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:

There is also a photo of a Passover seder on the site. Can anyone tell me where that seder took place?

Visit Public History Partners.

Do you think Rutgers chose red as their color so I could use their new emblem (the PR department had it redesigned last year) for Ruby Tuesday?

For more Ruby Tuesday pics, visit:

A little more of the bench.

And here’s the bench in its setting on Easton Avenue in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

For more Ruby Tuesday pics, visit:

I took this photo standing in Highland Park looking across the river at New Brunswick last month in early December. I believe that steeple is in Cook/Douglass Campus of Rutgers (Voorhees Chapel?).

These last two photos were taken this morning. Much bluer sky, right? The above shows the contrasts of old and new architecture in New Brunswick.

This is Easton Avenue in New Brunswick, one block from the College Avenue campus of Rutgers University. I was visiting my favorite computer fix-it folks: Cyber Knight Computers.

It’s nice to report that a local teenager did a mitzvah, a good deed, and raised money to help pay for the cemetery restoration. Read the article in the New Jersey Jewish News before they take the article offline (these newspaper articles don’t stay up forever).

A few weeks ago my daughter, her friend and I went to Family Day at the Zimmerli.

The event was free; balloons floated in front of the stained glass window. There were guards stationed in every room of the museum. All the guards were nice to the children, explaining sweetly that the children should not touch the art (this was not our experience at the Princeton Art Museum, which seems much less interested in having children in their building, or the Newark Museum, in which a guard once told my son he could not sit and draw the paintings. Maybe if I write this on a blog post someone at one of those museums will read it and try to be more kid-friendly?).

Activities included face painting, a scavenger hunt, a dance performance, an art activity, and storytelling.

My daughter and her friend waited in the bus stop sculpture by George Segal to get their faces painted. George Segal, known for his life-size human figures, also did a sculpture called The Holocaust, which is in the Jewish Museum in New York and in a park in San Francisco.

We worked on the Family Day scavenger hunt, searching for details in paintings.

As our grand finale event, we listened to story told by Peninah Schram, who was introduced as a “world-reknowned storyteller.” Peninah enjoyed having her picture taken with the girls (a third friend joined us):

Peninah began her story with: “Shalom Aleichem.” We were then supposed to yell back: “Aleichem Shalom!” The audience was a mix of Orthodox Jews, Asian Americans, Caucasian Americans, and at least one Muslim family (one could tell by the head scarf and pants)–typical Central New Jersey audience.

The story was about three brothers and a magic pomegranate. Peninah encouraged audience participation; when she talked about a shuk, the children were asked, “And what do you think was being sold in the market?” When she asked how many seeds does a pomegranate have, I whispered to the girls: “613″, so they happily yelled out “613!”, and Peninah explained how a pomegranate is reported to have 613 seeds, like the number of mitzvot in the Torah. (Aside: years ago, my brother and I counted the seeds in a pomegranate, and we found way more than 613 seeds. When I told my teacher, he responded: “but was it a pomegranate grown in Israel?”)

We bought a copy of the book, The Magic Pomegranate. I see we got a good price; we only paid $15 for the book at the museum.

On the way out, the girls got prizes for their participation in the scavenger hunt. One prize was a kite, so we ended the afternoon with a bit of kite flying.