OCTA makes the November ballot!

Check it out, straight from the state’s website:

7/13/12 Signature verification complete. Petition contained 88,887 valid signatures, or 58.53% of the 151,870 signatures accepted for verification. Qualified to the ballot for the November 2012 Election.

Looks like circulators did a MUCH better job in the final push than early on, because the petition “throw-out” rate went down from 11.5% to a mere six percent. Well done, guys! We still have to get a vote passed, but this is still an incredible step.

The OCTA signature drive is over, and…

The Oregon Cannabis Tax Act turned in just under 168,000 signatures, which is getting Oregonians pretty excited. We only need 87,213 valid signatures to get on the November ballot, and in 2010 we missed the mark by a huge number, so this is pretty good news.

Unfortunately, my math says we’re not guaranteed to get on the ballot – at best, we’ll barely pull it off. Read below for a full explanation, but my math says we’re going to be about 400 signatures short.

I hope I’m wrong, but only time will tell. The state has up to 30 days to give us a “yay” or “nay” on this one. Continue reading “The OCTA signature drive is over, and…”

Some Alex updates finally

Alex is up and down, as usual, though he had been doing really well from mid-June until about last week. We’re starting to get settled in, and finding time to visit him at least twice a week. Hopefully we can get that up to three times a week on average. Unfortunately, with everything still pretty busy, I have been forgetting to give him his tincture, and I suspect that’s part of why the last few visits have ended badly. When we were further from him, but remembering the tincture every visit, it seemed to be doing a great job of turning around bad visits within thirty minutes or so. Continue reading “Some Alex updates finally”