Hi, Jeffrey's Dad!

And that comment from Jeffrey's former classmate Jasper when I was just leaving Minot Public Library (Jasper's mom homeschools him and his sister Eleanor now and they were at some in-library program this morning) shot to the top of the list of titles today! And how are you today? It actually was -- I don't like the word busy for you can be busy and not really do anything -- an exciting weekend in our household and I'm learning to keep listening through all the changes.

Our first major change -- ok, this list is in no particular order, I'm just writing off the cuff today -- is that we no longer have the paper route we were substituting on! No, we just have the regular, forty-five minute one over by the soccer field; Martha and I talked about it and even with our alternating routes (she'd drive one paper route, I'd drive the other) the sleep we got was negligible ... we were falling asleep as the kids were weeknights. Now we'll alternate days with just one route.

Yesterday in church besides Sunday school the kindergarteners and 3rd graders got to come up with their parents and receive Bibles of their own! Martha and I got to go up with Sarah and Pastor Janet presented the SPARK Bible to me to present to her, though Martha joined me at the end. After worship everybody had different places to go; Sarah and Jeffrey went to their Sunday school classes, Martha had handbell practice (and this Friday has her first Chamber Chorale concert), and I

got to sit downstairs with Martha's parents and sister Margaret where Pastor Janet made a slide presentation of her July sabbatical which was a trip to Germany followed by a family vacation (she's married with three teenage kids; ok, Krista the oldest is a young adult now) through there Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Quite a sight -- just so you know, people born and raised in North Dakota often have family from or roots in Germany and Norway; there's a lot of connections and a lot of history.

And of the 309 slides she'd trimmed her presentation down to from the 2000 plus shots she'd taken, all of us got to see and learn a few things about traveling through Europe. Among other things, there are practically no borders so you can cross countries in most places without a passport, that it's a good idea to ride bikes versus drive cars in most areas, it's cheaper to eat at bakeries as opposed to restaurants, and renting hostel space from families is easier than staying in hotels.

I especially liked something I saw in a Norwegian church that had originally been built in the eleventh century (the entrance was built in 1723!); it's a raised platform with seating in the back of the church and its name translates as "the wife's cage". It's where the pastor's wife sat with their children and whenever parishioners chose to they could look back there and see whether or not the pastor's children were behaving or their mom had to ride herd on them.

In the last words of Marco Polo, I have not told half of what I saw. And over the last few weeks, when I have really needed to work on the play regarding Jesus' temptation and my novel "Victory" (the quotation marks are not dropped until it's done), I had spent my lunchtimes and non work-times catching up on books I'd read decades ago. Today for review I'll go with the biggest gap between when I last read the work and now; twenty-seven years, with David Brin's The Uplift War.

How narrow the Golden Age looked in retrospect. No more than a century had intervened between the end of the Darkness and contact with Galactic society. For not quite a hundred years, war was unknown to Earth.

Anyway, the author's fictional universe has twenty-fifth century human beings (known as Earthclan to the Galactics, a plethora of civilizations spanning five galaxies who have been "uplifted" themselves and "uplift" other species to intelligence and starfaring status, after a 100,000 year indentured servitude to the uplifters) already spanning the galaxies -- grudgingly, to many beings. Humanity's uplifted chimpanzees and dolphins themselves, apparently before Contact.

... No, he corrected himself. Not all [the Galactics are] monsters. In fact, the majority of Galactic clans were quite decent folk. But moderate majorities were seldom allowed to live in peace by fanatics, either in Earth's past or in the Five Galaxies today.

This story picks up concurrently with another of Brin's novels, Startide Rising that he is better known for, on a planet humans and uplifted chimpanzees were presented to maintain and preserve its ecosystem. But then it's invaded by the bipedal avian race Gubru, one of those races that looks down at humanity with no apparent patron ("wolflings" to the Galactics) and it's up to one human, one Tymbrimi (a race friendly to humanity with a penchant for practical jokes), and the chimps.

Perhaps golden ages simply aren't meant to last, David