Technically, it's Sunday, but I haven't gone to sleep yet, so I'm willing to stretch the point a bit. I'm currently back in the family home in Far Rockaway, having reclaimed my former room from the younger brother who took it over. Said younger brother has a computer that would be better than mine in every way, except that he's running Windoze 95 on it, which, I figure, drags it down to roughly the efficiency of a VIC-20. Well, okay, an XT.

I should perhaps clarify a few things. My apartment is over in Kew Gardens Hills, which is perhaps a half hour from Far Rockaway by car, assuming that you're not trying to get there during rush hour. By bus, which is what I used to take, before I got the apartment, it's about an hour and a quarter. Both are in Queens, in New York City; KGH is right in the center of it, while FR is right at the edge separating Queens from Nassau County.

Now, as for the family situation... I tend to take this next bit for granted, which no doubt explains why I didn't put it on my bio page. But, anyway, I'm the oldest of fifteen kids.

To answer the inevitable next few questions: I'm 25; there are eight boys and seven girls; no, there aren't any twins; I think the youngest is one year old; no, I don't remember all their ages; yes, I do remember all their names, although I do sometimes have trouble remembering which name goes with which face, in the younger half of the family.

How do we handle meals? I'm a bit out of touch with the youngest members of the family. The older ones learn to fend for themselves pretty quickly. We all know how to cook anything we'd be interested in eating, a skill I took for granted until I went to Israel for the first time, after high school, and discovered that most of the people in my dorm had trouble figuring out how to boil water.

Okay, fine, boiling water wasn't really a problem, but I don't think most of them could fry an egg. This still amazes me.

The only time the entire family gathers together for meals is Shabbos; specifically, Friday night, and Saturday afternoons. I think all of us, past a certain age, have been responsible for these meals at one point or another. Basic stuff, really; chicken (add onion powder, garlic powder, and paprika, and throw it in the oven), cholent (a stew, left to cook all night. Every family has a different recipe; ours includes meat, potatoes, sometimes barley, and, once again, onion and garlic powder), and occasionally soup, a more recent development that I've only served, not cooked. Most of the rest of the stuff is store-bought, although we do have to heat up the kugel and cook the gefilte fish.

As I said, I'm the oldest. The next two in line (a brother and a sister, respectively), have both gotten married and moved out -- the former lives near Jerusalem, the latter in Brooklyn. After that comes another brother, who currently attends school in New Jersey, and the rest of the mishpacha lives at home.

The brother who lives in Israel returned last week, along with his wife, and our aunt, once it became clear that my grandmother really wasn't doing very well. He was by his in-laws in Boston yesterday and today, but is back here now. So I got to speak to him for a few minutes, and am rather looking forward to being able to do so again over the next couple of days. Nice to have a silver lining, I guess.

Speaking of design, I'm keeping the individual entries. The question is now whether I'll keep the month-at-a-glance entries also. Personally, I prefer using those, but I'm not sure it's worth the trouble of maintaining two separate systems. Besides, yesterday's entry looks all wrong in cheerful yellow, and there's no way I know that would allow me to switch background images in mid-page. We'll see.