Twelve winters ago my friend Sherin and I ventured into Manchester, NH to experience Presidential Primary night at candidate John Kerry’s headquarters in the Holiday Inn.

Tonight, three general election cycles later, we repeated the trip, armed with a sheaf of candidate rally Eventbrite tickets, to see what we could see.

We started out the night driving to The Executive Court Banquet Facility – “one of New Hampshire’s premier destinations for the perfect wedding reception, corporate event or private party” and a handy four minutes drive from Manchester Airport – for the Donald Trump rally.

As soon as we turned the corner on Mammoth Road (yes) we realized that this would be easier said than done: there wasn’t a parking space within a mile, and there was a long, long, long lineup, snaking all the way around the front of the building, hundreds of people long. As the largest room in the facility holds only 500 people, this appears to have been a classic “book a small room and it will look crazy full” move. It worked.

We gave up our Trump dreams and headed north to the Jeb Bush rally at Manchester Community College.

This was a decidedly more sedate affair, where the media appeared to outnumber civilians. The “registration” process was lax (we could have easily skirted it). We were given as many Jeb! stickers as we could take. There was a palpable complete lack of energy.

There was, however, a cash bar and free buffet of cheese & crackers and nachos with a very nice hot spinach-artichoke dip:

Sherin is very skilled at talking to complete strangers, and so struck up a conversation with a police officer guarding the non-hordes. He was a very nice fellow; we chatted about the Primary, and what it had been like to work the events, and when things would wind down (he said Thursday, after the morning TV programs pull up stakes back to New York). 

Without much anything happened at Bush HQ, and with the Hillary Clinton campaign handy by, we set off there next.

Our GPS took us on a circuitous route to Southern New Hampshire University in nearby Hooksett. When we were about half a mile out we hit a traffic jam of cars lined up to get into the parking lot; to find a space to park we had to go to the back of the back back lot and then loop back a good distance to the field house where the rally was being held.

We found our way and arrived at the door, conveniently marked “No Press Entry,” where we were greeted by armed, bullet-proof-vest-wearing Secret Service agents.

We had to empty our pockets of keys and phones and change and then walk through airport-style metal detectors before we were admitted.

The Clinton rally, like the Bush rally, had a strong media contingent:

But there was also a much, much bigger crowd of supporters:

There was very loud pep-rally-type music – Taylor Swift, Pharrell and the like. And a VIP balcony populated by people like Ted Danson:

There was, however, no buffet.

As it happened, we timed our arrival perfectly, as about 20 minutes later Hillary Clinton, along with President Clinton and Chelsea, made their way to the podium, where Hillary delivery a spirited speech, part concession to Bernie Sanders and part “on to South Carolina and victory we go!”

The contrast between Bush and Clinton rallies was remarkable, given that they are running for the same position, are both running well-funded campaigns, and were holding rallies only a few miles from each other.

As I write this near midnight, Clinton’s result is 2nd place, with 38% of the Democratic vote and 79,005 votes in total.

By contrast, Bush is in 4th place, with 11% of the Republican vote and 25,859 votes in total, or roughly 1/3 of what Clinton received (albeit in a separate but parallel contest).

Neither may actually have The Big Mo, but Clinton was certainly better at acting like she does.

We timed our exit from the Clinton rally almost as perfectly, darting out before the big crowds. We were on the road a few minutes later, and back to newly-calm Peterborough, NH an hour later. Come morning, life here will return to normal. 

Election day is 270 days away.

We here a lot about the big-name candidates running for President, but almost nothing about the rest. Here are the two sample ballots posted on the wall of the Dublin, NH polling station listing the choices that Republican and Democratic voters have in this Primary. Notice how you’re allowed to simply write in a name of your choice!

I went across the street to Dublin Town Hall to watch my friend Sherin vote in the Presidential Primary. There are two ballot boxes, one for the red Republican ballots, one for the blue Democratic ballots. The older of the two was first used in the 1890s.

I’m starting Primary Day at the Peterborough Dinner, a ubiquitous stop on the Presidential campaign trail. Mostly deserted today, as the campaigning is all but over.

If there’s a constant that cuts across campaigns this New Hampshire Primary season, it’s Eventbrite: almost all of the candidates — except Hillary Clinton, who runs her own service — are using it to distribute advance tickets for their events. When I was here in 2004 there was nothing like this: you just showed up.

Ever since brother Johnny decamped to the west coast last July, I’ve been all alone in the Reinventorium. Sure the folks next door at The Guild are always ready with a cheery “hello,” and I have Anne and her new beau Gilbert to keep me company in the summer, but otherwise it’s a lonely one-man shop.

“Office culture,” such as it might be, is restricted to those special days when I remember that I should drink a glass of water and have a stretch mid-afternoon.

In this light, my occasional visits to my remote telecolleagues here at Yankee are an extra-special opportunity to have real coworkers for a change, complete with birthday celebrations, water cooler chats about Super Bowl commercials, and lunches at the local general store. I also benefit from access to the company Keurig coffee machine, and from access to the secret company snack bar.

It took me years to learn about the secret company snack bar.

Not that it’s really a secret, as the price list is clearly posted on the front desk of the company nerve centre. But I wasn’t completely sure that I was allowed to be a patron. Until I eventually realized that realizing you are allowed is the mindset that brings access with it.

And so, once or twice a visit, when lunch was too long ago and supper too far in the future, I’ll pop down from my perch in the crow’s nest to visit the always-friendly-and-helpful Linda  — you’ll hear her voice if you ever call Yankee on the phone — for a quick bite. The prices at the secret snack bar are enormously reasonable: a bag of potato chips, for example, is 35 cents. As is a bag of animal crackers. Cookies and granola bars are 40 cents. Chocolate bars are 55 cents, a price they haven’t sold for elsewhere since the 1990s. 

By dint of my role with the PEI Home and School Federation, I’ve become a member of the PEI Learning Partners Advisory Council, a new body conjured by Premier MacLauchlan to provide counsel on all matters of learning.

The first meeting of the Council is this week, and I’ll be away in New Hampshire so I’ll not be there. As the subject of the first meeting is for the members to get to know each other and to set broad priorities, I offered to make a video-of-introduction and my offer was accepted. I started off thinking this would be a simple talking-head video of me introducing myself, but as I started down that path it seemed much too boring, and so I went in another direction. And thus I ended up with this:

My imaginative son Oliver, on seeing this, and after several weeks of working on an ArtSmarts project where he and his classmates were tasked with taking a similar sort of personal inventory, spent the morning yesterday making his own video-of-introduction. I love his video much more than mine and I suspect that he was a lot more successful at capturing his true self.

I’m New Hampshire-bound this afternoon, flying down through Boston to spend a week with my longtime colleagues at Yankee Publishing in Dublin.

I’ve been visiting Dublin for 20 years, 3 or 4 times a year.

In 2003 I started creating an email folder containing all the travel-related emails for each trip; there are 34 of them now, and this trip will be number 35. With the trips that happened between 1996 and 2003 I suspect I’m coming up on 50 trips south.

Most of those trips have been by myself, but sometimes they were with my brother Johnny, and, especially in the early days, in the summer, they were with Catherine and, later, with Oliver too. We once spent a week in Dublin, NH and then drove to Boston and got on a plane and landed, the next morning, in Dublin, Ireland.

I’ve been working remotely with Yankee for so long that it’s second-nature now; these occasional visits are an important part of why we work so well together. It’s important to put faces to new names at the company. And it’s important to sit around a real, physical table with folks I otherwise only see on the other end of a weekly Skype conference call.

It’s also important to go out to lunch and supper together, so that we can remind ourselves that, outside of work, we have other lives and interests. It helps to make us whole people to each other.

So this afternoon I’ll get on Air Canada 7753 from Charlottetown to Halifax, then, an hour later, Air Canada 8895 from Halifax to Boston. When I land in Boston I’ll pick up a car from Hertz and drive the 90 minutes north – along Route 93, Route 95, Route 3 and Route 101 – to the Jack Daniels Motor Inn in Peterborough, NH a place I’ve been staying for years and years and years.

And tomorrow morning I’ll get up, have breakfast at Aesop’s Tables, and then drive up to Dublin, NH to start my workday.

As a special bonus, I’ll be in New Hampshire for Primary Day on Tuesday, as I was 12 years ago, and I plan to take in a variety of campaign rallies on Tuesday night in Nashua and Manchester; I’ll report in to Island Morning with a post-Primary review on Wednesday morning.

These days the bulk of my personal satisfaction in life comes from success at roof raking.

Last night, during a storm that dumped 50 cm of snow on the city, I made two trips out, followed by a more complete rake this morning. The result, with the cooperation of the bright sun today, is a good metre of bare roof on the front, and very little, if any, ice damming. Success!

Tomorrow I fly away for a week in New Hampshire and Ontario and I have to rely on the good graces of others to keep the roof clear in my absence.