and likes to write. I am not if he is allowed to blog; but if he is, I am sure we will hear from him.

Meet the newest member of our household. His name is Hector, after the composer (Hector Berlioz). He is a four year old Boston Terrier mix rescue.

Hope you are all having a great Valentine’s Day, regardless of whether you celebrate it, ignore it, or wish it would go away. At least the weather’s cooperating!

Apparently he has passed away after a short illness. There was a lot of friction between Pat and I, but he was a hard worker and passionate about politics, and about Lowell, and my condolences to his family for their loss.

It seems to be a bad month for losing political and public figures. I hope that this is the last condolence thread I have to make for a long while.

It was just announced that Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former presidential candidate John Edwards, has passed away due to her cancer. There are so many reasons to love Elizabeth - she was tough, smart as hell, progressive, caring, warm, and just a presence in a room wherever she went.

I had the privilege to meet her during the 2008 campaign, in NH, before her husband dropped out, and before revelations of his extra-marital affair with a campaign staffer which produced a child. She handled her illness, and her marriage, and her life under such public scrutiny, with grace and dignity. There are many many fans of Elizabeth Edwards and I am one of them…she shone, even as the luster tarnished on John Edwards. People stopped believing in him, but they always believed in Elizabeth.

Thank you, Elizabeth, for your example about what a great human being should be. Rest in peace.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, and I hope you are planning to spend a nice time with family and friends.

Things as you all probably know are very, very busy for me, with teaching and running a business, so following political news and posting has been difficult. So on the blog front, I am thankful today for my coblogger Mimi, who has continued to post on local issues and kept the blog light on.

So what are you thankful for this holiday season, and how are you spending it? As for me, it’s back to prepping for a hoard of family and friends descending on us tomorrow (about 18 of them), so back to my hidey hole I go!

I just got my little greedy hands on the brand new (released today!) HTC Evo phone, which has so many cool new things to do, it’s going to be months before I learn it all. And the apps…the apps…oh the humanity…

Anyway, I’m going to run some experiments today on one particular native app to the Evo, which is, live streaming video from the phone to the web via qik.com. If successful, then I will be attempting to live stream some parts of the state Democratic convention tomorrow, which I will be attending as a delegate and as a blogger. I’m so wickedly excited about this ability, that you can be sure that this will be the first of many, many events live streamed from me.

And one in the eye for iPhone - the guy in line behind me was coming to switch off of AT&T and his iPhone to the Evo. Sweet.

Get ready, weather.com is saying that Monday and Tuesday will see more heavy rain, and that parts of the northeast could get at least another four inches.

Since when did we turn into Seattle, anyway? I feel for residents who have basement problems. We’re lucky (well, mostly by design), ours stays dry - if the eight inches in 24 hours didn’t flood us, not much will - but I have family members going through a rough time.

Brace yourselves. I’m posting this mostly because it surprised me to hear about it, and if I hadn’t heard about it, maybe some of you hadn’t. I hope the weather people are wrong! But it wouldn’t hurt to check in on your sump pumps or other mitigation devices ahead of the storm.