cellio | weekend

Shabbat was pleasant and mostly uneventful. My rabbi thanked me again for being organized about the torah reading for our morning service. It's nice to be appreciated, though I don't think I did much. We switch to the new format next week -- yay! The next portion I'll be reading is Ha'azinu, on the Shabbat between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. The first aliya is only six verses.

I finished reading Invisible Lines of Connection, the book I posted a quote from recently. The book is a collection of stories of everyday (mostly) events in the author's life, with the overall theme of "everything is connected to everything else". Most of them work well; a few fell flat. The overall collection is interesting. I have the book because the author, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, is going to be a visiting scholar at our synagogue in the spring, so all the board members got copies to read. Hey, perks! :-) (Well, we're also getting homework assignments for board meetings. Each meeting has a block of time for an educational activity of some sort. I think this is good.)

We've made more progress in both West Wing and B5. I wonder when the third season of West Wing will appear. It'll probably be a while; the second half of the second season just came out in July. So we should savor WW episodes, but we won't. :-)

Yesterday the vice-chair of the worship committee and I got together to assign parts for the high holy days. Board members (and assorted other higher-ups) participate in these services if they want to, and the services are set up with spots for assorted readers. And, of course, there are the aliyot for the torah readings. We did the hard-to-fill spots first, of course, but missed one. When we got to it, Mimi said "why don't you take this one?" I said "because I don't know even the Shabbat haftarah blessing, let alone the special one for yom tov". She said I could learn and promised me a tape, so I agreed to fill that spot. To her credit, she didn't say "hey, you're the chair of the worship committee; it's your job to fill in the hard parts". :-) But I didn't notice until later that she, who offered me a tape of the melody, had evaded taking this particular slot in any of the services. Hmm. (I don't mind; there's plenty of time and it'll be useful to have this knowledge. I'm just amused by how it came about. Ironically, I had previously given myself a longer (English) reading, because I have a good reading voice and I figured this was more important than the "perk" of getting a blessing. There is this delicate balancing act in assigning parts where you try not to offend anybody but you also try not to have the people who butcher Hebrew doing blessings, the people with whiny or hard-to-hear voices doing long readings, and so on.)

We helped a friend move this weekend. There are 35 steps between the street and her second-floor apartment. You can't help but notice these things. :-) Dani got worn out much more easily than I expected him to; he may not be overweight like I am, but I seem to be in better physical shape than he is. Odd. (Granted, I didn't carry the uber-dresser of doom down the steps; I said it was too heavy. He was part of that team. But mostly it was boxes, which were I think mostly under 30 pounds.)

Today is rainy and dreary, but there are chores to do inside and we don't need to go anywhere, so that's ok. (There's no choir practice, as it turns out. There's an informal sing-along, but that doesn't motivate me.)

D&D Tuesday, the first post-Pennsic game. I'm looking forward to it. I even mostly caught up in the game journal. :-)