September 6-8 - Hillary travels with her mom and fiance Anders

This is Hillary. I traveled with Mom and my fiance Anders this week in Lincoln and Sublette Counties. I haven't been there since campaigning with Dad in 2002, so it was fun to see the towns, familiar faces, and all of the changes that have happened in just four years! In Kemmerer, we ate a delicious lunch in the senior center, where Mom gave a short speech and then walked around to talk to folks. She's also carrying the petition to make the removal of sales tax on food permanent and managed to get a lot of signatures at the senior center. In the afternoon, I had to get some work done, so I went to the library for a while and Anders went with Mom to many places around town. He seemed particularly interested in their visit to the medical center, as that overlaps with his interest in medicine (he's in medical school). In the evening, we joined folks for a picnic at the golf course. It was a potluck, so I felt a little bad that we didn't bring any food, but everyone was very kind and encouraged us to eat, and in the end there was plenty of food so it didn't matter. Unfortunately the weather really made a turn toward Fall, and none of us had warm enough clothing - thankfully, Ann Bluemel was kind enough to lend us coats for the evening.

Bright and early the next morning we left for Sublette County. Mom and I walked around both Big Piney and Marbleton to learn more about the towns and introduce ourselves - it was impressive to see all of the activity. In Big Piney, the Mayor showed us their beautiful library. It had a lot of windows, very bright colors, community meeting rooms, and a great area for kids. I think we both wished we could have stayed there and read all day. Marbleton was worth getting to, though, particularly to see their new Town Hall. The old Town Hall is an extremely small building that isn't very attractive on the outside, but the new building is gorgeous. We were there at just the right time because most everything is finished and it was just a matter of moving in the following week. After visiting the Town Hall, we visited the senior center (where the director was very friendly and they were getting ready for a wedding) and looked at a new subdivision that is going in to help with housing issues. I know that Dad has visited Marbleton and heard of the many difficulties associated with the rapid growth in the area, including a lack of housing, so it was good to see progress.

We started our visit to Pinedale with lunch at the senior center. It was breakfast for lunch day, which is a favorite of both Mom's and mine. Unfortunately I had to leave again for the afternoon, because we were working on getting some of our campaign materials to the printer by the end of the day. So I headed to the library - which was very cozy because it has a log cabin feel - in order to get some of that work done. Thankfully one of the librarians helped me find a print shop nearby and I was able to get a proof of our document. After soliciting the opinions of the print shop ladies, who thought the brochure was great, I sent it off to the printer - hopefully it will look good when we get it back! Later in the day I caught up with Mom and Anders again. It sounded like they had a really good day walking around town, touring the schools, and just generally talking with people.

September 6 - Putting Up Signs

Today I learned that I am very glad I'm not in charge of putting up signs for the campaign! Anders Chen coordinates a team of folks to do that normally, but I happened to be on the trip with him this week when he needed to put up a few signs in Uinta County. The little yard signs are no problem - I'm good at them! But unfortunately we were putting up the big wooden signs, which apparently I am not very good at! Here you can see my attempt to conquer the post pounder. I was also in charge of drilling holes in the signs for wire and then twisting the wire through. At least I could handle those two jobs. When we were putting up these signs, I was nervous it was going to rain on us, but fortunately it didn't, and instead it just stayed nice and cool as we got our workout for the day. In the photo, right above, Anders is standing with our finished product.