Oregon, my Oregon

Moving around the US as much as my family did when I was young, it’s not easy to come up with an answer to the question, “Where are you from?”  On the one hand, I am tempted to answer “Boston,” since that’s where the Cap’n and I lived for many years before making aliyah.  But [...]

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Birthday blues

Summer is here, which means birthdays in the Crunch household: Banana’s at the start of Tammuz, Beans’s, Peach’s, and the Cap’n’s in Av.  Of course, summer birthdays often mean cramming classroom birthday parties into the last few weeks of school or gan.  Beans and Banana had theirs with cake, musical chairs, and brachot (birthday wishes) [...]

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Home again, home again, jiggedy jig

After a 19-hour taxi ride, a 6 hour wait in the Madrid airport, and a flight home on El Al, the Cap’n came home Monday night.  He took the kids to the local Yom HaAtzma’ut ceremony (and saw Beans dance), gave me a cool t-shirt from the official Beatles store on Baker Street, and we [...]

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Planes, trains, and automobiles

The Cap’n traveled to the UK on business last week, and as anyone who has taken a gander at the news for the past several days can surmise, he’s stuck there now. He missed Shabbat with us, having to make do with the hospitality of strangers in Golders Green.  And he’s due to miss Yom [...]

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Lessons from twenty years ago

I’ve been thinking these past few months about what I was doing 20 years ago.  Following my college graduation, I traveled for six months in Asia and Europe on my own, and saw wonders and learned things that I would never have seen or learned otherwise. I had dutifully ordered my life according to expectations: [...]

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