This third article will cover the final preliminary step before you are actually ready to plant outdoors and launch your vegetable garden on its journey towards making the best vegetables you have ever tasted! This third step is the most critical one of them all; if it is not done correctly, then anything else you have done or will do is practically for naught. And, this step is the hardest one of them all – here is where we separate the proverbial men from the boys; okay, women from the girls, too! Ummm… no offense, boys and girls.

If you know the meanings of laydig-gayer and flahgmat, you earn 50 Yiddishist points – unless you peeked at the translation. (It’s hard not to, when it’s in the title!)

A laydig-gayer is someone who has either retired or who simply has nothing to do except twiddle his thumbs forward and then backwards. A flahgmat, on the other hand, is someone dedicated to taking his (or her) good old time.

So what does being a laydig-gayer have to do with us Yidden? you may ask. After all, there are nochrim (non-Jews) who perceive us as rich aggressive folks. But the truth is that we do have laydig-gayers and flahgmats among Bnai Yisrael (the Jewish people) – and I can prove it!

With tax time fast approaching, here is a checklist – along with my comments – of the information and documents you need to collect.

Personal info: The legal names, dates of birth, and social security numbers of everyone in the family.

Status: Married couples have to file as “married.” Single people file as “single” or “head of household,” which is tax talk for single parent. Married people can file separately, but they usually lose more than they gain.

Comment: It might make sense to file separately if you have high medical or work expenses. Planning a wedding date carefully can provide great savings. Also, if a couple is going to separate, the timing can make a difference.

Planning any kind of simcha – be it a wedding, bar mitzvah, bris, Kkddush, sheva brachos, pidyon haben, etc. – comes along with extensive planning, organizing, and prioritizing. Should the tablecloths be blue or silver? Orchids or lilies? A three-piece band or eight? A hall for 50 or 100? 200 or 400? The photographer who gives an album, or the one who just gives the proofs? The grander the simcha, the more intense the headaches for the baalei simcha.

In the past two decades, as simchos have swelled to credit-busting proportions, community leaders and rabbanim have been exerting pressure to keep simcha celebrations to a minimum, without unnecessary grandeur and luxury. So much focus has been placed on prices, decibels, and cutoff hours that we have been unanimously neglecting to focus on the behavior and chinuch (education) of the smallest participants in the simcha: the children.

Last month I shared with you “how I met my tichel.” Soon I was to discover that there was another Tichel Lady out there. Here’s how I met her!

It was two years since I started my website, Rivka Malka.com, as a way to reach out and connect to Jews whom I wouldn’t otherwise meet. Thanks to the excellent advice of Yisroel Bethea, I started by making tichel-tying videos. At first, I really didn’t want to. I thought, “Most of the people I’m reaching out to don’t cover their hair or are not even married.

Yisroel disagreed: “What will come through is your authenticity. That’s what people want. They know you for your tichels; go show them tichels.” So that’s what I did.

As children, we envision ourselves becoming all sorts of things – when we “grow up.” Some kids want to be garbage collectors and ride a noisy, green truck. Others want to be teachers, imagining what fun it would be to boss everyone around. A few children, finding the pediatrician’s stethoscope “necklace” intriguing, dream of being doctors. And some children believe that driving a big rumbling bus is the ultimate in power!

Then we become adults and reality hits. Being a garbage collector, teacher, doctor, or bus driver no longer seems exciting or even practical, and the ways we find ways to support ourselves turn out to be very different from our childhood fantasies. Some of us become accountants, speech therapists, or mechanics, but others find unique ways to use their talents to support their families.

Although traditional Mom-and-Pop stores still exist, today’s small business people are more likely to use “in” words like “entrepreneur” and “niche” business to describe what they do. And technology has so revolutionized the nature of doing business that it is possible to work from anywhere in the world and to reach customers across the globe. Many contemporary businesses would not have been possible even 20 years ago, because the technology simply wasn’t there.

Ad meah ve’esrim – until 120! With this bracha, we wish each other long life. It’s amazing to think that in a lifetime of 120 years, the average heart would beat 4,541,184,000 times and transport about 315,500,000 liters of blood throughout the body.

The heart is amazingly dependable – if we take care of it. Unfortunately, the typical American diet and lifestyle are not always conducive to heart health. Consider these sobering statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Every year in the U.S., about 715,000 Americans have a heart attack and 600,000 people die from heart disease. Heart disease accounts for one in four deaths in the U.S., making it the leading cause of death among men and women.

Just before noon on September 1, 1989, I was driving through a seedy sec­tion of downtown Elizabeth, New Jersey, when I spotted a branch of my bank. I parked in the deserted lot behind the building, walked around to the front entrance, and then remembered that I had left my check in my car. I trotted back, unlocked the car door, and leaned inside while fumbling through an assortment of papers and bills that filled my coat pocket. Finally, I found the envelope with my precious monthly stipend – most of which I had already spent, having mailed out a slew of checks the day before to pay some long overdue bills – and laid my coat back over the seat. As I straightened up and turned to close the car door, I let out a gasp.

Reeking of alcohol, three men wearing tattered jeans and filthy T-shirts had formed a tight semicircle around me. The man on my left was clutching the skinny neck of an empty whiskey bottle. Aiming it upward, he looked as if he were about to hammer something – or someone. His dark, glassy eyes revealed a mean, desperate gaze. The scrawny guy on my right looked almost friendly, but a little scared and hungry. The one in the mid­dle, however, was Lerch, straight out of The Addams Family. His large, rectangular head loomed above me.

As I pen this article, just hours before the levaya of Dovid Hess, a”h, one of Baltimore’s biggest askanim, I can’t help but wonder what will become of our community as the proverbial torch is passed to the next generation. After some research, I was reassured to find that the next generation is continuing the mesora (heritage) that Mr. Hess and other exemplary community-minded members have established. Here is just a sampling of some of the acts of chesed our youth perform, 24/7.

WOW!

Batsheva Feldman, 22, is a graduate student at University of Maryland School of Social Work. Although she tutors and babysits on the side, she also makes the time to learn weekly with a young non-observant female at WOW’s learning program for young professionals. She learns halachos of Shabbos, modesty, and other philosophical topics, and answers questions about Judaism. In addition, she learns with two other college students, weekly, through Skype.

There are three fantastic reasons to eat some type of flax food every day: favorable types of fiber, good-quality fats, and a high concentration of unique, immune-boosting phyto-nutrients. Let me elaborate on why I am I so excited about this blue-flowered plant that grows best in the cool northern climates. Canada is the world’s leader in flax production, while North Dakota is where 96 percent of flax seeds are grown in the U.S.
Flax appeared on the North American continent over 400 years ago, but humans have been eating flax for thousands of years. Flax researcher Dr. Diane Morris writes