My wife ran off to San Francisco yesterday, taking the children and leaving in their place a bag full of diapers and other essential personal effects that she apparently meant to take with her. They're due to return on Monday. Or possibly sooner if David needs his diaper changed.

In the meantime, I did what any other abandoned husband would do on a Saturday night -- I went out campaigning with my local candidate for the state legislature. Lt. Gubernatorial candidate Jim Nobles and I joined Mark Griswold to walk through the crowd at the Seafair Torchlight Parade carrying Griswold for Representative signs. It's a dangerous job to prance around Seattle advertising oneself as a Republican, but somebody has to do it.

The parade was good fun, with floats, clowns, pirates, marching bands, policemen on motorcycles, beauty queens, historic fire engines, people painted purple, etc.

We looked around the parade for any signs of life from Griswold's opponent, House Speaker Frank Chopp, who's managed to serve in the legislature for a decade without ever having to run against a Republican challenger. We failed to find any evidence that Chopp maintained a presence to reach out to voters at the parade, one of the largest annual events in Seattle. We did bump into a sympathetic local government insider who shared an anecdote that other Democrat bigwigs had recently told Chopp that his best response to the Griswold challenge would be to "sit down for a bit". We weren't quite sure what that was supposed to mean. Sit down and strategize? Sit down and collect his temper? In any event, it sounded vaguely amusing and apropos for someone who has managed to sit in the legislature for years and years without having to get up very often to compete for the hearts and minds of his constituents.

We were stopped a few times by visiting legislators from other states who spied the campaign signs and wished Mark a gracious welcome into the fraternity of representative government. North Dakota's Kim Koppelman (R-West Fargo) was in Seattle for the ALEC conference. He handed Mark his business card, which had a jagged right edge like the map of North Dakota. We also met Texas' Larry Taylor (R-League City), also in town with ALEC. We found Taylor sitting on the bumper of an unattended Christine Gregoire campaign pick-up truck. He didn't know who Gregoire was, so I explained that she was a goofy-assed ultra-liberal, whose gubernatorial campaign is bankrolled by a bunch of out-of-state feminists. Taylor quickly got off the truck and went to look for his wife. We didn't get to see if his business card was shaped like the map of Texas.