Taking advantage of my aunt's Internet access for an exciting weekend post. Just spent a fun-filled Saturday night doing my taxes with my accounting-professor father. It was actually pretty painless, and I'm getting a little cash back too. Not as much as last year, but hey, what can you do. Who says "hey, what can you do"? Me, apparantly. :) Spending the evening with my grandmother probably had something to do with it -- pretty soon I'll be calling everyone "doll" and spouting off some good Yiddish phrases...

Driving her back to Philadelphia, my father and I got her and her oldest friend, who joined us in our reservation for 12 at dinner, talking about the Depression... I know it's naive to romanticize the past. And I know there was a lot of horrendous stuff (sexism, racism, etc.) that went along with those times. But there definitely is this part of me, despite everything, that wishes I lived in a time of coal furnaces and iceboxes, in a family with 8 kids (Abe, Samuel, Morris, Anna, Harry, Lillian, Jean and Sylvia, in Aunt Lil's case) who sat out on the stoop of their South Philly townhouse on sweltering summer nights and licked the icy cream off the top of frozen milkbottles on winter mornings. When I really think about it I know I'm glad I wasn't around then -- but every once in a while I would definitely trade in my cell phone for a game of stickball, you know?