Sunday (mostly)

[cellio]

That's refreshing. On Sunday I ordered a couple of books from Amazon third-party sellers (neither urgent), and B5 second season from Amazon directly. Monday morning I received mail from one of the marketplace sellers telling me my book had shipped, and I got similar mail from the other Monday evening. (Both of these are books that I came out of the tikkun with recommendations for.)

Sunday afternoon we went to my niece's graduation party. The balance of guests was not what I expected. I was assuming there would be a flock of 17-year-olds and a smattering of folks our age, mostly relatives. As it turned out, the kids were all migrating among many parties, so at any given time the adults outnumbered the kids by, oh, 5 to 1 or so. (Graduation was Friday night, so this was probably the prime party weekend.)

Many of the adults were from the church choir (my father and Kim both sing in it). I noticed that most of the choir members were wearing red, so I asked my father about it. Sunday was Penticost, which I suppose I could have worked out on my own if I'd thought about it, and there is a tradition of wearing red for the holiday. (I think the reason had something to do with an association between the holy spirit and fire, but I didn't quite catch it. Education welcome.) I'm glad that the red shirt I pulled out of the drawer that morning had a spot of something on it (so it went to the laundry pile). I would have given an incorrect impression without meaning to. I much prefer that my incorrect impressions be planned. :-)

I found myself in the uncomfortable position of balancing kashrut concerns against being kind to my family. They went out of their way to make sure none of the side dishes contained dairy so I could eat the meat, when I would have preferred to stick to the dairy/veggie dishes instead. (They also made sure to put meat and cheese cold cuts on different platters, segregate the ham from the turkey, and so on.) I could see that I was going to upset my mother if I didn't eat the meat, though, so I did.

(I'll eat meat meals in my parents' home, and for that matter in my friends' homes, so long as the basics are observed (species, no dairy, etc). I want to be able to eat with my family and friends. In a situation where there's a variety of food, both meat and non-, however, I'll avoid the meat. Most parties are like that, for example.)

Sunday evening we had a lovely dinner with Ralph and Lori (mmm, brownies!) and then played a new-to-us card game that I've forgotten the name of. It was entertaining, whatever it was. It involves cards in rows and columns where you rotate cards to try to make edge patterns line up; if you do that you get to remove cards, which have point values. (The object is to maximize points.) There are enough unusual conditions to make the game interesting while not being so many to be hard to track. Most card games with individualized cards fall down on the latter point for me -- Magic, Illuminati, Chez whatever, etc.

Sometime during the evening it rained, which I didn't think much of at the time. I was surprised to come home to a dark house. Fortunately, we knew where the flashlights, candles, and mechanical alarm clock were, so this was not as inconvenient as it might have been. Pity I can't read by candlelight, though, but it was late enough that this wasn't a real hardship.

Panasonic scores points for at least one model of VCR. I'd noticed before that after brief power outages I had to reset the clock but the programming wasn't lost. A five-hour outage is more than the backup can handle, apparently, so this time the programming was lost -- and the VCR told me that in big letters on the screen. Definite UI points there for warning me that they'd violated an expectation I might have had. (Mind, I was going to check anyway, but still...)

Comments

Re: So. . .

[cellio]

Fish (that has fins and scales) is always acceptable; it's neither meat nor dairy. (Yeah, I know. You'd think it would be meat, but the "meat" designation seems to be more about slaughter than flesh.)

As I said, I eat meat in other people's homes; if they've invited me for a meal, I'm not going to ask them to cook specially for me. I'll eat what's served, assuming it's not ham or chicken parmesan or the like, and I won't ask whether the meat came from Kosher Mart or the local shop, or whether the pots have been attacked with a blow-torch, and so on. (Well, the pots should have been clean to start with, but it's been a while since I've hung around people for whom that would be an issue. :-) )

For me, it comes down to choices vs politeness. If I have the option of eating vegetarian/fish/dairy, as is usually the case at parties, pot-luck meals, and so on, I do so. I get fed and no one gets offended. In restaurants I never order meat (well, unless the restaurant is kosher), and I don't go to restaurants that don't have something veggie etc that I can eat. A restaurant is a business, so offense doesn't enter into it. (And it's gotten a lot easier to get by as a pseudo-vegetarian in the last decade or so, so there's rarely nothing I can eat.)

So, to answer your question, if you invited me to dinner and served me a steak, yes I'd eat it.