Life update?

After getting a couple of gentle reminders that I have not been as diligent updating my blog in the recent past, I am going to endeavor to do a better job in the more recent future. Is it possible my life is actually busy enough that I don’t have time to talk about it? Probably not, maybe I am just lazier than I expected.

This past weekend was the start of Passover, a celebration of when the Jews left Egypt and began their first guilt trip experience of having to walk through the desert for 40 years. You don’t think that is a guilt trip opportunity? Imagine Jewish friend saying to non-Jewish friend, “My family had to walk for 40 years just to get to their home, what did yours do? Ride on a boat?” Ok maybe a bit of a stretch, but all the same you get the idea. As part of this holiday is to try to have a special family dinner called a Sedar (think of last supper), I attempted to fly to Tucson to be with my Dad’s sister’s family as well as my grandmother.

I have learned one small lesson on Friday night. San Jose is just not the airport to try and fly out of on a Friday night if you are flying stand-by. These are all little 50 person planes and you know the crazy thing, all 50 people actually show up? Go figure. I think I should stick with 200-300 person planes, the odds are better. But indeed by Saturday noon I made it down to the warm climate of Arizona. It was pleasantly warm, with torrential rain off and on all weekend. “This is the desert right?” My mother kept asking as we got soaking running from place to place. If the definition of a desert is that they get less than 10 inches of rain a year, well I think they got half of it this weekend.

But no matter as we did not fly down there for the weather, instead it was to spend time with family. My grandmother, although a little older these days (aren’t we all) can still pull out early memories of raising my father and his sister like they were yesterday. Now although I will not repeat most of the stories, there is just one that I love and have to share. My grandmother thought it would be wonderful for my father to be a dentist, not a doctor. Yes very unusual for a Jewish mother to not want her son to be a doctor, but she was worried he would have to make house calls in the middle of the night, a reasonable concern. So for his eight birthday she gave to him a skull with a do it yourself dentist kit allowing him to practice his oral surgery right from the comfort of his room. Mothers out there, this is NOT what we want at age eight. For that I excuse my father for so many of the things he did to my sister and I.

But overall a good weekend, always fun to catch up with family. It is tough when you only get to see them every six months or so, you try to pack everything in to just a couple of short days. The best is when they ask what is new, and you struggle, not for lack of things to say but there is so much, where do you start? But somehow we unloaded everything and I think we are caught up for the next six months. More updates as the week progresses.