Finding religion in Ohio

We were assigned a semester-long project to outline the Torah, and write section summaries. I'm halfway through Genesis. Yay! What a milestone. My goal is to be mostly done by the end of Thanksgiving, so that I don't have to worry about it over finals week.

Thursday night Jonathan and I went over to Carl and Anne's. Anne made this fabulous stew and homemade cake, and we talked about religion for hours on end. Hebrew Bible, Christian scriptures, what makes the canon, C.S. Lewis, Eliade and the sacred and the profane, historiography of Genesis.... I hadn't had a religious conversation that good since I was back in college waxing rhaposdic with Antonio over fuzzy navels. I love intelligent people who aren't afraid to disagree or step outside their paradigm. Jonathan and I were saying in the car on the way home that as much as we like to talk to each *other* about this stuff, we know the other's arguments so well already, it just isn't nearly as much fun.

Yesterday I tried out the breadmaker to see if my last challah was a fluke - and it wasn't! Hooray. You all may be laughing, but hey, a breadmaker still counts as "cooking." My family's never let me forget the time that I helped Gwen make potato kugel when I was a girl... who knew that tablespoons of salt versus teaspoons made such a big difference?!

Let's see... on a whim, Jonathan put kippot and hats on all the lion stuffed animals in our living room. It adds a whole new flavor. The cats were so curious, they jumped up to the top of the bookshelves to see. We actually "lost" Osher for a couple of hours there - he had fallen asleep next to one of the larger lions and blended in!

The cold, by the way, is here. With a vengeance. There was frost on the car this morning, it dropped 20 degrees from last week, and ALL the trees here are beautiful. Why must the cold mean they change color? I'd much rather they just be pretty in spring! I suppose if I have to deal with the close-to-freezing weather, though, at least the scenery is nice.

Now it's off to the motorcycle store. We're going to buy me chaps so my lower half doesn't fall off on the bike. My jacket is plenty warm, but as we discovered on the last trip, plain jeans just don't quite cut it.

Oh! And one last thing. A bunch of HUC students went to the Creation museum I talked about before. From what they said, I'm SO glad I didn't go. I would have been very pissed off at the willful ignorance of the American masses. (Like, there was an exhibit of the Garden of Eden, with a T-Rex sitting by Adam and Eve calmly eating a pineapple. What?!). So by staying home, I've decided, I've saved my faith in humanity.