If I was a real Dominican, I would know someone going to Santo Domingo this week and I would have them drop off the copies of the Twilight saga I purchased for my cousin. (My Jewish friends tell me people do the same thing with sending things to Israel.) But I’m very American and I will instead suffer paying too much to ship them via the post office, I walked out of Federal Express when they tried to charge me three times what the books were worth. Bah humbug!

Meanwhile, I have plenty to write about and never enough time to write. My husband and I just got back from speaking on race and conversion at LimmudNY. Most people were delighted by our conversion session and one person said the race session had been “jarring.” (We’ve already been asked to speak elsewhere on both subjects.) As you might have noted from the previous post, we were afraid we wouldn’t survive for the whole conference. We didn’t leave Saturday night though I was pretty pissed about the circumstances we were enduring and ready to run back to the city. We decided to stay because my husband wanted to teach our sessions in return for the wonderful scholarships we’d received to help us attend the conference.

I’m glad we stayed at LimmudNY. My wallet is ready to burst from the business cards I collected. (D’oh, I forget to bring mine.) I’ve already been Facebooked by many of the new friends I made there. I had a chance to talk to many, many interesting people (something that was direly missing in my life) and I learned me some Jewish stuff (another thing I’d been dying to do). By the end of the conference on Monday, the hotel still wasn’t completely heated but we were warmed by how positive most of us (not me) had stayed in spite of everything.

I may or may not have figured out a name for my book. My friends don’t love it but I’m playing around with it, typing it in big letters and all that. I actually missed my book while I was gone. There were lulls in-between Limmud NY sessions where I really wondered what I had been thinking when I’d left my laptop at home. (Really, I don’t even know how I would survive without an Internet connection.) I came home and dusted off Chapter 23 (wow!) of my book but all I got done today was adding accents to Spanish words and correcting various errors. I’m up to page 228 but at least one of those pages is just my title scrawled in the Impact and Mistral fonts across the page.

I apologize for not Twittering more often. I apologize for not blogging more often. I apologize that I will not be devoting a whole blog to the inauguration though I am sure you all watched but which I mostly missed before I logged onto CNN.com to watch. I know, without cable, it’s almost like I live in a cave. And now, I am off, I am forcing myself out of the cave, away from all my loving fans (thanks for steady stream of email love) and my deathtrap of a computer.