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Yesterday was this year's snow day! Maxwell stayed home from school while Alora and Brittan opted to go (much to their later regret). We got about an inch in the morning - just enough to throw snowballs, eat and make little snowmen. Unfortunately not enough to sled on though.

THERE IS NOTHING MORE IMPORTANT THAN BACKING UP YOUR FILES. I have recently been reminded of this truism by the death of my laptop this past week. Fortunately I try to backup everything about once a month, so there was not much lost. But there is alot one can do in a month, and since I backup only new stuph I find my life is now spread out among a bevy of CDs. I also caught the stomach flu from the kids this week which made it rather lovely overall.

As mentioned in earlier blogs, my brother-in-law Amir Golshani is a Sargeant who does war planning for the Marines. Just last month he headed to back to Kuwait for a second tour in the Iraq War. Despite his self-deprication as not being very computer savvy, he courted my sister over the internet during his last tour and this time he's set up a blog to keep us all apprised of the happenings at Camp Arifjan. So go check it out!

A sandstorm picture from Amir's blog, Kuwaiti Vision.

This week was Valentine's Day and the kids got a bunch of mail - which they just love! Zara has been carrying her cards around like favorite toys and pretending to read them and give them to people. Her vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds as she learns affixation rules for converting between nouns, adjective/adverbs, and verbs. My favorite coinage was her claim that Maxwell's new legos "haf to be openified", because "ified" is such a frequently used suffix for verbing adjectives. Of course, after I opened them she turned to Maxwell and declared "he opened them", so I wonder if the "ified" suffix connotates some sort of command form in her language or if the later phrase is the beginnings of a past tense. For so long now Zara has lived in a linguistic world without the added depth of tense - no past, no future, only the present. I suppose that is how we all really live despite our memories and prognostications, but since we have these mental constructs of our individual timelines it's nice to be able to express them. She has also started expressing things she's going to do, using that word much as Standard English would have us use will. "We going to get Maxwell?" is her daily refrain as we count down the hours until his return from school. "Thank you, Zara." "I welcome."

This weekend my parents came up and we went hiking at Fall Creek Falls,
played Wii and instructed Alora and Brittan on the finer points of playing tennis.

Today across the USA a number of states had their primaries, Tennessee being one of them. Being that there is actually a candidate in the race I believe in nearly 100%, I went out to my local polling station to stump for Ron Paul. I was the only representative of a nonlocal candidate there, although Clinton and Romney workers stopped by to leave one sign each for their respective candidates. Alongside me just beyond 100 feet from the elementary school doors were several partisans of various local races. The local megachurch, Grace Baptist, has a candidate for county commissioner and had people coming in shifts all day to represent Brad Anders. Also running for county "commision" district 6-A was Sandy McDaniel, represented at our polling station by his sister. Then there was a friend of Phil Ballard, who is running for property assessor. Considering my annual property taxes have gone up from $600 to $800 during the current incumbent's tenure, Mr. Ballard was definitely on my list of people to vote for. Then there was a Knox county lawyer out supporting her boss John Owings. If he losses, then she losses her job. It was an interesting day to be sure. The kids had off school so I brought them along to play at the playground while I canvassed for Paul and they had a grand old time in the sunshine and fresh puddles. Plus they are still young enough to have immense respect for their father's choice of candidates and enjoyed waving signs in between running around like lunatics. The local NBC station, WBIR channel 10, came by and interviewed me for the noon news and apparently it also ran this evening as well. I talked about Dr. Paul's plans to bring home the troops policing the world and for allowing young people to opt out of social security, but, as Alora confessed to Cara later, I used alot of big words and she really didn't understand it. Considering how most of the media portrays Ron Paul supporters as the kook fringe of the Republican Party I wonder if the people who saw me on the news had any difference of opinion with her. Right now watching the returns it seems that even the drop-out Thompson has beat Paul in Tennessee. Maybe they're counting the early votes first though...

There's thunder in the hills above this morning. Cara's been sick with a stomach bug this past weekend - great for weightloss, but today she's recovering from several days without subtantial nourishment.