My Pesach Diary 2009

My innovative little brother continues to surprise me with his great inventions. For Purim he made a container on wheels to carry the shaloch manos and now for Pesach he made his own pillow out of cloth napkins, old pillow stuffing and staples.

   

On Pesach, I was helping out by changing the glasses on the lachter and to put in new candles. Now this is a un-girly thing to say, but a really cool thing happened while I was removing the old wicks from the glasses.

I had 3 glasses in my hand with a plastic knife in the other- Mistakes 1&2. I had used the knife to successfully take out a bunch of wicks and I had just those 3 left to take out. So I used the knife and tried to take out the wick of the top glass in my hand, but it wouldn’t come out. So I tried harder…then all of a sudden I hear a cracking sound, I didn’t know what it was from. So I continued trying to remove the wick using the knife. Then I realized the middle glass I was holding in my hand had cracked. I look at my hand and I see a really cool pretty and colorful shard of glass got stuck in my skin. It was the strangest thing, I pulled it out from my hand and it didn’t hurt one bit! Plus there was not a cut or a trace of blood coming out of my finger from where I removed it. But I remembered distinctly that the glass had been in my finger, so I’m not so sure how that was possible.

Chol Hamoed – Sunday:

We were going to go to Harford Connecticut, but we ended up going to Milford Connecticut instead.

First we went to The Maritime Aquarium, we watched a sea lion feeding where 1 of the sea lion’s had a Jewish Sounding name – Layala!

I saw a Watercolor painting which made me think of Leora, so I took a picture of it:

 

There were lots of kinds of fish there, thankfully it was all indoors, because the weather was chilly. There were a few fish that stuck out.

1. Lobster: Looking at that thing, I can’t imagine how people eat it, and I’m thankful it’s not on “our menu”.
   
    
2. Star Fish: There was a touch tank where you can touch some fish. One of them was the star fish, I didn’t touch it. But I remember maybe touching one when I was younger, so I enjoyed the memory of it.
   
3. Shark: So mean looking, makes me think of a Rasha!
   
4. Turtle: for a known to be slow creature, this turtle looked really impressive. This was the biggest turtle I’ve ever seen. It also had a fierce looking face.
    
5. Jelly Fish: now this was the best part! I loved looking at the jelly fish, I’ve always pictured one looking like the candy jelly fish, but that’s  not at all how it looks!
    
   
   I found the jelly fish to be so graceful I just had to take a video of it. I started the video and then some chassidish kids came over, I feared they would start talking and it would ruin the video and cause me to have to mute the sound. But an amazing thing then happened, I got the perfect sound effect!
   




6. Flounder: one of the types of fish that I actually like eating. I like hands on interactive exhibit’s so I was happy to try to solve this one. These flounder have got truly amazing camouflage.
   
    
7. Colorful Fish tank: This one is “Ma Rabu Maasecha Hashem”. I saw this tank of fish and at first glance I just loved it, amazing what color can do. 
    
    
   
8. Penguins: I don’t think I’ve ever seen Penguins swim before, I always imagined their in the snow only. (Happy Feet was a great movie!). 
   

We went to an IMAX about the grand canyon. When we got there the place was empty, so I took some pictures of the vast big empty room. I love the theater effect to it all.

There were a bunch of Chassidish people that did come in to watch, along with other frum Jews. We waited a little while, then the “movie” started. The first image on the screen was…you’ll never guess! 2 girl’s in bikini’s in the water. I watched the boys turn their head and look away, nobody could believe what was just on the screen.

Then the film continued and it was about how the water in the Colorado river was draining out, and it showed them kayaking the river for the most of it. It was cool to see them going over the big waves and falling upside down. I’ve never seen the grand canyon before, and it was amazing to see that too. They also showed Las Vegas, another scene I’ve never seen before, and the colorful lights were truly pretty.

I love going to gift shops to look around and get a key chain or some other little thing with the name of the place on it. This time I got a charm that said the name of the aquarium, it was silver too.

While I was looking around I saw a pacifier that I thought it was really funny, it would have been perfect for one of the kids I used to babysit!

 

After the aquarium we went to the Hotel in Milford. It was a very basic hotel, not fancy. The elevator was a plain one,  no glass see through doors. There was no pool, not that I would have gone swimming. The gym only had 3 machines, a treadmill, a stationary bike, and my favorite step machine! I used the step machine for a bunch of minutes and it was really fun.

This was the first trip in a really long time that my whole family actually came! We originally got 3 rooms, and my parents were going to share a room with me and my little sister. But when we opened the room we saw there was no room for another 2 beds, so I went on my laptop, logged in and booked another room for me and my sister. (I didn’t use my own money though…it was only 10,000 points so my father used his points).

It was so much fun watching TV, every time I go to a hotel I find there are new shows that I didn’t know about. I watched the NIK channel for about 3 hours straight! There was Drake and Josh which I thought had amazing actors, wow, those kids show a lot of facial expressions and put all their Koach into it! Then there was iCarly, this one reminded me of Hannah Montana and I loved it!

There were a lot of commercials, but since I haven’t seen them before, it was fun to watch the first time! I saw this commercial for a hanging tomato planter and I thought it was really funny! I thought of Jacob Da Jew and Leora though, cause I know they plant, so perhaps they might find it useful? I also noticed that by all the commercials, everything cost 19.95, or x payments of 19.95!

Chol Hamoed – Monday:

We went to an arcade game place called Smilez. Now this was truly a fun filled day. We spent 20 dollars in tokens, getting 112 tokens to play all kinds of games. It brought back so many memories of fun games I remembered playing.

1. Bop the Alligator: I always loved playing this game, so I went to it right away and put in my token, ready to play the game. But then nothing happened, and I realized I lost my coin, that the game wasn’t working. I later realized if the light’s off then then the game won’t work! 
    
2. Catch the Light: This next game I played I remembered playing before, it was a guaranteed win, so I got a few tickets. 
   
   
   
   
3. Sky Bowling: (not sure what it’s called?), this game I’ve also played before, but I wasn’t any good at it, kept getting zeros! (The game had a longer ramp, I just cropped it for the sake of keeping the picture small looking).
   
   
   
4. Rock N’ Bowl: now this is all about luck and aiming, you have to aim your coin to go in the slot and hit the pin and you get that amount of tickets. My father tried and actually got 100 tickets that way! 
   

After we had fun playing our games we went to the machine to count our tickets and redeem our prizes!

 

Then my mother saw a game that she remembered playing and wanted to play it! So we went over to the game, my mother put in her token and nothing happened. It was one of those aiming the coin type of games, so I shook the aimer thing to see if it would go then, but it wouldn’t go. Then all of a sudden we hear noise and tickets start coming out of the machine one after another, as the aimer was shook, tickets kept spilling out. So we let a lot of tickets come out and then we counted the tickets and had over 500!

As I was feeding the tickets into the counter machine, I felt guilty, I wasn’t sure if it was okay what we just did, to get free tickets like that from a broken machine. What would you have done?

So then we got some more prizes, and everyone was happy!

Then we saw a Chassidish boy go over to the broken machine and he also realized that tickets were coming out for free, so he let it keep going too. Then his father came over and saw what happened, then when they redeemed their tickets for prizes, the father told the person behind the counter about the broken machine. But looks like she didn’t care, cause no one went over to put a sign on it, or fix it, so it kept giving tickets to whoever wanted. So then I felt less guilty, cause they knew it was broken.

When we were ready to leave I put my hand in my pocket and realized I had more coins left, so I quickly played another game and got some more tickets, but I was too lazy to go get a prize for it, so I saw a Chassidish girl and went over to her to give the tickets to. I said “You can have these” and handed her the tickets, she was stunned and her mouth was hanging open, looking at me, wondering why I just did that.

I ended up getting a bunch of prizes, my first was the blue teddy bear for 220 points and the “I love Mom” bear for 180 points- those were earned legitimately! Then I got a little picture frame in a purse shape for 270 points and a “You’re the best” bear for 180 points- those were through the “cheated tickets”. Then I got a deck of cards for 30 points that was legit.

 

Hope you had a great first day’s and enjoyed your Chol Hamoed too!