Kol Emet, Palo Alto, then a drive through the Cupertino park lands and lunch at a restaurant in Cupertino Village: onion pancake, cucumbers with chili sauce, cold wheat gluten and black mushrooms, fried scallion dumplings, Chinese ginger candies for dessert.
This is the first year we didn't do a big family and friends dinner for the holiday.
It was a nice change...made me think more about the meaning of the holiday.

Last year at this time, we were in New Jersey. We'd moved back there perhaps a month before, in August, and we'd had to renovate and do significant work on the new house. I was commuting to Dulles 3X a week, staying over 1-2 nights. No one in the family was happy to be back in New York after California, although I was very psyched about the projects I was doing for AOL.
We had no idea at that point that we'd be back in California less than a year later.

When they write me in the book of life for this past year, it should say " She handled change well."