Well, Happy (quasi belated) New Year. I went back to West Hartford for a few days (Man, I'm doing a fair amount of driving lately) to celebrate Rosh Hashanah with my family. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year. It's typically a happy holiday (in stark contrast to the high holiday coming up, Yom Kippur) but it wasn't such a happy time.

Backtracking slightly, I had gotten in a day early (actually, in the morning, because I spent all night at Travis/Costanza_G's house playing video games, go me) and immediately started fighting with my mom. This happens frequently, but the long and short of it is she's been stressed (between her mom about to die, a long commute to teach, her new condo/losing a decent amount of money in the market, and other stuff) and she's taken that stress out on me. Fine, whatever.

The night before the holiday I picked up my sister Martina and my cousin Lauren from the train station. We went out to eat together then went to a bar - Lauren is great at bar games, and crushed me in darts. We played the bar game "family photo" together and actually set the bar high score. Ship it. So that was fun. But the following day (morning of Rosh) my family went to services (I don't go to services, not much to say here but I don't practice religion...) and upon their return everyone in my family intended on visiting my Grandmother in the hospital. For a recap, my Grandma is quite old (92) and has late stages of Alzheimer's - it seems she weighs 70 pounds or so. Quite scary, the hope is she's well enough to return home, but it's looking unlikely at this point.

I didn't go to the hospital because I got into a fight with my mother (my mother said to me she "burnt a good steak," which I still find pretty funny on several levels). I ended up going to the family dinner slightly late (I wasn't sure when to arrive) and the mood was fairly mellow/sad (obvious given circumstances) and unfortunately some of that was taken out on me. (Below is a picture of the tables... Everyone finished eating but me, and lucky me I was still eating alone. Call it self pity, but I decided to take a picture just to show that, lol. In the background is my cousin Paige)



The people there included: My cousin Jason, his wife Sheri, and their son Mack; my Uncle Johnny, his wife Kim, my cousins Elle and Paige; Kim's mom Grace; my mother/sister; and my cousin Lauren.

The following day I did end up going to see my grandmother (with my mom, we made up) and I drove to Boston. I spent most of today catching up sleep, and my objective before I return next week is to get an apartment. I'm staying at a Holiday Inn, which isn't terrible but seems overpriced for what it is. I needed my own space after constantly being with either a friend or family or so for the past 2 months.

1 last story: A guy named "Alan" from the Boston Ballet has been calling me every 10 days for about 3 months. Yes, we've spoken 10-12 times. The reason is I went to the Nutcracker this year (enjoyed it) and had my name on a call list. He has been very persistent about selling me a ballet package (we're friendly at this point, each chat is about 10 minutes or so, haha) and my reason for not buying one was I didn't have an address. (Not to mention I wasn't even sure if I was going to be in Boston to enjoy the tickets!) I finally caved in today and bought a flex package... So I'll be seeing at some point this year Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Jewels. I'm actually pretty pumped. Oh, I'm getting a student discount, since GKA's GF is sending me her ID to use for the tickets. Sweet.

Hopefully once I have my own domain I can actually log some hands! (I played just over 1k online hands last month...)