WHY I HAVEN'T BLOGGED IN 17 DAYS

     This may be some kind of new failure record for me - 17 days!  Holy shit!  But I do have reasons.  First I was absorbed in such a ferocious round of revisions to my book that I hardly did anything else except revise, go to work, revise, eat, revise, sleep, revise.  And since I finished that at the end of November, I've thrown myself into finishing a project that I barely started a year ago and left lying dormant until now.  Once of my nieces in Israel had a baby last January and I bought a baby blanket cross-stitch kit to make for her because I'm insane.  Well, now that baby is almost a year old, and I'm going to Israel on January 1st to visit my mother and to attend my other niece's wedding, and so I am absolutely determined to get this thing finished before I leave, no matter what.  So now, instead of obsessively revising, I'm obsessively cross-stitching, and I haven't even been able to think about anything else except, from time to time, about police in this country and their attitudes toward people of color.  But this isn't a subject I don't think about often anyway, because it pretty much arises on a daily basis for public defenders.  So mostly what I've been thinking about lately is: "Oh, so NOW do you people get it?"
     Anyway.  I know this is a short and lame-ass post, but I'm afraid that's the quality you're going to be getting from me until the end of the year because I'm going to be spending 95% of my non-work time cross-stitching maniacally and the other 5% trying to recover from it.  So if there's anyone out there in the blogosphere that misses my more thoughtful and informative and amusing posts, I apologize, and I'll try to make up for this shameful period once I get home in 2015.