I'm also getting Twilight Struggle, a board game devoted to the Cold War, but I think I like the scrapbook better.

Happy Birthday, billytea and forgive me for my mind immediately going to sparkly emo vampires fighting to get out of a bad book.

Ooops... was that my outloud voice again?

Hmmm, I believe I read a casting spoiler about 90210 that might answer that question.

DANA -- have you seen this?

Les Misbarak (completely work-safe although you probably don't want to play it at full blast in the office -- although you'll probably want to)

Come to think of it, we didn't hear from Dana once she left for the library yesterday. Maybe she's still there?

No, no, I did eventually make it home. Husband disposed of the mouse in several plastic bags, and I sincerely hope it suffocated quickly.

May I never see another one in the house again.

Happy birthday, P-C!

Happy birthday, billytea!

I'm coming from a family that reads 15 minutes of the Haggadah just because I make them do so, or else it would be 3 minutes. After an hour and a half my dad and the "dad" of their side looked at each other and mumbled "umm, mind if we skip this part...?".

We usually go to my aunt and uncle's for the seder, and they're very Orthodox (members of the Bostoner Rebbe's shul) and read every single word, so that's the sort of seder that feels "right" to me. There was one year that we couldn't get up to Boston, so we had the seder at our house with some local cousins. My mom and I spent a while beforehand editing the Haggadah to exactly what we would say. We ended up mostly taking out the parts that my dad refers to as "rabbis doing multiplication" -- the stuff about exactly how many plagues there were, if you count the "strong hand and outstretched arm" stuff as multiple plagues.

Happy birthdays to Polter-Cow and billytea!!!

And I understand that biting the nads off of reindeer as a adolescent rite of passage fits in there somewhere, too.

I wonder if my grandpa ever did this while drunk. He's from Lulea, Sweden, about 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle. It's an industrial city, but IIRC he grew up on a farm outside of town, so there might have been reindeer around.

Barb, you might be related to my BIL! He and his family were among the last to get out before Castro shut down the borders in 1962. His sister and her husband lived down the street from Castro's mistress and were going to be kicked out of their house due to security reasons anyway, so they left then, as well.

I am leaving in 4 hours, 45 minutes. I am leaving in 4 hours, 45 minutes. I am leaving in 4 hours, 45 minutes. I am leaving in 4 hours, 45 minutes. I am leaving in 4 hours, 45 minutes.

Happy birthday to P-Cow and Billytea! Today is made of SCIENCE!

Dana! I recount this conversation for your benefit.

As I drove Emmett to school this morning we were listening to a song ("Dog Eat Dog" - Adam & the Ants) with the lyric "What's a warrior without his pride?"

Which prompted Emmett to muse: "What's a warrior without his pride? Nothing. My favorite warrior is Achilles -- No! Ajax. Ajax is so beast-mode. Ajax is so cool they named a soap after him. It sucks that Paris killed Achilles. Paris is such a noob."

I think that was one of the things that startled the Jewish kids I went to the HS in Israel program with-- how very secular Israel was, especially since so many of them had applied to the program and gone with this idea of reconnecting with their spiritual roots.

My first trip to Israel was on Birthright Israel, and the trip I went out had a policy of have several young Israelis along for the whole trip. We got to really get to know a whole bunch of Israelis from pretty much everywhere along the religious and political spectrum. And this was the summer of the pullout from Gaza, and when the security fence was starting to go up, so there were lots of interesting political discussions.

The security fence thing was interesting. One of our stops was right by where we could see the fence, and a PR person from the IDF talked to us about it. He explained the rationale behind it, and some of the complaints. He pointed out that, from where we were standing, we could see some olive groves on the Israeli side of the fence that belonged to a Palestinian farmer who lived on the other side of the fence and had to travel a few miles to get to a checkpoint where he could go through to tend to his groves, and that sometimes, when the lines at the checkpoint were too long, he couldn't get through on a certain day. And in response to our "What do you mean that's an "acceptable consequence"?" questions, he'd just respond, "I am in this uniform now, and my answers are the answers of the IDF. If you ran into me on the street some morning when I'm not in uniform, I might say something different."

Poor sarameg! You sound like me when I'm stuck at the B&N register on a slow day. "204 minutes left...203 minutes left...[two customers later] Oooh, it's below 200 minutes! 194 minutes left..."