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:

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).