Thanksgiving Weekend

Well, Thanksgiving weekend is over, but we had a really nice time.  We did nothing on Thursday, but on Friday, Lisa and I went in to London while Adam and Meyer were at school.  We took a walking tour of the radical Jewish East End by author and tour-guide David Rosenberg.  Lisa's colleague from her fellowship, Arie Dubnov arranged it, and we went with him and his two kids and another fellow fellow, Michal.  David did an amazing job showing us the remnants of Jewish radical past in the East End, including the site of the first English-language Jewish daily newspaper, a hall that hosted Emma Goldman, among many others, the biggest synagogue of 1890s London (formerly a Hugenot church, currently a mosque), and the site of the terrible Yom Kippur riot of can't-remember-the-year (a riot between Jewish anarchists and Jewish non-anarchists, not between Jews and nonjews), which also happens to be the street that he lived on as a small Jewish child in the sixties.  We planned to have lunch at a nearby Ottolengi restaurant (Ottolenghi is the author of my favorite cookbook), but ran out of time.

The next day, Saturday, we were back in London, but this time with Adam and Meyer to see a play at the National Theatre.  The play is called The Red Barn, and it stars Hope Davis, who happens to be the wife of my childhood friend Jon Walker.  Adam and Meyer absolutely loved the play, which was fantastically staged and acted.  Then Hope was able to give us a short tour of the backstage area after the play.  The Theatre is amazing, and we got to see the vast backstage area, and the ways that complete sets (even for the next production) are all assembled on trucks that run along tracks to move in and out of the stage area. Again, we hoped to eat at Ottolenghi (dinner this time), but Adam left his phone on the train, and we had to race back after the play to recover it (which we did), after which we ate sandwiches from the station.

Finally, yesterday (Sunday) we had the equivalent of our Thanksgiving meal with our friends Steve and Sarah (and Posy and Lila), and some of their friends.  But instead of Turkey, we had a South Indian feast cooked by Sarah (who is an historian who studies South India).  But it had all of the essential elements of a Thanksgiving meal, which I have come to recognize as (1) a warm cosy room, (2) friends, (3) food, (4) drink, and (5) complaining loudly about Donald Trump.

Hurt My Back

Things have been thrown a little off kilter, but everything's back on track now.  Two weeks ago, I did something extremely painful to my back while reaching down to pick my pyjamas up off the floor.  I spent the next two days lying on the floor where I initially collapsed (nice bonus that it happened in my bedroom).  By the end of last week, I was up and walking gingerly around the house, and even going on short walks out of the house, but still couldn't sit in a chair for more than ten minutes or so.  This past week, I've been making really good progress, and am basically back to work.  I saw a physical therapist who has given me some new exercises and stretches, and I even went running yesterday.  And, I've been sitting at my desk working, so that's good too.  It's alarming to think my body is falling apart, but I guess the kinds of exercise and stretching one does just has to evolve over time, so I'm working on my new regime to take me through to my fifties. 

Adam and Meyer seem to be really happy at school, which is a huge relief.  Today was "no uniform" day (pay a pound to charity, wear your regular clothes for a day), so they got to wear their own clothes to school for the first time, which they seemed happy with, rather than choked with anxiety about, so that seemed like a good sign.  Adam is going on a day trip to France with his class next Friday.  They leave before dawn and return long after dark.  I'm not sure if he's quite as excited as I am about it, but he's pretty excited.  They're going to practice their French at a winter market buying stuff.  I do not envy the venders, even if the profits are high.

Obviously, the election was disappointing, and the general confusion about what a Trump presidency could possibly mean might be even more pronounced since we're not in the US.  But, I actually think it would probably be just as confusing, and maybe even more so, if such a thing is possible.

Tomorrow we're going on a tour of the Cotswolds with some of Lisa's colleagues from her program.  Adam and Meyer are not enthusiastic, but I'm looking forward to it a lot.

My Work Blog

It just occurred to me that readers of this blog might be interested in what I've been writing in my "professional" life.  I have been making occasional posts to a blog written by a group of tax professors.  If you haven't seen them already, here are links to all of them, listed in chronological order (most recent last):

introduction,
marijuana I,
marijuana II,
basic income I,
basic income II,
charities endorsing candidates I,
charities endorsing candidates II,
charities endorsing candidates III,
charities endorsing candidates IV.

They're supposed to be pitched at a general audience, so if you read them, let me know what you think (and whether I'm writing them clearly enough for an educated general reader to follow).

Vacation in Malmo/Copenhagen

Sorry for not posting for so long.  This week was half-term for Adam and Meyer, and Lisa had been invited to give a talk in Copenhagen (actually, Roskilde, outside of Copenhagen), so we turned it into a family trip.  But, more than a family trip, we turned it into a multi-family reunion.  My good friend from New Haven, Josh Murray, has been living in Malmo, Sweden, for over twenty years, and I've never visited him there.  It was easy to get another good friend from high school, Claude, to bring his family from where they're currently living (in Belgrade) so we could all visit each other together.   Claude has two daughters close in age to Josh's daughters, and they love each other.  We three families had vacationed together in Sicily two summers ago, and had a really nice time, so we repeated the experience.  Then, Josh convinced another friend from New Haven, Jon Walker, to come visit from London (where he's living with his family for the fall/winter), so all four New Haven friends could be together.  Josh, Claude and Jon were three-fifths of a musical group called "The Leftovers" in high school, and Josh signed them up to play a few songs at a singer-songwriter cafe in Copenhagen, so they had their first reunion show in 30ish years.  All the families came to the show, and it was really exciting to be out hearing music at night in Copenhagen.  Jon has been writing music and put out two albums in the last couple of years, so they played two of his songs, one by Claude, and one old Leftovers song that Claude and Jon had co-written.  

Here's a link to the video of the whole show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKoPmZ58HbI

 

The rest of the trip was also really fun, although more conventional.  We went to the Copenhagen zoo, an art museum, a Danish history museum, a design museum, a canal tour, and, of course, Tivoli Gardens, the famous urban amusement park in the middle of Copenhagen (we actually went several times).  I would post pictures, but the ones I took all look like this (!):

Some Meyer Updates

Meyer and I were back at the hospital last night for a scheduled MRI.  You may remember back when he was having double vision, his doctor wanted him to have an MRI to rule out the horrible possibilities.  Well, his vision is back to normal, but his doctor still wanted him to get the MRI, so we went to get it last night.  Meyer said it was "really loud" and that some of the noises made parts of his body feel weird or even hurt, but generally it was no big deal.  He's learning to play a David Bowie song with his new drum teacher, so we got to spend a lot of time talking about David Bowie (whose music was really important to me when I was just a little older than Meyer).  Afterwards, of course, we got cake.

The coffeeshop was closing up, so we made it in time to get the cake, but had to eat it out of styrofoam containers (yes, I got a piece too).  While we were at the hospital, Adam and Lisa went to a dinner party for Lisa's work, which was apparently also really fun (and probably had its own cake), but I wasn't there to take pictures so the whole experience will be entirely lost to history unless I can convince Adam or Lisa to write a blog post.

Today, Meyer and I went to get him a haircut. 

It looks really great, and the whole thing was a good experience.  The guy who cut Meyer's hair was really open to discussion about what Meyer had in mind, and we may actually go back in a week or so to make some modifications.  He cut off a LOT of hair. 

Rosh Hashana Dinner!

Lisa's parents are visiting, and we're having a really nice time.  Yesterday was Rosh Hashana, so we went to services at the Oxford Jewish Congregation, which is a very unusual and special community here in Oxford.  It is a single community representing multiple religious traditions within Judaism, and on Rosh Hashana they had both a "liberal" and an orthodox service.  Unsurprisingly, we went to the liberal service, which is approximately like a U.S. Reform service. We didn't require Adam and Meyer to skip school to come with us, and since they had missed some school last week because of being sick, they chose not to come to services.

But we had a nice Rosh Hashana dinner in the evening.  I made a brisket and finally used the apples growing in our backyard to make some homemade applesauce, which was really good and complemented the brisket perfectly.  Consistent with my (recent) tradition of failing to take any pictures of people and only taking pictures of things nobody cares about, here's some pictures of food:

L'shana Tova!

On Tuesday, I took a little solo trip to London to walk around and see two old friends from New Haven, Damon and Brigid (who are married to each other). 

First, I went to see the old neighborhood I lived in when I did a semester in London in 1989. I found the street without any problem, and it did look somewhat familiar.  It's a really cute neighborhood, with shops right at the corner.  I remembered buying groceries in a little market that didn't appear to be there anymore (replaced by a small chain grocery store), and fresh bread at a bakery that also wasn't there.  But there were loads of great little restaurants and shops nearby.

I couldn't remember the street number, so took a picture of a random house that looked like it could be the one.  I generally have a pretty powerful emotional response to walking around places that were important to me in a distant past, so I thought maybe I'd recognize the house, but I didn't.  It could have been this one.  Who knows.

It was great having drinks and dinner with Damon and Brigid.  Of course, because I'm not a big picture-taker, I didn't take a picture of them.  Just some random old houses and street signs.