She Loves to Knit

No time to knit...

I have no time to knit.  That's it!  End of story.  I'm heading into the real planning stages of Daughter #2's Bat Mitzvah (mid-August), wrapping up the year in my 4th Grade Hebrew classes and my Hebrew High School Teacher Training course, getting the family outfitted and all of the travel plans set for my niece's Bat Mitavah in Alexandria, VA over Memorial Day weekend, practicing the trope for my own aliyah during that service, I'm going to Tae Kwon Do 5-6 times a week to keep flexible and fit (haha! on both), I just tested for my yellow tip (2nd level) of Black Belt, and, oh yeah!  I sometimes still get called to sub, I have a 12-year old and a 15-year old at home who have this need to be places, do things, have clothes to wear, and yes, to eat, I'm still going to Weight Watchers and although I'm down over 20 pounds, that's not even half-way towards my goal weight, and every now and then I actually sit down and pay the bills, phone a friend, read a book....  Not to mention another new pasttime in my life:  HOCKEY!  BUFFALO SABRES hockey!  They totally rock.  Wanna know what I did this afternoon?  Here ya go:

And yes, we won -- 3-zip.  SHUTOUT!  Go Ryan Miller, we love you, baby!

Knitting?

To all of my readers who stopped by here in the past week or so to find out about my knitting, my sincere apologies.  Who has time for knitting?  If you read my last post, written during the wee hours of this morning, you know that the past week was spent cleaning and cooking for Passover.  You might actually think that after all that there would be food to eat in this house!  How mistaken you would be.  I think I have to make another trip to Wegmans.  (Holy cow... I've already spent like $300+ there in the past week!)  Let's see, for dinner tonight we could have:  kosher beef hotdogs (well, for the rest of them, not for me,) more matza ball soup, one leftover sweet potato, a little dish of leftover stir-fried string beans, salad, tunafish, or a hard-boiled egg (barf, usually I love them but enough's enough.)  The chicken is gone.  I have some potato kugel mix in a box.  I just made another few dozen matza rolls.  The Pesadik potato chips are almost all gone.  There's a dark chocolate seder plate in the pantry.  And there's some salad and some fruit.  I'm BORED, and we still have another 4 days to go.

But, as I was saying, to all of my readers who stopped by here in the past week or so to find out about my knitting, my sincere apologies.  Who has time for knitting?  I'm still in just about the same place on that pink shrug as I was 2-3 weeks ago!  But, the taxes are mailed (as of this morning, the 15th of April.)  And the carpets and kitchen floor are vacuumed.  And I just spent about 45 minutes hammering tree fertilizer spikes in strategic points around the yard and pulling some little bitty weedlets out of my back patio garden area.  Rick is out there now raking up almost the entire front lawn in preparation for me to seed it tomorrow.  Got a Bat Mitzvah planned for this summer?  (Yep.)  Better make the yard look nice!

Insomnia!!!!

2-freakin'-thirty in the morning and I'm wide awake.  Not 'cause I want to be.  Just 'cause I am.  Must be the 2-hour nap I took yesterday afternoon.  Which was understandable at the time, as I  spent this entire past week shopping for, preparing for, cleaning for, and cooking for Passover.  Pesach.  (Same thing.)  Dreading it for weeks ahead of time, I stubbornly refused to plan or purchase much of anything ahead of time.  I needed Inspiration!  Which came thankfully last Sunday.

A combination of things... a... oh, what do you call it when things just "come together"?  Not a comingling... more like an epiphany, but not quite.   Oh well.  In any case, it DID all come together last Sunday morning.  In Hebrew School, my 4th graders made matza from flour and water, which turned out, surprisingly, quite good I thought.  Then they made sculpey mezuzot with me, and then, with their Judaic Studies teacher, led a tour of Israel (in their classroom) and we all ate felafel and other Israeli treats.  The whole morning was just so full and worked so beautifully!

After Hebrew School, I made a quick trip to Wegmans to grab up my first batch of Pesadik foods, and then enjoyed a few hours in the afternoon at a local paint-your-own-pottery studio with Anna and J-Daughter and a few of Anna's jr. youth group girls during which I painted a ceramic mezuzah AND a seder plate.  By 4 PM we (Anna, J-Daughter, and me) were back at temple for a very inspiring and meaningful Women's Seder.  I'd never gone to a Women's Seder before, but this year when the publicity came out I was intrigued, so I invited both of my daughters and several of my friends, Jewish and non-Jewish, to attend with me.  Karen was already contemplating it and appreciated my little kick in the butt.  And my dear friend Joyce from Tae Kwon Do, recently back from several weeks in Italy, who had never been a seder before, also agreed to attend.  It was so sweet to be there with my friends and my daughters.  And it was so invigorating!

It gave me the energy and initiative that I needed to spend the entire next two days preparing. What did that mean?  Packing up all of the chametz (non-Passover) food in the house and schlepping it down to the basement (shelves, fridge, freezer, storage.)  Of course, that also meant schlepping up all of the Passover dishes, silverware, cookware, etc.  And the cleaning! So I don't kasher the way the Orthodox do, but still, I cleaned out the entire refrigerator and freezer, including removing the one dead fly underneath the vegetable bin.  (That was gross.)  I mean I took apart the entire thing... scrubbed all the shelves and bins in the sink with hot water and scouring cleansers.  Self-cleaned the oven.  Wiped down every surface I could find.  Yadda yadda yadda.  Did that take all of Monday and all of Tuesday?  I forget.  I know I was back at Wegmans at 7:30 one morning asking for kosher brisket, horseradish root and fresh beets (since this girl won't touch a real lamb bone!)  And I know I didn't do anything else this week but prep for Pesach and the two seders we held here.

Highlights?  Wednesday morning, J-Daughter and I performed (is that what you would call it?) Biur Chametz, the burning of the chametz.  I uncovered the grill on the back patio, and we took out the last of the bread that I'd emptied from the fridge, doused it with lighter fluid, set it on fire, and we recited the prayer.  It was a most meaningful moment!  My sister calls it the Kol Nidre of Pesach.  How fitting.  Somber, mystical, yet free-ing,  releasing.  Basically, it allowed me to walk back into my kitchen and feel as if I had completely kashered my kitchen, whether I actually did or not.

And then came the cooking.  Matza balls and matza ball soup, two kinds of charoset, the hardboiled eggs, homemade matza, a brisket for Wednesday night and salmon for me 'cause I won't eat red meat, chicken for 10 people on Thursday night, vegetables, a kugel (cauliflower, it was awful) and in general preparing for two seders!  Its just so much freaking work.  The cleaning, the cooking, the setting of the table, AND the planning for the service!  What haggadah to use?  How to get it to print out correctly?  I had such high hopes.  Oh well.  NEXT YEAR I WILL MAKE THE INVESTMENT AND BUY A NICE SET OF HAGGADOT!  (No more baby haggadahs... no more crappy computer-copied things.  Enough!)

The good news is our two seders went very, very well.  The first night, it was just the 5 of us.  The kids were a little wild.  I guess that's how it should be.  They are well-schooled in their seder-ology (thanks to my brother-in-law David, who has led many seders in their lifetimes and always makes it an involved, intellectually-stimulating event.)  Zack needed to excuse himself several times "to go to the bathroom."  Funny how each time he returned, he had the latest report of the Sabres game.  But, we made it through the entire service -- the parts before AND after the meal.  And they loved my brisket.  And on Thursday night, Zack and J-Daughter each had a friend, and Anna brought three Jewish kids from UB home with her.  They were the loveliest kids!  Unfortunately, I was so busy trying to lead the seder and hopping up and down getting the meal together and served, that I missed most of the college conversation.  Still, it was wonderful to have our diningroom so alive and so Jewish!  So what if the matza balls the second night were, dense.  (Some people prefer sinkers to floaters!)

Alas, the pomp and circumstance of the holiday is over.  Now, its all about surviving the next week without putting on another 5 pounds.  (I skipped WW's this week... I'm already up 4-5 lbs.  Not good.)  I DID make sure I got to tkd noon class this week.  At least I did something for my mental and physical health.  And I'm planning on going to 9 AM Saturday class tomorrow.  Er, today.  Except that it is now almost 4 AM and I'm wide awake!  I finished reading My Friend Leonard, the second book by James Frey, and I'm as intrigued by him as I was with A Million Little Pieces.  Perhaps not as moved, but still quite curious.  Maybe I'll head on over to his website and see if I can make myself sleepy.