One of the best annual events in Highland Park, New Jersey is the street fair. Traffic is closed from 12-4 pm along Raritan Avenue, the main street in our borough. Booths line the avenue from 5th to 2nd Avenue.
Here’s what my son and his friend chose to do:
If you are in pain, pay a visit to my friend Diana Hakakian, chiropractor:
Kosher pizza for sale, too:
My friend Iola tried to get me to join Hadassah.
Politicians, potters, ponies and people selling various stuff also graced the avenue.
Unfortunately, the rain did come down on my husband, daughter, son and his friend. My other son and I managed to walk the fair without any drops falling.
For more street fair photos, see the environmental booths here.
A while back, Lion of Zion posted this about how one might lessen stress on a Friday afternoon. My response to his suggestion of eliminating some of the side dishes was “But those are the healthy dishes!”
Here’s a post of quick, healthy side dishes and not-quite-as-quick-but-worth-the-effort side dishes. And some kid-friendly ideas, too. If there’s no link to a recipe, maybe some day I’ll write up a recipe.
Quick Side Dishes
- Sweet potato: Put in a baking dish and bake along with other foods. Takes about 1.5 hours to bake, but if you are baking other things at the same time, it’s only 5 minutes of your time.
- Avocado: Buy an avocado or two on Tuesday or Wednesday. By Shabbat, it should be ripe. Mash and mix in salt, garlic (optional, and we have cubes in the freezer so as not use garlic press on Shabbat), lemon juice (again, we have lemon juice in bottle so as not to squeeze lemon on Shabbat), possibly some hot sauce.
- Beets: If you are in the kitchen anyway, boil some fresh beets. They take 1.5 hours to cook (quicker with a pressure cooker), but most of your work time is spent cutting the ends of the beets off before cooking and peeling after cooking (10 minutes). You can mix them with cucumbers, olive oil and dill right before serving.
- Steamed cauliflower or brussel sprouts: both taste good cold or room-temperature the next day.
- Garlic Spread
- Spinach : use frozen spinach–don’t cook it but take it out and put in a baking dish. Then put it on warming tray before Shabbat for Friday night dinner.
Quick Sides for Kids
My kids don’t like salads. So here are some ideas of what you can put on the table in front of the kids while you are enjoying your salads:
- Carrot sticks
- Strawberries
- Cut up melon pieces
Healthy Sides (not-quite-as-quick-but-worth-the-effort)
Years ago, I took a course on Environmental Economics, in which I learned that the poorer a country, the less it can afford to spend on the environment. It seems that is also true with health; if one is busy making money to pay for tuition and groceries and whatever else is in the budget, it is harder to take the time to cook lengthier dishes. At the same time, some people just don’t like cooking. And then there are those who would rather be cooking than working. Personally, I’d rather write a blog post about cooking than work or cook. Because I get an excuse to draw those little veggies at top right with my kids’ markers.
The ground hog ate away at my peas. They were beginning to form, the little pea pods, and the big, bad ground hog chomped on them. I sprinkled the leaves with hot sauce, in the hopes that he won’t like it. My neighbor down the block has a ground hog trap; I think the idea is you capture the ground hog, and then you have to drive somewhere to the woods so then he (or she) can come scurrying back to your garden? What joy. Like I have nothing better to do.
I actually saw him in my backyard, and if I hadn’t been in a rush yesterday, I might have been able to capture him on my camera. But I don’t want to post villains on my blog, anyway. Instead, here’s a photo of a tulip that did not get eaten by a deer:
Why is it I call the ground hog a villain, and I have sympathy for the deer? Is it just because deer are prettier animals?
A Highland Park mom is pushing for uniforms, prayer in public schools. (I had to check several times to make sure it was New Jersey–there’s a Highland Park in Illinois and one in Texas and others, too).
Here’s the story:
HIGHLAND PARK — Parent Karen Blount-Torres is saying “Enough.”
The Highland Park resident said the rising incidence of sexual harrassment in New Jersey schools has gotten to her.
And she wants to do something about it.
She started a signature drive for a petition to introduce uniforms and prayer into the New Jersey school system — as a solution to the problem.
Blount-Torres said the recent incident in South Brunswick, where a teacher was allegedly involved with a student, was the last straw.
‘I’m simply tired, there’s so much mess going on in the world,” she said.
The 38-year-old mother of three children, who are in the school system, said she looks back to the old days when she was a student and prayer was a part of school.
She said reintroducing a common prayer that does not offend any religion will help the students and staff realize their purpose in school and focus on it.
She also strongly believes that a uniform system would require students to cover up and bring back standards and principles to the system.
Uniforms for students will ensure that “the staff can identify them as children and not adults.” It would also save money for parents, she said.
Blount-Torres, who has served on the Parent Advisory board for Highland Park High School and on the PTO committee board, said she has seen firsthand how the clothes worn by the students can be distracting.
‘The prayers and uniforms will keep both staff and students safe,” she said.
A week ago, she started a signature drive, getting people throughout Middlesex County to sign a petition that asks to include prayer and uniform in the school system.
She has been out at barber shops, diners, stores, Dunkin Donuts, Sam’s Club and other stores. Her efforts have led to a record 700 signatures in the first week itself.
Two questions here:
1) What is a Google Ranking? (and should I even care)
2) What is MY Google Ranking? How do I find this out?
Let’s start with question 2. If you type “Google toolbar” in Google, you can get a link to the Google Toolbar. Download the toolbar and install it in your browser. I have mine turned off most of the time (because it takes up a little space at the top of the page), so now I’ll go turn it on so I can see the Google Ranking for every page I browse.
The Google Ranking for my own blog is 3 (out of 10). For my main website page, https://www.leoraw.com/, my Google Ranking is 4. Why is it higher for my main website page? I design websites, and I often link from the home page of the site I designed back to my main website page. So if the site I designed has a higher ranking than mine, it helps boost my ranking. I’ve been designing websites longer (10 years?) than I’ve been blogging (6 months?).
You can read more about Google ranking technology here. But the basic answer to question 1, what is this ranking stuff, if you want your page to show up higher on a Google search than a similar page, you need a higher ranking. The best way to get a higher ranking is to have related web pages with a higher ranking than yours link to your page. Note that I said related. If you are writing about dog food, and someone who is writing about poetry in China links to you, that is not as valuable as a dog food company linking to you.
Now comes the fun part. Let’s take some blogs and find out their Google ranking:
Maybe at some point I’ll discuss Technorati ratings.
So I have this idea to interview interesting individuals in Highland Park on this blog. For example, someone here was one of the only women among thousands of Breslov men who visit the grave of Rebbe Nachman in the Ukraine. Yesterday, Mark Shoulson was mentioned on this post on Deciphering Samaritan. And my friend Elisheva aka Liselle could talk all about hypnotherapy or about the Algerian Civil War and how the Jews got *&$#@!ed (misled?) by the French government.
Here’s where I need your help: I don’t know what to ask. I’ve never done an interview before. What would you ask? Thanks.
My daughter’s kindergarten class is doing a section on artists. So far, they have learned about Seurat, Jackson Pollack, Monet and Matisse. And they met the illustrator of Only Nine Chairs: A Tall Tale for Passover, who happens to be the grandmother of one of the kindergarten students.
Today, they met an artist who likes to do Jewish subjects: me.
First, I showed them my havdalah painting:
I asked them what they saw. They mentioned the candle, the cup, the plate. Then I asked them about the colors. What colors did they see on the cup? What colors do you see? Any idea why I put red next to green? I told them I was inspired by Rembrandt. Their teacher then pulled out the Night Watch (that’s not its real name, just its popular name), and I pointed out how the light and the angles of Rembrandt’s painting had similarities with mine.
Next I presented the four cups:
We talked about pointillism, and how the colors in this one differed from the previous painting. Besides the cups, what else is 4 in the hagaddah? The kids reminded me that there are four questions. But what I had in mind was the four sons. Why is one son separate from the others? They believed it was the “rasha”, the bad son. That wasn’t what I had in mind when I did the painting, but I let my viewers find their own interpretations.
They loved my final painting, a watercolor:
Not only is it someone they know well (my daughter), but the setting is their classroom.
Here are the flowers on my neighbor’s dogwood tree.
Here’s the whole dogwood tree.
I learned from Gail that the cherry trees bloom first, and then the dogwoods show their flowers.
See my dogwood painting.
Name the only country in the world that has more trees in 2008 than in 2007. To find the answer, go here.
Ever wonder if your blogging can have effect? This morning I woke up and found this:
Remembering in New Jersey
So I felt I should share with you the next day as well, the annual RPRY Yom Ha’Atzmaut parade, which is always a lot of fun. This year, the sky was rather cloudy. But out came many people: students, teachers, parents, neighbors. We march around the block.
I enjoyed talking with some other moms about my chauffeuring 5 teenage boys to Teaneck on Tuesday, and how as a mom of a teenager you are “not supposed to say anything in the car.” No adding your own jokes, no reflections on the conversation.
In the end, it did rain on our parade.
But I had brought my daughter’s treasured umbrella, and she enjoyed sharing it with a friend.
Some of the littlest children went for shelter on a porch:
We had live musicians accompanying the parade, too, to add to the merriment.
The younger children returned to their classrooms, and the older children, such as my boys, continued the celebration with dancing in the gym.
On my walk home, I was tempted to take some photos of some of the homes with Israeli flags. Instead, take a look at all the flags in the Tel Aviv area here.
