Coming Up for Air

Sorry I've been so scarce.

After Thanksgiving we travelled including participation in a glorious 80th birthday party for my stepfather, the youngest octogenarian on planet Earth.

Life's been a whirl since then with scant time for blogging.

Monkeyboy had a violin recital. Nailed it.

He's part of a nine-voice children's chorus that will help celebrate Chanukah in a chapel at the Pentagon next week. Pretty cool opportunity to teach that, even when we disagree with what the politicians ask of the military, the profession of arms is a noble one, and worthy of respect.

He's got violin juries coming up too, but he's inherited my fearless disdain for tests and seems not to be fazed. He already rips through multiple-guess standardized tests as a matter of routine.

I'm overwhelmed at work.

Tutoring again this past Wednesday night was a G-dsend. The kids, and the teachers and principal too, are energizing folk.

RFB and I took Monkeyboy to an interfaith Thanksgiving service last week, in Old Town Alexandria, at a church dating back so far it was visited by both Revolutionary War and Civil War notables.

This Episcopal church's congregation and my shul's congregation have done this together for many years. In odd years we meet at the church and in even years at the synagogue. The visiting clergyman gives the sermon. It was quite moving.

I also was a witness to an exceedingly minor traffic collision where the guy who got bumped from the rear was my congressman, a few days ago. It was the other guy's fault. The congressman agreed, but there was no obvious damage to either car and the parties just decided to return to driving.

Any one of these things could have been a blog post.

Now they're just items in a catch-up-on-a-week-without-posting blog post.

That'll havta do.

OK, sorry, continue talking amongst yourselves.

As Linda Richman's son-in-law and imitator famously proclaimed:

I'm all verklemmpt.