Weeeeee’re back!

Waiting

We’re back in Morris, Minnesota, sleeping in our own beds for the first time in 10 months!

We arrived late Tuesday after a long, but generally uneventful trip. (Well, uneventful if we ignore a bit of a rush transferring in Chicago that contributed to WeatherGirl leaving her iPods on the plane there. But still, generally uneventful.) Jess Larson was super generous and drove us and our sixty zillions Tons O’ Crap (TM) back to Morris, and for this we are incredibly grateful.

We were thrilled to find that the house was in wonderful shape, and are very grateful to Rebecca and Joe (our renters) for taking such good care of our home while we were away.

All the major utilities have been restored, including Internet and DirecTV, so the family is unlikely to revolt :-). Sub-Evil has been catching up with his friends as much as he can, but many are out of town so it’s a process that will dribble on for a while. Now we plow into the unpacking of suitcases and boxes (both the ones we left behind 10 months ago and the ones we shipped last week) and the restoration of the flotsam of our lives. (We defrosted and cleaned the chest freezer since it was nearly empty, and today I shoveled all the mature compost out of the composter so we could start filling it up again.)

It was a great year abroad, and it’s nice to be home again.

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And the all-important Stevens County results are in!

Pickles for a dollar
As far as I can tell, most of the major news outlets have yet to report the details of yesterday’s Democratic Caucus results from Stevens Country, MN. The county DFL chair Peter Wyckoff has, however, sent out the results, allowing me to fill that key gap. Arguably the best news of the evening is that there were 540 total votes, which is way up from 192 votes in 2004. Not being in Morris, I don’t have anything concrete to say about the reasons for this, but an increase in participation is almost certainly to the Good.

As far as those silly candidate like things go, Obama pretty much cleaned up in Stevens Country, mirroring his success in Minnesota in general:

Barack Obama 387 72%
Hillary Rodham Clinton 139 26%
John Edwards 8 1%
Dennis Kucinich 2 0%
Uncommitted 2 0%
Frank Lynch 1 0%
Joe Biden 1 0%
Chris Dodd 0 0%
Bill Richardson 0 0%

It’s hard for me to make a lot of immediate sense out of the results nationwide as they seem extremely scattered. One thing that I think is interesting, though, is that Clinton only carried more than 60% in one state (Arkansas – her previous home), while Obama carried 8 states with more than 60%, two of which were over 70% and one (Idaho) with a whopping 80%! OK, I realize that 80% of the handful of people in Idaho aren’t going to swing a national presidential election, but the fact that he carried so many states so strongly does seem to speak to larger questions of electability in November.

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