cellio | weekend

Friday night was our "mostly musical Shabbat" service, which we're now doing on the first Friday of each month (except maybe not in the summer). We have a home-grown band, now, which is fun. Some day I may join them. (I'd bring the drums, not try to play dulcimer. There would be too many logistical challenges around transportation and tuning for the dulcimer to be feasible.)

Saturday we went to the AEthelmearc Academy (SCA event), which was held at Seton Hill College (universtiy?) in Greensburg. It's a really pretty campus. (Looked to be pretty unfriendly to wheelchairs; I'm glad a local member who was using a wheelchair last year isn't using one now.)

Dani spotted a poster on campus advertising a field trip to Giant Eagle and WallMart. The campus is not exactly downtown, so while you could walk to those locations, it'd be a shlep and you wouldn't want to do it carrying groceries. So this makes sense, but it never would have occurred to me.

The event was pleasant. There weren't many classes that particularly interested me, but I ended up at some that were pretty decent. One of the classes I specifically wanted to attend got cancelled, unfortunately (instructor didn't make it to the event). The overall feel was pretty casual; I've seen university-style events that were higher pressure for the instructors, but this didn't seem that way.

The school provided the food. It was very good for catered food -- not really medieval in content or ambience, but no one expected it to be (given the catering) so that's not a problem. It did look like they ran out of some things before everyone got through the line; I assume this is due to the too-common SCAdian tendency to take large portions.

At the end of the day they put out some fruit and bags of potato chips/pretzels/etc, and there were a lot of leftovers. I noticed that our college students were grabbing some extras; when the autocrat announced that people should take the leftovers home, they went into full starving-student mode. It was kind of cute -- kind of like Halloween, sack and all. :-)

The event ended around 6:30 (no feast). We failed to find a local restaurant without a long line, so we just headed back to Pittsburgh. (Well, first we bumbled around a little, because the directions to the site didn't reverse neatly and, ahem, some drivers just won't ask for directions. But we found the highway entrance and all was good.)

After we dropped off our passengers Dani and I went to Indian Oven, a newish restaurant in Squirrel Hill. It replaced Platters and is, alas, no longer kosher. It has a significant vegetarian and adequate vegan menu, though.

We both got samplers (meat for him, veggie for me), and we both liked the food a lot. Service was a bit slow due to a sub-optimal waiter:customer ratio. But I'd definitely go back. The vegetable korma (ordered at a spice level of 7) was nicely zippy and not mushy. The mattar paneer (one of my standard benchmarks) was nice but not excellent. The raita was very good, as were the green and red chutneys. The spiced tea (with cream) was evocative of chai.

This afternoon I finally took down the sukkah. Sometime before next year I'm going to take the vertical poles to be cut down a foot or so (a friend has the relevant power tool for cutting metal tubing), so that next year I won't have to do awkward things involving a ladder to put it up. I don't need my sukkah to be 8 feet tall; 7 would be fine.

Tonight was a pleasant dinner with ralphmelton and lorimelton. Dessert was a nice pumpkin cake with whipped cream; Lori mixed some powdered ginger into the cream before whipping it, which added a nice effect. I'll have to remember that. (Ok, whom am I kidding? When's the last time I whipped cream rather than buying it that way? But hey, I might...)

Monica

weekend

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