This past weekend was the Queen’s Birthday long weekend. Australian’s are fond of public holidays, we have enough of them, and most of them are set on a Monday or Friday with the odd one being on a Tuesday (but I’m not mentioning Phar Lap or the Melbourne Cup) to enable us to have a long weekend. Some fortunate people are able to take an extra day or two off and make it an even longer weekend.

I’m sure you’re aware of the myriad of possibilities of things to do on a long weekend, one favourite would be to sleep in but that wasn’t possible for us as the OH had bought us both tickets for LimmudOz. I’m sure you’re all exclaiming about the nonsense I’ve gotten myself involved in this time, but this is different, it’s not a conference, not a convention but a learning festival. Limmud is Hebrew and means to learn, so this was a whole weekend of learning about Jewish stuff.

I’m not going to detail the programme, if you’re interested you can look at it here, suffice to say it was massive. It started on Saturday night as it caters to all sorts of Jews and so they have to allow the Orthodox time to finish all they things they need to do after Sabbath and then to get there. Saturday was straightforward, there were only four choices prior to the play. The play was very challenging, it was a one-man play about a boy who recorded conversations and his relationship with his father, I won’t reveal any more but I did have tears in my eyes at the end, it was well attended but the acoustics weren’t crash hot.

Sunday and Monday were very full-on as there were 11 streams to choose from on Sunday and 12 on Monday, the reason for one fewer on Sunday is due to Little Limmud, aimed at the younger end of the market but you still had to have a parent there supervising you, I didn’t try to get in despite claiming to be 18 although they did look fun.

So hard to choose only one stream to attend in each hour. There was a 15 minute break between sessions in case the presenter ran over and to allow people to get to their next session on time. Many presenters ran over and some finished exactly on time. It was an excellent weekend and I have one article in mind to write as I attended the session about Jewish books for children and young adults, I hope I didn’t talk too much during this session. I took a break on Sunday as I ran into a friend and sat to talk with her for most of one session, and similarly on Monday when I absolutely had to write up my thoughts about a particular session. I don’t plan on publishing those here, it’s for a different market.

This week is back to whatever passes for normal. I do hope everyone has a good rest of the week. I’ve got Discworld stuff next weekend so we’re back to silliness.