WTF?????

I was driving home today on the way back from a morning at the park and our daily trip to the supermarket for suppertime fixings when I noticed a police car parked at the entrance to a nearby trailer park. I thought it seemed strange, since his lights were on and he wasn't sitting there to tag people for speeding. As I approached our development, I noticed a line of cars waiting to get in, as well as another line of cars leaving. When it was our turn to enter, I saw a sea of police cars and realized that no one was being allowed into the development, even to go home. The cop I spoke with advised that the area was being locked down because they were looking for someone. Judging by all of the police vehicles, both marked and unmarked, the person they were looking for was armed and considered dangerous, so I was semi happy to leave them to do their jobs, although I silently lamented the frozen yogurt melting in my trunk. A trip to McDonald's (we'd been heading home to eat lunch when this incident ocurred) and one hour later, we returned home to find yet another line of vehicles waiting to get into the development. I shut the car off, turning it on periodically to use the air conditioner, and decided to wait it out, since I had noplace left to go and was aggravated enough at that point to go in there and catch the guy myself. Never underestimate the damaging capacity of a locked down fold up stroller!!! They can be deadly, I swear! Apparently, they'd either caught the guy or given up, because they finally let us back in. I think I heard one of the officers say that they'd gotten him-we can only hope there isn't some crazed maniac still running around the streets of South Florida. What am I saying??? Of course there are many maniacs running around the streets of South Florida!!! After a shooting incident at a North Miami Burger King recently I didn't even feel safe taking my daughter to lunch at Micky D's today. It's insanity. Makes me want to move to the woods of Maine and buy me a shotgun. It would just be so boring, though....

Whatta Day

I had great plans for this afternoon which were sidelined when I walked out of the supermarket at around 2:15pm. I was in the driver's seat, about to push my car into gear, when this guy who was talking outside his truck on a cell phone called out to me that my front tire was flat. What?!!!! Urrrrrrr.. So, I got out of my car, and, sure enough, my left front tire was as flat as a pancake. The strange thing was that prior to going to the supermarket I'd stopped at a kosher deli and the same truck was parked next to me there, so alarm bells started going off in my head. I don't know if that's a sign of the times we live in or just a sign that I watch too much television and am now highly paranoid, but I was very nervous when I opened my trunk, half expecting that he was going to shove me into it or something. All he did was take the jack and very calmly walk over to my dead tire. Phew!!! But I was still paranoid. After arguing with the lug nuts (the tire was brand new and the mechanics had used power tools to affix it to my Kia) for awhile, we finally managed to get them loose, with him pulling on them and me jumping on the tire iron. It must have looked hilarious, because my daughter was howling with delight in the back seat of the car. This poor man, dripping with sweat (did I mention that it was around 86 degrees outside today?) put the spare on my car, lowered the jack and then promptly informed me that the spare was also flat. He offered to drive me to the gas station to put air in it but I was still paranoid, even after all of this, and besides that I had the baby with me, so I called my husband and he called some of his guys and they came and got the tire to have it fixed while I took my daughter to get something to eat (we hadn't eaten lunch yet and were both starving and cranky by this time). It turned out that the valve had gone bad in the tire, which was why I couldn't find any nails or tacks or glass stuck into the rubber. So, now it's 6pm and I'm just getting around to doing my hair, which looked REALLY bad due to the fact that I knew I was going to do it today and so didn't wash it this morning. We are meeting some friends tonight to watch the Red Sox game at a local sports bar/restaurant so now I'm going to have to really hustle to be ready in time. Why is it that I always seem to be in situations where I have, despite my best intentions, to rush around like a maniac to be on time getting someplace??? Anyway, I have to be grateful. If this guy hadn't been in the parking lot by my car I wouldn't have been able even to change the tire, and if my husband didn't have guys working in the area I would've had to wait for much longer for him to show up and probably would not have been able to have gotten the tire fixed today. And that's my story for today.

Signs of Intelligent Life on Our Planet???

Okay, maybe I'm going to sound a little bit petty with this post, but a few days ago I was browsing blogs at another blog hosting site. I came across this one particular blog on someone else's page and the person's icon looked fairly interesting, so I clicked on the picture. When I got to her page and looked through it I found it to nothing more than just a lot of semi sexy pictures of her posing on logs, bending over in lacy pajamas, etc. with little cutesy comments like, "Hi, everyone!!! Have a nice day!!" Don't get me wrong; I know that people blog for different reasons, and, as well, people check out blogs for different reasons. I'm sure that she has many an appreciatory fan out there, just waiting for her to post yet another semi naked picture with a message underneath telling them to "have a great day". Indeed, she has probably helped more than one person to do just that. The thing that got me about the site was that she had something like 80,000 hits!!! Maybe it's just me, but I couldn't figure out for the life of me why this person would have so many viewers enthralled with her page. If I posted more pictures of myself in compromising pictures with cute little captions underneath that basically said nothing would I have 80,000 hits on my blog site? It's not going to happen; it's just not my style. If anything, I'd have to post something sarcastic beneath the pictures. There are bloggers out there who post hot pictures but have something to say as well, and I think that's great (I'm thinking of Stealth, in particular). I understand why they get so many hits-they're beautiful and intelligent; they have both outer beauty and inner substance. Has our world gone so far down the tubes that all people care about is getting a cheap thrill online? Does anyone want to think anymore? Perhaps I'm just being egoistic. It's not like my site is so damned interesting that everyone should be checking me out. I actually have quite a few friends at the other blog hosting site, too, so I guess I should stop kvetching about not having 80,000 checks into my page. Still, though.....

Pondering the Holy in Everyday Stuff

I've been reading this really great book called "Judaism for Everyone" by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and it's been making me think a lot about how I express spirituality in my own life, as well as how seriously I take my own religion. I love the way Rabbi Boteach interprets biblical scriptures, and how he says that suffering isn't something we are obliged or even expected by God to take without fighting. In fact, "Israel" means "to wrestle with God" and God expects us to rail against suffering when we see it. There was no suffering in the garden of Eden, so therefore suffering must be something that we should not see in a utopian world, which is what we are supposed to experience when the messianic era arrives. Conclusively, we should all alleviate suffering where and when we are able to do so, since that's a beautiful thing in God's eyes and maybe something that will hasten the arrival of the one who is supposed to help the world to usher in an era of peace and harmony (in Judaism, the Messiah is believed to be a human being like any one of us, rather than an angel or some sort of God figure). This book has been causing me to reflect a lot on how I live my life, and on how by participating in the Jewish rituals of everyday life, I can bring myself into a more spiritually grounded place. By practicing kosher eating, for example, I enable myself to experience the spiritual in the everyday act of nourishment. As well, I am performing a mitzvah says, "See, God? We love and care about you. I'm doing something to bring myself closer to you. Please notice this and look favorably on humanity." I do this as part of a community of people who are also doing this, which brings me not only closer to God, but also closer to the Jewish community as a whole and to the Jewish community of the past, including my relatives who survived the Holocaust. This is not to say that I have become a master at kashrut. I have not. Mostly, I've been practicing some of the dietary restrictions of kashrut when cooking in my own home, by not mixing dairy with meat and that sort of thing. It's a very small step but big changes start with small steps and big changes made all at once can often be so daunting and overwhelming as to cause the changer to give up the challenge when the journey has barely begun. I guess it's like losing weight; people who lose a few pounds at a time tend to keep the weight off for life, while people who shed a large amount of weight quickly tend to gain it back plus extra. Slow and steady work is what brings about lasting, positive change. I suppose that when I stopped chemicalizing myself I began to have a deeper need for spiritual meaning. I've always been curious about God and I've always searched for the spiritual among the activities of everyday life. I never could access the true meaning of it, though. Now, in sobriety, I can finally begin to feel what it's about and to really need it in a true and less selfish way.

Happy Manic Monday!!!!!

Today wasn't actually too manic of a Monday for me, which is unusual. We had a great day, in fact. I took Bebe to the park in the late morning and we spent an hour or so running around like crazy, up and down the slides, ladders, stairs, and ramps. It was very windy and a bit chilly here today so my daughter lost interest in swinging on the swing after about four swoops back and forth. I opened my computer to news of the Virginia Tech shootings and have to wonder what is wrong with the people on our planet. It is frightening to think about being the victim of such a crime; those people didn't do anything to this madman, yet they had to be the object of his psychosis. They did nothing to bring about the fates that befell them; they were just going about their day, when suddenly the gates of hell clanged open. I am reading a fantastic book right now called "Judaism for Everyone" by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. I'm learning so much about my faith, about my religion, about this awesomely cool heritage to which I am heir. In the book, Rabbi Boteach talks about the violence in the world, about the lack of spiritual grounding suffered by so much of the populace. It's a great book that, even in the early stages of reading, has helped me with some recent life situations. I love that my spiritual path can do that; it guides me when I don't have a clue as to what direction I should be going in, when I don't know how I should be reacting to a particular situation or to another human being's actions. For a long time I felt such a conflict with being both Irish and Jewish, but I feel like lately it's all coming together. I feel like that conflict can be okay; I can be both and embrace both wholeheartedly. I recently read an interview with an author who expressed a similar conflict in being both Jewish and from Yorkshire, England. She said that conflict has been a positive issue as far as her writing is concerned, and I can see where that tension could be a great driving force in my own artwork. Anyway, all is peaceful at this end of the computer and I'm grateful for that.

Post Sick

Hooray!!!! Both Bebe and I seem to be getting over the cold/sickness we've been suffering under for the past few days. I got sick on Sunday, the day we came home from Disney, and Bebe has been sick for about a week. Whatever the bug is, it doesn't seem to be very hearty (thankfully) but it kicked me in the head on Monday and I spent most of the day lying around the house. By Tuesday I had no choice but to motivate myself into action and keep moving until it was okay to stop (which, for me, is at around 9PM). In the midst of being sick I managed to get my latest newspaper article written and sent out, complete with interviews. Hopefully the editor/newspaper owner likes it and will include it in this month's paper. I dropped the ball recently and forgot to re-order our business checks. I realized this today when I used our last check to write out a bill. I don't know how I didn't realize that we were out; I could've sworn we had another box floating around somewhere. Oy vay.

Post Seder

We had the first night of Passover at our house again this year and I spent the past two days in the depth of preparations. I'm so tired today that I had trouble waking up this morning and have felt groggy and stupid all day long. I can barely think! I basically spent two days in the kitchen for long stretches of time with only one screw up (my matzoh balls fell apart the first time around and I had to make them again-argh!!!). The night of celebration and friendship was well worth the effort put in. We had just three friends over, and only one of them is Jewish, but it was a lot of fun; better for the small crowd, actually, since we all had a chance to really talk. Lots of yummy food, lots of comaraderie, not much sleep! Today was very screwed up time wise because of my lack of energy, but it's okay to have days like that now and then. I must say, though, that I'm looking forward to curling up in bed with a good book and probably falling asleep before I've read three paragraphs.