Happy News for a Happy New Year

You may have noticed that it's been quiet around this blog lately. Too quiet. The kind of uncomfortable quiet that you find when there is something going down, but nobody's talking about it.

Well I'll let you in on a little secret my friends. There is something going down. It's not so big now, but it's going to get bigger and bigger until it takes on a life of its own!

That's right. Michelle is pregnant :)

HELP!!!!

So I must admit that I was a little surprised when I just saw that Michelle had posted to the blog a little while ago. For some reason I had it in my head that we were "taking a break" from the blog for a while.

Anyways, now that I've given you my incredibly lame excuse for not blogging let's turn our attention to the matter at hand. Simply put, I need your help.

I play around with business ideas all of the time and I think I stumbled into one with a lot of potential. I call it RecVault.com and in a nutshell, it is an online service that allows users to securely upload and store all of their recommendations, letters of reference and resumes. The "special sauce" of the site is that it will verify that the letters of recommendation and references are legitimate.

I entered the idea in a business contest online hosted at Ideablob. I need everybody to vote for my idea at http://ideablob.com/ideas/3780-RecVault-com-Store-Manage-Al

Tell your friends. Tell your parents. Tell your neighbors. Tell that guy sitting across the room from you giving you funny looks! Then tell him to get lost (but only after he voted).

I need as many votes as I can get by Friday night so that I can make it into the finals for a chance to win $10K.

Thanks in advance for your support!

Local Politics

I went to an event at Hebrew College last night, the first in a discussion series called "Jewish & American: Confronting the 21st Century." The event was entitled "Red, Blue and Jewish: Changing the Way We Talk About Politics," and it featured Steve Grossman and Jeff Jacoby in conversation. I love Jeff Jacoby's columns in the Globe -- he's a Midwestern transplant to Boston, politically conservative and Jewishly educated and committed, like me. Last night only increased my good opinion of him.

Of course, as often happens at these events, most of the questions from the audience consisted of mini-political diatribes thinly disguised as questions. Most of them had to do with Israel and the Middle East, and all but one came from middle-aged men. The one that wasn't asked by a middle-aged man was asked by yours truly -- I decided to represent my gender and age group (and place of employment) by taking the microphone towards the end of the evening.

I said that I work at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, and that our research consistently shows the strong, positive impact of Jewish day school education on future Jewish identity. How would the two candidates' positions on the economy and taxes, as well as education, impact our community's ability to educate our youth?

The question went over very well, as it tied together Jewish concerns and political positions, not to mention eliciting responses that showed real differences between the candidates. Afterward, I went to introduce myself to Jeff Jacoby. He was happy to meet another Midwesterner and hear a little bit about Milwaukee's voucher program, and he said that we should have a whole evening devoted to audience questions like mine! I totally agree. Bring it on!

Feminist Woes

In my office, everyone is on a first-name basis. So it wasn't until last Friday, when I was inserting a brief bio into a proposal for a new project, that I was hit with the title conundrum. While the other two bios in the proposal used "Dr. This" and "Professor That," I don't have a PhD. The default for me would be "Ms. Shain," as per the current position of the Emily Post Institute on the form of address to women in the business world:

Ms. is the default form of address, unless you know positively that a woman wishes to be addressed as Mrs.

Incidentally, this is a far cry from Chapter X ("Cards and Visits") of Emily Post's 1922 book Etiquette, in which she laments the necessity of any derivation from the Mrs. His Name format:

She is Mrs. John Hunter Titherington Smith, or, to compromise, Mrs. J. H. Titherington Smith, but she is never Mrs. Sarah Smith; at least not anywhere in good society. In business and in legal matters a woman is necessarily addressed by her own Christian name, because she uses it in her signature. But no one should ever address an envelope, except from a bank or a lawyer’s office, “Mrs. Sarah Smith.”

But I digress.

I very much prefer Mrs. Shain, because the use of Ms. as the default form of address for a woman was, if not invented, certainly pushed into the mainstream by the feminist movement. And I reject the label "feminist," because -- and I say this with all due respect to the very real accomplishments of the first- and second-wave feminist movements -- the (third-wave) feminists of my generation spend most of their time promoting a post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality, which I utterly reject, and advocating for issues more and more marginal to modern women's lives.

So, as part of my rejection of this trend and affirmation of gender, marriage and other tools of the Patriarchy*, when the time came to refer to myself in the third person in this proposal, I...boldly typed in Mrs. Shain, you ask? Nope. I avoided the issue and used my first name, which was eventually replaced with pronouns in the final draft.

Oh, well. At least it didn't read "Ms. Shain."

*This is a joke.

Workin' for a Living

It's been almost four weeks since I started my new job at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at my alma mater, Brandeis University.

One of the books that I read with my Jerusalem book club shortly before I left was this book by a Harvard professor (an Israeli, actually) called Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. One of the main points in the book was that, in order to be happy, we should find work that is both enjoyable and meaningful to us. The Cohen Center makes a meaningful contribution to world Jewry, and the day-by-day, hour-by-hour work is fun and challenging for me. So I guess I'm on my way to daily joy and lasting fulfillment, right?

Check me out on the Cohen Center website!

Last Vacation Post

I was waiting for Adam to post about the rest of our vacation, but he's been very busy lately, so I guess it's up to me.

After the Laura Ingalls Wilder fun, we went to the Badlands, which Adam really liked (that's him on that rock formation):

Mount Rushmore:

Custer State Park, where we saw bison:

Wind Cave, where we did the "Natural Entrance Cave Tour," walking through the middle level and seeing the boxwork (a rare cave formation):

And, finally, the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. The Corn Palace tradition started in 1892, when early settlers displayed the fruits of their harvest on the building exterior in order to prove the fertility of South Dakota soil. Today, it's basically just a sports arena.

After finishing our trip out West, we spent a week with my Dad and family in Wisconsin. For some reason, we didn't take any pictures, but we did finally get a chance to relax and unwind at the cabin in Northern Wisconsin. And we learned to play ladder ball. That game rocks!

On the Prarie

After returning from Florida, Adam and I spent a few days in Boston before turning around and heading to Minneapolis, where my mom and step-dad picked us up for a road trip to Mount Rushmore. On the way there, we also had the opportunity to stop at many of the places featured in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. This was more fun for the women than for the men, but Adam and Richard were good sports. Here we are at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Walnut Grove, Minnesota:

The next day, we toured the Ingalls' homestead in De Smet, South Dakota, which was beautiful:


There were homesteading activities, like pumping water:

Making rope:

And "sewing" on Ma Ingalls' sewing machine (replica):

There were also sites in town: the surveyors' house from By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Long Winter, and the house that Pa Ingalls built. We saw those, too. Fun on the prarie!

The Happiest Place on Earth

After the cruise, Adam, Adam's sister Melanie, Melanie's fiance Adam Login (henceforth to be known on this blog as Login) and I rented a car and drove to Orlando for a four-day Disney vacation. I had thought this would be a cheap add-on to the cruise vacation, which it wasn't (Disney is expensive!), and a good opportunity to hang out with my sister-in-law and soon-to-be-brother-in-law, which it was.

I had never been to Disney World (although I went to Disney Land once in seventh grade), and I expected to love it. I'm a total sucker for fairy tales, happy endings and classic Americana. To my surprise, though, I felt lukewarm about Disney World. I loved the nostalgia element, but I wish there had been more there for adults, like Six Flags-type rides and behind-the-scenes looks at the history of Disney. I also found the endless cheer and cleanliness kind of creepy, in a Stepford Wives sort of way.

Anyway, here we are in front of Cinderella's Castle at the Magic Kingdom:

And I took this great picture as we were spinning (very quickly!) in a teacup at the Mad Tea Party:

Coming soon: our road trip through Minnesota and South Dakota!

Family Family Family!

One of the things that we most missed in Israel was family, so it was wonderful to have the chance to spend some time with my Nana, parents, siblings, aunt, uncle, and cousins on the cruise. All in all 17 of us gathered to celebrate Nana’s 90^th birthday. Together we romped around the ship, roasted by the pool, gambled in the casino and walked around Key West. The cruise also gave Michelle a chance to meet some of my extended family in a less formal setting.

One of the most meaningful moments of the cruise took place during our first dinner when the grandchildren presented Nana with a quilt composed of our profiles and handwritten letters. The quilt was made by my cousin Aliza using meaningful pieces of fabric and by printing the letters onto cloth.

(Aliza is an aspiring artist who received her MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and who has served as an adjunct professor at George Washington University. Check out her website at www.alizalelah.com)

Other notable experiences included finding an Israeli-run Kosher restaurant in Key West (which helped alleviate Michelle’s home-sickness for Israel) and my future brother in law winning the ship’s blackjack tournament.

All in all we had a great time on the cruise and were able to celebrate a tremendous occasion with family. Just like my Nana wanted.

The First Few Days

It's been just over two weeks since we arrived in the United States, but tonight has been my first opportunity to blog. Things have been crazy and emotionally intense. In my next few posts, I'll try to re-cap the adventures of the past two weeks.

Here is the last picture we took before boarding the plane at Ben Gurion Airport (I'm on the far right):


Sadly, my kosher McDonald's-inspired smile didn't last very long. I was asleep when the plane took off in Tel Aviv, but I cried all through the landing in Boston, and when we walked out of the airport, and many more times in the ensuing days, most recently on Shabbat morning when Adam's family's synagogue sang Hatikvah during morning services. I hadn't expected to feel so homesick so soon, and it's tough, but I'm trying to focus on enjoying my friends and family.

Luckily, I've had plenty of opportunities to enjoy them. We arrived in Boston two weeks ago (on a Tuesday) and flew to Florida the next day. We were supposed to land in Palm Beach at 9:30pm and get a good night's sleep at Adam's Nana's house in West Palm Beach before driving to Miami the next morning for the family cruise to the Western Caribbean. Unfortunately, our flight was delayed by bad weather, and we didn't make it to Nana's until after 4:00am the next day. My specially-prepared kosher meals were supposed to arrive at the dock a few hours later, at 10:30am, but they were delayed by the same bad weather and didn't show up until 4:30pm -- and that only because of our many frantic phone calls to FedEx.

The picture below was taken just after the meals finally arrived, as the ship was leaving Miami. Things got much better after this point!