Went to the 43rd District Democratic Caucus in Seattle on Sunday. It was a zoo! There were about 1300 people there trying to fit into a 1000 seat high school auditorium. I am pretty sure the fire codes were not observed :). But boy, was it great! Hundreds of people of all shapes, sizes, colors and persuasions. People in wheelchairs, people with babies, people with buttons of all kinds. Old people with canes, new people with binkies. The Hillary delegates were LOUD and PROUD. The Obama delegates were LOUDER ... but I gotta say, proportional to headcount, the Hillary delegates were amazingly scrappy. We heard speeches from each candidate's surrogate -- and the Obama and Kucinich surrogates were local people, but the Clinton campaign sent Sean Astin, a.k.a. Sam Gamgee, to plug Hillary. It was an interesting choice; I'm not sure he's cut out for public speaking, but he basically hit the "experience" and "strength" notes as required. At 1:00 (I'd been there since 9 and the caucus officially opened at 10:07) they announced, "The hot dog stand outside is down to its last 150 dogs," and there was a small stampede. Since my delegate vote had already been counted, I decided to bail at that point, since next up was delegate selection to the next convention, and that was going to take forever. There were dozens of would-be delegates, each of whom had thirty seconds to make their bid! So I don't know who went on to the next level, but I really enjoyed having been there. (And I would have enjoyed it far less without Matt's Kindle to play with during the parliamentary-procedures stuff...yay!)