Sunday 1

I love my life, by the way.

Jonah hosted an amazing Shabbat dinner Friday night (that's a redundant phrase) and I even managed to make some good tzimmes although it paled in comparison to Sonia's amazing kugel. I am making Sonia adopt me, because she is the best Jewish mother ever. There was a ton of great food (Debi makes really good challah, too) and I even made sure that Jonah made deviled eggs so it would be a real potluck (I told him that macaroni and cheese was also necessary but that didn't happen. The kugel had cream cheese in it though, so I guess that's kind of similar). It was great to have most of the internship kids around hanging out and eating, which we don't do often enough, even though we live together. And Debi tried to teach us some crazy Yiddish socialist songs, and then she taught us crazy Yiddish folk dances, which were more successful. There is something pretty amazing about doing mating dances barefoot in the grass at midnight. Especially when it's followed by a bonfire and singing (Kari needs to learn Jew songs because Christian songs aren't going to cut it this summer) and then playing in a creek. Nothing identifies city kids and country kids faster than wading across a(n ankle-deep) creek in the middle of the night and near-darkness. I'm a country kid, by the way. We even had some 1-in-the-morning-ice-cream-straight-from-the-carton (which included the brilliant "get a spoonful of ice cream and then dip it into the jar of hot fudge sauce" method, which I highly recommend for your next communal ice cream function), courtesy of Paul and Jeremy who know how to pick very good ice cream flavors and not boring chocolate/vanilla.

Other highlights of the week:
We have a theme song, and it is in Polish. But it's called "Oy Madagascar" and it is better than you can possibly imagine. Because of this song, Marissa is Jungle Jew.
Nicknames are happening! I love nicknames. Most of them involve Yiddish diminutives.
We took pictures in a tree (with a professional photographer and a bunch of Hebrew religious books that we did not treat with appropriate piety) and I hope they give us copies of a bunch of them cause I bet they're awesome.

Naomi Seidman is coming tomorrow and she is #3 on my list of Yiddishists I adore (after Max/Uriel Weinreich and Jeffrey Shandler) and I am beyond excited. I have no idea how to deal with this, granted, but I'm sure I'll be fine.

Yiddish!