For the first time in my adult life I've had the distinct honour of voting for a presidential candidate in a primary who won! Senator Barack Obama carried the Democrats Abroad primary by better than 2-1 and I'm looking forward to voting for him and seeing him sworn in as a dramatic improvement on all that's gone before, for at least the past 48 years! Imagine that, 45 years old, never having missed a vote and now the country's finally catching up with my way of thinking! I guess it just took the right person to explain it.

I have four books in print and six coming out within the coming 24 months. I am not, as a lady who once accosted me in a suburb of Barcelona claimed, "fay-moose," but I'm pretty damn pleased with what I do and it's working out on all the most important levels. My modest literary accomplishments and immodest ambitions are somewhat reflected here

Theresa continues on a less ethereal (or maybe more) and speculative plane. She teaches at the Exeter Steiner School, where Myles attends and from whence Amelia has graduated. It's an incredible school, wonderful, every day full of passion and pathos and all those things that learning should be, but too often isn't.

Kasmira is now 19, beautiful, and almost always in a good mood. Hers is the embodiment of forgiveness and understanding to which the rest of us can only aspire. Yeah, she also cooks really great stuff (not as great as mom, yet, oooh that could be a problem some day) and brings it home for me (now at more than 150% of the mass that Theresa first discovered near the pool table at Dream Street, Ocean Beach, California, that magical day all those years ago). Kasmira will receiver her Catering degree from Exeter College in a few weeks.

Kasmira just won all kinds of Indiana Jones stuff off BBC2 radio; the full on promotional kit including t-shirts, stickers, hats, posters, a bullwhip, you get the idea-and the new game and PlayStation2! Theresa has successfully battled to keep video games out of the house for 19 years. I'm happy enough with that, but now assert "It's a sign!" Theresa has driven the demon from the living room but whether or not it remains in Kasmira's room-or is somehow traded in for clothing (her most recent acquisitions include a Led Zepplin t-shirt, a Rolling Stones t-shirt, and a New York Mets t-shirt, aaah, my girl) remains to be seen. Amelia's bound to get involved and then all bets are toward disruption, anyway.

Alexandra has established herself as "a legend" according to certain members of her school. She was chosen to emcee a school event and took the opportunity to attack nearly every single act along with school policies relating to...er, a lot of things, effectively everything that she could think of. The audience went wild, and she's been retained in the same capacity for the duration. It's a good school. Except for some of the policies that Alexandra's complaining about, whatever they were...something about not having free cookies for the actors was part of it.

The school just started trying to convince them to perform a variation of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" with the alternate lyrics "We all need an education..." She didn't even know whose song it was, but she knew that it was wrong. The ensuing debacle will no doubt be remembered by all. To the credit of West Ex, they took no disciplinary action.

Amelia attends the same school as Alexandra, and is enjoying baseball season. She's a good contact hitter, and way faster than I am (of course Theresa was a runner in high school, which explains that). Exeter is one of the few cities in England that has a Little League (no, that's not why we moved here), and last year Amelia won the first year MVP award over a bunch of disgruntled boys. Amelia plays piano on occasion, and is so successful in her brief forays that she occasinally wins awards for proficiency and apparently feels no need to practice at all. She does her homework, though, so that's pretty good (and not entirely representative of either generation living in the house). Like Alexandra, Amelia is a tremendous writer, though their styles are very different. Amelia is something of a natural surrealist.

She's also elected to miss this week's game and classes in order to attend the Glastonbury Music Festival. Jack White's playing, so we said that's fine.

Myles attends the Steiner school with Theresa, and is taking guitar lessons from a Polish master. We also snuck him into baseball this year even though he's not quite technically old enough. Thirty months short, or something. He's doing well and throws with a laser-like precision borne of his paternal genes, no doubt (did I ever tell you about the two times that I struck out 16 against Göppingen?)... Like Alexandra and Amelia, Myles is active in Woodcraft Folk, which is a really cool thing. It's everything that as a kid I hoped that the scouts would be, but weren't.

Collectively, our good children are The Newfins. It's a long story relating to a visit by the Queen of England to Newfoundland in a snowstorm. In any event, here are a few stories about Newfins.

Here's how the Newfins looked just a year or so ago (I'll try and round 'em up for a current one, but at Christmas they just made angry faces at me, and demanded cakes)::

I'm pleased to say-though I'm uncertain that the sentiment is always entirely unanimous-that our house is also inhabited by an entity that looks like this: 

Laural (named after graffiti in his birth town of Newton Abbot, "Laura L is a dog") is a fine companion, if an occasionally demanding one ("I want to go out again!" "I've only eaten ten times today!"), and his jaws represent the achievement of an evolutionary ideal. I can swing him around, I can fly him through the air, but I can't get him to let loose of the sock! It's an even dumber game to play with him than anyone else...

I sing him a song every morning, and he joins in for the chorus according to his mood. He's quiet for the improv section, though, out of respect for my art, no doubt. I'm not saying that he enjoys the improv section most, you understand-if anything he may find its wild unpredictability unsettling-just that he's quiet for it because he's still getting his belly scratched.

Peace and teleological agitation!

Clayton & Theresa

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