In this picture my sister is standing up on something and pretending she’s taller than Mom. She’s actually short like me. They visited to bring my car from Minnesota and see family, and also do fun trip things like drinking coffee and getting new books and snacks. They will be departing by train late tonight.

That’s not really my car, but it’s the one I’ve always driven at home and also last summer in Indianapolis. They named it Carly on the drive over, which seems rather uninspired considering they had all of North Dakota and eastern Montana to think about it. However, christening our van back home RuthAnn* is brilliantly appropriate.

*I had to ask them how they would spell it, and that’s what they decided after talking it out a bit. Though they said they hate capitalized letters in the middle of names and would never do that if it wasn’t just a van. As my mom said, “Whenever we take her into the auto shop they’re going to say ‘How do you spell that again?’”