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This morning our own Sarah and Jeffrey and their cousin Josceline who spent the night at our house went with Martha to deliver the papers on our Minot Daily News route. Martha says it took thirty-nine minutes, and the reason she traded days with me (I was supposed to deliver on Wednesdays) is that Sarah wanted to help deliver a paper without inserts, and I was texted yesterday there would be one in tomorrow's edition. So bright boy here gets to rise at four in the morning, but I'm tough.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JEFFREY! Of course I wouldn't forget that my son's birthday is today, what kind of parent do you think I am? The one whose kids seem to not want to go with him when he delivers the papers, but that's another story … but after homemade burritos for dinner last night (a friend of mine making major lifestyle changes regarding her food intake in Florida asked me to snap a picture of it and send it to her, and she was super-excited to see it!) I was outside dribbling the basketball with the kids.

Sarah and Jeffrey are getting to be awesome board game players. Sunday night Jeffrey and I teamed up against Martha and Sarah to play Scattergories and some of the answers we came up with (you roll a die and whatever letter comes up you have to come up with as many items on a list within three minutes) were awesomely funny at best and twisted at worst. I especially recall when one of us rolled “w” and for the weapons category Jeffrey came up with “wives” … girls, he'll be hard to catch!

He doesn't quite run at warp speed now, but still … usually it only takes me a day or two to read a Star Trek novel, but David R. George III's One Constant Star (ISBN 9781476750217) was hard to plow through at first. This adventure of the Enterprise-B (the ship you see at the beginning of Star Trek: Generations) dealing with their captain and crew's loss and retrieval over a seemingly dead planet … you know, it reminded me of the penultimate Star Trek show from the sixties, “All Our Yesterdays”.

The population of a planet escaped their homeworld's imminent destruction by traveling into their world's past. Not tried – as far as the episode goes – to alter their world's fate, but just keeping somewhere they thought would be safe. But the past isn't safe. The past isn't easier. We may paint it that way, but mom and dad when they were our age did NOT have it any easier – people and the world of the past had their own brutality, cruelty, and hunger for power. So we have to be careful all the time.

Now. Which brings up Ann Brashares' novel The Here And Now (ISBN 9780385736800) where seventeen-year-old Prenna James tells her story of her and many families coming from an end-of-the-century future where mosquitoes bore a disease that killed most people there. I don't remember the details of how they came back to our present-day New York, but I do remember they had rules to interact with people here as little as possible while trying to find a cure. Then Prenna falls in love …

And I will finish today's seventh paragraph with an answer … you probably haven't been DYING to know, but it occurs to me after having gotten a guided tour of Martha's new workplace at Trinity before work that I've been numbering all my blog entries since May 13 (starting with #50) and I almost forgot why! Well, my goal was to finish the novel “Victory” that I've had sitting on my computer for years by Jeffrey's birthday. And while I've gotten further than I would have without that goal,

 

 

 

I've not quite made it. But I can start again today, David