Comics Crusader: Remembering Jackie Ormes : NPR

Comics Crusader: Remembering Jackie Ormes : NPR

BNB is back

Yesterday, J. mentioned to me his disappointment that I had not been better at keeping BNB active while maintaining a very active "rabbi blog." He didn't press the issue, but I got the message. Since I am having one of my excessively early, "why am I awake" mornings, I thought I'd finish up a few drafts from the blog and make a vow to get back on track with BNB.

BNB news...

• J. and I just bought our first house, a condo a bit further down on the Peninsula. We are nervous, excited, and buried deeply amid boxes. We are down-sizing our possessions quite a bit, as the new place is only 1000 sq. ft.
  
• I have started writing again for myjewishlearning.com. I have the featured lead article (and a related one) on the homepage for this week, that of July 13, 2008. It even has a little illustration. The part I'm most excited about is that I proposed the articles myself, and the editor thinks the topic (religious diversity in Jewish families) is as important as I do.
• My teaching this year has been fabulous. Really. I love my fellow teachers and director. I love my students (as always). And I love being able to have sufficient time to prepare as I like. Plus, my teaching blog (Rabbi Rochel's RealLife) has taken off big time. It even has a fan in France!
  
• In the past year, I travelled to: Fiji; Auckland, New Zealand; Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Sacramento; Las Vegas; Salt Lake City; Boston; New York City; and Baltimore. Not to mention the usual trips to LA. J. and I are about to head out to Israel (to meet another new niece) and Turkey.
• I saw an incredible film A Jihad for Love, about gay and lesbian people from Islamic countries, working hard to maintain their dignity and their dedication to Islamic practice.
• All my wedding research of the past couple years is being put to good use by friends B. and S., who are getting married next year. In particular, B. (for whom I will be matron of honor) shares my love of Bridal Bargains, especially the clear way it breaks down how bridal salons, caterers, locations, and other vendors break up their bills and sometimes add on excessive fees.
  

BNB Obsessions, Occupations, and Preoccupations...

• J. is whipping me into good fiscal habits. I produce a monthly expense and income report for him, and he tracks our budget. And takes care of the taxes. Thank God for that!
• I sometimes sound like an evangelist for marriage. I am even more convinced that human beings flourish in the security and intimacy of committed, formalized monogamy and will continue to advocate for marital rights for my gay and lesbian friends.
  
• I'm seriously thinking about writing a book proposal this fall.
• I am researching organization strategies, including built-ins, that enhance small-space living. We have two poorly-organized bedroom closets that will need some early work, as well as a plan to build in a wall-unit with bins for toys and Judaica, bookshelves, TV and media storage. We are contemplating putting a washer and dryer into a hall closet and buying a new refrigerator that is bigger, better, and Energy-star rated in the next few years. And I am fantasizing a teeny bit about convincing the HOA that we should all go solar, at least for our water heaters. (Yes, I know it is a dream.)
  
• I have been knitting up a storm, which motivated me to join Ravelry. Recently, I have caved in to the pressure and joined the ranks of happy sock knitters. And I've chosen a pattern to try again knitting myself a sweater.
  
• I love Google Docs. Between it and Google Calendar, J. and I are SO coordinated and organized in our planning. Plus, I've started using Google Docs for work, including interactive progress charts for students.
• I have committed to finishing our thank you notes from the wedding in the next week. We figure, if we can get the last few out before our year anniversary (August 5), we'll be OK. Whatever the manners-mavens say.

BNB To Do List...

1. Discuss more fully how I resolved my issues with the non-egalitarianism of the traditional ketubbah and Jewish wedding ceremony.
2. Reflect on the decision to buy a home.
3. Confess the ticking of my biological clock and my frequent desire to hold a baby.
   
4. Bemoan the delay in the completion of Battlestar Galactica due to the writers' strike.
5. Justify my love for watching television when I know I have something better to do.
   
6. And most of all.... WRITE MORE OFTEN!
   

Knitting success!

As many of you know I am a bit of a frustrated knitter. I work very slowly, and I am easily distracted. With the arrival of cooler temperatures, and a new niece, I found motivation to pick my knitting back up. A pink chenille sweater for the niece is well underway, and I have completed my first project in a LONG time.

Now that I'm teaching more, I feel compelled to wear hats more often, since I get frustrated with kippot (yarmulkes) that slide off my hair. When I checked out the most recent issue of Knitty a few weeks ago, I took note of a simple, adorable hat--Urchin. I love berets, and I'm sort of bored with the plain Parkhurst cotton berets I frequently wear. Unfortunately, I get extremely irritated from wool, which keeps me from buying most of the cute hats I see in stores. Once I picked the Urchin pattern, I needed to find an appropriate yarn with minimal, if any, wool. On eBay, I found Classic Elite Bubbles, a cotton-blend in #2410, a blue tweed. I knitted it on size 10 1/2 needles, even though the pattern calls for size 11.

In less than a week, the hat is done. It fits. I am very happy. Photos will follow.

Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness?

At the apartment in Berkeley (where I lived with female J.), we didn't have a dishwasher, but I wasn't particularly disturbed by the state of our dishes. Like most older apartments, there wasn't good lighting. If our dishes were anything less than sparkling, I didn't usually notice. Every once in a while, I'd "reject" a washed dish and put it back in the sink. J. felt the same way. Her only preferences were about the type of sponge we used (Dobie) and that we shouldn't use the natural dish soap. In everything else, we were all-natural girls, but dishes just didn't seem as clean.

Ever since I moved into this apartment, I have had a goal. And it is cleanliness of the dish kind. You see, the townhouse's kitchen sink is just below a window. Once again, the only dishwashers are human. At first, I noticed the grime and the filminess. Then, I realized that there was a huge difference between the cleanliness of the dishes I did in daylight rather than at night. Now I just accept that I will have to re-clean dishes washed at night, when my insufficient kitchen lighting fails to provide sufficient task lighting for the sink.

I changed my dish soap. Since then, I have tried at least 6 different dish soap formulas. I still haven't found the right one. The current tester: Method, unscented. (I could also rant for a while about my distaste for the scenting of every cleaning product imaginable. But that is for another time.) I'm not sure it's up to the task, but the jury is still out.

Meanwhile, J. (that is, the husband J.) and I just bought a condo. With a teeny, tiny dishwasher, one that at first glance appears to be a garbage compactor because of its narrow proportion. I really, honestly hope the little machine does its work. I think I even still have my beloved Ecover dishwashing tabs from years ago, when I last had a dishwasher.

In Sickness and in Health

Okay, so J. and I didn't take the standard American, Christian vows... but less than two months into marriage, and we have already had more than one test of the "sickness" part of partnership. As Joshua is taking care of me today--getting groceries, doing dishes, calling attentively to check on me--I figured I should reflect on this a bit.

As a few of you already know, J. was in the hospital less than two weeks after we got married. Six days after the wedding, he started having neck pain. The next day, Sunday, he had neck pain so bad that he couldn't turn his neck at all. On Monday, J. woke up with a fever. At this point, the Bride insists on his seeing a doctor. Fever plus neck or head pain of that severity equals potential meningitis. For the next few days, we went to multiple doctors for multiple imaging procedures and blood tests.

That Thursday, J. got a phone call from the doctors telling him that his blood culture was forming as-yet-unidentified bacteria and he needed to go to the hospital immediately. So, a quick packing of a bag, and we were off to Stanford Hospital, where J. got the best of care and a lumbar puncture to rule out the meningitis. We were there for just over a day. The bacteria turned out to be an unusual strain of salmonella para typhi which manifested as blood poisoning before showing gastrointestinal symptoms. A day of massive antibiotics took out the salmonella very quickly, but the lumbar puncture left him with an absolutely horrific headache that ended up lasting for 8 or 9 days, and was worse any time he was even slightly upright. (After that, he was fine.)

And--oh, yeah--this all happened just days before we were to leave on our honeymoon. He got home from the hospital on Friday, and we left on Monday for Fiji and New Zealand.

For J., it was a massively stressful, scary, and painful experience; for me, it was massively stressful, scary, and exhausting. It did, however, leave us feeling very close to one another, to review our priorities, and appreciate the wonder of marriage. J. was very glad that he had me to take care of him at home and advocate for him at the hospital. I literally mopped his sweaty brow. For my part, I gained first-person insight into the weighty responsibility of being responsible for another person's health and well-being. The idea that I was now responsible for emergency decisions and even had Joshua deferring to my opinions on his non-urgent hospital care was clearer than ever. And both of us spent a lot of time contemplating how singles living far from their parents--particularly single men, who are less likely to have networks of friends who are willing and able to make the necessary sacrifices of time and energy--ever cope with being REALLY sick.

RL's Current Online Obsessions and Pastimes

1) Boggled.org: I love Boggle. J. will only play a few games with me at a time. My sister and I grew up playing Boggle with grown-ups, since there were no cousins of our generation for many months. J. hasn't learned to think the Boggle way yet, so he gets demoralized after a few games. I used to get my Boggle on by playing at WEBoggle. However, WEBoggle has a few drawbacks, particularly the fact that you have to wait for games to start (you play with others in real time) and that it can be VERY slow, sometimes so much so that dozens of words won't be registered. Then I found Boggled. I am much happier now. You still compete with others, just not in real time. It is always ready with a game for you. You can register and track your scores and records (for each game--highest score, most points for a single word, most words, and longest word). Instead of standard Boggle scoring, you are awarded points for each word according to its length AND rareness.

Yes, I know that my visceral reactions to incorrect grammar and spelling are bizarre... yet "unjuster" does not belong on the list of acceptable terms.

And you can see a pie graph that displays the relative proportion of each level of word difficulty. However, the thing I get frustrated about most is still there--the words that are included and excluded. For example, tose, which means "to tease or comb" in OBSOLETE English. Not Modern English. There are also SO many acceptable spellings of words and varied inflections of words that I get the creepy crawlies down my spine. (Yes, I know that my visceral reactions to incorrect grammar and spelling are bizarre... yet "unjuster" does not belong on the list of acceptable terms.)

2) Viva Caligula: I saw a strange promo sending me to the Adult Swim website. I soon got sucked in by the unabated violence--particularly the spurts of blood when on a rampage. I have 18 out of 26 weapons and a hand that really hurts. I think the reason why I like it most is because the game's shortcuts actually make sense to me: it's really easy to remember what key to push when your weapon's first letter is the key you hit to deploy it.

3) Google Calendar: As many of you might know, I am highly inept at keeping a calendar. Even when I have one, I forget to use it. And I have been known to double- and even triple-book myself. Now that I have to include J. in the schedule, things are a bit more complicated and require a better system. I really like that the calendar does the color-coding I need, J. and I can both edit and view events, and that I can have the Jewish calendar superimposed with no work on my part.

4) Surfing for My Teaching: I am SO happy about being back in the classroom. I love my new students, and I am really excited about preparing awesome lessons for them. I've got three different grades at two schools. I haven't even met the eighth graders yet.

Post-Honeymoon New Zealand Obsession

Upon returning from our amazing honeymoon (its perfection only slightly marred by J.'s salmonella adventure), I became obsessed with the history of New Zealand and spent an obscene amount of time researching the natural history of New Zealand, its flora, fauna, and people. In particular, I was blown away by the performance of Maori music and dance we saw at the Auckland Museum. (You can find video of the cultural experience performance at You Tube.) I was fascinated by the relationship between mundane Maori activities--fishing, boating, fighting--and the dance. The Haka is their signature dance. It was performed in battle to intimidate the enemy. Today, the national rugby team, the All Blacks, performs it in international meets. The last time it was used in battle was WWII.

I was also fascinated by the fact that New Zealand was the last landmass occupied by humans and is so distant that no mammals lived there until more recent times. Birds dominate the native fauna. Moa are now extinct, but they were enormous birds that were at the top of the food chain prior to the arrival of the Maori's Polynesian ancestors.

Lastly, I should give a few more general comments on our honeymoon. It must be said that the Kiwi people are the nicest I've ever met. It's like they all understand that being friendly and polite really is a better way to get along. The food is amazing. Our local favorites were Kapiti ice cream and Cin Cin, a wonderful restaurant at the marina. Auckland is a lovely city, and J. and I concur that we must go back to Auckland again as the starting place for future New Zealand adventures.

Fiji was also awesome, but we mostly saw the island resort we had booked through Luxury Link (an amazing resource for big discounts on luxury travel). Vomo resort occupies an entire small island off the west coast of the main island of Fiji. They waited on us hand and foot, and were particularly helpful in bringing us meals to our cabin (called a bure), where Joshua was resting up from his lumbar puncture. The room and amenities were first class; the beach was unforgettable. The fish were absolutely gorgeous; you could walk right into the reef and see them. The water is so clear that we could see straight down to the bottom from our helicopter ride back to the airport. I did my first snorkeling jump from a boat and spent large portions of each day in or beside the water. For some bizarre reason, I rose at dawn every day we were in Fiji. I would wander out and lay in a hammock by the water and watch the world wake up.

Recommended Resources:
Pacific migrations - From West to East Polynesia - Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand
Auckland Museum Maori Resources