By Christopher Walsh

There was a knock on the door late last week and a tiny, shy girl of indeterminate middle-eastern descent handed me a pamphlet with what looked like a license plate at the top asking me, “R U Ready?”

She wasn't, because she was just about to turn around and head down the steps when I made it to the door. Instead, she slipped me the pamphlet and was quickly on her way before I could determine exactly what this exchange was about.

She was handing out Social Credit Party literature and obviously didn't have time to answer any questions about it. It was self-explanatory, a social credit message from Calgary-North Hill candidate Jim Wright. But the part that grabbed my attention was a scribble across the left side of it. An apology from Jim himself, written with a red pen in strongly feminine characters. “Sorry I missed you. 708-8160.”

I was having a cigarette with Battle River-Wainwright MLA Doug Griffiths on a dark September night in Castor last fall, when I first heard we'd all be going to the polls this month.

Doug was on some type of rebellion truth-telling crusade and had just finished apologizing to town council if they felt he had let them down over the last year. It was a trying time, Griffiths explained, but he was over whatever personal turmoil he had gone through earlier in 2007 and was back and focused and ready for anything.