Idle Hands

This week six Council members were supposed to be in Washington, D.C., for various reason, not the least of which is a meeting with Ken Salazar. I've never agreed with sending that many people on the same trip, especially one that revolves mostly around meeting with elected officials and political appointees. We tried that last year, and that is what turned me off to the idea. Try cramming six Council members and three or four staff along with the person you're meeting with and their staff, and the rooms can get crowded and half the people don't say a word. There isn't time.
And it costs a lot of money. The last time I went to D.C., April of 2008, we all stayed at the same hotel, the Hotel George, which charged roughly $400 per night, per room. Five or six Council members and your suddenly staring at a couple of grand per night just for our hotel rooms, and some of us don't even get in a word edge-wise in half the meetings. But sometimes these meetings turn into contests of who can impress people the most. So there is a little ego involved, which for me is all the more reason to not go.
Weeks like this, no quorum, are for me now a boon. I can catch up on emails, reports, letters, phone calls--all the things that go neglected while away from the office. My new G1, the offspring of T-Mobile and Google designed to provide an industry rival to the iPhone, helps me keep up somewhat; It's a defacto blackberry. But there just doesn't seem enough time, or maybe I'm just not good at rationing out my time. Probably both.
But the lack of a quorum means no meetings, except Wednesday when we will have a conference call to discuss the "Leno Letter" yet again, and that gives me time to try and get organized. But looking through my office, where to begin?
Wink Soderberg thinks I'm crazy to keep most of the reports and try and stay organized. Looking at all my shelves, he might be right. But a lot of this stuff I just can't bear to part with. It is more out of journalistic instincts than anything, I want reminders of past events, statistics that might be useful someday. Plus frankly, I saw a record years ago that looked tampered with, and some of the major decisions made before I got elected there seems to be no record at all, or if there is it might be hidden away who knows where. The words "needle" and "haystack" come to mind.
So this week will not be idle for me, even with the void of meetings and work sessions. I'll plug away at the unstoppable flow of information, file some of it away, shred the rest. Once in a while, I'll come across something important, even disturbing, that I knew about at one time, and then forgot. There is a lot of stuff like that.