A History of Seth: The 2010 Primary; My 40th Birthday Party; a Geocache; and Poolesville Day 2010

Catching up with my blog again in a race to keep it from falling over two years behind. So as I promised in June 2011, this is a brief history in pictures of the 2010 campaign season and my run for Congress. This is a picture of my e-bumper-sticker in my car window. I thought it was a neat alternative to trying to distribute ordinary bumper stickers. I figured everybody who wanted one could have one whenever they wanted one. I never did do any tracking to see how many people actually downloaded it. I still think it's a neat idea. My aunt and uncle took it a step further and printed out not only the e-bumper-sticker, but also copied an article on my candidacy and taped that below the e-bumper-sticker! That was cool!

These are the traditional yard signs I encountered as I made my way to the Washington County Republican Club picnic. I probably should have gone early, but for some reason--probably work--I didn't. About half the candidates whose signs you see here lost.

This truck window didn't have any room left for one my e-bumper-stickers. Half the candidates with stickers here lost, too.

I wound up sitting at the picnic table with the staff of the local Bartlett office. I got to have a nice chat with Mrs. Bartlett, anyway. The emcee at the event announced all of the candidates present for all of the offices that were up that year--except me. I didn't make a fuss. Most of the people there knew me anyway.

A couple weeks after that, I arrived in Pangborn Park for a 40th birthday party.

That would be my 40th birthday.

That means I get cake!

Another fun idea I had (at least I thought so) was to create signs for kids to color in. I wondered a little bit if kids really would color in letters of a sign instead of a cartoon. I discovered with my trial run at my picnic that kids will in fact color in anything. Here Caleb, the son of my friends Jason and Stephanie, takes a break from coloring his sign to have his picture taken.

Emily, his sister, was more diligent in her coloring.

I also discovered that kids' parents will color right along with them. This was done by Stephanie.

What I thought was that people could put these in their windows like this. This would be fantastically better than a bunch of preprinted yard signs. My goal was to give people who were committed to the process a way to be personally involved. It seemed like people were motivated to take things into their own hands for the elections of 2010. I wanted to give those people a way to do that!

This is from the sample Republican primary ballot for 2010. I received 3,860 votes, which worked out to 5.5% of the total. I actually finished third in Frederick County, which was interesting. There are no prizes for second, or third, or fourth place, however. Bartlett went on to easily defeat the Democratic challenger in November.

Since I wasn't going to be campaigning anymore after the primary, that gave me time to do some geocaching! I went over to HCC to find a new cache there and to see if I could rescue an old one that I had found before. When I got to the campus, I was greeted by heavy machinery like this.

This bulldozer sits where once a bunch of trees sat. It was making way for a parking lot, which has since been completed.

Unfortunately, it rather indiscriminately plowed away the cache with the trees, it seems. The hand points to where the cache should have been, surrounded by trees and brush. There was no rescuing this cache! I think it was an ammo can cache, too. That's too bad! Construction on campus claimed a couple caches that I had found before.

I found this cache while my car was being bombarded by stinkbugs. They were everywhere and apparently very attracted to my clean car. It was stinkbugmageddon when I got back to my car. It was also kind of a losing battle because they just kept coming.

Speaking of losing battles, this nice-sized wasp nest was responsible for me getting stung some more. I was stung twice on my fingers here; that, plus one sting I got geocaching earlier in the year, plus the other three I documented earlier here in my blog, means I got stung a half dozen times in 2010. I haven't beat that record yet, but I am working on it. More on that in a subsequent blog entry, probably sometime around 2014 if present trends continue.

I also had a chance to go down to Poolesville to join my friend Jeff for Poolesville Day. They have a car show the same day as the parade. This is one of the cars I thought was interesting. Seems like it would be noisy to have the engine in the car with you in the back seat, but there it is.

This is an old Bonneville. I like these huge old cars. They just take up the whole road.

This is the rear end of a Cadillac El Dorado.

Here's the interior. I can almost imagine this entire car being made out of chrome. That would be awesome.

Here is an engine pre-EPA. This is what we need to make cars run. Everything else in your engine compartment, including the increased cost of making and maintaining all of it, is required by your government to make the car run.

There are motorcycles to go with the cars.

This was an interesting entry. Sure, I think of Indiana Jones movies when I see it.

It's not all hotrods and choppers. Well, maybe these are hotrods to farmers.

This is a picture of a walking carpet, also known as an alpaca.

This is a calf.

This is a piglet. I think I can still call it a piglet.

And this is a goat kid.

There are also inflatable moon-bounces and whatnot.

This little girl doesn't get to play in the moon bounce. Instead, she gets to walk around carrying a placard. Doesn't she look happy? Scott Graham lost in the general election.