Alternative writings

I exist!

Mostly.

Passover is hard the first few days.

We managed to mostly stave of disaster.

Monday morning while we prepared we discovered a lack of potatoes and carrots. My brother accidentally used up all the carrots for the geflite fish. So my dad ran out and got carrots and potatoes. We ended up with a surplus of potatoes.

Then the soup wouldn't soup.

The gas burners decided to have a holiday themselves by refusing to light half the time. "Do you smell gas?"

Of course then the matzah balls wouldn't matzah ball either. They were goopy after about an hour in the fridge instead of being firm enough to make into balls. A bunch of matzah meal was dumped into the mix and they ended up rather hard and chewy. People still liked them.

I did a nice thing the first night.

My brother always has problems with finding the afikomen. As in he never finds it. Ever. He has, to put it in D&D terms, the worst spot check ever. He doesn't know how to look for things. I don't know. It's bad. But the first night, when I was helping get the soup ready to take out, I spotted it.

It was under some paper on the printer.

My dad, it should be mentioned has a very interesting way of hiding the afikomen. He hides it so that you don't need to move anything to see it. As he calls it "In plain sight" However, this doesn't preclude needing to twist yourself into strange positions to actually see it in the first place. You may have to look under neath the table, but if you don't have to move anything, it's fair game. One year he took a clothes pin and taped it to the side of the stove and a cabinet. He then stuck the afkiomen in said clothespin. It was, as he put it, in plain sight. I didn't have to move anything to see it. Never mind the fact that it was defying gravity.

So, even in normal conditions the afikiomen is hard to find, never mind if you have a lousy spot check.

Having spotted the afkiomen I decided that when it was time to actually to look for it I'd let my brother find it. It took some subtle prodding, as he doesn't look very well, but he found it. He was thrilled about it. Which makes me happy.

Second night we started late because we had only dry and not sweet wine. There was lots of wine drinking. We finished around one, I got home about a half hour later. Woke up with a lovely hangover Wednesday.

Still had to help clean up on Wednesday.

Wednesday wasn't very productive.

Pair of books I'm cataloging are by a "Ka-tzetnik 135633". Curious about such a name, I checked the internets. Apparently it means "Concentration Camper 135633" in Yiddish. He used it as his publishing name because, according to Wikipedia, that is what he'd become.

Kosher Food does not mean that it has been blessed by a rabbi.

Do you even realize the ridiculousness of this belief? If all Kosher food had to be blessed by a Rabbi then every Jewish family kept Kosher would have to have a Rabbi in their home when ever they cooked or prepared a meal? Now I do realize that us Jews do have blessingsfor everything. We have blessing for when we wash our hands, blessings for when we go to the bathroom, blessing for a new experince. Just about everything. But that is not what keeping Kosher is all about. Keeping Kosher is about following certian guidelines in regards to food and how it's prepared. No blessings needed. Except maybe one for hoping that the food doesn't burn. And you don't need to be a rabbi to make blessings either. Any Jew can make them. Because if they couldn't then you'd need a rabbi to say a blessing after you went to the bathroom. So then ever Jew would either need to have a rabbi follow them around or become a rabbi themself. And if that were true then every Jew would be a rabbi.

Can you imagine what the world would be like if every Jew was a rabbi?