I forgot to mention, when I was down in St. Thomas my dad and I went to Friday services at the synagogue down there. It's the oldest continuously operating synagogue in the Western hemisphere and it's a pretty amazing place. The Rabbi is your typical New England reformed Rabbi. He moved down a couple years ago from New Hampshire. His sermons are half jokes and half social justice and the service is in English as much as it is in Hebrew. It's an Ashkenazic synagogue rather than a Sephardic synagogue, which means its rooted in the Spanish and North African tradition rather than in the Eastern European tradition like most American synagogues. So, what does that mean? Well, not a whole lot, particularly because the congregation are mostly Sephardim. The layout of the room was a bit different. Rather than rows of seats facing the ark where the Torah is kept and the podium at which the rabbi stands, it had two sets of benches facing each other with the ark off to the East side of the room and the rabbi on a raised dias off to the West. They also keep sand on the floor, a tradition I am told that goes back to the time of the inquisition when the Spanish Jews would pray in their basements and used a layer of sand on the floor to muffle the sound. It was a pretty unique setting.

Edit:
Also, I don't know what this is trying to say, but it's kinda funny:

The last three weeks have been fun. I left on the 26th and spent two weeks down in St. Thomas. It was a hell of a good time. I got wicked sunburned snorkeling on my second day down there, so I was kind of incapacitated for a couple days after that, but other than that it was all gravy. I met Chainlink down there, my first ever real-life meet-up from the site, and we got to hang out for a few hours. I was drinking a cup of coffee, and about half an hour into the conversation what should have been a small chuckle turned into a complete eruption of coffee all over Chainlink and his banana bread. I tried to convince him this was just the island ritual of 'sharing our water,' but I'm not sure he believed it. Coffee eruptions aside, though, it was good to meet him.

I have a fairly good friend who's been living on St. John for the past year, and I got to meet up with her and her new boyfriend, too. That was fun. She's working as a teacher, and staying in what she calls her "shackteau," a really sweet little place with an amazing view. She's dating a stone-mason from Vermont who lives on his sailboat. $150 a year lets you moor up in the harbor, and you can get little wind turbines and reverse-osmosis desalinators that let you live more or less independently. She seemed really happy, and it's always nice to see people you really like doing really well for themselves.

I got back and finished up the memorandum of law I was working on before I left. I think I did a pretty good job wrecking the guy who took us to court, but we'll find out if the judge agrees with me next month.

Then I went to Vermont for the weekend. My dad asked me to watch his dog, Ginger, because he's off in Boston visiting his lady friend, so I took Ginger with me. She got to splash around in the White River a bunch, which she loved since she's part lab. The, on Saturday, we drove up to the Northeast Kingdom, where one of my oldest friends is working as a hand on Butterworks farm. It's a pretty awesome place. She's in grad school for natural resource management, and got interested in Butterworks because they are one of the very few dairies in northern New England that grow their own grain, and one of the even fewer organic farms to do so. They've also got a big old wind generator that makes all their power, and they process their milk into yogurt right there on site. It's one of the most successful farms in the Northeast Kingdom, and it's really something to behold. Ginger and I got to help out with evening chores. It's been a few years since I've been in a barn, and it felt pretty good to get my boots dirty again, so to speak.

I got a flat tire, so I drove home in torrential rain through a flash-flood danger zone on my doughnut. (Interesting. Doughnut is not recognized by my spell-check, but donut is.) Good times.

Anyway, life is good, and I hope you're all doing well. Thanks for the birthday wishes, by the way.

Hi folks. I'm heading down to St. Thomas tomorrow for a little working vacation, and hopefully I'll have a little time down there to spend here. I've been working for my dad, writing a sort of truncated brief trying to defend his security deposit policy. He deducts a routine cleaning fee, which I'm not entirely sure is legal, but so far I haven't been able to find any statutory prohibition in New York state. Anyway, life is good and it's good to be doing a little real-world legal work for a change. My best to you all, and I'll talk to you from the Islands!

Okay, new post. As I told Emotedcreations and Margot, the death I mentioned in the last post doesn't effect me so much personally, since I didn't know the guy all that well, but it offends my sense of justice, and I feel really bad for the guys family, who just got done dealing with one tragedy when another hit. Also, like I said, it makes me realize things aren't ever really as bad as they seem until they're really bad, and when that happens you're to busy dealing to do much thinking about just how bad things are. At least, that's been my experience.

All that aside, I'm doing really well personally. I've got a property final tomorrow and a crimlaw take-home due the next day, but I think I have a passable grasp on both subjects. I'm on probation after last semester, and I'll get the boot if I don't get a 2.0 or better, but I think I've done that well so far. At least, I know I'm a hell of a lot more prepared this time around. I took far fewer credits, and it's paying dividends sanity-wise.

This is my first real spring in a couple years. I spent last year in Oregon and the year before that was mostly indoors in the Rehab place in New Jersey with my lady, and I certainly wasn't paying much attention to the seasons. Spring has always been my favorite season. It's all about the euphoric joy of waking up one day after a long, cold, winter and realizing you can go outside without your jacket, and then you can leave your window open, and then you look out the window and there isn't any snow on the ground and the birds are back, the trees are budding, and there are birds singing. I tend to lock myself inside getting fat, lazy and miserable in the winter, and waking up to spring sort of makes it all feel worth while. Sort of a mild bipolar seasonal affective disorder that I'm totally okay with because a grumpy winter is worth a euphoric spring in my book.

The river rose up and flooded its banks, which is always fun to watch as long as your house is on the ridge above the flood plane, but now it has started to recede. Some hapless law students decided it was a good time to get their canoe out, not realizing the massive increase in volume of water meant a corresponding increase in speed. They had to bail out and got stuck on an island in the middle of the river. The sheriff had to rescue them, much to the amusement of the locals.

I'm working for my old man again this summer. It's kind of a drag, but I'm starting to think that getting into his business might be more fun and rewarding than being a lawyer.

My best to you all.

Also,



and I must have been sitting right behind whoever filmed this:

The Future Ms. Ascanius had a roommate when she was in rehab (of the physical therapy kind, not the drug kind) after the accident that left her a paraplegic. A truly lovely 40-something New Jersey Italian lady who suffered a high level spinal chord injury falling from a horse. We got to know this woman and her husband, Eddie, pretty well in the months we were there. I got an apartment near the place, so I was there all day every day, but Eddie lived about an hour away and worked in the City to boot. so he had plenty of driving to do, but he still came every night after work. This was a couple of years ago, and this lady has regained a lot of function. She can walk without braces and drive, even though she is a quadriplegic. Well, I found out today that Eddie just died due to a ruptured artery as a complication of leukemia. He's been sick for a couple of months. A couple of damned months. What can you really say to that? How can things go so wrong so quickly for one family, particularly such a truly good family? My reaction is not an emotional one, since I only knew Eddie in passing, but the cosmic injustice of it all sort of sticks in the craw. I've been called a pessimist, but pessimism is not without its up sides, so at a time like this let's just be glad that the things we suffer through, as bad as they are, could always be worse, and I'll be keeping Eddie and his wife and daughter in my heart.

I fell asleep with an adiobook version of Dune playing last night and I dreamed all morning of ambushing Harkonnen from a mountainside. It was pretty fantastic.

The summer after I graduated from college I traveled around a bit working a little and traveling a little. Well, friends, Arkansas was about the worst place I ever saw but I ran out of money and gas there and so I found a job working on a farm there. I worked for a few long, hard, hot days, but I didn't like the farmer, nor the farmers wife, nor the food, nor the work, nor none of his children, so I say, "mister, you can pay me off right now; I think it's time I traveled on."
"Well, if that's the way you feel about it, son."
"That's the way I feel about it."
So, I'll be damned if that farmer didn't hand me three mink skins. "Hell, brother, I don't want these. I want my money."
"This is what we use for currency here in Arkansas", he says.
So, I go to the local bar to spend some of my hard earned hides and I say to the bartender, "bartender, how about a pint of the darkest beer you've got."
After I finish my Rolling Rock I hand him one of these mink skins I've got. He takes it, blows the fur back, and opens up a chest he's got back there behind the bar, and damned if he doesn't hand me a raccoon hide, a rabit hide, and a couple of squirrel pelts for change.

I dated a red-headed girl for a couple of months in college. We didn't talk much. We didn't have a whole lot in common. Really just a love of red meat, horror movies and a vague mutual attraction. So, she'd come over, we'd grill up some steal, watch a movie and make out. It was fun for a while, but it certainly wasn't going anywhere, so I called it off.

My fiance eats like a bird and I lost my cast iron grill in a car accident. She won't watch horror movies; they give her nightmares. But she's flying out here on Friday and I couldn't be more excited.

Does anybody know where heijoshin went? Is he coming back any time soon?

In other news, I rented a cabin for next year starting mid August. It's gorgeous and I can't wait to live there. That stove is fully functional!