Shabbat Shalom and Happy Hanukkah!
Please note that on Friday afternoons until Saturday evening, the author of this blog is unavailable, in observance of the Jewish Sabbath.
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I had a little fun with the shapes of this week's challah, making an oil flask and a menorah with 4 lit candles (orange peels) in honor of tonight being the fourth night of chanukah. (The oil flask one isn't burnt, that's cocoa I put on the background to set off the shape of the flask.)
The cakes are about parshat Miketz, where we read about Pharaoh's dreams. One is of seven lean and hungry cows, ready to dine on the seven fat ones. The other cake has two stalks of grain, one with seven fat ears and the other with seven skinny ears.
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Hanukkah!
Comments made during this time will be held in a queue, to be moderated afterwards.
Thank you for your patience.
I had a little fun with the shapes of this week's challah, making an oil flask and a menorah with 4 lit candles (orange peels) in honor of tonight being the fourth night of chanukah. (The oil flask one isn't burnt, that's cocoa I put on the background to set off the shape of the flask.)
The cakes are about parshat Miketz, where we read about Pharaoh's dreams. One is of seven lean and hungry cows, ready to dine on the seven fat ones. The other cake has two stalks of grain, one with seven fat ears and the other with seven skinny ears.
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Hanukkah!
FAME
In addition to Ted's generous and wonderful "The Magic and Mystery of Challah", Jen Taylor Friedman (inventor of "Tefillin Barbie") kindly linked to my toy shul instructions, sparking discussion on Jewschool (which I found, thanks to an e-mail from Stacey, a Juggling Frogs reader, and sent in a lengthy comment.)
Shortly afterwards, it was featured on the very popular BoingBoing news site. (Thanks to Aidel Maidel telling me (and everyone else) about it, and for her kind words!) From there, discussions and links exploded, and now I've lost track of them all.
Many thanks to readers who have pointed out Hashkafah.com (thanks jewinjeru!), chatiryworld, fodors (which has a couple of threads, I think, but this was the first), and Menupages Boston's Blogston Proper: All Hanukah Edition!.
There were also a couple of prolific and extended, passionately negative, disturbingly x-rated and profanity-laced discussions, which I don't understand and obviously can't share here. Sometimes I think the Internet is one big Rorschach test. May everyone get the therapy they need.
LINKS that made me smile
- Giving gelt for chanukah? You might want to try MoneyGami (via SwissMiss)
- This was a lovely article by Rabbi Horowitz: "Wal-mart is Coming"
- It's amazing what we can do when we can identify a common enemy.
- A couple of cute stories of hanukkah in Jerusalem shops (via Jewschool's Danya)
- SephardiLady deftly relates her thoughts on saving for retirement to this week's parsha, Miketz.
SOAP!
CrunchyGranolaMom's redesigned family soapsite looks wonderful! May you have every success!
PRODUCTIVITY
I enjoyed this well-written (and free) e-book about Time Management for Creative People by at wishful thinking.
Tim Ferris' "How to Take Notes like an AlphaGeek" does a great job of explaining his system, parts of which are remarkably similar to mine.
He numbers his pages 1, 2, 3, and then uses 1.5 to refer to the back of the page, while I prefer the Vilna-Talmud-inspired "B" side for designating the back of the page; he likes graph paper, as is in my beloved squared notebooks
, and has developed a similar indexing system for retrieval of the information stored in his notes.It's interesting that while he's running around the world and taking on all comers in a 4 hour workweek,
and I'm at home playing with my kids in a zero hour workweek, the same type of system works for both of us.MAZAL TOV again to the winners of the Chanukah Book Giveaway: Preemie Twins' Nanny**,Shelli**, Chavlene**, Phyllis Sommer, and SephardiLady, and THANKS to all who entered, and to Sharon Estroff and Broadway Books for providing the copies of this book to give away to Juggling Frogs readers.
I'm interested to hear what you think of the book when you read it. You can see Amazon's page/reviews for it here. Send me links to your reviews, and I'll attempt to compile them.
(** Please send your mailing address to Carolyn at Jugglingfrogs dot com, so I can get your prize to you before I spill something on it!)
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Hanukkah!
