Listen, I know it has been quiet here lately, but I have started building something that I have been planning to build for two years now. It isn’t ready to share with you yet, but I’m very excited to say that I think it will be soon, hopefully some time in my (now rapidly approaching) birthday month. I will need a lot of inspiration and perspiration to continue its construction, though, so wish me luck. And thank you, so much, for the sweet support I know you will give me when the time comes (because you guys rock).

I am also terribly pleased because I visited the Field Museum today and received the most marvelous possible tour of the Bird Division’s specimen preparation room. I do not think I need to tell you how incredibly cool it was to be invited into the room where tiny black beetles eat the flesh off various small-to-medium sized carcasses.

Wait, do I?

P.S. Ross and I are going to get our drivers’ licenses converted tomorrow and—since we have to take a written test—we have just spent two eyeball-drying hours studying the astonishingly badly written Illinois state drivers’ manual. I leave this process with so many questions. To wit: Why, DMV writers, do you include six impressively redundant diagrams and two pages of bulleted lists to illustrate the many ways in which it is right and proper to turn from one lane into another, and then go and toss around the snazzy term “hydroplaning” without explanation? Why is it that after three pages of photographs and text, I am still not clear on whether you are or aren’t required to stop when coming upon a school bus unloading children (like screaming offerings unto the world) in a roadway with four or more lanes? And finally, do you think it would be possible for me to meet and shake the hand of the singularly brilliant individual who came up with the term “aggravated fleeing”?

That is all. Luck, my friends.