Rosh Hashanah 5783

It's the year 5783, or at least the Jewish year 5783.  We celebrated Rosh Hashanah tonight by blasting our shofar out on the back porch as I usually do this time of year - it's a huge, loud horn.  I've got the trumpet sounding great this year with short staccato blasts, and long sustained ones to announce to the whole neighborhood that it's time for a new year.

Mom took some of the apples we picked and sliced them up, and it's tradition to have apple slices served with honey, which we had a delicious sample of tonight, but also we had some caramel there too.  Which is symbolic of... Mt. Carmel, right?  Okay, that's a stretch.  But the apples and honey bit was good, and we celebrated tonight with hopes for a sweet new year.

Tonight Maddie was revisiting Candy Corn and its stoic wisdom.  This is a reference to a video game, one called "Candy Quest 2," where you can select a costume to do battle in, one that looks like a giant piece of candy corn.  Along the way in your battle, the other costumes actually do things to help out, regenerating health or doing vicious attacks.  Candy Corn, however, never does anything and serves as a handicap, its only function being to not do anything for many, many, many reasons listed on the screen, one at a time, all throughout the game:

Candy Corn abstains.

Candy Corn can't control what the media says about him.

Candy Corn doesn't have arms.

Candy Corn doesn't want responsibility.

Candy Corn has nothing to prove.

Candy Corn is a lover, not a fighter.

And so on.  Maddie can't help but each one when it shows up, every time there's combat.

It's so great to be back into this seasonal game.  We also were playing a lot of LEGO Lord of the Rings, largely because we came straight out of watching the latest episode of "Rings of Power."  We spent a good deal of time in Middle Earth tonight, watching that and then exploring the Mines of Moria, and then walking from Hobbiton all the way to Mordor.  Because yes, one can just simply walk into Mordor.  

It was a good day today, one that started out with KidPak and our last service of the latest version of our "Kung Pow" series, one we've called, "The Path of the Warrior."  I've had new skits and new stuff in there, just to add to the existing library of material dedicated to this series.  It's a lot.  We've got some great material for this series.  It was a great, great morning.  Kids loved it!

Online we've kept our fun going with a wrap-up to the series that had me as a giant sumo wrestler hungry for food delivered by way of this zany relay race.  It's been fun having these awesome games and activities each week - lots of stuff to watch online, including Josh's amazing animated movie and messages from pastors and staff.  I did the message last week, and Pastor Lance did this the week before.  It's been going on since March or so of 2020, right when the big pandemic started.  We were planning on doing something online weekly anyway, but suddenly there was a reason to do it right away, and so we got going and have been doing that each and every week for two and a half years now.  Can you believe it's been two and a half years?  Pretty soon it'll be like 9-11, something that happened twenty years ago.

Moving on, today we were doing a bit of packing for our upcoming vacation.  We were also eating ice cream on the back deck, and enjoying that beautiful weather outside.  It was still a warm Sunday afternoon, but the weather is going to get cooler soon this week, and just in time for our fall vacation.

Tonight we read, and we said our prayers.  It was a later night, but everyone can sleep in tomorrow, and that'll be a nice way to start out the new year!