3/31/13

Passover seders had their good and bad sides this year. Good was the gluten free matzoh for Teddy, and even Willie has decided that he likes the plain gluten free matzoh better--probably because it is salty and crispy. Willie has been having matzoh pizza at least once and sometimes twice a day, and the rest of us are enjoying kitnyot given papa's now more liberal stance on the holiday eating tradition. Hooray--rice and beans and legumes and corn!!! Of course it also means that nobody wants to eat at our house during passover, but that's okay--some people want our food, like the smoked brisket that we brought to first night seder. 2nd night we were limited to bringing official sealed box certified kosher for passover and not touched by us or our kitchen goods. The bad part of seders were they were both on school nights this year and I (willie) still had a lot of homework to do after we got home from seders. I was up til 2am on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. Homework doesn't seem to let up for our holidays which I think we should protest.

Papa made some chicken strips with the gluten free matzoh by putting in a mortar and grinding it with a pestle. It was better than the last time he tried to make gluten free chicken strips, but not as good as with regular matzoh meal. Oh well.

Baseball season starts tomorrow--do you know how we could tell? Papa's been watching/listening to games since the end of February and he isn't foaming at the mouth when the A's lose, so we figure it must be preseason, but he said he's going to the stadium tomorrow night to watch the game on TV there, just because the stadium has a bigger TV than here. No matter how much you whine, you are not getting a 200 foot wide TV at our house.

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 I was late to the track meet wednesday and they made me run the 3200 meters. I ran a 13:54, but felt like the stitch in my side was going to explode. Hopefully I'll be back to the 1600 next week.

 Seder time with the Litov's. Always fun at their house!

They've got this great indoor/outdoor room that we can get crazy in. You should have felt the table rocking during Ki Lo Noyeh--Lara's mom was running around rescuing the wine glasses before they exploded which reminded papa of Grandma Zetta doing the same thing many many many years ago.

 Lily pads on the table can only mean one things--FROGS, EVERYWHERE!

 And wine and sombreros. Definitely a fun seder.

 And did we mention wine? And more wine, and more wine. Hey, why don't we have 5 cups of wine anymore?

 After America's Funniest Home Video's, I had to read some of the best quotes of the week to Teddy so we can get ideas for our own $10,000 video creation.

Here are some of the random funny lines I heard this week:

I have psychic powers over the quarters

I can't remember if I have a facebook or not

Look Willie--It's a watermelon with a rocket launcher

Take that Mr. Trainhead

What are the seahawks?

He has the brain of a 5 year old and body of a panda

Cheese grater triumphed over the nazis

Copyright 1997-2013, The Berman Brothers, Willie and Teddy. All rights reserved.

3/17/2013

I (Willie) had my first track meet of the season and I ran a 6:26 1600. It wasn't the fastest, but I didn't finish last, or collapse, or barf up a lung or anything like that. The important part is the teamwork, and the snacks. Mmmm, snacks. Will run for food. You'd think they weren't feeding me enough at home, and being the insatiable growing boy that I am, that would probably be true. I want to complain to some UN agency that runs these things because I have been skipping extended snack times (and snacks in general when I don't get home from track practice til practically dinner time). Skipping snacks! Teenager! Teenager Skipping Snacks--Film at 11!

I (Teddy) had my first practice in the sanctuary in front of live microphone, and I sounded pretty good if I say so myself. I marched around the place in processional style, and read some of my portions and other readings. Having an audience of 3 was easier than an audience of 200+ but I've got to start somewhere.

Tante Margie came to visit today and we gave her a little taste of everything from couch jousting to carpet surfing to in-meal swordplay to advanced debating skillz. We're sure she appreciated our youthful rambunctiousness. Is that even a word?

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 Photographic evidence--We now invite Teddy to be our teacher this morning...

 Okay Teddy, so when they call for you to be the teacher, throw a tantrum about people putting a tack on your chair, and tell some of the adults to stand in a corner, and give little kids who won't sit still the gimlet eye, and send papa to the rabbi's office, and...

 Uh oh, I think papa over heard our schemes. So Teddy, deliver your speech in a nice loud clear voice exactly how it was written on your pages...ya, right...that's what you should do.

 Looks like Grandpa Bill's sheep shearing kit got put into full use by somebody on Willie, or maybe he was trying to match Tante Margie's hair.

 Is he a Katz or a Berman?

I'll be whoever has the crackers--CRUNCH!

Copyright 1997-2013, The Berman Brothers, Willie and Teddy. All rights reserved.

3/10/2013

Daylight savings time switch-overs just bite. So, here's two versions of why.

Teddy: so papa comes into my room at 7:45am, ON A SUNDAY, and says move in out a bed and get dressed and get some breakfast and brush your teeth we gotta go soon, BUT IT'S SUNDAY AT 7:45! Except it isn't--it's 8:45. Nuts.

Willie: so mommy comes in and gently suggests that I get up and get my day rolling because it's 9, but my clock says 8, and my internal clock is closed up shop-good night everybody, so I get up at about 11 and have breakfast, and lunch at about 3, and then, oh crap, gotta get down to the TV by 7 to watch that home videos show then papa comes in and says this must mean that you've finished all your homework--crap. Back upstairs, no funny home videos. Dinner at 8 and back to homework, and I'm not even close to tired and it's now 9--looks like I won't be asleep before midnight, or one.

On the plus side, papa fed Tzachi smoked ribs for T's birthday lunch on Monday, and 3 guesses who got the leftovers and the first two don't count--that would be me and Teddy. They were good--smokey, meaty, delicious. We want more meat--we want more bones.

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Just look at the smoke ring on this thing--don't take too long because soon it will be IN MY BELLY!

I'm more of mommy's kid, because touching the bones weirds me out--I know why they're called ribs, and I don't have to like it, but the meat is good.

 Now stop taking pictures of me--I won't smile, I won't smile, I will not smile...

 You...can't...make...me...smile...(off camera--papa making goofy noises and faces)

CRAP!!! He did it--the first truly great picture of me in I don't know how long--darn cell phone cameras--they are always there when you least expect them. Go back to film where you didn't know what you were going to get until three months later when they came back from the developer guy.

Dinner at home, and same old-same old, we're reading and some guy is assaulting us with the camera.

Shoo--scat--scram--be off or I'll take a stick to ye!

I hear there's sausage in the fridge (off camera--spin, dash, clatter clatter, rummage, rip, gnaw). Just gotta know the right buttons. Get on with your week now. Nothing more to see here.

Copyright 1997-2013, The Berman Brothers, Willie and Teddy. All rights reserved.

3/3/2013

Two weeks in a row? Are you kidding me? We're going to report you to the child labor authorities for over-working us. What do you think we are, models for your weird sociological experiment? Objects for you to display at will? We need another 3 months off. Maybe come back to us around Shavuot--but just one week after the last update? Preposterous! We have nothing to say. We've done nothing. Okay, we did do stuff--we went to Ellie, Dana & Esther's house and had dinner with Rabbi Fern, which was quite fun. I (Teddy) had some really good gluten free bread, rice and a new kind of hot sauce. And I (Willie) ate green beans. I won't say whether I liked them, suffice it to say that I didn't vomit afterward, or during the eating of the green beans. It helped to have a thick layer of good bread in me first, and the promise of tasty dessert for later. Oh, and we got to pet cats and Lucas (the dog) didn't eat anybody's socks. The Fern whooped us in Apples to Apples--it's like she was using some weird Jedi juju (jew jew?). We've never seen anything like it.

Later in the weekend we went to celebrate Tzachi's 50th birthday--it was fun, and cake and ice cream were eaten, and eaten, and eaten.

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Hey--forgotten super bowl pix--we know, it doesn't look like football, but it might be the super bowl of meat. Doesn't papa look happy about having BBQ'd the side of a cow?

 OUCH! That looks like it hurts. What did that cow ever do to you?!

 Barbarian. What else can we say.

I especially appreciate these multi-use garments. They're a shirt, they're shorts. They're a topping. They're everything. We wore these the other night for the shul photo directory shoot, and somebody was super impressed that we had shirts from some movie. We didn't know what they were talking about. Ho hum. Don't even ask us about the picture shoot--suffice it say photobombing was in the house, and papa, nervous enough already, pretty much lost it.

Hey papa, I have something else for the BBQ...

 Oh no you don't, I know where you live.

 Just when you think you're safe, hanging out at a bat-mitzvah party talking with friends, papa's got the camera trained on me, again. Grrrrr.

Train your camera on this--ice cream gluttony! More, more, more!

Copyright 1997-2013, The Berman Boys, Willie and Teddy. All rights reserved.