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trip to Toronto
We got up there a couple days before Pesach, rather than zipping in the night before (or day of) the first seder like we usually do. This gave us more options for going out for food, though we actually only went out once, and also gave us options for doing touristy stuff because it could be done on days that weren't Shabbat or Yom Tov. One of my frustrations in the past has been trying to do Shabbat/Yom Tov in a place that isn't my own and doesn't contain similarly-minded people, so this timing worked well.
The first seder is always with Dani's father's side of the family. These days this amounts to Dani's father's wife's kids and extensions. (Since Dani was already in his 20s when they got married, we both have trouble calling them his step-siblings with a straight face. They don't have a shared history per se -- just a shared node in the family tree.) This side of the family seems to hail from the "now let's eat" tradition; we zipped through the first half of the haggadah in about 30 minutes, then had the meal, and then never returned for the second part of the haggadah. This happens every year, so it's no surprise, but it's frustrating. In addition, there were some children there who were very badly behaved (and old enough to know better), and their parents weren't riding herd on it very well. But the food was good and the adult company was mostly pleasant. Dani's father's wife has three kids (two of them married), and I quite like one of those couples, particularly the wife (who is not the relative).
The second seder was both better and better than I expected it to be. This was with Dani's mother and some friends of hers (and, of course, us and Dani's sister's family, as with the first night). There were no pre-teen children, and we took things at a leisurely pace, and we stopped and asked questions and had discussions. It was good. They use a home-brew haggadah that's a little light on content (for example, it does not contain the festival kiddush, only "...borei p'ri hagafen"), but it was still an enjoyable seder that I think had lot more religious content than the previous night's. It does no good to say more words from the haggadah if you're mumbling/racing through them to get to the chicken soup at the finish line.
I seem to be Dani's mother's halachic authority (err...). She directed all of the "do we do this now?" and kashrut questions to me. Maybe she figured I'm the only one who would care? Dunno. (I don't know much about her other guests.) Things did get easier once we established that she was not asking for a discussion of kitniyot but, rather, the simpler question of whether I would eat green beans if she served them. :-)
The second seder also involved a fair bit of singing, as is typical with that side of the family. The friends were visitors from Israel and they knew some different melodies, which was fun, though we didn't do a lot of theirs. (They got outvoted by the local melodies, I guess. :-) ) And note to self: before next year, teach Dani a complete melody for "B'tzeit Yisrael"! They do this hodge-podge where every phrase of music is from the version we all know but it's assembled differently, and it always ends in a train wreck. I know this melody, but the crowd will follow Dani before they'll follow me so I should make sure he learns it. :-)
Before all that got under way we made a couple outings. Dani was very good about this; one of my objections to going a day earlier had been that we spend a lot of time sitting in the house -- reading, not visiting, because our hosts have lives -- and this is boring. So he agreed that we'd get out more, and we did, and he took the initiative on planning most of it (it being his city). This is good.
We went to the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum, I presume, but everyone just calls it the ROM). They have a special exhibit on the first couple dozen Egyptian dynasties going, and there were some pretty neat artifacts. I was struck by how well their craftsmen seemed to understand proportion with sculpture but how badly they understood it with flat media (painting etc). The statues look so much more like people than the drawings and wall-carvings do. I guess there's a real advantage to being able to turn the figure in your hands (or walk around it, if it's a large statue).
Nifty artifact we both want as a replica #N: a "statue" (from, I think, the third of the seven major ages) of a fat scribe, seated, that turns out to be a flask. I'll put it on the wish list near the coconut-bird we saw several years ago. :-)
(The coconut exhibit was back -- it was missing the last time we were there -- but that bird was not on display this time. Basically, in the 16th century some Italian artisans went bonkers with coconuts, embellishing them with silver and gold to make them look like other things. Most of the ones I've seen are variants on the "covered challace" theme, but there was one that had been made into a bird, with hinged wings, jointed legs, and a removable head that turned out to be a whistle. (Or so the exhibit notes said.) Very nifty. I keep hoping one of my SCA friends will make one just for grins.)
We walked through several other exhibits in the ROM, but a fair bit of the place is currently closed for renovation. Sadly, this includes the museum shop, so no browsing catalogs and postcards for us this time. That seems like poor planning; at the very least you'd expect them to find space in which to sell stuff related to their big exhibit.
We also went to a large art gallery -- referred to as "the gallery" by everyone, but I didn't catch which. They had a bunch of modern paintings that didn't do much for me, some nifty modern sculpture that did, and a respectable showing in medieval and renaissance items (mostly religious paintings and artifacts; I think one book; very little jewelry; some secular housewares). They also had a few of those wacky coconut challaces.
There was a small display of Inuit art. Someone once described Inuit sculpture to me as "take {wood, stone, bone} and carve away everything that isn't a bear". There's some truth to that, but there were some nifty pieces. There was, sadly, nothing much in evidence to put it in context -- no explanations of history and culture for the uninformed southerners who didn't spend grade school learning this stuff. They had a video looping with a woman in long robes dancing around and playing a "drum" -- just a head spread over a large (3-foot?) hoop with a handle. She held the handle in one hand and a beater in the other, moving both around, and got some interesting rhythms. Again, no explanation of what we were seeing/hearing. It could have been invented in the 1960s for all I know.
We made a stop at the "World's Biggest Bookstore", because how can you not?, but while it's physically large, its coverage isn't that deep. (And really, I'm not sure it's bigger than the largest local Border's.) I went looking for their music-history section -- nothing under "music", and their entire "medieval history" section was smaller than the "seafood cookbooks" section, just to put this in context. The latter produced my only purchase, a rather thorough book called Fish: The Basics that should give me culinary ideas for months to come. I like fish, but I rarely do more than season and bake it, and I'd like to change that given how often I cook it.
In addition to time spent with Dani's sister and her family (our hosts), we made visits to several local relatives. We did not actually visit with Dani's father and his wife (other than at the first seder); we called them when we got to Toronto on Saturday night, and apparently at the time they were in Pittsburgh (driving back from Florida). They usually return earlier. They said they called us, though the machine didn't have a message from them when we got home. So anyway, after not getting a return call Saturday, Sunday, or Monday during the day, we were pretty much stuck with the seder as the only option.
We visited other relatives; this was mostly Dani's show, of course. I get along just fine with all of them and we made appropriate small talk, but I'm not the reason for the visit. :-)
One odd thing came up: we were visiting with Dani's uncle (his father's brother), and the subject of cars came up, and Dani told him I had just bought a car. Lenny asked what and Dani answered, and then Lenny looked at Dani and said "you let her buy a German car?" I said nothing, Dani shrugged, Lenny said something kind of snarky, and the conversation went on.
Ok, yes, I understand the twitch factor, especially in someone who is (barely) old enough to remember the Shoah, and I would have understood the reaction in anyone, say, 30 or 40 years ago, but now? Is it any more reasonable for me to boycott Volkswagen now than it would be for, say, an American black to boycott today's cotton industry, or a descendant of an Irish immigrant to boycott the steel industry (robber barons 'round the turn of the century), or a Japanese person to boycott anything made in the US? Horrible things have been done in the past in all these cases, but when does the past stay in the past and when should it carry into the future? If I thought that VW today was benefitting from uncompensated slave labor from the Shoah then yeah, I'd avoid them too, and I would certainly have a chilly reception for anyone still alive who was actually involved in perpetrating that, but to hold it against everyone, indiscriminantly, with a national connection seems excessive to me. Am I insensitive or missing a major clue or something?
(I did later talk with Dani. He says he doesn't have a problem with my having bought a VW. That's good to hear.)
While we were there one of Debby's daughters asked for help in puzzling out the web-based submission process for a paper for one of her classes. We followed the instructions for uploading the material, but it just wasn't showing up in the directory listings even after sufficient time and refreshes. It was pretty confusing, and of course they didn't just provide FTP or the like. (That would have been too easy...) Eventually I figured out what was going on, and this shows bad design from both ends, the courseware and MS Word (now there's a surprise :-) ).
I noticed that other students' papers were showing up in the directory with document titles (not file names) as the hyperlinks. (So click on a title to view the paper.) I asked her to show me her paper, and she brought it up in Word. ("You used Word to generate the HTML you had to submit?" "Yes, the professor told us to do it that way." "Tell your professor that your geek aunt says he should be taken out and flogged." "I don't think so, at least until grades are published.")
So, it turns out, the very first thing in her document is an embedded graphic; the text follows. And what does Word do if you export HTML in that case? Why, it specifies that the title is the empty string. It could have omitted the title tag, or looked for the first text in the document, but it does neither. The course software, on the other hand, blindly accepts the title it's given, even if it's empty, and makes it the link. We don't know what it does if the title is missing, but I doubt it's any better. This did not seem to be a web site that makes appropriate use of warnings and error messages.
So since her document really was on the web site, even if she couldn't see it in the listings, she was able to edit it remotely, saving me the trouble of figuring out how to edit Word's output. We found the empty title, filled something in, and suddenly her paper was there. Sheesh.
A couple years ago while visiting for Pesach we were introduced to West Wing, which we now very much enjoy. (Maybe not this season as much as the previous ones, but I digress.) This year, Debby showed me 24. I knew the conceit of the show already -- that it takes place in almost-real time, one hour per episode -- but I didn't actually know what the show was about. I've now seen one episode, and I very much want to see more. My friends who are already fans of this show are hereby invited to enthuse in my general direction. Should I start at the first season? (I assume it's out on DVD?) Are the seasons related to each other, or is each season one stand-alone one-day story?
Dani did not watch it with us, so he's only heard my description. But we can fix that when it next rolls around.
Re: 24 and AGO
Probably. I remember seeing a sign for AGO, and we walked past several small galleries on the way to the one we visited. Am I correct in assuming that AGO would be the biggest gallery in its immediate vicinity?
(Hmm, I don't think I can now remember which subway stop it was. Maybe Dunlap? Either that or we passed Dunlap but it was farther along; not sure now. We started at Eglinton West, just to help orient on direction. (Since the subway forms a "U" and we were down near the bottom of that, I can't even usefully use terms like "southbound".))