IS IT PASSOVER YET?

BS"D


Erev Pesach - finally finished slaving away & am ready for redemption...now the oven doesn't work. Stove is fine. Changed fuse, tried circuit breaker, no dice. Apparently this year's Pesach prep killed it. I'll call the landlord after the chag. Joel did more than his share of the cleaning & prep, being the gentleman he cleaned & kashered the whole stove/oven, leaving me to do the fridge. Whatta guy!

Biur chametz was a gas - I took the challah heels & stale bagel halves out to a corner of our garden where we haven't planted anything yet & made a pile with bits of the sukah & dryer lint, dried ferns, sticks, paper bags & taco chips. The lint went up like a torch as did the ferns, but the paper bags are what had the staying power, to catch other things on fire before they burned themselves away....such interesting colours, too :D
The ash floated up & around our building like migrating geese or killer bees or something natural...
I'm such a pyro!

& I'm TOTALLY exhausted, so am looking forward to dinner/seder (sed-inn-er?) with R' Schachar & Me'ira.

We made a pit-stop at Choices, that place Joel makes a reference to in this eco-politi-kosher post. There is a beggar who is outside there practically every day. He isn't homeless, as he's always clean & well groomed, but he's quite gaunt. His toothless grin is charming, as his engaging wit. & he has a beautiful silver ponytail tied behind his baseball cap. He's the one I always give extra tzedaqah to erev Shabbat & chagim. Our last rabbi, Ross Singer, thought he was Jewish, so each Pesach he would leave the table & go out looking for him, in order to bring him to the seder. He was never to be found.
So we're dicussing this man while we shop & Joel, mensch that he is, goes back outside to the corner to ask the man if he's Jewish. The conversation went something like this:
"Are you Jewish? Because if you are, I'd like to invite you to a seder tomorrow night."
"Well, yes & no."
"Really? What do you mean?"
"Well, I'm circumcised, but I was the wrong baby."
"?"
"We got switched. But it allowed me to marry a nice Jewish girl."
"So your wife's Jewish?"
"Yes, & we're going to her mother's for the first seder. But thanks anyway."
Then he always ends his erev-yom-tov-or-shabbat remarks with, "Happy Holidays!" & a big wide grin.
:D

Good Shabbes, Good Yontif