Hi there all! I’ve been taking a look at doing some things to make The Puget News better. While I have a few ideas (and more frequent content is still the TOP priority!), I’d really like to hear from any of you that are passionate about design to give me ideas on changes you’d like to see here. I’ve got my friend Ross coming over to help me with some template design stuff tomorrow so I’d like to get a sense if we’re working on the right things.

So please, if you have an idea on how you’d like to see this blog’s design change so that it would be more useful to you, let me know via the comments below. Do you hate my color scheme? Want larger print?

The design ideas I’m looking at:

1. Switching from a 3-column to a 2-column layout, giving more room to the posts and possibly expanding the size of the remaining sidebar as well
2. Adding tag-based post-navigation via WordPress widget

The content ideas I’m exploring are as follows:

1. Getting a larger group of writers to post content for the site. If you’ve got ideas for interesting original content on art, architecture, design, literature, politics, whatever, I’d like to have you writing here. Please feel free to contact me via email at eric [at] thepugetnews [dot] com!
2. Continuing to expand the focus of this site well beyond the current focus on the literary.
3. Getting to at least one original content post per day, preferably two…

That’s all I’ve got so far but I’m open to all suggestions on making this a more useful and fun place to discuss and debate ideas.

My mother came to town late last week and Jan and I took her to Walla Walla to do some wine touring and look at some property. If you live in Washington and you have not been to Walla Wall yet, get out there as soon as you can because it’s moving up-scale in price pretty quickly. I think we’ll all look back at this phase of development as a pretty special time out there.

While out there, we discovered a different piece of property that recently entered the market as a foreclosure and before I knew it I was making an offer. This is a picture from the uppermost corner of the property. As you head down the property (walking straight from where this picture was taken) the views of the valley open up a bit more. Yesterday, my offer was signed by the selling party. At this point, it’s all just financially contingent on whether or not I get the loan product I’m trying to get.

Eventually we hope to build an energy neutral “green” vacation home (something similar to some of the Michelle Kaufmann pre-fab designs like the Glidehouse or Lotus) out at this location and rent it to adventurous wine tour folks who want to go home and drink their wines and cook some dinner with big views and some peace and quiet. For me, I think it’ll be a nice place to escape from the greyness of Seattle and kick up the feet to do some reading.

You can see my other photos of the property on flickr in my photoset.

So I just got back from my first Democratic Caucus. What a fascinating process. When you think of the word “grass-roots”, it’s really happening. You and your neighbors getting together to discuss the candidates and attempting to woo undecided voters to your camp. The turnout at the Thornton Creek School Caucus was insane. People were standing in the hallways until we broke out to into our individual precinct sessions.

Check the photos. The first one is the main gathering area and the second one is in my precinct caucus:

Our particular caucus was civil, but I could easily see how these things could turn heated. Did any of you have crazy experiences out caucusing? If so, please leave them in the comments.

So how do these things work? When you arrive at the caucus, you find a table for your precinct number (people can help you find this if you don’t know) and sign-in with your candidate selection. You can also mark “undecided” if that’s the case for you. Everyone gathers in one gigantic room to hear some basic directions and then you break out into smaller groups with your neighbors to do an initial vote tally. Due to the vagaries (and rounding of numbers) in the caucus process, this translated initially to 4 Obama delegates, 1 Clinton, and 1 undecided. Each of our three groups got together to pick a representative to make the case for their candidate to the other camps.

In our little breakout session, we came up with the following bullet points that we wanted to get across to the other groups:

1. Inspirational leadership. Yes, we can. Uniter
2. Community Organizer vs. Corporate Attorney
3. Charismatic and persuasive.
4. Hillary polarizes. Might not be able to move on big things effectively
5. The foreign perception stands to be improved by electing Barack Hussein Obama
6. Barack more palatable to Republicans. Better battle for McCain
7. May get larger share of the Edwards delegates

At the end of this, we took a 10 minute break, probably the most interesting part of the whole process. At that point, the most outspoken people in each camp descend upon the undecided voters and try to convince them to vote for their candidate. After the break, anyone can go up and change their vote. In a room of 77 people, about 5 people went and changed on ours (mostly from the “undecided” camp of about 11 or 12 people). After the switch, there’s a final tally. In our case (district 46-2302), here was the count:

• Obama: 56
• Clinton: 14
• Undecided: 7

After all was said and done, our delegate count was unaltered. Each group then gathered to vote on who to send as their delegate to the next phase. In future years, I’d like to try that out. This time, I really just enjoyed seeing the turnout, meeting my neighbors, and learning a bit about the process. I’d recommend it to everyone. It’s our strongest chance for change.

The original “Yes We Can” speech…

I’m looking forward to a president than can speak and inspire unity with something other than fear. Aren’t you?

Funny.