"Okay, we'll go."

Early on the morning of June 5th, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower met with his staff of the Allied Supreme Command, and listened as head meteorologist Group Captain J.M. Stagg delivered his weather forecast: the storm system that had halted the planned invasion of the French coast on June 5th was opening up. There would be a narrow window of a few days in which the Allies could establish a beach-head on the beaches of Normandy. If the commanders did not take this opportunity to launch, they could not make another attempt until the next full moon a month away.

Eisenhower listened to Stagg's report, conferred with Montgomery, Ramsay, Leigh-Mallory and the other commanders, and finally reached his decision: "Okay, we'll go."

And with those words, the second front of the war for Europe finally opened. Eisenhower had done all that he could do: the goals of Operation Overlord were now left to the American, British, and Canadian soldiers to fulfill.

A short while ago I accomplished what for all intents and purposes is the final task of my school board campaign: submitted the ad that I've made that will run in two newspapers here on Sunday. My friends and I are in agreement: it's a really nice ad. In some ways I think that this, even more than the commercials I've made, summarizes everything that I've intended to do in running for school board. I'll post it here on the blog come Sunday for everyone to look at.

And now, like Eisenhower, I've come to the point where there really is nothing else that I can do, at last. I've filed the paperwork, attended the meetings, gone to the public functions, handed out the cards, put up the website, put out the signs, made and aired the commercials, and now am running a half-page ad. Everything that I could have possibly done in my first-ever political campaign, has been done. Now it's left to the voters to choose what will happen next.

After all these months, it's really quite a relief. Now I can finally just watch the thing unfold, and see what happens. But no matter what does happen, I'm proud of myself and of the campaign that I've run. In every way, for my first time out it was a world-class campaign. This is something that, win or not, I can always look back on with only the fondest of memories.

But now, I can finally rest some. Lisa and I might head out to the Blue Ridge Parkway on Sunday, or maybe go up to Natural Bridge in Virginia. It'll be a welcome change from the past few weeks, and a good respite before everything comes to a head on Tuesday. But now, for the most part... it is done.