My Sukkos Diary 2009

1st Day Chol Hamoed, I had a great time at Hershey Park. I was expecting to see lots of people I knew there, but ended up seeing 3 people I knew. I went on 5 rides there, the lines weren’t so bad. It’s been so long since I went to an amusement Park so I enjoyed all the rides. Seeing kids waiting on line was comforting, knowing if they can handle the roller coasters then so can I!

(I tried to insert JavaScript in the post before, but apparently blogger doesn’t let, so I had to remove it.)

Comet

Skyview

Wild Mouse

Ferris Wheel

Lightning Racer

2nd Day Chol Hamoed, I went with my family to Skver to visit relatives. It was nice when they spoke English for us, so we can understand. We went to one of my father’s cousins house, she has 15 children, all married, and her grand children are married, and some are getting married. One of her grand children was there, she was 18 and getting married to her uncle, similar to the wedding I mentioned before.

There were a bunch of Chassidish men and boys there too, 2nd and 3rd cousins. I was watching them talk in Yiddish and I finally figured out the glasses style. They have 3 different styles. One is a beigish rim around thick classes for children, another is black on the top rim and clear on the bottom rim on big sized glasses for boys and adults; most common, the third is a bigger thicker beige rim for adults, which wasn’t too common.

We sat and talked in their sukkah for 2 hours, they offered us fruits, cakes and drinks. Here are some pictures of the decorations in their sukkah. In Skver, a lot of houses have sukkah’s in their house, seems really convenient and comfortable. Though I wonder if it takes away from the traditional feeling of going outside for sukkos.

If you look on the bottom right side you will see part of a recliner.	If you look on the top right side you will see part of an air conditioner.

We then went to the Palasades Mall. One my fathers cousins in Skver owns a few rides there, and he said we can go on for free. We checked out the Ferris Wheel, but it wasn’t running at the time. So we went to play Laser tag. It was my first time playing Laser tag, it was lots of fun, they had tons of caves and places to hide in. We played a team game, and my team one of course: girl power!

   

We then went to watch a 3D imax “Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs”, it was excellent!

 

What I have to say about it:

1. I noticed a lot of father and son relationships, they weren’t much into the mothers. One father kept telling his son he loves him, another loved his son but didn’t no how to express it, and yet another spoiled his son, the brat, but didn’t know how to love him. It was a family oriented movie, which I liked. It had that loyalty thing, of choosing family over someone else.
   
   
2. I liked how it had techy geeky stuff, I noticed that he always said what he was doing, I figured this is so the kids can understand what’s happening.
   
   
3. I liked how they made the “nerd” be the cool one. That she started out as a pretty girl who would say silly things so that she didn’t sound smart and won’t be made fun of as a nerd, but then when she was excited about something she knew, she would just say it, and then play dumb after. So then the scientist realized she was smart and told her to be herself, and put a pony in her hair, and put glasses on her, and said she was beautiful then.
   
   
4. They were really creative with their play on words, and use of food. I loved the Jello part, where they took into account the substance of the food and then created a function out of it, like the ability to jump on it like a trampoline.
   
   
5. I noticed a lot of food avalanches, with people running away, but yet no one got hurt. That’s what makes it a PG movie. But yet, it makes it unrealistic. There’s only one case of a kid getting sick from eating too much candy, he then gets better with cellery in a second. So that makes it not scary for kids.

3rd day  Chol Hamoed was a really windy day, and our sukkah started to collapse; the door busted, so it was time to take it down before more damage occured.

 

One of the boards even flipped over from the wind while it was on the floor. Good thing we don’t have to eat in the sukkah second days, because now it’s all put away. Good thing I took pictures of the Sukkah before Sukkos.

I then got to do some fun mini high way driving, down curvy roads at 30 mph, and that was my fun for the day. I drove my family to an arcade/ride place. Then later that night we went to see the Simchas Bais Hashoaiva a shul in the neighborhood put together. There was a “fire” man who juggled with fire, and made balloon shapes for the kids. There was singing and dancing and the kids really enjoyed it.

4th day Chol Hamoed, I Drove on my own, for the first time! I took my little sister to a ceramics place, and spent 4 hours there painting. It was buy one get one free, so we both got to paint 2 things. I painted a shoe and a rollerblade.

After the painting, I drove my family to the water to say Tashlich.

Hope you all had a great Chol First Days Sukkos and Chol Hamoed.

Can’t wait for Simchas Torah; Candy!

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!