cellio | last few days

Tonight for the first time the choir sang "Hashkiveinu" all the way through and approximately correctly. Yay! I really like the sound of this piece; the chain of suspensions at the end is especially cool. Rossi had some odd ideas about harmony in places, but this one works.

Sunday dinner featured a small grilled turkey with rosemary and apricot coating. (Ralph says there was also garlic, though I didn't detect it.) This worked really well! I wonder if I can simulate this in an oven, perhaps with chicken. (Though this turkey was small enough that it wouldn't produce ridiculous amounts of leftovers.)

After dinner we played a variant of Carcessan (which I've probably misspelled) called, I think, Hunters and Gatherers. I've only played the original game once, so while I recognized the game system, I didn't really know how to play. I wasn't doing a very good job with long-term strategy, though I was doing ok with short-term tactics.

Sunday afternoon we went shopping to replace the wall-to-wall carpet in the basement guest room that destroyed by the rain invasion a couple weeks ago. First we went to Home Depot, who advertised installation services, but it turns out they don't install indoor-outdoor carpet, only the regular kind. So we ended up at a carpet place, where we ordered the carpet and someone to make it all fit, which is supposed to happen sometime next week. It's an L-shaped room with some cabinets and stuff to work around, so there was no way we were going to do this ourselves. They have a fixed price for carpet plus installation, based on square footage of the piece of carpet you have to buy (which is larger than the space it goes into, especially in this case). Charging for installation for the part of the space they don't install into seems wrong, but they didn't ask about complications like cabinets so it probably works out in the end.

Saturday night we went to a party hosted by friends who had recently returned from a trip through wine country with, shall we say, excess potables. I had a red that I actually liked and that wasn't ridiculously sweet, though I failed to record what it was. (I can find out, though.) There was much good food, including several very nice cheeses. I'm going to have to go in search of good cheese locally. And, of course, much good conversation as well.

I spent some of Saturday afternoon continuing to work through the Torah portion. I'm pretty comfortable with about two thirds of it. I hope to get the rest soon. The rabbi wants to hear me chant it before he leaves for camp and I have an appointment with him next week for study anyway, so that would be an obvious time.

I'm not fluent in Hebrew, but I know some words and of course I read through the portion in English. As it turns out, the trope often provides additional clues for emphasis, significant words, and so on. It's pretty nifty. Not surprising, of course, but this is the clearest example I've seen so far. This is an action sequence, which works better for that sort of thing than the laws of the sabbatical year. :-)

Friday night was the first service with our new cantorial intern. She's good, and very friendly. It sounded like she was a little nervous; I assume that will pass. At the oneg Phyllis (the administrator) introduced us and she recognized my name; fortunately, that was only because she'd been told I was the chair of the worship committee, and not because of some nefarious reason. :-) (We'll be working together on two upcoming services.)

The fireworks were on Friday, but on Shabbat I have other places to be. I would have liked to go to Ray and Jenn's party, but the logistics just didn't work out. Some other time.

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I like this variant better than the original, actually. I find it easier to figure out what I want to do, though I still shy away from incredibly aggressive play... (It swept through a local crowd a couple of months ago, and I think it's still preferred by a bunch of people I know.)

Maybe, though the skin really helped to seal in the flavors. (I believe the rosemary was inserted subcutaneously.)

As it turns out, the trope often provides additional clues for emphasis, significant words, and so on. It's pretty nifty. Not surprising, of course, but this is the clearest example I've seen so far.

My favorite example is from Genesis 19:16. It's about Lot dallying about Sodom while the angels are anxious to get him out of there. The english in the JPS translation is "Still he delayed. So the men seized his hand...". The Trope, though, has a, uh, Shaleshet (zig-zaggy thing that could be wv smushed together and rotated 90 degrees). It's not common, and is usually sung in a long, drawn-out, way. I'm not describing it well, but it really fits with the story.

One of these days I will learn the names of all the symbols -- but not yet. If this is what I think it is, I call that the "little zig-zag thingy" or the "sort-of Z". :-)

(I'm not yet 100% on singing the correct phrases without consulting my handy key. I can do almost all of the common ones cold, but not the rarer ones.)

i can't think of it off-hand, but as i remember, there's a case where there are two of the exact same sentences in the torah, each with a different meaning due to the trope.

Interesting! I didn't know that the trope could change the plain reading of the text. I wonder where this is.

last few days

Carcassonne Hunters and Gatherers

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trope

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