weekend bits

[cellio]

There's nothing quite like a fire truck parked outside your garage to get your attention upon looking out the back window. (Err, is there a problem on our property we're not aware of?) Near as I can tell, the bus stopped between the fire truck and the ambulance had caught fire. There was lots of milling about but no haste, so I assume no one was badly hurt.

This has been mostly a quiet weekend, which I'm not complaining about. :-) We did Thanksgiving with my family on Thursday, and we've been puttering around the house the rest of the weekend. (We'll be headed out to dinner with friends tonight.) Friday afternoon I cooked a brisket for Shabbat because, for once, I actually had the 3.5 hours available to tend it. (I'll freeze the rest -- there's no point in making only a little brisket.) It was quite tasty, and very easy. Saturday for lunch we had leftover turkey et al.

Odd Thanksgiving nomenclature: lots of people apparently call the bread stuff "stuffing" if it's in the bird and "dressing" if it's in a pan, but I learned it all as "stuffing". magid refers to them as endostuffing and exostuffing, which I think sums it up perfectly.

Services Friday and Saturday had lighter attendance than usual but not as light as I had expected, and Saturday morning the 94-year-old woman who asked if she could chant halftarah brought several family members along. She did a good job (especially considering the challenge) but felt that she had made mistakes. I'm glad she gave it a try, though, and lots of people had kind words for her.

We almost had the opposite end of the spectrum at the same service -- a recent bar mitzvah who wants to keep up his involvement and was going to chant torah -- but family holiday complications kept him away. He'll chant next week instead. The confluence of young and old would have been nifty if it had worked out.

Real Live Preacher (preachermanfeed) recently published a book collecting some of his blog-published essays and a few new ones. It's an interesting read. I wonder if that will catch on -- dead-tree compilations of the best blog entries, either from a single author or in topic-based compilations. While entries like this present one are just "daily life" stuff not really interesting to most people, some entries out there are more like essays and, I imagine, the same writing considerations go into them whether they're for blogs or print. Compilations of essays are nothing new; there's just a new venue for building up a following prior to a collection.

Comments

[jducoeur]

There's nothing quite like a fire truck parked outside your garage to get your attention upon looking out the back window.

Reminds me of one of my more disconcerting tenant-moments: finding out that my apartment building had *been* on fire.

I'd noticed for a week that it was smelling a little funny, but that wasn't unusual (which tells you something about this particular slum). Then I happened to be wandering past the front of the house (unusual, since I usually came in the side entrance), and found the semi-basement bottom floor blackened and gutted. Apparently it had caught fire while I was in class, and the building damned near burned down, but the landlord never bothered to mention it to the other tenants.

I wonder if that will catch on -- dead-tree compilations of the best blog entries

I think it will. The nature of the blog medium is somewhat transitory: while entries may stick around forever, it's rare for people to go back and re-read them. So I expect the better essayists to come out with collections. (Indeed, some of us occasionally tell my apprentice ladysprite that we would like to see her collect her Adventures in Veterinary Science essays someday -- they are often both poignant and deadly funny, and relatively timeless...)

[cellio]

Reminds me of one of my more disconcerting tenant-moments: finding out that my apartment building had *been* on fire.

Yikes. That just seems like the sort of the thing a landlord really ought to mention, rather than waiting for people to encounter random bits of smoke/water damage and wonder what the heck happened.