Milestones: I Made it to 80 - And What A Ride the Past 9 months have been

 

 

March 12, 2025

 

This post is delayed due to a very busy schedule managing the petition campaign for A Better Contract. Petitions are due March 17 so it's almost over.

 

So as you can see I have the bald look due to the chemo - my last treatment was Feb. 11-13. And I got to bang the gong at MSK after they disconnected the contraption from my port. 

 

If you had asked me if I would make it to 80 when I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on May 24, 2024 or when I got out of MSK 15 days after my June 26 operation- I'm Baaaack - Norm Almost breaks Medicare after 15 days in hospital - I would have had doubts. And having completed 6 months of chemo on Feb. 12 in relatively good shape, I am looking at things 3 months at a time between scans. The one two weeks ago showed a lesion in my stomach and I also have an abdominal hernia, so you may see me protruding. Pancreatic cancer is probably the worst in terms of coming back and the oncologist told me if it does come back he cannot cure it but manage it - with more chemo. Oh, goodie, something to look forward to. In the meantime I intend to enjoy the next 3 months before the next scan. As the oncologist said about the lesion. If it is cancer what would be do about it now since you just finished 6 months of chemo.

Anyway, I seem to have come out the other end of the chemo in fairly decent shape, other than my feet are often numb and I drool a bit. And I am gaining back weight but also the diabetes may be my biggest issue for now. But No worries.

 

My wife took me out to our usual birthday spot at One of By Land Two if By Sea for my beef wellington.

 

Last Friday night at the Rockaway Theatre yearly gala, I was complimented by people who thought I was shaving my head for my new look. But on the bright side, I was invited to join the RTC bald guy group - young guys who choose that look and are trying to convince me to keep it despite my hair beginning to grow back.

 

Nothing wrong with a beautiful woman blocking me out. I'll take her hair anytime.

By the way,  I mentioned my last chemo lasted from Feb. 11-13. And Feb. 12, while still on my chemo pack, was a DA and the beginning of the petitioning and I was not sure if I could manage it but I had no loss of energy and organized a group of retirees to work that day to get the petitions ready for pickup by many ABC candidates and we pulled it off and it took the crew at ABC the shortest time to get all the sigs we needed and then went out and started signing up more people to run for AFT. I was contacted by someone who lives in Africa and a couple in Portugal who want to run with us. Just today I hear of 20 people who signed up to run for AFT. They are coming in from Florida too. We are taking new people right through Friday and even some late comers on Saturday. People are mailing me their wet signatures - a new wrinkle by the Unity elites to make it tougher to run.

You can still sign up if you are willing to drop off your signed petition by Saturday.

 

Download this form from the UFT site: Nominating petition (individual candidates) 

Fill it out and sign it and contact me on getting it to me at normsco@gmail.com.

Even if you are running with another group, ABC welcomes you to the slate. So yes run on multiple slates. If interested contact me asap -- if you can't get your signed petition to me we can try to arrange a pickup.

 

Have a great rest of the week.

 

Petitionology - UFT Elections/#MORE2016: Today is Final Day to File Petitions to get on Ballot

Gloria and me getting ready to eat

What me worry? We are done. Gloria Brandman, Michael Shulman and I handed thousands of pages of petitions to Amy Arundel and Ray Frankel at the UFT yesterday afternoon.We've been seeing Ray for over 40 years at these things and seeing her still doing this work even if she is on the other side is still a treat. Ray has to be pushing - I better not even try to guess her age but I hope she is still there in 2019.

I am free, free at last from the burden of organizing and managing the MORE/New Action petition campaign.

Call me a petitionologist. One of the few things I am an expert at.

We needed 900 for our officer slate. We got 1800. For the
divisional Ex Bd positions - elem (11), middle (5), high schools (7) and functionals (19) - we needed 100 for each of the 42 candidates and we were getting so many signatures we told people to stop gathering signatures. Look at the petition. It only holds around 40 signatures and to get to 1800 you can imagine how big a stack that is.

The UFT Executive Board is made up of these 42 plus 48 Ex bd at large (any UFT member can sign) plus the 12 officers.

We had so many great candidates we had to prune our list. All our other 200 candidates are running for the AFT/NYSUT RA delegates. Thus we have roughly 300 people on the slate.

We monitored the numbers every week so we knew where we stood. The amount of coordination, especially since we were working with New Action, was at times intense. Having NAC's experienced Jonathan Halabi as a partner on this made a big difference as we gathered and coordinated the information from 300 hundred candidates. And we could have had many more if we wanted but given the time frame and work involved we decided to save an entire forest by cutting things off at 300.

The only way I can get a project like this done is to obsess about it obsessively. So my mind has been cluttered over the planning and execution and now I can rest.

We were actually done on Saturday. They came by planes, trains and automobiles - and by foot to deliver piles of petitions all day.
We brought in a great team, including the always awesome Julie Woodward who used to write the Under Assault blog who comes out of retirement every 3 years to help us review and organize the petitions. Julie, Pat and David Dobosz, Gloria, Dan Doyle, Kit Wainer, Ashraya Gupta, Michael Shulman, Jonathan Halabi and others did yeoman work. Every one of our AFT delegate were put in folders in alphabetical order.

And our team did an amazing job, working from 10AM to 4PM. Still, I am always concerned until we actually turn over the petitions. Fires, floods and who knows what else can wipe you off a slate. I made sure not to leave the petitions in Rockaway in case a sudden Sandy hurricane or tsunami hit. (Yes I am that crazy.) I had to shlep a suitcase full down to 52 Broadway.
 I feel I have become an expert at organizing an effective petition campaign for UFT elections, which began Feb. 3. I wrote about it then: #MORE2016 - UFT Election Season is At Hand - Petitioning begins today through end of May. With the mid-winter break in the middle of the campaign our people had to hustle to get it all done with time to spare. Special thanks to Roseanne McCosh at PS 8X for chipping in with a good number of signatures. And to one of our own heroes Dan Lupkin at PS 58 for getting 14 people in his school to run and for coming in with a major batch of sigs. Also to Kevin Prosen at IS 230Q for delivering BIG numbers. Julie Cavanagh at PS 15k and Kit Wainer/Mike Schirtzer at Leon Goldstein and Arthur Goldstein at Francis Lewis HS plus our crew at Fort Hamilton HS also came up HUGE.

This is the 4th straight petitioning campaign I have organized since 2007, 10 (ICE) and 2013, 2016 (MORE).

I honed my strategy based on these experiences - what went right, what went wrong - see, experience does count.

This time, rather than view petitioning as a burden, we asked people to use their time as an organizing tool to tell people about the election and why MORE is running. We hope that in our schools where people actively petitioned that will translate into votes in May. But who knows? If our people don't engage their colleagues from now through the end of May to get them to vote it won't make much difference.

One thing we know. Unity will pull out all stops to win everything and you will see your teacher mailboxes flooded with Mulgrew literature. In addition you will be getting visits from Unity slugs under the guise of union business, which to me is a violation of some sort but other than complain, what can we do about it?

Another angle Unity has is that they get all the petitions and can see which schools we have strength in and they can then focus their people on targeting these schools for visits and extra literature.

But thus is the nature of the Unity machine and why they are so hard to make a dent in. But MORE will continue to challenge them throughout this election and beyond. It ain't over till it's over.

After we were done we went down to the 3rd floor cafeteria with Michael Shulman to enjoy a celebratory meal. Now it's on the the election campaign and a massive distribution of literature to the schools which we have the right to go into to put lit in the mail boxes.  If you want lit contact MORE or me.

I am a happy guy getting this mess off my hands