Or I’m taking one, anyway. Today, we begin the move out of the motorhome, out of storage, and into the new apartment. It is reorientation time. Then, next Sunday is my birthday. (I will be thirty-five. Or twenty-five. I forget. But either way I look much younger, and I have a head of hair like Rita Hayworth.) The morning after, I leave for Indian Wells in the California desert with my brother and nephew (a year closer in age to me than his mother, he is like another brother) for our yearly ritual of the BNP Paribas Tennis Open: four days of close-up Federer, Nadal, and Murray, dining and drinking, and the kind of non-stop New York wise-guy humor, in triplicate, that sets Julia longing for the sand hills of Nebraska.

It is a good time for a break. I’ve been blogging steadily since I began over fifteen months ago, and the timing is propitious for discovering exactly how out of control the world will spin without my commentary upon it. I’ll be back in about ten or eleven days. I hope you will be too. If you’re relatively new, the horizontal menu bar and the last couple of months’ archives, not yet added to it, are the places to explore in my absence, if you care to, so as not to have missed a word of my indispensable wit and wisdom.

Now, where was I…

AJA