Monday, May 25, 2009

Memorial Day Weekend

Here it is Monday already. Shabbos passed fine without Jeffrey and the boys (though we missed them) who were camping with the Boy Scouts. The girls, the little ones and I had our meals, made it to shul for a little while, and even managed to attempt a walk in the park (which we don't normally try since it's outside the eruv). Addie walked happily about 1/2 mile from the house and then sat down and wouldn't budge another step. Gilad found a caterpillar on the path, put it on his arm, took it with him for quite a while, then shared it with Addie who wanted a turn. Then they put it back on the path to continue on its way, but they hoped to come back and pick it back up on our return. Unfortunately by the time we got back to it, it had been squished by a bicycle. For the record, Gilad had named it "Naruto."
Sunday, my mother, Tirtze, and I took Gilad and Addie to the zoo. We saw a lot of the animals, but Gilad's favorite part of the whole zoo trip was the mist machines they have up along the main path.
Jeffrey and the boys came home in the middle of the night last night. Kayla's out camping with the Girl Scouts now, and Tirtze's at her grandparents.
I've gotten very little knitting done, but I have finished the front and back of my "Boggart in the Window" sweater (so-named because I joked about Harry Potter book boggarts appearing to me in the form of a cable needle, and the sweater pattern is called "Windowpane."

2 comments:

Barb said...

Hi Leesy! It's bluecanary from the knittyboard. May I ask a question? What's an eruv? I love reading your blog...I wish I had a better understanding of Hebrew (I hope I got even that right!).

Leesy said...

Hi--you're so sweet! An eruv in this context (there are several different possible definitions, mostly kind of related but not too obviously) is the legal construct which binds together one geographic area so that on the Sabbath we can consider it one community or congruent area within which we can carry (things like books or small children) or push (things like a stroller) and so on. Within the eruv, if you "hold" by eruv, you can carry and so on; with no eruv or outside of the eruv you can't. So we don't usually take very small children for a walk outside the confines of the eruv if there's a good chance they can't walk the whole distance. If they do just sit down on their tushies and refuse to go any farther, but it was reasonable to expect they would walk, under most circumstances we do the obvious thing--pick them right up and carry them.
There are several components to the construction of an eruv--laying out actual lines around the area included (generally fishing line around utility poles), the setting aside of food on behalf of the community, and a statement that the eruv is on behalf of the community.
In our neighborhood, the eruv ends just before Rock Creek Park largely because the utility poles stop there! Other local eruvs stop at the Washington Beltway and so on.