I don’t see a lot about the people who click on or read my posts. But I can tell you that the number per days varies and that yesterday’s post on Israel had the fewest readers than any of my posts over the past few weeks. I wonder why that is. Is it happenstance? Is it that people don’t really care, or follow, what is going on in Israel? What is it?

I tend to write about whatever I am thinking about on a given day, and I am determined to put something down every day during this my 80th year (actually, I guess it’s my 81st). After that, we will see.

And you can tell there is no overall theme to my posts, but that they track some of my interests. Originally, I thought they’d be more like a diary. But my diary does not provide for interesting posts every day. When we are away, like our Portugal trip, or the trip coming up starting Labor Day to Saratoga Springs NY, interesting things do occur. But at home, typically not so much. Especially, since I am not using this blog to talk about family members or friends.

Which reminds me of a “quote” that I have heard attributed to Philip Roth. He said (I paraphrase and have not verified) that if you are unwilling to write honestly about your close family members, you will never really become a writer. So…..there you are.

Yesterday was a fairly uninteresting day for a blogger. My two grandchildren (8 and 2) are on summer break, and their parents have to work. Their mother can work from home most days, but their father has just started (Monday) a new job that requires him to be elsewhere. So, this week, we are entertaining both of them for at least four days, and next week, while our 8 year old is back in school, our two year old won’t be.

So, to make a long story short, yesterday morning, we picked up the grandkids and brought them back here. My wife was pre-committed during the morning, so I had the two of them to myself. After a bit of screen time, we did other things. I don’t remember what. I do remember that after lunch, while the 2 year old napped, the 8 year old started on her dessert cook book, which so far has involved making stickers of desserts – about 8 of them (very cute); the recipes are supposed to be composed starting today. My guess is that they won’t be.

At about 5:30, we started driving them back home. The 8 year old is a pretty good navigator, and she likes to “roam” around, giving me orders “turn left here”, “go straight”, etc. I don’t mind doing that both because I don’t mind doing that and because it helps here get a feel for the surrounding area – at some point that may be important.

When we got home after dropping the kids off, we had a very nice, spicy shakshouka, a rich tomato sauce and two perfectly cooked 4 minute eggs and we watched the Nats hand the Yankees their 9th loss in a row (“hardly a man is now alive” who remembers the last time that happened). It is so interesting how the Yankees with Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, the Cardinals with Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado and the Mets with what is apparently the highest baseball payroll anywhere ever can all be doing so poorly. The Nats, who broke up their World Series team to rebuild and who lost over 100 games last year, have been playing winning baseball since the All Star Game, and what started out as a season to ignore has become the opposite.

During the evening when we were watching the game and for about an hour afterword, I was reading Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One” (it is only 126 pages in its Penguin edition). I have now read five Penguins by Waugh and this is one of the two I would recommend, although it’s not a perfect book. A guy dies, a younger friend is in charge of funeral arrangements, he falls in love with the funeral home cosmetologist but is afraid to tell her that he has a similar job — but at a funeral home for animals. The lead embalmer, a strange fellow to say the least, at the funeral home also falls for the young cosmetologist, and she does not know which one to marry – there are clear problems (beyond those I have mentioned) with both of them, but she believes she should choose one of them. Totally confused, she asks (several times) the local newspaper gossip columnist (off-line), who gets so tired of her questions that he suggests she just kill herself. You can guess the rest.

And that was the day. Today – not quite a repeat. The kids are here again, but so is my wife, and they are all now at the neighborhood playground. I have two Zoom meetings today (one for the Haberman Institute and one for the Jewish Funeral Practices Committee), and tonight it’s time for a birthday dinner for one of our daughters. We are doing it at 6:30, so we should be home before 9 and the start of the Republican debate.

I assume this will give me something to write about tomorrow.