It is September 27, 2018, less than a month until the municipal election and I'm presently in the middle of one of my most ambitious projects ever - The 155 Podcast, a series of interviews offered to all candidates in the election including School Board Trustee hopefuls.
Today, I completed the 97th interview. It's been a six week marathon of nearly nonstop interviews. The interviews are the easy part, I'm presently editing episode 41 and will really need to bunker myself down and focus to complete the remaining 60 edits in the coming week.
In many ways the interview series reminds me of my days refereeing. I've had to enforce a rule book: the questions, I've had to exercise judgment and discretion interpreting the answers of the candidates to ensure that they meet the intent and purpose of the question, I've been criticized by many in the bleachers, and to ensure fairness for the candidates I've had to be limited in what I say during the interviews, similar to how I had to use discretion during tournaments when discussing games to avoid advantaging or disadvantaging any teams .
I have one more day of interviews left, Saturday, to complete the Mayoral candidate round. In the end, I'll end up interviewing 102 of the 155 candidates. I disqualified five candidates from the interviews for various conduct and character issues such as being a racist, a sexist, personal attacks against other candidates, harassment, and past use of violence against a journalist.
I have five acclaimed Trustee incumbents I have yet to invite, due to time, I'll speak to them after I get the ~100 podcasts edited and published.
So this is my personal blog post for September 27, 2018. I'll have plenty of interesting stories to share from doing this podcast series: a mixture of professional posts are put on The Public Record and my personal reflections which I will post here on my personal blog.
Thank you for reading.