Over the last two days I’ve made vegan latkes, vegan pate, vegan Oreo truffles, and pumpkin cookies. I’ve attended 2 holiday gatherings. I am completely exhausted and my legs are completely useless. Shout out to everyone who hosts holidays I’ve never been so glad my house is not good for a crowd.

Watching the muppets with these muppets.

Obviously Muppet Christmas Carol is a top tier movie and Michael Caine should have gotten an Oscar for it, but just want to take a minute to appreciate Gonzo narrating using the actual words of Charles Dickens. So much of what he say is straight from the text.

The verdict: vegan chopped liver looks gross but tastes good (just like not vegan chopped liver); vegan latkes are great but you really have to trust the process. Excited to show up to my SIL’s house as the plant-based Christmas Jew tonight!

Emmet Otter’s jug band Christmas has so much going on - it’s Appalachia, it’s the depression and also the 70s, it’s the Gift of the Magi, it’s about cycles of poverty, it’s about collectivism and community.

My husband heard me saying, “oh how silly of me…hellOOOOOOOOooooo” and came down to see if I was ok lol

I love Miracle on 34th Street because there are so many intentional and unintentional funny moments. A lawyer whose NYC apartment has twin beds, the coworker’s drunk wife not knowing how to use a phone…a truly bonkers Christmas classic.

Gearing up to make latkes and vegan chopped liver for Christmas just like the goyim do!

A very Erev Christmas Sameach to all who celebrate!

Not to be thinking about work over vacation but I’ve heard from so many property owners and brokers over the years that lenders won’t let commercial landlords lower rent to attract tenants, and then I met with a lender recently who said that’s basically a lie (unless they are refinancing).

The problem with swimming after work and urgent care (I’m fine) is that now I have to go switch over my laundry and I can’t get up from the couch. At least I got in a swim before all the cooking that’s about to happen!

This was my problem with the newer muppet movies. All the humans were acting like they were in a muppet movie, rather than like they were in a movie and the muppets were their costars. Beyond Christmas Carol, that’s what made movies like the Great Muppet Caper so incredible.

Please read this article while you consider how Mayor Wilson just fired Helmi Hisserich from the housing bureau to undermine a social housing strategy. The Mayor is literally harming the future of our city and its residents. He’s unprepared and unfit for this political moment.

I am so sick of the way people in power across the ideological spectrum use Jewish people as pawns and completely ignore the fact that we exist in real life. “I stood up to some neo-Nazis” is a good start, but giving a shit means not following that with “here’s your swastika for Hanukkah.”

Today I learned that my 4 year old niece has a tendency when she is at a museum to point to works of art on the wall and claim she made them, or that she could have made them. I’m obsessed with her confidence lol

Because I’m back watching LIB and they love a veil on this show, just putting out a reminder that you don’t need a veil. I, personally, wore a tiara because I felt like a veil would be too heavy on my head/hair. Be free!

When I was a kid a close friend’s family was renovating their house and her dad insisted on adding windows like the arched ones in the hotel in White Christmas. He died when I was a teen, and now whenever I watch White Christmas and see the windows I think of him.

Love is Blind Italy is like catnip to me because my mom’s family is Italian American from Naples and so much of the energy is so familiar. But also, all the LIB seasons regardless of location really hammer home the point that we need to quarantine men until we figure out what’s going on.

A n'hood assoc. colleague remarked that "getting more housing downtown will be impossible" as the downtown is "already very built up." I hold a different impression of my community, so I took to Google MyMaps to graphically illustrate just how much land in downtown on which there is left to build.

Shout out to the inspector who came to check out our solar panels and gave us a sticker with a picture of his cat on it before he left.

Embrace loving your city. You don’t have to love everything about it but love it enough to want to see it succeed. Love it enough to advocate for a positive and inclusive vision. Love it enough to fight for its future.

I feel like every compliment this guy gives his imaginary ChatGPT coworker started in his brain as “unlike my ex wife…”

Night 3 🕯️🕯️🕯️

There are things I say that my husband calls classic New Jersey ailments and today it was “my head hurts because it’s going to rain but it’s not raining yet.” I can’t be the only one in Portland who is suffering right now.

If you haven’t joined the Culinary Class Wars to Chef and My Fridge pipeline, I highly recommend it.

PNW Board Vice President (and all around badass) @jenwith1n.bsky.social is quoted in this terrific story out of the @sfchronicle.com about the successes of Portland’s missing middle housing 🏘️🏘️🏘️

I know it’s not wrong but whenever I see non-Jews describing Hanukkah as the Festival of Lights it makes me laugh

This motherfucker thinks antisemitism is something that previous generations DIDNT HAVE??? The yeshiva elementary my dad went to was SET ON FIRE! Red line maps sure as shit will tell you which neighborhoods had too many Jews! For fucks sake.

Reposting this again today because I feel like for the past two days my heart has been beating to the rhythm of “another world is possible.” It has to be.

Getting solar panels today - excited to live in the future I imagined for myself when I was co-president of the environmental club in high school!

Never forget that those of us driving 15+ year old Hondas with not even so much as a rear facing camera are basically gods compared to these people.

This is the first year I can light my menorah on my windowsill - previously I was always worried about my dog knocking it over.

Just thought about the fact that my cousin will get to say shehecheyanu with her son tonight after this whole nightmare and now I can’t stop crying.

Just got word that my cousin’s son is home with his parents. I didn’t realize just how much worry for him I was carrying until I got the news and broke down crying. Can’t stop thinking of the families who lost loved ones or haven’t heard from them yet. It’s all too much to bear.

I know this is about acoustic bikes and not e-bikes but I’m the annoying e-bike evangelist here to point out I biked ~16 miles yesterday, all trips that a few years ago I would have done by car. Reducing car trips is so much easier than you think.

V’ahavta by Aurora Levins Morales www.auroralevinsmorales.com/blog/vahavta

I could barely sleep and woke up with relief to the news that my cousin’s son at Brown is on his way home to his family, only to immediately learn what happened in Sydney. The grief for all this needless loss is so unbearable.

My cousin’s son is a freshman at Brown. He’s locked down in a science building, safe, and in touch with his mom. I hate this so much for all these kids. All this boy wanted was to go to Brown - 3 months in and he’s in the middle of this absolute nightmare.

I have 2: 1) The Lion King - the whole theater was silent as everybody realized Mufasa died. Then a young kid yelled, “THE DADDY’S DEAD” and everybody laughed. 2) Swim Fan - theater full of teens simultaneously realizing we were watching a terrible movie and mocking it mercilessly. Incredible.

Consultants contracted by Minnesota found that an eight-story single-stair building with 6,000 sq. ft. per floor (building 4) has dramatically lower fire risk than a same-height code-compliant two-stair building with a larger floor plate (building 1) www.dli.mn.gov/sites/defaul...

“Those programs often revolve around students reading short stories, articles, and excerpts from novels, then answering short-form questions and writing brief essays.” I encountered my first “literature textbook” when I was a substitute teacher in 2012 and I was appalled.

Literally last night I was talking about how he was one of my favorite actors when I was younger but I can’t really watch him since he told that story of the time he tried to do a hate crime. Maybe this will stay in people’s memories longer than a second…

My husband just said, “hashtag blessed” because the dates I kept telling him not to throw out have finally expired.

We do, that’s the secret.

The whole “people aren’t drinking coffee anymore” thing makes me wonder (as someone who had to give up coffee for esophagus reasons) if it’s a function of some share of the consumer base aging into GERD.

Deciding to take up swimming and also not looking up whether my gym has car parking (so that I always bike) was the best decision I made in 2025.

There is so much I wish I could tell my Bubbe. I wish my husband could have met her. I wish I had spent more time with her. I don’t want this. Her memory is a blessing - she touched so many people and she lives in our hearts and our memories. AI could not approximate who she was to all of us.

I was told I was “bad at math” until I took precalc my junior year of high school and my teacher told me to come in on lunch breaks so she could help me understand the material. It turns out I’m good at math but the “self learning” style my school used didn’t work for me!

I don’t think there’s any way to for sure tell when something is written by AI but any time I get AI text I need to edit it is full of meaningless words like “impactful.” It would be so much easier to write from scratch than to have to edit this nonsense!

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde where Beaker turns into Animal.