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As I drove down the empty streets of Lincoln tonight to pick up a bottle of Bordeaux, I figured I probably come across as the most un-American person ever. Buying French wine instead of watching the Huskers football game? Sacré bleu! Another random thought: after watch Sarah Palin's acceptance speech last night I'm convinced my Auntie Dell is running for president. I'm not sure what exactly seems so similar either. Today we went to Nebraska State Fair which is held right here in Lincoln. It was an awesome experiance with everything from chainsaw carving, to cattle judging, to winetasting, to preformances. The only down note was that it seems I'd already visited Nebraska's best attempt at winemaking. We passed on the $5 per ride tilt-a-whirl type activities, but Alora and Brittan did each win giant stuffed animals. We also learned a lot about livestock and the girls took notes on the most interesting breed of chickens as preparation for next year... I also updated the last 4 or so months of my politcal vlogs.

Cara has embraced our reconnection to cyberspace with a plethora of content: she's started blogging again, and has also set up a Shutterfly page with copius pictures you folks who like a meatspace copy can have printed out and delivered to your door.

Today I had my first encounter with the Prussian efficiency of Nebraska bureaucracy - a far cry from the fat black ladies who treat southeastern bureaucratic jobs as a sinecure. I suppose you get what you pay for. There's income tax, ad valorum car tax, property taxes 4 times as high as Tennessee and no doubt other taxes I have yet to discover. Actually, the tax structure is quite a bit like Georgia's but they seem to use it quite a bit better here. Since our largest monthly expense is usually groceries it's nice not to pay taxes on them again. But it's also nice to buy liquor at the grocery store ... on Sunday. The cop at the DMV this morning saw the wine bumper stickers on my car and recommended a nearby vineyard. In the southeast liquor laws were the biggest irritant. In CA we enjoyed the best of both worlds by retaining our Tennessee residency. Lincoln is somewhere in between, but honesty is assumed and encouraged here more than anywhere else I've lived. To get a Nebraska driver's license I merely had to fill out a form and prove that I was not blind. No proof of residency. No inane security measures. There are laws on the books to prosecute fraud, and apparently that's enough in a state where most counties have seen negative growth for decades. It seems that people here are either successful or leave. The average salary here is above the US per capita GDP unlike most cities. Before leaving Knoxville I spent an afternoon with the family of Maxwell's friend Adam. Adam's mom is from Kenya and apparently there the University of Nebraska (UNL) is highly sought to attend. I found that humorous because one thinks of Africa as being such a hot place and the winters here are quite cold, but that does not matter to Kenyans, who, after all, have the few snowy mountains of that continent in their country. I wonder if this is the most European place we've lived. Stability rather than growth. Stability would be welcome to my eldest children who have dealt with change deftly over the years but are entering their more difficult hormonal period. Yesterday I found Alora in the kitchen crying because she had to move every summer forever and would never live anywhere more than a year. When I presented counterexamples, she said, I know, I justed needed a reason to cry. Despite all our preperation hormones are still hormones. My biggest regret as a father is forcing them to move so much, despite the fact that they are much more mature and successful at dealing with it than I ever was. Maxwell also has started kindergarten and made new friends very easily in this new place, but we are renting and will doubtless move again. Zara visited half the states in the Us before her first birthday. Alora and Brittan email to friends half way around the world in India and meet other friends visiting Monticello in Virginia. In a few years they will travel further than I ever have and learn firsthand about the similarities and differences of the cultures of our globe. Place is important, but people moreso. I suppose every generation has their difficulties and I can only try to equip them for it.

Molly and I have made a ritual of going for walks around the neighborhood in Nebraska's cool mornings. Whenever I pick up the leash she is still beside herself with excitement though. This is especially funny because she usually sleeps half under the end of our bed, which is on a hardwood floor. Her excited self flails all about as she slips on the floor and unintentionally pushes herself further under the bed. Then, of course, on the walk there is Lincoln's abundant wildlife - rabbits and squirrels that is. This morning Molly hopped like a rabbit after one. The squirrels just like to taunt her with chatter from the nearby trees. One day I let Molly loose after one on the ground. She didn't catch it, but I daresay she had a lot more fun than the squirrel did.

We finally have internet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nebraska is a western city - midwestern, yes, but still western. This has made everyone, kids included, pine for our beloved Picchetti. In Sunnyvale the winery was just ten minutes away up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, but it seemed a world apart with its peacocks and hiking trails. There has never been anything like it anywhere else we have lived. Well, now that we live again on square blocks with black dirt and a park nearby it seemed almost too good to be true that there was a winery just outside Lincoln: James Arthur Vineyards. The atmosphere was nice, but this was no Picchetti. Alas it seems these folks like so many others have fallen for the lie that European varietals cannot be cultivated this far north or in such a cold continental climate. In Tennessee they fall for the same lie only there it's "too hot". Malarkey. All of France* sits at a higher latitude than Nebraska! If anything they should be taking advantage of the méthode Champenoise to produce sparkling wines over the cold winter, or focusing on German varietals like Gewuerztraminer and Riesling. James Arthur only manages to make a good Traminette and Vignoles - both sweet hybrid varietals. Their other wines, while well made, are using varietals that just don't make good wine. Even the best Frontenac will never be better than a mediocre Cabernet. The hugely overgrown vines and nearly-ripe grapes in their vineyards were also a clear testament to the potential of Nebraska's soils. With aggressive mid-season pruning even the slowest ripening grapes could be cultivated here. Of course, listening to myself I hear echos of Bubba discussing the shrimping possibilities of Vietnam in Forest Gump. Then again, where does most of our shrimp come from these days?

*Correction (9/4/08) - A small portion of France in the Pyrenees is actually below the 43rd parallel, Nebraksa's northern border.

The mornings here are cool here and the afternoons are hot, so we like to open the windows in the morning. The temperature inside never seemed to get as low as the temperature outside though. A couple mornings ago, as we got the kids set up for their first day of school, Cara asked me to come over and touch the screen. I said What's wrong with the screen? It looks fine. She said I should just touch it. So I did. There was glass over the screen, just like in a stormdoor. It only took us three weeks to discover...

The other day I realized I have a serious problem: the more I analyze data at work, the more I want to analyze more data at home. My ongoing frustration with Quicken's fewer features in every edition has led me to finally write a PERL script to convert the data to Excel. Sure, the data is a little more cumbersome, but at least I can generate expense reports without credit card payments listed as expenses (how retarded is that!?!) I also took a battery of free tests available at work to gather some health related data. No surprises, here: good glucose levels, bad cholesterol levels, bad weight, good body fat percentage, etc. Well that led me to further obsess and mine my old medical records (99% pre-1997) for more data. Most of it is descriptive and hence not very good for graphing, but there were some highlights like my 16-year-old physical when I had "Normal female genitalia". Childhood weight gains also make my recent weight gains look rather insignificant:

Apparently Cara's injury a couple weeks weeks ago made the children jealous. Friday night Maxwell was running around wildly in the basement and fell, slicing his forehead open. Not deep enough for stitches, but we still put butterflies on it for a couple days. Then on Saturday Brittan was attempting to do a pop-a-wheelie and wiped out, giving her a nasty abrasion on her belly the size of her hand. This morning Cara called me at work to tell me that instead of going to her appointment to get her stitches out, she was taking Zara to visit the Bryan Hospital ER and get four staples of her own on the top of her head. Ouch. Will Alora be next or will it be me?

In 1994 while studying Merlot vines in Chile viticulturist Jean-Michael Boursiquit made a surprising discovery: many of these "Merlot" vines there were in fact Carmenère. During Bordeaux's early history Carmenère had been one of the French region's main grapes, but during the phylloxera epidemic of the late 19th century they were basically wiped out in France. And so Carmenère, whose grapes look quite similar to Merlot's, passed out of the mainstream and became known only to viticulturists. (more info)

Taking a page out of the Jaime & Amir playbook, Zach & Colleen got married earlier this year and are now deeply involved in planning their fancy wedding for next summer. Next month Cara will be headed to Maryland for her cousin Bobby's wedding to longtime girlfriend Aaren. Unfortunately, logistics precluded the rest of us coming, but I'm sure Cara will party enough for the rest of us... This past week we also learned that Cougar Dan is, in fact, Joy Jubilee. In a few more generations men will be driven to extinction by these genetically superior females.

Rabbits. I have never seen so many rabbits in my entire life. They must have no natural predators here. We see at least one every day. The little ones love it! Supposedly coyotes are at the top of the food chain around here, but I haven't seen any hunting the hopping feast of downtown Lincoln. Living on the great plains I can't help but think about the missing megafauna which ought to be eating the rabbits - like large cats and bears. And where the heck are all the elephants, rhinos, camels, equids and giant ground sloths? Gone. But I bet the Indians thought they were tasty. Then again, there aren't many Indians around here these days either - the closest reservation is a hundred miles away. Just desserts? Maybe so, but I'd still like to see elephant herds lumbering across the plain to cool off in the Platte River. I supposed they'd step on alot of corn along the way though...

Airplane runways are longer than I thought. Today I ran up and down one for a 5K. Yes, they shut down the airport here to have a race on a Saturday morning. The National Guard has a station there too, so they brought out a bunch of their toys for the kids to play on (see pics on shutterfly). I also got new cool running shorts from Target like Jaime. The built-in underwear is a little weird, but quite comfortable. Being that my weight is down I thought I might do better than I did, so I was surprised at a result similar to my last race. Ergo I decided to dig into the data and see if there was any correlation. Surprisingly, there is not much:

It's hard to get much done when you loose the middle 9 hours of the day. Okay, so I got a lot done at Experian, but I'm going to bed again tonight with stuph still out in the truck. C'est la vive. Tonight more neighbors came over to help and we finished moving the big scary stuph, especially the armoire of death. At least quite a few things were broken on the truck so we won't have to move them again. Like bookshelves - what good were those anyway? Next time we just might have to bow out to economics and hire professionals. Does that mean I'm getting old?

Yesterday ... ah yesterday. It was a wonderful day! Today, not so much... A heat wave is passing through eastern Nebraska; at over 100 degrees it's great truck unloading weather. I worked a half day this morning because the truck was due around noon. When it came in I came home and we started unloading. I was drinking a coke, but Cara is more of a Starbucks fan so she was drinking a little glass bottle of Frappacino. Drinking it, that is, until she tripped on the driveway and fell on it. I heard the crash and Cara crying and all I could think was Is she really crying because she dropped her stupid Starbucks? Then I saw that she'd fallen and I ran over to see her pulling a large chunk of glass out of her hand and copious blood flow down her arm. She rinsed it in the spigot and I checked the wound for more glass because she didn't want to put pressure on it until she was sure. The cut was deep, but in the pad of her hand so not a big problem. We all loaded up in the car and I realized I had no idea where the closest hospital was. Consulting a map I discovered it was Bryan East. Could it be that Bryan? Nah. Sitting in the waiting room later on, I noticed the gathering clouds outside the window and thought of all the things we'd taken off the truck and left in the front yard. I went outside to check and, sure enough, it was starting to rain. So I ran across the hospital to the car and then raced home in the downpour to get our things under shelter. It seemed like a good idea to get the mattresses off first at the time... Back at the hospital to pick up Cara I discovered it was THAT Bryan: creationist at the Scopes monkey trial, cross of gold speechmaker, perennial presidential candidate ... congressman from Nebraska. And just like in Dayton, TN there was a statue of the man bearing an inscription to his supposed greatness. So around 3 o'clock we finally really started unloading the truck. Our new neighbors came over and pitched in. We got our bed out. We got the fridges out. We got the washer and dryer out. The day seemed to be turning around until, in the growing darkness, a metal trampoline rod fell down and hit me in the face. I was fine, but my glasses, not so much. So here I sit on the front porch with my glass of Viognier, watching the girls continue to bring in boxes and contrasting this day with the last. We will not finish tonight after all.

Today was Maxwell's day - my attempt to make up for missing his birthday which he spent driving in the car. We both got up early due to my inability to sleep in and his wetting of the bed. The spraypark didn't open until 11AM, so we had some time to kill and shot a video about Maxwell's new transformers swimsuit. He loves making videos and watching himself, so he hammed it up quite a bit. Around 10:20 I finally gave him permission to wake up his sisters. With news of the impending spraypark visit the girls bounced up, swimsuited themselves and would've been quickly out the door if I hadn't made them eat first. After their late breakfast we were off to play at the spraypark. Cara joined us around noon and then we headed home around 1PM. We hung around the house for a while before Maxwell, the twins and I headed off to see "The Dark Knight". Cara stayed home with our youngest because it would have been too scary for her - she prefers movies without badguys. If you want to do a great child psychology experiment, take a 5 year old and 10 year old to see this movie. In Maxwell's 5 year old world everything is still black and white, right and wrong. Batman is good. He fights the Joker, who is bad - simple and fun. For Alora and Brittan, the story was quite different. The Joker a number of moral dilemmas that they hadn't really considered before and were quite disturbing to their worldview, which was so recently black and white but is becoming increasingly gray. I tried to have Brittan write a paper about the movie to help her work through the issues, but I'm not sure it was a useful exercise.

This morning I woke up to spend the first full day with my family in weeks. Cara want to sleep in, so when Brittan woke me up worried I had overslept for work shortly after 8 AM, I decided we should walk over to McDonald's for breakfast. Alora woke up and decided to join us as well. We returned from breakfast to discover that the little people had not let mom get much more sleep. Then it was time to pack up the cars and check out. This is a two hour process with four children who open their suitcases and distribute all their belongings throughout the hotel room. Holmes Lake, a small man-made reservoir with adjoining park, was our destination for the morning. After a lovely romp on the playground is was time to head over to our new house and pick up the keys. We got here a bit early and set up a picnic in the backyard while the kids laid claim to various parts of the swingset. After lunch the keys arrived and Cara got her first look inside our new house. Zara also had to pee so we let her in to go to the bathroom (Maxwell preferred to christen the grass). As we toured the first of the empty rooms we heard crying. Zara had locked herself in the bathroom. Now our house was built in 1918, so it took more than just a pen to unlock it from the outside. We were glad Cara had packed the toolbox in the van; 15 minutes later Zara was free and running amok in her new domain. "Domain", by the way, is the official name of the girl territory downstairs. They have their own bathroom. It's purple. After signing the lease and unpacking the cars we headed over to check out Woods Park and see when the spraypark opens tomorrow (11 AM). Our new house is very different from our old house in that the personal areas are much smaller than the common areas. Initially, Cara found this very much to her dislike. Walking to the park, however, as the girls rode ahead down the sidewalk on their bikes, Cara declared that our new neighborhood reminds her of Berkeley. I must admit there are architectural and city planning similarities. Plus the larger common spaces relative to personal spaces scales up to the city level as well. It is a western state college town after all. We dined on leftover pizza and sandwiches and then went out for ice cream. No Bruster's here unfortunately. Then it was off to the HyVee, our local grocery store, to stock up on necessities we can now put in a fridge. After putting the kids to bed, Cara and I sat down in our breakfast nook to enjoy some milk and hot pockets (her) and a glass of Zinfandel (me). It was a good first day all together in Nebraska.

Everyone got to Lincoln last night around 10 o'clock and I feel only sorrow for the people in the room below us because it had been a couple weeks since the kids had a good romp with daddy.