Thanks for your help.
In the end my solution was to create category specific php pages and use the just attached the category id to each page in the query. Not ideal but with a set number of categories planned it seems to be best.
For those that find this later running the query string by itself allowed the categories to display properly and running the array for the stickies allowed me to display just the stickies but without categories working. I suspect what I did wrong has to do with how they were combined.
Just checking to see if anyone had a chance to see this 🙂 Happy Holidays everyone.
