Do not ship liquids, blood, or diagnostics in this packaging.

Thank you very much, FedEx Express through which we got an urgent letter Monday night stuck in our door! Though I only read that warning this morning after I ripped open the envelope and right beneath it is the almost-warning, “Reuse this envelope if it is in good condition.” Seriously, in a few years you would think that not recycling, whether you have the resources or not to do so, is going to be cause for social exile if not outright criminal. But here I really digress, even though it's unlikely Martha at her primary job as a courier for Trinity Health will ever have to send something in this type of envelope as she transports liquids and blood, but I don't think diagnostics … by the way, am I the only person who read that and thought of performing a level-one diagnostic in Engineering?

Yeah, I really don't want Geordi LaForge's job (STOP IT, YOU'RE DIGRESSING AGAIN!). So after I got home with Sarah and Jeffrey Monday night – remember, Martha works several nights a week at a local McDonald's as well – and we ate dinner, which on nights I don't want to cook or don't have something set out TO cook is a fend-for-yourself night, they were not happy about going to bed even though I know, the way parents intuit this stuff, that they're tired. After playing outside with some of the neighbors' kids, I called Sarah and Jeffrey in and Sarah, the seven year old who's going on seventeen, was especially not happy about it. Wouldn't even talk to me after bedtime prayers and Tuesday morning was an effort!

And you know another irony? Our niece (Sarah and Jeffrey's cousin) Breanna started a new job Tuesday and wants to work during the day in summer so when school starts for her this fall she will be able to stay awake in school and be awake afterward to work this job! I certainly can't fault her that, but the older we get we so appreciate naps more. Oh, if I'd only remember to write down more of what appears to me in my dreams, even if it's gibberish … anyway, I brought Sarah and Jeffrey to their grandma's house Tuesday and left for MY workday as their great-aunt Della arrived with Marilyn one of her patients for a day at the North Dakota State Fair and Josceline on the eve of her ninth birthday began to paint Sarah's nails while Jeffrey and a neighbor boy Carlos played ball of every sports type!

This morning I brought Sarah and Jeffrey to Grandma's house and no one else besides Sharon (Grandma), Josceline (HAPPY BIRTHDAY), and Breanna and her friend Kimi who'd stayed the night was there. Breanna and Kimi were both sleeping off work and yesterday's day five of the North Dakota State Fair, and Jeffrey wanted me – quite naturally, since no other kids were there – to play with him. And we did for a bit, it was fun (though he still won't fit into the basketball hoop in the backyard)! Last night after I'd picked them up Jeffrey treated his sister and I to dinner from McDonald's with the money he had, and I certainly didn't knock that! They helped me hand out invitations to the bingo and potluck we're having at our house Sunday to our neighbors too, and I look forward to meeting with them!

Even on the same street, we're out of the house so much that we hardly see or know each other … one wonders what the main character Tochtli's view is on that, who at the beginning on Juan Pablo Villalobos' debut novel Down The Rabbit Hole (ISBN 9780374143350) knows a total of sixteen people because he can't leave his house. Not a Hallmark movie, Tochtli's knowledge of the world is so vast (along with the house he lives in, he calls it a palace) and his experience is so limited because he's the eight or nine year old son of a drug dealer, quite a small drug dealer but very big for where he is in Central America. Besides his ever-growing collection of hats, Tochtli also has his own zoo, and the animal he wants most is a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia, and they get it in a roundabout way and a great story!

Take the red pill, David