Last night Claudia's band performed and they sounded awesome as usual. Here's Claudia in the bleachers waiting for another band to warm up.



Tonight Sammy and I made tortillas. Here's Sammy on flipping duty, learning what they look like when they're ready to turn.


The next two weeks are going to be kind of crazy (but crazy good!). We have my dad's birthday, my friend Jana's birthday, my birthday, Sammy's birthday, Easter, Claudia has a band contest and a youth convention in (glamorous!) Dayton, Ohio and while she's there, Jamie and I got tickets to the Opera (Tosca) and I guess I should find a sitter for that, shouldn't I?

My mom and dad primaried and caucused in Texas on Tuesday night. The littles were asking how a caucus works so we had a mock one at our house. Obama won (Bobo was persuaded to go over the the side with the little girls--it's possible they promised him treats). Obama won at the place where my parents caucused, too.

Miscellany

We have an annoying virus on El Computator, so I haven't been blogging because the virus is annoying. Must take care of that asap. In the meantime, beware our emails!

My parents are back home from their visit here and Memphis. We really enjoyed seeing them, but it was crazy with two jobs, three kids and a dog and it seems like we hardly got to see them at all. And somehow, the week got away from me and I hardly took any pictures! Disappointed!

Claudia'a presently in Texas with Cutter and Co. and from what I understand, she's having an absolute blast. So far, that I know of, they've done the safari thing in the car (a zebra put his entire mouth around one of her hands when she tried to feed him and that was deemed "COOL"!!), they went to the San Antonio Zoo, which is an awesome zoo, did a day trip to Houston and spent the day and into the night at Schlitterbahn, which is a mucho primo water park. We go to pick her up from the Chicago airport on Sunday. I so Can't Wait! Our house is very weird without Claudia.

Jordan and Sam have been having a really fun time with our babysitter this week. She's been taking them to the library, fixing picnic lunches, baking cookies and playing all sorts of games with them.

In other news, Jamie and I are leaning towards supporting Hillary. Yes, it's true. We liked her answers in the last debate better than Obama's and Jamie pointed out that she looks more fetching in pink than Obama does.

Cool thing: Google Earth. We're spying on you!!!

I'm organizing our main livingroom bookshelf by color like this one:



We have a pretty relaxing weekend planned. Jamie and I were invited to a pool party tomorrow by some new people we've met, but we had babysitter issues and some other stuff, so we won't be going. Too bad, because we like the people a lot.

And here are some miscellaneous photos of lately:


Sammy on her tennis award day.




Floating candle Jordan made for us. It was very cool, she had the idea and did it all herself and surprised us with it. It has some pretty marbles at the bottom.


I have about zero experience growing things from seeds, but I'm so excited because this summer I've had pretty phenominal success. The gourds are going like gangbusters. Times like this I wish I could do time lapse photography.






Picking the girls up at camp.

Photos!

Various painting, protest and tennis photos.

Sicko!

This week I asked Claudia if she wanted to go to see the new Harry Potter movie. No, she said, she wanted to go see Michael Moore's Sicko!. So we went to the (one?) arthouse in Indianapolis Wednesday night to see the 8:00 showing, discussing propaganda, manipulation and the U.S. healthcare system on the way to the theater. American 12-year-olds, even awesomely intelligent ones like Claudia, who watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report religiously, don't have a lot of background data in their brains to go into a movie like that cold.

I was in my theater seat about a minute and he had me crying, the manipulative bastard. But seriously, some of the anecdotes were really actually frightening and heartbreaking and I'm sold on the fact that the system needs some serious improvement, which, really, I already felt. But some of this stuff is far more alarming than I realized and I feel a lot less safe.

Moore was persuasive and brought up some interesting points, but I just can't trust him. I wonder, who is this British doctor you're interviewing to let me know doctors there do ok? Is he really representative of the majority of doctors working in systems of socialized medicine? You're showing me that Canadian citizens aren't waiting a long time in the ER, but what about people needing non-emergency tests and procedures?

Jamie emailed me this Slate article with a note saying he thought it was a balanced and thoughtful response. So do I.