Treading water

I wrote this on Instagram a few days ago:
I am propelled by #coffee lately. Such important #protest and scary virus news in the world...but I am still #homeschooling, cooking a lot and managing kids and dogs. Even managing our household is a lot right now. I am lucky and safe but still very tired...

But I wanted to update the blog.  And I wanted to tell you about our garden, which is growing so well just now.  (much farther along than this one photo we took a few weeks ago...)  I also wanted to offer up a couple links to articles that have run recently.  This ran in the Vancouver Jewish Independent:
Rabbinic planting advice

This second link is not really about Shabbat specifically, more about how to keep ourselves and our old dog eating and alive and propel everybody forward during this hard time:

Jewish surety in Shabbat ritual

There have been a lot of afternoons like this one though, where our world has been small, we played in the yard, and focused on how grateful we are for what we have.  It's more than enough.

For those who have followed me a while, you may know that I've written about social justice issues for a long time, too.  Here are a couple links on that...one from this blog in January, 2019.  Sadly, none of the injustices taking place are new.  It's been happening for a long time.

An instagram post about how justice is long overdue.

May stories

It's been such a long time since I posted here...because I've been swamped with real life stuff.  Homeschooling, job issues, and a death in the family in NYC --not the virus but she died alone in the hospital because of it--awful.  

I decided to  show this last month mostly in pictures...with one article link.  Thanks to the Vancouver Jewish Independent, I still get to write a column every so often!  This one is about how three big world religions find common ideas to discuss and help us get through during these challenging days. 

Uniting in significant times

In our province, our PC (Progressive Conservative) premier, Brian Pallister, has decided that this would be a good time to cut the budgets of Manitoba's universities and also to cut public sector jobs.  

According to every economist and all the business leaders and columnists in the media, this will create an even more depressed provincial economy...think of Herbert Hoover in the US for a reference point. 

 However, our premier keeps pushing this.  It will definitely affect our household--our biology professor--and since my work is uneven or nonexistent these days, it feels very personal.  We made signs and went in our car to a couple social distance "honkathons" at the Legislature Building.  Here are the signs.

We've been doing school at home.  Kids built a 'bonfire' for Lag B'omer...and played outside, of course.  (This would be jousting with pool noodles, on hobby horses, if you have not seen this particular version of the game before.)  We also had hotdogs and I had to bake buns for them.  Cause it would not be a day outside without them...

I've been knitting whenever I can, mostly to maintain my sanity...and I finished the next Woolly sweater for the kid who is growing a lot but still really wants to wear a sweater with sheep on it.

There were some pretty great Mother's Day cards.

The professor took boys on a lot of bike rides, which gave me time to do crazy stuff like work and have an hour by myself.  (Hahah, not kidding.  One hour!!)

I've baked a lot of bread. Our local bakery is closed, we shop about once a week, and these people in my household are like locusts!  You'll note here that now I have to cool the bread on a rack on top of the refrigerator.  When Sadie the dog stole and ate an entire loaf of bread (anyhow, that's what we think happened, although she may have shared some with Sally, hard to say?)---well, I got creative.

It's been a long month...but I hope you'll still come back and check in and I'll find time to write more...
  Stay well!  Wash your hands!  Take care.