Yesterday, before I got into the shower, I did 20 push ups. I don't know why, exactly, I decided to do so. I guess I looked in the mirror and saw that my gut is smaller than it used to be and it really struck me that the loss of 27 lbs. this year is a substantial reduction in my weight. Ergo, doing push ups should be significantly easier than it would have been if I had tried it a year ago. It was fairly easy. I didn't feel any pain. I didn't get winded. I didn't feel like I put any undue strain on my cardiovascular system. It seemed like an okay thing to do. And intellectually, I know that it's better to get exercise than to not. I did not choose 20 because that's all I could manage. I didn't push myself to the limit. I just decided that 20 was what I would do, so I did 20. This morning, before I got into the shower, I did 21 push ups. It felt not unlike yesterday's exercise. Good for me. I'm not necessarily aiming to add one push up every day until...

We just got back home last night from another vacation, this one to Texas. This vacation was interrupted by a side trip I had to make to bury my cousin Mark, who decided that he needed to kill himself on Monday morning. It's hard to express all of the feelings this has drudged up. But I feel as if it's somehow my responsibility to try to say something appropriately solemn. I always thought of Mark as "Marco". I'm not really sure whether this is because I grew up hearing other people calling him Marco or not. As I've mentioned before, I'm cursed with a horrible memory. So I honestly can't say whether anyone else ever called him Marco, although in my mind's ear, I can pretty clearly hear it rolling off his father's tongue. I'm also not sure whether I ever called him "Marco" to his face or whether the nickname resided strictly in my head. What I can say is that in some sense I always felt closer to Mark than I ever felt to any other ...

Last week started very badly, with the news that my much beloved uncle, Elie, had succumbed to the cancer he had been fighting since late last year. The burial was on Monday, and so Beth and I drove down to Long Island to be there for that. It was nice seeing family (some of whom I hadn't seen in a couple of decades), although the circumstances for bringing us together were the saddest imaginable. I am very thankful that we now have a GPS device that gives us on-the-fly directions to where we're going. The trip was estimated at 4 1/2 hours. With the NYC-area traffic thrown in, it took us just 5 hours, which gave us plenty of time to get there early and have some lunch before heading to the cemetery. (This in contrast to a few years ago when we missed my grandfather's funeral because the mapquest directions we had printed were wholly inadequate and got us so very lost that we never did find the cemetery. On that occasion, we ended up heading home thoroughly disheartened just...