Grand Master

Ruby participated in her first chess tournament yesterday. She was the only girl and all the boys are extremely serious - some have private tutors. she came 9th of 9 and even though my heart was breaking as she lost game after game she smiled the whole way through and genuinely loved it. So proud of her.

And she got a trophy anyway, everyone gets a trophy. G-d bless America. 

Happy as Larry

I (which for this post is in fact Al) went on a pretty unique field trip with Ruby’s class yesterday. I volunteered because it was the right thing to do. Oh and because it was a trip to the Freedom Tower/Ground Zero complex where i'd never been. It started off as a standard trip on one of those yellow school buses (they're actually incredibly loud and uncomfortable in case you're wondering). It quickly became apparent though that this wasn't the regular tour. Turns out Ruby's classmate Julian is the grandson of Larry Silverstein who owns the site. So it was all VIP. Freedom Tower itself is still under construction so we couldn't go up, but we had a personalized tour led by the head of PR for Silverstein Properties around Word Trade Center 4 and 7 as well as the showcase suite for Corporate tenants. We got to build own own towers, wear hard hats, chat to the chief engineer and eat our packed lunch 1000 feet up on an empty floor. We were a little overexcited. I mean the kids were. (They had a professional photographer follow us around which explains why they are so good.)