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Day One – Seek Balance

It’s Monday again, and I don’t mean that in any sort of dispirited fashion, it’s just that Mondays have become so typical in that they are the days that you race into work and plunge headlong into your projects and yet just minutes before you leapt out of the gate you were reticent to start the toil. My neighbor was walking her dog which started out with her dog running at a clip around one…

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Hobnobbing with the poor and disenfranchised

After a big walk through the park this morning with the dogs and Tin, we went to Parkway Bakery & Tavern for lunch to meet friends who wanted to see the open house on the bayou. The house turns out to be accurately described as a Gentilly house (a neighbor described it) with a new reduced price tag of $299K. It was $475K. But that’s another story, apparently the home owners paid around $300K for…

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Just Be It

On my block of the bayou I have fabulous neighbors, who have become great friends as well, but even down the block and on the court, and across the bayou there are more of the same. Last night, we walked over to a neighbor who has a tradition of holding a break – fast after Yom Kippur, and there we found once again the company of friends. The table was filled with delicious food and…

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I love my wife

Everyone needs a wife – this has been my motto for a long time since for many many many years I have been a wife and I could see how you would benefit from having one in your life. Today, T was my wife, having shopped and prepared the meal to break my fast – Afghanistan lamb with noodles and Turkish green beans – can I get a big AMEN.

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Ideal Cities (read: New Orleans)

Ideal Cities Ideal cities are cities where the neighbors play soul music all night long & don’t care who they bother because who doesn’t like Holy Ghost or Loose Booty? Ideal cities have at least one drunk lady outside the liquor store mornings, who asks you to hold her cigarette so she can lean in to touch your baby. In ideal cities, the pharmacist knows your prescriptions by heart. In ideal cities your neighbor sells…

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Updating that old time religion

There is an article in the New York Times about a new modern version of the High Holy Day prayer book for Conservative Jews. In this new version, they are attempting to be all inclusive, not a traditional Jewish way of going about things. In this new version, in the Yizkor service (for the deceased) they have a prayer for a deceased partner, and they also have a prayer for parents who were hurtful –…

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Good Yom Tov Irene

Even though it is probably odd to say Yom Tov (good day) to someone on Yom Kippur, a somber occasion, in the United States, a lot of people say Good Yom Tov, even more weird. But even weirder still, a friend was listening to the shofar link that I posted and said while she was listening, Pete Seeger began singing Good Night Irene in the background on her iTunes and she said, “it actually worked,”…

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Yom Tov Y’all

I got this off of Wikipedia: Yom Kippur, also known as the Day of Atonement, is one of the holiest days of the year for Jews. Its central themes are atonement and repentance. Jews traditionally observe this holy day with a 25-hour period of fasting and intensive prayer, often spending most of the day in synagogue services. Yom Kippur completes the annual period known in Judaism as the High Holy Days (or sometimes “the Days of Awe”)… According to Jewish tradition, God inscribes each…

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St Peter don’t you call me

A friend called and said her widowed father is getting married – what the hell, he has such a short time left on this earth – go for it. It’s been months since his wife died. Similarly, another friend is lamenting that after two years her father wants to remarry, she said her mother is not even cold yet (two years?). Another friend tells me her husband will have a date for her funeral. I…

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