Shalom Y’All and Happy New Year, dear audience!  I’m writing to you from my blizzard-ridden home in Wilmington, Massachusetts, where we recently received a whopping twenty-four inches of snow, the highest snowfall in the entire state (except for a little town out in western Mass. called Savoy, where they received a total accumulation of thirty-four inches)!  I know that in a previous edition, I let it be known how much I love the snow and the cold, and that fact remains unchanged; I am in my glory here in our winter wonderland!  As a matter of fact, tomorrow my daughter Amber Rose and I will be taking our synagogue’s youth group to Nashoba Valley ski tubing park.  I’ve never actually gone tubing before, but I’m totally up for it, so long as there’s no skiing involved (I’d rather run into a burning building without a Scott airpak than than careen down a mountainside at top speed on a pair of skis!  Yikes!!!)  (I don’t think that I had mentioned before that last November we had taken the group to a paintball range, another first!) 
This week I’ll be visited by the family of a fire department friend who was born and raised here (he lived directly across the street and I used to babysit him and his siblings, actually) but has been living in Florida for the past twenty-something years.  He is so excited at the prospect of having his two little boys experience their first snow ever!

I believe that in my first newsletter I might have mentioned that I will be turning fifty years old this year (or if I didn’t, then I’m mentioning it now).  Yep, that’s right, folks the big 5-0!  The prospect of turning fifty might be daunting to some folks, but I’m happy as can be.  Why?  Because I’ve tried to live my life in such a way that I wouldn’t have many regrets in my old age about things that I did (or should have done).  I’m definitely not perfect, although I constantly strive to be, at least about intentionality and integrity of heart in my day-to-day doings.  It sounds very cliché, but I do try to love, forgive, and laugh at myself, not taking myself too seriously.  After all, life is short and unpredictable.

Talk about unpredictable!  My brother and his significant other in New York have been trying to adopt a child for five years now.  Finally, in early December, the agency with whom they have been working came up with a baby boy for them in Mobile, Alabama.  They had to wait for the child to be born, then they had to wait for the interstate adoption paperwork to go through, and while they were waiting to bring the baby home, another major snowstorm caused flights all across the country to be cancelled, so they had to wait even longer.  Then, at four o’clock in the morning on Christmas Day, they received a call from another adoption agency with whom they had been working that there was a baby girl available right there in upstate New York, so they actually were able to bring her home before the baby boy!  The babies were born on December 9th and 20th respectively.
But then two weeks into it, the birth mother changed her mind and wanted her daughter back, but thankfully they still have the boy, and as far as I’m aware, he’s a keeper!

Meanwhile, my eldest brother (I’m third out of four children) also surprised us with the news that he is now a homeowner!  That doesn’t sound very unusual, unless of course you knew my brother.  He’s always been somewhat of a drifter, although in recent years he kept to one job as an operator for the telephone company in New Hampshire, and he even managed to finish school while employed there.  Well, for the past twenty-five years he has been living in a tiny hole-in-the-wall apartment in Woburn, where it seemed as if he’d stay forever, and the next thing you know, he surprises us with photos of a house, complete with outbuildings and – get this – a swimming pool inside of the house!  Wow!
My youngest brother and his wife, who also live in New Hampshire, have two brilliant, talented and adorable little girls in second and fourth grades respectively.  They are always travelling somewhere and doing something interesting, be it participating in a fundraising race or a horse jumping or cheerleading or dance competition.  Next month they are going on a vacation to Costa Rica with various members of his wife’s family. Knowing them, they will most likely participate in various nature-related activities.

So now, I feel as though I in reaching my fiftieth year need to do something notable; however, I have no idea as yet as to what this might be!  Seeing as I literally have a zero budget, I will really have to be creative in thinking up what wonderful thing I might accomplish.  Perhaps it’ll be something that incorporates all of the loves of my life – music, poetry, song and playwriting, and let’s not forget about the fire department - and serendipitously turns them into something wonderful!  It’s funny how a new year brings new hope.  At the end of last year I admit I was feeling kind of low, but now I feel grateful that I have a clean slate ahead of me.  Perhaps I’ll finally lose the rest of that weight and become a triathlete (yeah, right!  But hey, it could happen.  Life’s unpredictable, remember?)  Hey, I’d just settle for getting my debts paid off (like that’s gonna happen anytime soon.  I definitely didn’t have the winning Megamillions ticket.)

Oh, that reminds me.  I want to recommend a wonderful book to you, entitled ‘Aftershock’, written by a Berkeley professor named Robert Reich.  This guy’s written a dozen books; this is the first one that I’ve read, and am I ever impressed!  Barely one-hundred fifty pages in length, this brilliant, but modestly-written little book is an unbelievable source of enlightenment about how our present economy evolved into what it is today, and why us middle-class folks are in the predicament that we find ourselves in.  I never read books on politics or economics – not my favorite subject matter; too dry and confusing for me - but I literally couldn’t put this one down; I actually read it twice and even took notes!  It was almost a spiritual experience for me.  Please give it a try; you’ll be so glad that you did.  If I can read and understand such things, so can you!

I’ll close by telling you that this year is a milestone birthday for my daughter also, who turns twenty-five this month.  She has been ‘hinting openly’ for the past three years that she wants a surprise party for her twenty-fifth birthday.  I started thinking about it seriously in November, but didn’t end up planning anything because as I mentioned earlier, my budget is zero!  But then a friend, my synagogue president, actually, got wind of my non-plan and offered her brother’s karate school building, complete with furniture, sound, and all of the paper goods I wanted.  She says that all I have to do is invite some people, ask them to bring a potluck dish, and I’ll have an instant party on my hands!  So that’s what I’m going with.  It’s so unlike me to be so spontaneous – I didn’t even have time to think to ask who’s bringing what – so it’ll be a surprise if everything works out!
Then – get this – the day after I get the party details all worked out and invite all the guests, my daughter tells me that the cast of American Chopper (motorcycle reality series that she loves) is coming to Massachusetts for a motorcycle exposition - when? – the day of her surprise party, of course!  So I had to invent a story that we were already invited to see our synagogue president’s daughter perform in a play that day, and that I had already accepted (they often do put on plays in the karate school’s ‘theatre’ and the last time that we had been invited to attend one there, we’d had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict.)
So we got into a big argument about why can’t we cancel our plans and go see her play another time, since the cast members never come up this way?  The play won out in the end on the basis of ‘letting your yes be yes’, but she let me know point-blank that she ‘doesn’t have to like it’!  We’ll have to see what happens!  Until then, stay cool (or warm, depending upon where you are or where you’re going).  Hopefully we won’t have a snowstorm the day of her party, but this is New England, so who knows!  Love, Stacele