I've been trying to do a couple of things these past two days, and circumstances have conspired to keep me from accomplishing my goals. I had been prepared to make a trip across the border to hand in my end-of-month paperwork yesterday. While there, I had hoped to stop at a nearby grocery to pick up the Passover supplies I was unable to purchase here.

Well, I don't know if it was the Good Friday tourist crowd, or increased border security due to the situation in Israel, or a new alert in the war on terrorism, or what exactly; but the traffic waiting to enter the tunnel was so thick and slow moving (read - at a complete standstill) that I decided to leave my place in line (two full blocks from the tunnel plaza) and go home. In the short term, it meant that my paperwork was not handed in by the Friday deadline. Actually, I'm not that concerned about the deadline, because, as it turns out, my supervisor had taken the entire week off, so he wasn't even there to receive the paperwork. More importantly, it meant that I had precious little variety of food in the house. My lox collection continues to dwindle and there's still five days left of Passover.

So, here it is Saturday, and I again decided to try the trip across the border. This time, I didn't get within a half-mile of the border crossing when I saw that the traffic backups were at least twice as bad as they had been yesterday. I decided to turn back before getting caught up in the traffic jams. So, I will wait until tomorrow, Easter Sunday, to try one last time. I have to get across, since the paperwork has to be on my supervisor's desk before Monday morning. And, if I don't get some additional Passover food soon, I may have to "cheat" before the holiday is over.

I wonder if my sister has been reading my blogs concerning the Passover dilemma. I got a call from her today, and she invited me over for lunch at her place tomorrow. I should say that Passover was not a bad holiday growing up, because my mother and aunts knew how to make so many different dishes, I could pick-and-choose, and still be left with several "favourite" meals. By far my absolute favourite was a potato pancake called the bubeleh (hope I got that approximately correct). Anyway, my mother made the very best bubelech (the plural form) the world has ever seen. Whereas my aunts' renditions were heavy and dry (the Jewish equivalent to the Christmas fruitcake), my mother's version was light and airy - filling, without feeling like you had rocks in your tummy. We always told her she should have gone into the business of making bubelech professionally, because they were without peer. Anyway, I think my sister must have gotten the recipe from my mom, and kept the tradition alive. I adore her bubelech, and tomorrow, she will be serving them for lunch. I'm already drooling on the keyboard thinking about them.

I love my sister....