The problem with catching up

As I know you've noticed, our blogs have become much less frequent. It's not that we don't want to share our adventures with you, our faithful reading public. We do! We miss you and want you to know where we are, what we are doing, and that we are safe! We look forward to your comments and questions. We have been busy trying to learn Hebrew, traveling around, and engaging in all the usual family and domestic activities--and feeling guilty (this is the Jewish state, after all) for not being able to keep up with either our personal journals or this blog.

I am relieved to find that I am in good company. I am reading Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad with the girls. It tells the story of several hundred people, who in 1867, embark on a year's voyage to Europe and the Middle East. Onboard, there is a specific room where people gather and assiduously write in their journals. They plan to write every day about their travels and glory in the number of pages they write each night.

Sadly, most of these journals were abandoned with great discouragement when the writers got off the ship and began adventuring. Oh, how familiar! "Alas that journals so voluminously begun should come to so lame and impotent a conclusion!...At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he only he lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty's sake, and invincible determination may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat." But, by the time they reach Paris, one formerly enthusiastic youth dejectedly exclaims that he is "as much as four thousand pages behindhand" sees no way to catch up, briefly considers to " leave France out and start fresh. But that wouldn't do, would it?" before finally giving up.

I'm not giving up, but I'm not sure I can precisely catch up either. We're going to go back and highlight our past adventures, though not necessarily in chronological order. Starting tomorrow...