My Learned League season has not been going well so far; I didn’t get my first win until Day 6 (of 25), and I am near the bottom of the standings.

This morning, I opened the “results” email and found that I’d lost yesterday’s match due to changing two perfectly good answers because I had second thoughts.

Gatorade High School Basketball Player of the Year Award winners from 2017 (Megan Walker), 2018 (Christyn Williams), 2019 (Azzi Fudd), and 2020 (Paige Bueckers) all went on to play basketball at what university?

Even though I’m not much of a sports fan, I do page through the Mercury News sports section every day. They cover Stanford women’s basketball well, so I was sure none of those women had played at Stanford. I also knew that Connecticut has had a very strong program for many years, so it was going to be my answer. Then I remembered that South Carolina had won the 2022 tournament, so I wrote them in. I should have stuck with Connecticut.

GEOGRAPHY – A city named Cairo is famous, perhaps above all else, for its location at the confluence of two major rivers. What are the names of those two rivers?

The question was obviously asking about Cairo, Illinois, not Cairo, Egypt, and one of the rivers was clearly the Mississippi. I thought the other river might have been the Ohio, but rejected it in favor of the Missouri because Cairo, Illinois isn’t in Ohio! It’s not in Missouri, either, but that didn’t bother me. It should have.

Learned League is a lot of fun, but sometimes I trip over my own mind. At least I got all six questions right once this week!

I remember reading the first Rabbi Small novel, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, not long after it was published. It was a mystery set in a small town in Massachusetts, and the protagonist and detective was the local Rabbi, Rabbi David Small. It was a success (the author, Harry Kemelman, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel), and the series continued until Kemelman’s death, though I quit reading after the sixth or seventh book.

This morning, the (incoming) Rabbi texted me to wish me Shabbat Shalom; I returned the sentiment and got back to proofreading the photo book Diane is making about our most recent Tulip Time trip.

Several hours later, I looked at my phone again and found I’d missed another text from Rabbi Nico – he didn’t just want to wish me a Shabbat Shalom, he wanted to talk. It’s as though he’d read my blog posting of yesterday – but he’d actually read the committee minutes I’d sent out yesterday afternoon and wanted to discuss what I’d written there.

It was a good conversation; I’m looking forward to his official arrival.

Shabbat Shalom!