Gerry came to the mailing party on the 22 bus, and he went back to Sunnyvale on CalTrain. He was full of news about the Green Party outside the bay area, where we are not quite as organized. He told one story about a guy in Owenyo (Inyo County, on 395 south of Independence) who had called him about starting a chapter there. The nearest organized local was in Fresno, a couple of hours away. As a Co-Coordinator of the Statewide Green Party, he must get a steady stream of those now. The story made me think about how even the names of the places there sound lonesome. I looked it up on the map, and found out we are talking about a place near the western edge of Death Valley National Park.

Dana is shown examining the pictures of the Raging Grannies on Tian's website. In those pictures she is the one with the green feather boa and an apron covered in pictures of apples that look somewhat like flowers. I told her that set of pictures had set a new record for my website, as far as number of hits in a one week period goes (almost 300). Despite being one of the stars of the show, she hadn't visited the webpage before that evening. She came back on the last evening of the mailing to help finish it off.

Kyra and Cameron carpooled over from the East Bay at least twice during the mailing. Kyra talked about the nice romantic dinner she had with Cameron on Valentines day. Since moving out here from New Jersey she has started working as a private tutor already. If you have kids that need after school instruction, she would be glad to help out. Contact her at IvyLeagueTutor (at) hotmail (dot) com for more information.

Cameron gave me the lowdown on the problems he had debugging the program he wrote to get the labels printed. It is much better that the previous generation one, which we used last time we did a mailing. He also brought over a couple of low power florescent bulbs for my dining room, which make the place a lot brighter than it was, and more energy efficient to boot. I have no idea why my camera went cosmic while taking Camerons picture...

Stephanie Schaaf had a lot to say about her campaign for Mountain View City Council, which will be kicking off soon. She gave each of us a copy of her new business cards, which gave her title as "Mountain View City Council Candidate". She talked about how one of her core issues is going to be making Mountain View more sustainable. So far her parents have already given the maximum allowable by law. By the end of the evening I had also written her a check. I'm looking forward to her campaign kickoff party!

Sara has hands that move very quickly for long periods of time. During the two evenings she spent with us, we did way more than half of the mailing. She is currently a student at San Jose State, and plans to be a teacher when she graduates. Both of her parents work for themselves, an unusual but very neat thing. Of all the people at the mailing party, she wore the most interesting T shirt.

Mike is steadily looking for ways to make the Santa Clara County Green Party a better institution. In his day job, he is a Doctor at Kaiser-Permanente. He talked abut how for Californians (and Americans in general) heart disease is the number one cause of death, but for Kaiser-Permanante patients it is number two because of all the preventative care they do. The best idea we discussed was giving new people a flier that answers a lot of questions about the Green Party they might have been curious about.

Tian hosted the mailing party as well as getting together the supplies (stamps and postcards mainly) and taking the finished postcards down to the mailbox.

Valerie did a lot of work. She talked about some old friends she had worked with before asking her to send in her resume. I found myself hoping this one works out. It is simply wrong to have such a nice and hardworking woman go without a job for any longer.

Fred helped out on the last day. He brought over dinner and stuffed for hours. Then he went home and cut postcards for another couple of hours, more than we had any right to expect. He said he would vote Democrat in the fall only if the Nominate Dean or Kucinich. Otherwise he just couldn't do it. He also talked of good memories of Wisconsin (a State he still cares deeply about) and his Grandchildren.

This was the largest single days output during the five days we worked on the project.

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