For those of you wondering why it’s been so quiet on the TikkunGer blog it’s because a lot has been going on in my neck of the woods.

First there was the high holidays and then there was getting married (yup we got married) and then there’s the fact that I’ve been putting a lot of time and energy to a new group blog project entitled Jewsbychoice.org

I meant to blog about the high holidays and getting married but to be honest both events had me too tired to string together anything coherent and so it just never happened.

As for JewsByChoice.Org most of my recent available blogging time and energy has gone into kick starting that baby.  We only launched the first week of October and it’s still early in the game but we’re already generating great posts and conversation.  If you like the type of Jewish blogging I’ve been here, I highly recommend checking out this new blog. Also if you wouldn’t mind adding us to your blog roll would be happy to reciprocate, just let us know via e-mail. Lastly if you’re in the mood to do a mitzvah (which some readers already have) please consider doing a quick post on your own blog letting your own readers, know all about our new project.

The new blog does mean that I’m going to be Jewing things down here a little bit but only because I will be Jewing things up over at Jewsbychoice.org

Posting here will probably be light for the next couple of months but TikkunGer.com is far from dead and in fact I’m hoping to do some remodeling here in January.  You know freshen up the little bit as well as change the focus of content to better reflect my many varied interests. You know stuff like spirituality, politics, green issues, movies, books and whatever else strikes my fancy at any given moment in time.

Anyhow, that’s about it for now.

Oh and again please do consider updating your blogroll, feed subscriptions and bookmarks to include Jewsbychoice.org.

Be well

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Last week Tamara and I found ourselves taking a last-minute trip up to Washington State. We had to take care of some family business so I wouldn’t call it a real vacation but we did manage to squeeze in an extremely fun day trip to Seattle. I’m not going to go into great detail with this post because Tamara’s already beaten me to the punch and I might add done a great job. However I will say that being in Washington felt a lot like home and made me realize a couple of things. One is that what passes for green here in Southern California really is brown and it would seem, that the further north one goes, the deeper blue the sky becomes. Secondly, I truly miss clouds and the rain and I mean truly miss clouds and rain!

But seriously all things considered I think we had an excellent trip especially our time in Seattle, which was fun and surprisingly inexpensive. I think that keeping kosher actually really helped keep the cost down because we avoided restaurants opting instead to pack and carry our own kosher food. I suppose that what we did might be called urban picnicking and it was a blast. By the way Pepper Tofurky is freaking awesome!

Anyhow we were staying a little over an hour outside of Seattle and instead of driving into Seattle we decided to park the car and take a ferry. I think it was a smart move because both of us to really enjoyed the ride and we managed to snap some excellent pictures. There were a flock of seagulls that followed us all the way to Seattle. On the way back they were with us again and this time people were feeding them, which was a pretty amazing thing to watch. The birds spent more time gliding than flying and literally seemed to float over to people’s hands, where they elegantly plucked food from fingers and then just floated away.

If you’re interested in seeing more pictures from this trip you can do so by clicking here.

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I just wanted to throw together a quick video syncing everyone who took the time out of their busy day to wish me a happy birthday.

Thanks so very much for adding to the specialness of this day.

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I saw my father last Friday for the first time in a few weeks and it was a good visit. We went and saw that new movie (sorry I can’t remember what it was called) about the American spy who was caught in the 90s. An interesting film but apparently not interesting enough to remember its title.

Anyhow on to the point…

My father said two interesting things to me which fall under the broad category of parental feedback. The first was that I look like a rabbi these days according to him. I should note that my father is more or less an irreligious (at least institutionally) person, who has a pronounced dislike for the Catholic Church and organized religion in general. So it’s hard to tell exactly what he meant with his comment, but it made me happy nonetheless. I suppose because I take it as a sign of me coming into my own, which in my opinion is a very good thing.

The other feedback I received was regarding a recent completed school paper which I shared with him. He told me that he’d read it twice and thought it was excellent, however a lot of it he didn’t understand. Not in terms of the paper being deficient but rather that my father was unfamiliar with the topic covered. I was surprised to hear this from him for a couple of reasons. The first being that because although I feel that it’s a good paper I didn’t think it was all that advanced in terms of the topic and content. Without getting into details it was related to the role of ideology and the development of public policy. And so my second surprise is rooted in the fact that my father was a civil servant his entire career and did a lot of work around policy, so I was extremely surprised that he had a hard time with some of the material. Anyhow I took this is yet another sign of me coming into my own, which is something that feels nice.

PS: the site is still in somewhat of a state of disarray and if you were on my blog roll and are no longer on but would like to be, please just let me know.

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