There is a dog park (a large caged in area) for little dogs and one for big dogs. There were a lot more big dogs. They romp around and play games with each other. My daughter was following the interactions carefully.

I enjoyed the oranges, reds, yellows of the sunset. The steeple you see is across the Raritan River in New Brunswick.

Good night!

For more photos Straight Out Of the Camera:

Photo by Mason Resnick: Smashed window of Park Place in Highland Park, New Jersey

I will be visiting the Judaica Gallery today because I need to make a purchase for my daughter – at least those of us that are local can support the businesses that were targeted. Rutgers Hillel and Chabad in New Brunswick also were targeted with smashed glass, as well as the restaurant Maoz. The Highland Park businesses were Jerusalem Pizza, Park Place, Judaica Gallery, Trio Gifts and Jack’s Hardware. Maybe I should go buy some light bulbs at Jack’s.

A big thank you to the Highland Park police for their quick and decisive action regarding this crime.

Update: A Letter from Mayor Steve Nolan (it ends with: “As a community, we are much stronger than a pane of glass could ever be.” – bravo)

Update: An excerpt from a letter from Rutgers Hillel director Andrew Getrauer:

Wednesday morning at 2 AM a Jewish Rutgers student, very
involved in Hillel, was at the kosher Dunkin’ Donuts in Highland Park,
when a man approached him and started a conversation about Jewish
issues. He identified himself as Jewish. This deteriorated into a rant
where the man also declared himself a neo-Nazi and told the student he
should be in a camp and killed like his ancestors, and that he would
start a ‘second Kristalnacht.’ At this point the Dunkin Donuts staff
threw the man out of the store.

Wednesday morning Highland Park woke up to find 5 Jewish-owned
stores with windows broken; 2 Judaica stores, 2 kosher restaurants, and
a hardware store owned by an Orthodox man. A Jewish-owned falafel
restaurant in New Brunswick was also targeted. Hillel staff contacted
the student who had encountered the man at Dunkin Donuts and made sure
he was in touch with police. Hillel staff contacted the ADL and New
Brunswick police to help connect the dots between the various incidents.
There was wide spread anxiety throughout the local community, expressed
thru constant phone calls, emails, Facebook and twitter messages. To
give you a sense of the feeling at the time, people were calling it
“Kristalnacht in New Jersey.”

More details were reported in the Star Ledger, New Jersey Jewish News and other press.

To quote Aaron Marcus, Rutgers student leader: “”We wanted to protest this event because as the children and grandchildren of victims of the Holocaust we believed it to be absolutely absurd to compare Israeli act of self defense to the viscous, systematic murder of millions of Jews, Catholics, Gays, Gypsies, Russians and others.”

Watch the videos on Challah Hu Akbar:
Rutgers University Event Bans Jewish Students and Community Members

Videos with commentary on Jake Binstein’s blog:
BAKA Lies

Learn more on JoshuaPundit:
Rutgers Puts Apartheid Against Jews Into Practice

A Statement by StandWithUs:
STANDWITHUS DEPLORES ANTI-JEWISH DISCRIMINATION AT RUTGERS “NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE” EVENT, APPLAUDS PRO-ISRAEL ACTIVISTS’ STRONG RESPONSE

Rutgers student organization BAKA (Students United for Middle Eastern Justice) sponsored the presumably public event, but when it became apparent that pro-Israel attendees would outnumber BAKA sympathizers by almost four to one, the organizers became alarmed. “There are so many Jews here,” exclaimed one BAKA member who was wearing a “Smash Israeli Apartheid” T-shirt.

To end this post with an upbeat, local event, here’s one of my son the filmmaker’s videos that may appear in the Highland Park Public Library Teen Film Festival on February 6:

This is the top of the bridge. I liked the colorful leaves growing on the fence.

Unfortunately, graffiti is too common a site on bridges in our area.

The bottom of the bridge with the Raritan River: the bridge is at the end of our walk that started at Rutgers Gardens.

Past posts with bridges and the Raritan River:

• View of Donaldson Park and the Raritan River from the bridge on Route 1
• Bridge over Raritan River into Highland Park

For more Sunday Bridges:

1. Read the magazines and newspapers left out on the table for jurors to read.
2. Make conversation by the coffee machine. “Is the coffee any good?” I asked someone. I had already read everything I had brought, and I was just trying to strike up conversation.
3. Read books that you brought. Of course, you came prepared with plenty of reading material, right?
4. Daydream.
5. Plan your next vacation. If you don’t have money or time to take a real vacation, plan what you will cook for dinner.
6. People watch: lots of different kinds of people show up at the Middlesex County Courthouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
7. Think about what you might photograph if you were in a place that was worth photographing (unless you were doing a piece on urban depressing sights, I don’t think this room would be appropriate. And I doubt taking pictures of jurors is legal, anyway).
8. Stretch. Do some neck rolls. Move your legs around. Walk around the room.
9. Draw.
10. Write a blog post on ten things to do while waiting at jury duty.

Here’s what I didn’t see on my day yesterday – a view of New Brunswick from the Highland Park side, Raritan River all sparkly, photographed in Fall 2008:

Since this is a post for Ruby Tuesday, I focused on photos with a bit of red. There’s the schoolhouse. All of the buildings were moved to this spot from elsewhere in Central New Jersey.

We had fun in the one-room school house, with its pretty red gingham curtains.

Throughout the buildings there are a lot of fake place settings, showing how food might have looked or been served. The buildings are from a variety of periods in New Jersey history.

This sign, with its red border, says the “In the 1970′s, the Indian Queen Tavern was relocated from New Brunswick to East Jersey Olde Town in Piscataway. In 2003, archaeologists uncovered artifacts from the original site of the tavern in New Brunswick.” (On display were a toothbrush, a comb, a shaving mug and a chamber pot.)

On our way out, I photographed this colorful bush, with its red fall foliage display.

For more photos with red, visit Ruby Tuesday:

Robin’s Summer Stock Sunday is a photo meme, but I am again taking liberties with that definition and including this video, as creativity is in important part of our summer. My daughter is in theater camp for three weeks; I hope to do a post about the play (Brave Little Tailor) she was in on Friday soon.

I got on the computer tonight, and I found a note from one of my favorite European bloggers, Jientje, who granted me this:

The rules to this award are :

1)Show the award in your blog.
2)Link back to the blog that tagged you.
3)Pass on the award to 8 blogs that you love. (Since this award has been around for a while feel free to pass it to as many or as few as you want.)
4)Inform the bloggers that they have been awarded.
5)Take your time, there’s no pressure, but try to check out the other awarded blogs.

I picked three (new to me) blogs:

• Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (G6)
• EllieVellie
• Confessions of a Startup Wife (Abbi)

Congratulations to the awardees, and thanks again, Jientje.

Hey, anyone know what “de Ouro” means? I had to look it up.

I liked this shot of the bridge a little better than the top photo (do you see graffiti as art or as pollution or ?), but no water in this shot.

For more watery photos, visit Watery Wednesday:

Part of the reason for the trip was the boys have been studying the 39 Melachot, the 39 acts of work that a Jew is not allowed to do on the Sabbath. All of these Melachot are agriculturally-based, so their teacher used the museum as a way to show them threshing, winnowing, grinding sheaves (I have no idea what those are; I took those words off Wikipedia). Each boy had been assigned one Melacha to study in detail.

My son’s Melacha was weaving. He had already presented to the class, and his teacher told me later that he gave my son weaving because it was a more difficult one, but he knew my son could handle it. He did an origami basket project with his class. Yes, I am proud of him!

For more posts with a little or a lot of red: