Aloha Friday Archives - Page 18 of 34

Aloha Friday: Superheroes

May 6, 2011 TechyDad Aloha Friday, Comics, Geeky Pursuits, Superheroes

Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day. This is when comic book stores across North America give away select comic books for free. We went last year and the boys had a blast collecting and then reading through the comic books.

This year, will be a bit more complicated. B’s going to meet someone for lunch tomorrow. This means she’ll be out for most of the time that Free Comic Book Day runs. The complication is that I don’t usually drive on Saturdays for religious reasons. My geekiness (“must take boys for free comic books”) is battling my religious side (“must observe Shabbat”). Who will win? To be honest, I still don’t know.

Meanwhile, I’ve been introducing my boys to various superheroes. They love the Avengers (Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Ant Man, Wasp, Thor, Black Panther and Hawkeye), Young Justice (Robin, Superboy, Miss Martian, Kid Flash and Aqualad) and Batman on the TV. They have also been introduced to the Green Lantern. My boys just love superheroes and would love to pour through new comic books. Somehow I’ll have to make this work for them.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Who is your favorite superhero and why?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #86

Aloha Friday: Food Deprivation

April 29, 2011 TechyDad Aloha Friday, Food, Holidays, Judaism

Last week (and the beginning of this week), I celebrated Passover. During this holiday, I give up a lot of foods like bread, rice, corn, beans, and soy products. This can be a tricky time as we are confined to matzo as most of our source of carbs. It also means that favorite year round foods, such as macaroni and cheese or soy-based veggie burgers, aren’t allowed.

Of course, in many ways I’m used to restricting my diet. While growing up, I learned about the Kosher dietary rules during Hebrew school. One by one I decided to follow them. First, I stopped eating milk and meat together. This meant turning my usual bacon cheeseburger into a bacon burger.

Next, I gave up all meats that couldn’t be kosher* while eating out. This wasn’t too hard. Except for bacon and the occasional Chinese food spare rib, I was never a big fan of shrimp, clams, ham and the like. Spare ribs were occasional enough that I gave them up easily. Bacon, however, I dreaded giving up. I expected it to be a difficult affair packed with cravings and backsliding. Instead, I turned my bacon burger into a plain burger and never looked back.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: What foods would you find difficult (if not impossible) to give up for a week? What foods would you find difficult or impossible to give up for the rest of your life?

* To clarify, by “meats that couldn’t be kosher”, I mean meats that intrinsically couldn’t be kosher due to the animal they come from** such as ham (from pigs) and shrimp.

** For the curious, the rule for land animals is cloven hooves and chews its cud. Pigs have the hooves but don’t chew their cud; cows do both. Therefore cows are kosher while pigs aren’t. Water animals, meanwhile, need to have fins and scales. Tilapia, for example, have both and are thus kosher while shrimp have neither. Of course, while eating out, I tend to just say I am “vegetarian” since this is quicker and something most waiters will understand instead of “I have a complex set of religious rules that I follow and here they are…”

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #85

Aloha Friday: A Holiday of Exhaustion and Stress, A Payoff of Pride

April 22, 2011 TechyDad Aloha Friday, Holidays, Judaism, NHL

As I mentioned previously, I had a lot of cleaning to do before Passover. The good news is that I got the cleaning done. The bad news is that it came with a ton of stress.

Growing up, I remember my mother cleaning for Passover. She would tear apart the entire kitchen, cleaning every cabinet and drawer even if we weren’t using them for the holiday. The process took about a week and was completely exhausting. (It didn’t help that my father, my sister and I didn’t help. Bad younger me!)

Even though I don’t do the intense cleaning that she does and even though I made a checklist a few years back to help organize the process, it still is tiring work.

Then came the Seders. I like going to B’s aunt’s Seders. We get to see family and it means I don’t have to cook two meals just after a tiring cleaning session. On the other hand, the Seders tend to run long. We left the first Seder at 11:30pm (before it was completely over) and the second after midnight (again, before it was over). The kids, somehow, stayed awake until after midnight each time.

Add in a bad sore throat that brought back memories of my New Year’s Day bout with strep (and therefore a trip to the doctor’s office to rule it out) and you can see why I’ve been feeling especially stressed out.

And yet, amid the stress and exhaustion, there were moments of joy. Playing with my boys, spending time with them, and seeing them spend time playing with relatives. But, perhaps best of all was seeing NHL at the Seder. He loved singing Ma Nishtana (the Four Questions). Perhaps he didn’t get all the words right, but he tried his best and enjoyed it.

Then, when it came time for responsive reading (which passes from person to person), he declined. He didn’t want to read just any passage, he wanted to read the names of the 10 plagues. During this, we dip our fingers in our wine glasses and leave a drop on our plates for each plague. The symbolism here is that, in Judaism, wine represents joy. Though we are happy to be free, our joy is diminished by the realization that people were injured/killed in the process of the exodus from Egypt. As our joy is diminished, so our wine is diminished.

Noah, perhaps, doesn’t fully grasp the significance of this passage, but he realized it was important. That was enough for him. He wanted to do something important during the Seder and that filled me with pride!

My Aloha Friday question for today is twofold: Do you find holidays to be stressful and/or exhausting? Also, what do you enjoy most about celebrating holidays with your children?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #84

Aloha Friday: Cleaning, Cleaning and Some More Cleaning

April 15, 2011 TechyDad Aloha Friday, Cleaning, Holidays, Judaism

This Monday night begins the Jewish holiday of Passover. During this time, there are many dietary restrictions. To adhere to these, I need to clean our kitchen (to prevent any “cross-contamination” between Passover foods and non-Passover foods). This means I have a lot of cleaning ahead of me this weekend.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Do you do any spring cleaning?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #83

Shifting Gross Out Goal Posts

April 8, 2011 TechyDad Aloha Friday, Fatherhood, Gross, Parenting

Yesterday, I chronicled our journey through the body. Along the way, I highlighted some pretty gross photographs that I took. Becoming a parent has changed my life in many ones. One of the biggest surprises was how my idea of what constitutes “gross” has shifted.

Back before we knew that B was pregnant for the first time, we did the “test the pee, see if you’re pregnant” test. This particular test required B to pee in a cup and then hold the stick in the pee for a minute. Since B had the job of actually peeing in the cup, it became my assigned task to hold the stick in the pee-cup.

Standing there, with a cup of urine in my hands, I felt wave after wave of nausea hit me. The smell, sight and just plain idea of holding someone else’s pee make my stomach (and a few other internal organs) turn. Luckily, I didn’t succumb to the nausea. Even better, the test came out positive.

Fast forward a few years. Did the idea of someone else’s pee in my hands disgust me? Not at all. In fact, I was quite comfortable relaying stories of the Day of the Seven Diaper Diaper Change (where NHL filled up diaper after diaper as quickly as we could change them) or of the Great Projective Pooping Incident (where his poop shot out 4 feet and then covered a span of rug stretching another 4 feet, timed right when we needed to head out to see a house). I could even discuss these subjects in the middle of lunch (and be amused at the reactions of the non-parents within earshot).

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Has being a parent changed your definition of what “gross” is?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #82

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