Shabbat Puns

Enjoy the punny stores on this page.  They'll have you chuckling all the way into Shabbat.

Heat Wave

It feels like summer is here.  It's hot as can be - upper 80s today, hiking up to upper 90s this weekend.  This is not my time of year.  I like it in the 60s or even the 50s.  I'm really into climate control when the weather is like this.  

BB has finished school for the year... one part happy, one part not so much.  Ette has another week of school - but it was cancelled today.  Yes.  We had a snow day in June.  Well, not exactly a snow day.  Yesterday afternoon there was a nasty storm here.  Trees down all around the DC area.  Gazillions of people without power.  Count the Babka family in as active participants on that one.  Our electricity came back on around four or five this morning.  Some friends still had no power this evening - others didn't lose it until late this morning.  As hot as it was today, I'm SO glad our AC is cranked up!

So now I'm in the process of orchestrating BB's social life for the next week.  After that, his friends will be in day camp, but Ette will be home.  We're around until the end of June and then we become the Traveling Babkas:  four or five days in NJ, home for three days,  then four weeks in NC at camp, then a week at the beach.  Hopefully all will go smoothly.  It's a long time to be away!

In the mean time, I'm dreading going outside tomorrow.  Maybe I'll buy a personal fan for around my neck!

Grocerant

I live in the local grocery stores.  You will notice, I hope, that I stated that in the plural form.  I do not shop in one grocery store.  I shop in five.  Not every week.  But depending on what is on my shopping list,  I can hit all five in one week.  It's kind of awful.  Especially since four of the five stores are all in the same local chain.  I don't go to the expensive quasi-organic chain.  I try hard not to patronize our local kosher store "Gonef Mart."  And yet,  I drive along in my gas guzzling mommyvan to a whole lot of stores.

Why?  Because my preferred store, #1, doesn't carry the pareve wafers that BB likes to eat.  Nor do they carry the bread crumbs I like.  #2, which is a much larger store that recently underwent renovations, didn't have kosher onion soup mix.  #3 has a decent kosher aisle (including my wafers and bread crumbs), but is a very small store that doesn't carry a lot of other things.  #4 is huge, not close by, and has weird lapses in what they carry, both in the kosher aisle and otherwise.  #5 is not a place where I usually shop, but they have an amazing kosher section.  It's also not too close, but when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Today I went shopping with a large list... and as I pulled into #2, I wondered aloud which items I'd have to search elsewhere for.  Lucky for me, it was only 2 items.  But what a pain in the tuchus!  

What makes matters worse is that the international conglomerate that owns the stores (which I have affectionately renamed Royal A**holes... if they own a chain by you, then you know who I mean) has decided that as they renovate the stores, they'll add a Starbucks in each one.  Not my thing.  Especially since they have cut back on the number of products they carry (you can no longer by Hunts ketchup at these stores... no, I would never want to, but still) under the guises of getting better prices from the distributors.  Which I'm SURE they will pass along to the customers as better prices.  Right.  I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.  Store #3, the tiny one, is going to get their own SB this summer.  For those people who are too lazy to go to shopping center one block down.  If they have so much extra space, how about carrying a couple more products???  If you shop at #2 and forget to buy your mocha crapaccino while searching for chocolate milk that hasn't expired, you can walk FOUR DOORS down in the shopping center to get one on your way out.  #3 is an enormous store that no longer carries the pareve frozen breads that I LOVED, but they do carry small appliances and overpriced party supplies.  

If I could avoid these stores, I would.  #5 carries most of what I want.  I could fill my kitchen with everything I need by just shopping at #4 and #5.  But they are 20-25 minutes away, depending on traffic.  That's a little ridiculous when #1 and #2 are each 6 minutes from my house.  There is another chain nearby, but their product selection is worse and they employ some of the worlds most amazing morons.  So I try not to shop there.

Instead, I complain loudly - to the managers in the stores, to my mother, Hubby, my friends, and now to you.  Don't you feel special?

Let Him In

In honor of my hero Jack, I offer this tale from Shabbat...

The Fedex man came to deliver a package this Saturday.  He was cute.  Not hot like our regular UPS guy but cute.  I mean, I'm not paying extra to have things delivered via Fedex on Saturdays just to see him (um... that's really not the reason I like to order things to be shipped by UPS, honest!).  

But I digress.

As Mr. Cuteypants Fedex guy and I were chatting, he asked me about all the men walking around in the neighborhood.  I looked around and noticed 6 or 8 nicely dressed black men walking in pairs down my street and the on the cross street.

Huh.  Missionaries.  

Mr. CP Fedex chuckled and told me to have fun.  Gotta love a delivery guy with a sense of humor.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, my doorbell rang.  Who could it possibly be?

I answered the door, but left the storm door closed.

Can I help you?

Yes, we'd love to talk to you for a moment about Jesus Christ.

At this point, I open the storm door, and point to my mezuzah.

I'm Jewish.  I'm not interested.

Oh, you're Jewish?  Well, have you thought about letting Jesus Christ into your heart?

If you friend Jesus comes anywhere near my heart, I'll slap him with a sexual harassment suit.  Have a nice day!

I wish I could have heard their conversation as they walked away.

Remember Me?

So Jack asked me if I've lost the blogging bug.

It's not that I've lost it, it's that... it's been temporarily misplaced.  I think of things I want to say, but when I sit down at my computer, I have too many other things that need to get done.

A few weeks ago, I sent my pretty little laptop in for repairs.  I did a back up, as I'm supposed to... but I didn't know that I really ought to perform a FULL back up... of all my info in Mac OSx and in Windows.  So when it came back to me, it had been wiped clean.  

As in EMPTY.

It took me several hours to go through all my back up files and move them onto the computer.  But I didn't have any of my extra software.  Nor did I have any of the files that were saved in the Windows side of my computer.  Bye bye to all my Hebrew song lyrics and the Haggadah that I had worked on.  

But my calendar and address book were safe because they were all on my Crackberry.

Until today.

I had to replace my beloved Crackberry because the charging thingy wasn't working (inside the phone, not the charger).  They replaced my phone at no charge (because I threw a fit).  I came home to sync it up with my computer... For some reason, I felt it was necessary to change the settings of the syncing software.  And I accidentally switched it to "overwrite Mac" instead of "overwrite device."  When the process ended, both my phone and my computer were EMPTY of calendar and addresses.

So every time I look at my laptop, I am stressed out.  It was starting to subside, but now I'm frantically emailing friends and family (the ones I can come up with) and asking for their contact info. 

Wish me luck.  And Zanax

Chimpanzees and Kangarooseys

Hubby and I are so excited to have people over and finally use our new(ish) deck and patio.  The patio wasn't completed until it was too cold to spend much time outside, so its life has really begun this spring.

I invited BabkaEtte's friends (and their families) over for dinner tonight after their dance class.  Mid-May... a perfect time to eat dinner outside.  Not too warm, not too buggy.

As they say... Babka makes plans, G-d laughs.  Ok.  They didn't say it exactly like that, but you get the picture. 

Noah stopped by last night to see if we had any left over gopher wood.  This morning, lots of animals are walking by my house... in twoseys, twoseys.  Uh Oh.

So what was I saying?  Mid-May - not too warm, not too buggy.  Not too dry either.  

Oh well.  I guess we'll look out the window as we eat.  And dream of blue skies.

Troll

Every spring, the fifth graders in our elementary school take an overnight trip to Williamsburg, VA.  In their absence, a group of fourth graders are assigned to take over "Safety Patrol" duties.  You remember the patrols from your school, right?  They directed you to cross the street or yelled at you to sit down on the bus.  And they wore those very cool yellow or orange belts across their chests.  

This year, my next door neighbor's twins are in fourth grade and both were chosen to be the honorary patrols while the fifth graders were away last week.  BabkaBoy was enthralled.

This morning at the bus stop, BB comes running over to me:

Mommy, when I am as big as Michael, I want to be a troll on the bus, too.

When I stopped laughing, I told him that he could most certainly be a troll on the bus when he grows up.