Many readers may not know that I’ve been overwhelmed with paid work in addition to my convention preparations, so it’s been a little hard to keep up with letting you all know what’s happening. So as I sit in an apartment two blocks from where we once lived in Philadelphia, I’m gonna try to quickly get this blog caught up with current events.

The late part of May involved spending a lot of money. We got our train tickets ordered to get us from La Crosse to Philadelphia, with a 24-hour stop in Harrisburg to visit a friend. Fortunately, we have lots of points from our Amtrak credit card that were available to cover that expense.

We decided to spend a weekend in our old neighborhood in Philadelphia (where we are now) before the convention, and we reserved a room thru a home-sharing site. It wasn’t until mid-June that we were able to reserve a room in our “official” hotel, but that got done.

We had to handle some logistical issues. We are late-comers to the mobile phone world, but we’ve had one for a couple of years now. One phone has so far been enough when we’re on the road, but on this trip we will be separated a LOT, so we needed another phone. RoZ HATES the phone we have, but we found a good deal on a refurbished iPhone 5C that we paired up with a pay-as-you-go plan. So now we can (theoretically, at least) contact each other when (for instance) I’m on the convention floor and she’s at Reading Terminal Market.

Typing a blog is a time-consuming process, so I want to try dictating what’s going on into our iPod Touch and posting the audio on this blog. I bought a stereo microphone to record with much better quality than the iPod does on its own, but it sucks up electrons very quickly. On one of the conference calls with the State delegation, there was talk about the long amounts of time that we would be without access to charging stations, so we were advised to get a back-up battery. Since the battery in my iPod Touch is lame as it is, that was another necessary minor investment.

Once travel and lodging arrangements were made and we had the “stuff” we needed to embark on this mission, I got an email from goFundMe that almost felt like extortion. They said that if I did not get a Facebook account, then my campaign would not show up in search results. I don’t know if there is collusion between GFM and FB, but this (along with the 8% bite that GFM takes from my donations) is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. So to help my fundraising campaign and to stay in the loop of goings-on among my fellow delegates, I bit the bullet and opened a Facebook account.

Now I truly understand another good reason to avoid Facebook for as long as I have: it’s a HYUGE time-suck. There are (and have been) some valuable exchanges in that venue, but it has also taken time away from other things.

I did get some one-on-one contact from the Bernie campaign representative and from the chairperson of the state party. They were each checking that I had travel arrangements and room reservations in place and that I was doing all of the other things a delegate must do to prepare for the convention.

Tomorrow we move from this rented apartment to a room in the Home2 Suites next door to the convention center. As I type, my inbox is getting bombarded with invitations to “receptions” for the “Jewish Roundtable” (I’m an agnostic atheist and recovering Catholic), the “Faith caucus” (see previous parens), and – in quick succession just now – “Women for Hillary”, “Latinos for Hillary” and “Hillary for America” (I’m a Bernie delegate, male and Slavic/Germanic). On the other hand, someone had to form a Facebook group to get any kind of environmental caucus going (we finally have a Climate Caucus), which is where my interests are centered.

There is a lot happening in the political world this week in my party and in the other party that merits discussion, such as the revelation that the “neutral” party committee was not neutral at all, Hillary’s unfortunate choice for VP, and the fascism of the RNC. This will have to wait for another post, or you can read some of my fire-breathing reactions over on my Facebook feed.

I know, I never expected the word “my” to be in front of the words “Facebook feed”, but we all must make sacrifices to move the revolution forward.