Hello and welcome to my third attempt at a blog. Hopefully this platform will be a little more user-friendly than the last and hopefully I’ll stick with it this time.

What’s different this time? That’s a valid question. I have been feeling a little stagnant in my life and so I have started to take some steps to fix that.

Step 1 is just to broaden my horizons intellectually, wherever that might lead. Two years ago, I found an online graduate program in Intellectual Property Law that really interested me. Unfortunately, some really difficult things happened in my personal life (the impetus for my last attempt at blogging, although under a pseudonym) that prevented me from pursuing that program. But now I am going ahead with the application and hopefully I will get accepted.

As part of that, I decided to take some online classes to get back into the habit of studying. So I signed up for a few classes through Coursera.org, including two that relate to my interests professionally – European Business Law: Understanding the Fundamentals and English Common Law: Structure and Principles – and two that intrigued me personally – The History of Modern Israel – From an Idea to a State and
The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry. The latter two stem from wanting to better understand aspects of my own heritage and the rising tide of antisemitism in the world today.

Step 3 is profit…

What about Step 2?

Okay, so I couldn’t resist digressing to an Underpants Gnomes reference.

The second thing is that I am trying to travel more and explore places I haven’t visited. I have been to 17 countries (counting the UK as one country as the linked app does, and if you count the US, a cruise stop in Ensenada, Vatican City, and that time I was at the demilitarized zone in Korea and was able to go about 10 feet across the border into North Korea) and 28 or 29 states (counting some that I have driven through, and one where I have visited multiple times but never really explored). Add in random airports I have passed through, and those counts goes up a little. I have a trip tentatively planned for later this year, so hopefully that will add at least one country to the list.

So my plan is to share interesting (at least to me) things I learn on those two journeys – whether new legal or historical tidbits, travel experiences, photos, etc. And there are the random musings I may choose to share about things that interest me (law, politics, hockey, nerdy stuff, pictures of my cats…) and the world around me.

So, if you are still reading, welcome to a little slice of my world…