keep your teeth

during pesach i visited my great uncle who is temporarily in a nursing home . he has the most amazing attitude. in case you don't know it is rather depressing to see someone in a nursing home. especially when i last saw my great uncle he was not in a nursing home. anyway he was talking about how great his life has been and how wonderful our family is. he also looks forward to future family get functions. the hardest part was understanding his speech because he wasn't wearing his false teeth. false teeth get stolen in nursing homes. so he  wasn't wearing them. so folks make sure you tend to your teeth. no i am not a dentist , nor am i related to any dentists. but be sure to tend to your dental health.  it will be so much easier to eat and speak when you are old if you still have teeth.

20 Things To Do With Matzah

this is one of my most favorite pesach  you tube videos. michelle citron has an amazing voice.

Who Let The Jews Out / Passover

i think this is cute.

yartzeit

the year of mourning is over.i thought it would never end. i had a shiva that couldnt start until after pesach and a year of avelus that had two adars.  i have survived it !!
today is my father's yartzeit. im glad that a year has passed. those first months after his passing were excruciating. i couldn't eat and i couldn't sleep. now that a year has passed those symptoms are gone. it is also a year since i have seen my father. its always a weird feeling when someone passes away and one imagines how the years will pass and it will be x amount of time since one has seen the dearly departed. one does not forget them, but because they have passed on . one can choose to remember the good parts and forget the parts that  one would rather not remember.
though a lot has happened since my father's passing it also seems like it was just the blink of an eye since it happened. life is strange like that.
i've learned a lot about life and about myself since then. death is funny that way. it forces the living to re-access  life.

Japanese Passover Tip

the cute thing about this video is that it was made a few years ago.i thought it would be cute to view .

chag kasher v'sameach

have a great pesach everyone. i've scheduled a few posts as i will be away for pesach and won't always be able to get to a computer to write. i'm looking forward to so matzah with cream cheese and jelly  and well the four cups of wine.....

Jake Gyllenhaal : Afikomen

i'd like to invite him to my seder. have a great pesach everyone!

free???? book events

it finally happened like i knew it would. the death of the free celebrity book reading. i went to barnes and noble's in union square tonight intending to see katie couric speak about her new book and there was a barricade in front of the book event space. the guard said that there was priority seating for those who bought books and those who didn't buy  books could wait in the stand by  line to be seated later. this is a first . i don't know it if was just because it was katie couric's book event, or if this is the new policy. either way it sucks. i admit that i don't always buy the book when i attend a book event, but there are many times when i do end up buying the book  after hearing snippets of the book during the book event . i thought that this was one of the ideas of a book event.
lots of people attend book events and do not buy the book so i understand why they want to have priority seating for book buyers at these events. however, if i have to wait in a stand by line before a book event i won't bother attending the  event unless i know for sure before hand that i wanted to buy the book. the store will be missing out on me buying a book only because i attended the book event because if i can't get a seat unless i buy the book, im not going to bother attending at all. this is why i said that these book events are no longer free. if i must buy the book to get a  seat the book event  is no longer free.
i have the feeling that the priority seating will only be for big name book events because few will want to buy a book buy an author they are unfamiliar with before attending their book event.
if i would stand in a stand by line to get a seat at a book event i would on principle not buy the book.
im so glad i have taken advantage of attending all the book events i could possibly attend in the past ten years because now the party is over  .

having a baby

one of the most amazing things that happens to people when they have a baby is not the miracle of life but the miracle of positive personality changes in the baby's parents. i have met some women who always had to be the center of attention renounce their crowns . i suppose they had no choice , but even so i find their change  quite awesome. only a tiny baby could change them so.

pre-pesach peril

i HATE crowds. and because i hate them so much i normally stay out of brooklyn supermarkets at their most busiest times. today i had to pick something up in a grocery store . i should have done so while i was still in manhattan. manhattan is not having a pre-pesach shopping meltdown in their supermarkets.
first i had opted for shoprite. bad move. i should probably be benching gomel. a grey haired russian , probably jewish, man who was in front of me pushing a  shopping cart was upset that i was behind him so he pushed into his cart backwards with brute force into my cart. i  fortunately was able to move back quick enough so i was unscathed. a shoprite employee reprimanded him , but i had enough. i left shoprite and instead made my way over to my least favorite avenue m supermarket- moishe's. there too there were those with shopping carts who stood behind me who bumped into me, but when i told them not to they stopped.  the express line was long,the temperature july-esque, but i was able to get what i needed without any physical injury.
needless to say, i do not plan on entering any brooklyn grocery stores until after pesach.

baby mama

i recently saw the comedy baby mama on netflix. baby mama is about a 37 year old single woman who employs a surrogate mother to carry her unborn baby. its a cute movie but unfortunately i'm in the wrong demographic to think of this movie as a mindless comedy. life stinks...

simcha dancing or let the wild rumbus start!!

the worst part of a frum wedding is the dancing. i am a  spoil sport. its not that i dislike the concept of  dancing at weddings its just that usually its just a matter of time before someone nearly cripples me by crushing my toes with their high heels. often i sit the whole dancing part out because of this fear.
my other gripe about  simcha dancing shows my age. if the participants in the dancing circle are  much too young they tend to  dance way too fast.... if the dancing is too quick i am prone to falling. falling on the floor at a wedding in my nicest dress is not my idea of  simcha.

if i can survive simcha dancing unscathed- without falling on the floor and without having my toes smashed then i consider the simcha a truly blessed event.....

earthquake

there was an earthquake in crete on friday and one of the countries affected by the aftershocks was israel. i haven't yet heard any inane "reasons" why this has happened. i always find it quite amusing when many rabbis try to define why these things have occurred. since they are far from neviim i take what they say with a grain of salt.okay with a gallon of salt.  is i think of their "reasons" for these disasters more like they are using gematria. sometimes gematrias are correct but other times you can make the letters stand for words that you want them to mean.or maybe they are not understanding the big picture when they are making these gematrias.
i have no clue why the earthquake from greece had aftershocks in israel. i do think that one issue jewish people need to work on is ahavas yisroel. this is one thing i never hear any rabbi ranting about unless it is tisha b'av. usually they prefer to blame everything on lack of physical tsnius. the second bais hamikdash was destroyed due to sinas chinam. in israel and everywhere there is a lot of sinas chinam among different jewish sects. the frum vs . the non-frum , the charedi vs. the modern orthodox. , the misnagid vs. the chassid. its so much easier to point a finger at others. we are in still in galus. how far have we really come from the days before the chorban.? ahavas yisroel does not just refer to loving a reform jew solely to  mekarev them.
i certainly don't know the definitive reason why any of these disasters have befallen any country. i don't think its even the point. i think that disasters occur more as think questions that don't necessarily have a definitive answer.  perhaps they happen so we realize how fragile life is so that we try to appreciate the time that we do have on this earth. i don't think that they happen so that any clergyman can be pompous and point  fingers.

cruelty free?

whenever i hear or read the words 'cruelty free '  and  'living a compassionate life' im always surprised that neither  term refers to being nice to humans .
in regard to makeup 'cruelty -free' means that it was made without animal testing. nowhere does it say that the condition of the workers at the makeup plant were treated kindly.
a lot of celebrities claim to be living a 'compassionate' lifestyle. this means they are vegan. they are compassionate by being compassionate to animals ,  there is no reference of kindness to other humans as defining  their compassionate nature.
it is sad that being 'cruelty-frre ' does not refer to humans. perhaps it is easier to be kind to animals than to humans. animals don't talk back to you.