weekend

[cellio]

This has been a pleasant weekend, for the most part. We've been learning some fun new music at Shabbat evening services lately. Next week's celebration of Shabbat Shira is going to be a big deal musically; this is the parsha where we read about the song at the sea, and we're going to have a more music-focused service than usual. It's also starting an hour earlier so that families with young children can come without hassle. Should be fun.

Saturday morning went well. My rabbi had just come back from a retreat where, among things, they apparently focused on doing more with less. So we skipped some songs and some of the English repetitions and stuff and tried to really focus on the parts we did do. I liked it. I don't like rushing, especially if the rushing is in pursuit of something arguably pointless. (If you've just said the prayer in Hebrew, repeating it in English is pointless to me. If the point is to be friendly to those who can't read Hebrew even with transliteration, then the answer IMO is to sometimes skip the Hebrew. But don't do things twice.)

lefkowitzga joined us for Shabbat lunch, which was very nice. And she found fresh, tasty strawberries in Giant Eagle! I didn't know that was possible this time of year. We had no leftovers. :-)

Gail and I spent some time looking through the collection of Salamone Rossi's liturgical music to choose candidates for the choir. We both like his kedusha (for four voices), so we're going to suggest that. It took me a little while to figure out where the text came from, as I didn't recognize parts of it; it's from Shabbat Musaf, which Reform doesn't do. (Artscroll to the rescue.) Ah, ok. I knew there were differences, but I didn't know they were as significant as they are.

The edition of the Rossi music I have is bad in a couple ways. Some of the transliterations are just plain wrong; the text is also difficult to read in places. This is also someone's attempt to transliterate for French speakers, so it's not the usual mappings. For the last two pieces I retypeset the whole thing, but both times, despite serious proofreading, I managed to make some mistakes. I'm wondering if I should just hand it out as-is this time, hand everyone a pencil, and start reading off the text the way it's supposed to be. Or maybe someone else in the choir is better at transcription than I apparently am. We'll see, I guess. The first step is to get approval for the piece.

Saturday night was our long-awaited D&D game (it's been several weeks), where we rescued the two party members who had been captured by the vampires. It went very well, I thought, and Ralph was able to give us an adventure hook that got us some money and a specific task to pursue. The fight with the vampires, and subsequent rescue, cost a lot of money, so this is a welcome development. (Side note: the character who is largely responsible for this mess in the first place, the wizard, was both ungrateful for the rescue (we didn't get his spellbooks) and presumptuous about the spending of the money. (He got a lot of it for restarting his spellbooks.) He's a pretty ornery character, and in-game we probably would have dumped him long ago. But the player-level dynamics make that hard. I have no idea how much of this the player realizes.)

Sunday dinner was pleasant, except that Dani's been fighting a persistent cough for a couple days and it got worse tonight so we had to bail early. We stopped at a store on the way home to explore alternatives in cough syrup. I hope that whatever he picked out is more effective than what he was using.

Two mechanical annoyances struck this weekend. The first involves the washing machine; I went downstairs to move the laundry to the dryer only to find sudsy water on the floor and (I would later discover) still in the machine. The tub into which the machine drains was almost but not entirely full (and not draining), but I couldn't tell if the water on the floor was overflow or a separate problem. (What would cause the machine to stop, after all? It doesn't know that the tub is full...) So I applied a plunger to the tub and eventually picked out a lot of gunk from the drain; I could tell there was more that I couldn't reach. (What the heck is that and what's it doing in our drain? Eww...) This looked like a job for Liquid Plumber. :-) I rinsed off the clothes from the washer by hand so I could move them to the dryer and started the next load with some trepidation. Nothing went wrong there, so I still don't know what stopped the washer. I do not like this kind of mystery.

The other problem is that either my monitor (CRT) or my graphics card is failing, but I haven't shlepped heavy monitors around yet to test which. (Well, I suppose it could also be a cable. Hmm.) Every now and then my screen flickers and takes on rather more yellow than is normal. My computer has jaundice. Whee. Maybe tomorrow I will investigate further.

Comments

[ironangel]

I had the washer phenomena happen once. I think there is actually an overflow guard, where the hose connects to the washer. If the hose can't empty, the washer stops.

:)