Forsythias are named after William Forsyth, an 18th century Scottish horticulturist.
My rhododendron has little green buds now. Sometime this spring I will see large pink fluffy flowers from my kitchen window.
Song of Songs 2:12
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing is come.
A week ago I posted about Z., a friend of Ann who is very ill with cancer. Z.’s father regularly writes posts in a password-protected blog on the hospital website. Ann gave me access to these posts, and they are touching. And disturbing. It is clear that this is an important emotional release for Z.’s father. Z. was hospitalized so they could improve her pain medication. She will be coming home soon and receiving hospice care.
Some quotes from the letters:
I wish that I knew what Z. was thinking and feeling. We respond to her pain, try to understand her increasingly garbled speech, guess at what might make her less uncomfortable, and tell her that we love her, almost all of the time.
and
Thanks for your posts, your emails, your prayers, your love and warmth. And for our fellow Cagers and bball fans who are going to Greensboro, give a yell and clap really hard for our team. Tell them Z. sent you.
Go, Rutgers.
Love and Peace,
[Z.’s father’s name]
Finally,
As one of my friends has said right along, “no parent expects to watch his child die. It is our own personal Holocaust.”
Sometimes people mis-use the term “Holocaust”. Not here.
Unfortunately, too many families have suffered such a loss. Here’s another family’s story.
You have two choices. You can either clean or paint. Which would you pick? This past Sunday I did a little of both. I got the painting finished, and my freezer is almost all cleaned.
Here was the creative process:
Stay tuned for my sponge cake recipe. Coming soon. At least, before April 7.
Jill teaches art in Highland Park. Stay tuned for Leora’s attempt at a “salty” painting.
Salting is a fun technique for adding texture to your watercolor painting. It works by absorbing water and pushing away the pigment around each grain of salt. You just use regular table salt, but the larger grain Kosher salt can offer you further texture possibilities.
Salting works best on darker and fully saturated color. You lay down paint on the area, then throw salt where you want the effect while it’s still wet. Working quickly is of the essence, so have all your paints and tools ready to go. The secret is too not over do it with the amount of salt. If you put on too much you won’t see where the individual grains have absorbed the water and pushed away the color around it.
It looks particularly nice for representing snow or ocean spray in a seascape, but also just a good general textural device. You can experiment with larger amounts of salt just to built various textures. Fun stuff.
Enjoy, and I’ll post more techniques soon.
Art Teacher Jill
I had great fun this past week creating a new header for a popular blog called:
A Mother in Israel
If you are interested in parenting, breastfeeding, interviews with other bloggers, life in Israel, burkas or potato kugel, mom in Israel has a lot going on.
Mom emailed me a variety of pictures; the final header has abundant, colorful fruit in a market, a child’s tricycle, challah, a laundry basket and squeegee, and a boy in a cap at the beach. I asked my children to review the header before forwarding the final version; my daughter remarked the bike looked like it was in the market and the laundry looked like it was on the beach! Bravo, daughter. Great to have assistants like you.
A few of my favorites:
Finally, here are links to two very touching posts:
My Aliyah Part I
and My Aliyah Part II. In these posts she talks about the sudden death of her mother, loneliness and grief, and making friends in a new place.
She is funny, personable, and informative. I hope you’ll enjoy her blog as much as I do.
What do you do when you only have one potato in the house? Or two? And the potato is a beautiful red potato (called new potato), no little growths popping up at all, smooth-skinned and welcoming?
First, if you have a five-year-old who is learning how to count or add, you play one potato, two potato. (We actually didn’t add potatoes, but we did add Hershey’s kisses. You show the child four kisses. Then you put one next to it. How many do you have? There is too much candy leftover in this house from Purim! Argh! I already threw out the laffy taffy. But I have an attachment to chocolate that makes it hard to throw away. It is the fifth food group, as you may know). OK, no more digressions.
Here was my one potato salad:
Ingredients:
Boil the egg with the potatoes. Take the egg out earlier, as it needs less time than potatoes. You can leave the skin on the potatoes or not; up to you. I like them with the skin. Also, peeling is a pain. Chop the potatoes and the egg. I often have fresh cooked beets available, as I make them once a week, but you can 1) skip this ingredient, but it won’t be pink 2) make some fresh beets or 3) open a can. Put in chopped beets. Add parsley and onions. And any other optional ingredients. Coat with olive oil; it is important to do this while the potatoes are still warm, so they absorb the flavor. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Toss with apple cider vinegar.
Optional ingredients: dill, granny smith apple, pickles, oregano, scallions, peppers, garlic
I was having fun with my camera and decided to try the Color Accent feature. I’m going to call this my kitniot picture, because it highlights the peas, which Ashkenazi Jews are not allowed to eat on Passover:
You know the Barney Song? The purple dinosaur who sings: “remember please and thank you”.
It’s been a while since I’ve highlighted a local business. Here’s one that knows how to say thank you:
And, if you’re a search engine who is too stupid to read the words on an image, that’s:
RARITAN AIR WATER POWER SERVICE
HEATING • COOLING • PLUMBING •
ELECTRICAL • DRAINING CLEANING
10 YEAR WARRANTY ON NEW EQUIPMENT
CALL FOR SERVICE
1-877-501-COOL (2665)
A friend is working on a document for clients for her business. In order to stress the importance of thanking the client, I tell her about my furnace-air conditioner-fix-the-toilet guy, Zev, who sends thank you notes just about every time we use their business. Well, his wife Leslie actually sends the note, but they are both so gracious and professional.
And, lo & behold, I get a notice yesterday asking us to renew our contract, with this lovely, hand-written note at the bottom:
I had recommended her to Mike Beberman of Cyber Knights in New Brunswick. Another gracious businessperson.
Anyway, thank you, Leslie, for sending over your husband to fix: our shower, our toilet, our sink and our furnace. And whatever it was he did with our air conditioning system.
I have this livejournal account, mostly so I could answer Daniel Saunder‘s posts. Daniel writes about severe depression and Judaism, two topics about which I have experience, and Doctor Who, about which I know very little. (I don’t even own a tv, though I’m sure my older son could show me how to watch it on the internet if I were really interested). Daniel had a great post last week about Rav Soloveitchik’s Halachik Man. It takes a while to read his posts. He recently posted a best of the Blog, in which he starts out by saying:
I think part of my problem with blogging is that I can not decide what my blog is for. I sometimes think of it as a place where I can be myself, where I can explore all of my various, unconnected interests, in which case it does not matter who reads it. However, I also think of it as a way of delivering a message of some kind, of exploring certain ideas that I want relate to people in one or other of the sub-cultural groups that I am in, so it becomes necessary to reach that particular audience, whether of Doctor Who fans or Orthodox Jews or some other group.
Except perhaps for the Doctor Who part, this paragraph is one many bloggers can relate to. Who are we talking to and why?
Last week someone stopped me and said: “I found your blog!”
Uh, oh, I think. What did I say? Is someone REAL finding my blog? Someone I’m going to meet on the street (actually, it was in the back of my kids’ school)? Turns out, she has a great blog herself, and here it is: elinka.livejournal.com. Oh, by the way, it helps if you know Russian. Sometimes she writes “Shavua Tov” in Russian (Shavua Tov means Have a Good Week. In Hebrew). You can always enjoy the cute pictures.
I took a look around Live Journal tonight, and my account said I have no friends. Don’t you love it when you sign up for something new, and it tells you that you have no friends?
Finally, it asked this question:
What talent do you have that you wish more people would recognize?
I don’t know the answer. Do you have an answer?
My son, middle son, the one who once commented on my blog as me, who is up too late playing computer games next to me, said I should have said “fishing.”
One of the live journal bloggers answered:
I can fly.
Jack is a clever blogger. I have about ten ideas for posts in my head, but only time to write one quick one, as my children are now arising, and the real day is beginning.
So, here’s a link to Jack’s blog:
Second Annual Link to Jack Day.
We should all be as clever as Jack!
Yesterday I cleared out space on the top of my cabinets. Passover is coming, and I need to stock up on the non-perishables already available for weeks in the supermarket.
Clearing out the space was easy, because in addition to anything I had placed there for Purim, for the last few weeks I put up non-perishables that I did not need and wanted to donate to the Highland Park Food Pantry. I dropped them in the food pantry bin today in our local supermarket.
I’ve organized two Cub Scout food drives in the past for the Highland Park Food Pantry. Unfortunately, too many people in our area find it necessary to stand on line and wait their turn for food. One of my friends said her son saw a classmate standing on line. It made him feel his task was all the more important.
Passover food is expensive, too. So our area has a kosher food bank at the Jewish Family and Vocational Service.
So while we are all enjoying the spring, put a non-perishable item in your local food pantry bin.