weekend

[cellio]

This shabbat my rabbi was away with the confirmation class on a retreat. I don't know which rabbi had the bigger handfull -- him with 20 or so teenagers, or the other rabbi with back-to-back services and a double b'not mitzvah (twin girls) Saturday morning. :-) I wonder what we did before we had a second rabbi.

Last week I shared my comments on the new siddur with another member of our morning minyan (I emailed her the URL). This is someone who understands liturgy, is smart, and enjoys talking about stuff like this. (I wanted to wait until she had completed her own evaluation before hitting her with the full force of my opinions.) She was there Saturday morning and told me that she really enjoyed reading my comments, and she said some very flattering things. That made me feel good. (She also asked if she could share them with an ex-congregant who is now in rabbinical school. The person in question is someone I wish I had a closer relationship with than I do, so I said sure.)

Saturday was a local SCA event, the Vetr Thing, on a Viking theme. It was a lot of fun! The site had a couple inches of snow, so the mood was right for the outdoor activities but there wasn't a big pile of snow to slog through. I missed the spear-throwing (at targets, not people :-) ), which I had wanted to try. (I've never done any sort of thrown weapons, though I used to shoot archery.) I spent much of the afternoon schmoozing with people I don't get to see all that often, and some with people I do. Lunch and dinner both included fish, which is under-used in the SCA, so that made me happy. (There were no green veggies at the feast, but given the theme and time of year that's not a surprise.) During the feast I sat next to two people who were at their first regular event, though they have been to Pennsic. They seemed like they were having fun, so I hope they come back. A few people camped; I day-tripped.

Court was fun; the royalty played along on the theme. Karadono's presentation of a "special delicacy" to our baron (Tofi) was a hoot. Tofi has been talking for years about a dish he wants to try where you basically take shark, let it rot for a while, soak it in urine, let it rot some more, and then eat it. Um, yeah... Fresh shark is toxic, apparently. (The question naturally arises: what sequence of events led someone to discover that this sequence renders shark edible?) Anyway, Karadono found a source in Iceland and presented him with a jar, challenging him to eat it, which he actually did. I think this particular specimen involved chemicals, not actual urine...) After Tofi pronounced it "not as bad as I thought it would be" several other people tried it -- but I was glad to be able to say, truthfully, that shark isn't kosher so I would have to decline. (Later, Aidan compared this to the competitions some people have to see who can be macho with hot sauce and the like.)

Today someone from the cable company came by to pick up the converter box (we dropped the digital cable), and I discovered that the "basic" service he returned us to is not the same service we had before we did this experiment. Before I was getting some extra channels that I no longer get (the History Channel is one), and some of the channels were assigned to different numbers. (On the other hand, I think we're getting one or two channels now that we didn't used to get, though they're ones I don't care about.) The person from the cable company swears that this is the basic service that I should have had before, but it's not and I want to know what happened. For the most part I don't think I care, but I am puzzled that we didn't revert to prior state.

The cable company also didn't disable the extra channels that come with digital until today, though the converter box stopped responding to the remote (and stopped offering features like the on-screen program guide) the day I cancelled the service. Since it took a week and a half for someone to collect the box and finish the downgrade, and that's not our doing, I hope they stopped billing us for the digital service on the day they said they would. I'll know when the next bill comes, I guess.

Comments

[jducoeur]

The person from the cable company swears that this is the basic service that I should have had before, but it's not and I want to know what happened.

It's probably a grandfathering thing. These companies rearrange their service lineups all the time, but they often don't change the channels for the existing customers because it causes too much tsouris. But when you actually change your service, you get the new definition of the lineup.

At least, that's been my observation...

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

Our area was recently rewired so we don't have the two wire system anymore. As part of this, the channels on the one wire were shuffled around. The other wire stayed basically the same but it's now redundant so I stopped using it. Maybe what you are seeing is related?