WE CAME, WE SAW, WE CAUCUSED

We came, we saw, we caucused.
Today was the Colorado caucus and Dave and I showed up at our local high school to participate. We had never caucused before. Being from Arizona we just voted in the past. It was 12 degrees outside and icy when we arrived. The high school was packed with people - different precincts in different classrooms. There were 60 to 70 people in our classroom plus lots of children. I knew a good number of the folks in the room from church. We voted on pieces of paper for whom we wanted for President. Two gals volunteered to tally the votes and that was that. Romney swept our room with 44 votes, McCain 12 votes, Huckabee fewer votes, and Paul 4 votes. A man came around to each precinct classroom and collected the vote information and phoned it in to a central location. It appears that Romney swept Douglas County entirely.
After the vote, they signed-up volunteers from our precinct for county delegates and for election judges. I volunteered to be an alternate county delegate for my precinct. This means that on March 1, I will show up at the high school and if one of the delegates does not show up I will get to vote for county level stuff.

A Crookston relative lost

We got a couple phone calls from the Associated Press inquiring if we were the family of Duncan Crookston before we decided to look him up on the internet. I also looked him up on the Crookston copy of PAF and it turned out that he was Dave’s third cousin. He had lived in Denver all along - kind of a small world. We googled Duncan’s name daily to learn more and more about this Crookston cousin. We learned about Duncan’s injury in Iraq from a road side bomb that killed three other soldiers and his five month fight for life. Dave and I were both greatly moved by his story. What a brave young man he was to join the military in a time of war. Duncan was the first person I feel like I have some connection with who has died for our country in Iraq. There are many blogs that were on the internet to keep everyone current on Duncan’s status after the injury. He was days away from his 20th birthday when he passed away leaving a wife and a family of Crookstons. Duncan's great-grandfather was the brother of Carlton Crookston, Dave’s great-grandfather. We had wanted to go to the funeral service at the LDS church in Denver but Dave couldn’t leave work and I was afraid to go alone. This all brought home to me the realness of this war. I get so caught up in my life that I forget that there are young men and women fighting for my right to get caught up in my life.