weekend stuff

[cellio]

This Shabbat was the first of four in a row where we have no bar or bat mitzvah. This means our rabbi gets to stay for the entire informal morning service -- yay! It's nice that we have lay people who can conduct the service and read torah, but this really is his minyan in many ways, and I feel bad when scheduling makes him miss some of it.

Torah readers are assigned through mid-March. This is the farthest ahead we've been scheduled for a while! I don't know when I'll next read there; I'm probably reading for a women's service in February, but that's a different group. (They asked for volunteers to read torah or lead parts of the service; I said I could do either but have Opinions about content of the latter that I'd like to discuss before committing. So it looks like I get torah reading, which is fine.)

Something I wonder about in this week's portion: after Yosef interprets Paro's dreams, Paro elevates him to second-in-command of all Egypt. One of the things he gives Yosef is the "chariot of the second in command". This makes it sound like the position already exists, which leads me to wonder what happened to the previous holder of that job. Did he misinterpret Paro's dreams?

As long as I'm doing minutiae... during Chanukah and on Purim there's an insertion into the Amidah (central prayer). In the Shabbat service, the siddur includes the Chanukah one but not the Purim one. (The Purim one is included for weekdays, though, so it's not a general oversight.) I wonder if that means that Purim can never fall on Shabbat. (Chanukah, being eight days, is guaranteed to hit at least one Shabbat. I wonder if it can hit two, or if it never starts on Shabbat either.)

Saturday night was my company's holiday party. It was huge! We've been growing a lot, but when people are spread out it's not as obvious. Put us all in one room with significant others and... wow. We missed the party last year, and this was much bigger than two years ago.

The party was fun; the organizers did a good job with it. This year, unlike last year (I'm told), we did not run out of food. Dani found a wine that was sweet enough for him (a Riesling, but I failed to get specifics). Some people brought instruments and were jamming in the front room; I didn't bring any on the theory that it would be Christmas music, but it turns out that would have been ok (they were improvising, mostly). On the other hand, for expedience I would have brought drums, not the hammer dulcimer -- and one of my coworkers is really good on drums, so there wouldn't have been much I could contribute. But I enjoyed listening, so that was fine.

Today the washer and dryer rebelled. (What did we ever do to them?) The washer has decided that it doesn't like the rinse cycle, so it just stops there. We can drain the water and reset it to get it to fill and agitate again, hacking a rinse, but it won't spin. Bah. And then the dryer decided that heat was optional, though once we took the front panel off to look for a fuse (unsuccessfully) and took the vent stack apart looking for a lint clog (nope), it began to give us lackluster heat. I guess we just needed to speak sternly to it -- for now.

The appliances came with the house (five years ago) and weren't new then. I wonder what the usual life-expectancy is on these things. I guess we should find out what a service call costs, and whether he'll give us a break for two appliances in one visit.

So, hours after I expected to be done, my shirts are slowly drying, jeans are queued up behind them, and Dani has a load queued up behind that. Whee.

Comments

[eub.livejournal.com]

This QmP scale has a correlation with sweetness, though it isn't exactly a scale of it. It's a scale of sugar in the unfermented grape must, which may all be fermented to alcohol, or may be left as residual sugar. One way to tell is to buy an English-speaking Riesling (or whatever) that may give a hint on the label. :)

(Another is that Beerenauslese and up are pretty well always sweet. But, well, I can't afford that.)

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

I'm not that heavily edumicated in wines. I never expect the scale to be exact; just that for a particular vintner, the sweetness will rise with each name change. And since I'm an inveterate label reader, if the extra grape sugar has been converted to alcohol, I'll usually notice it...

Speaking of can't afford, Wegmans had a SIX liter bottle of Sauternes in their locked display case today. It's for sale. If anyone is willing to pay twenty-three hundred clams for it. At a *grocery store*. Sheesh...

[cellio]

*boggle* I guess that would be aimed at someone having a big party with a big budget (but do such people go to Wegmans for wine??), as you could not otherwise possibly drink six liters before it goes stale. Or, at least, people who'll pay $2300 for a bottle of wine would probably think so; personally, I don't mind wine with screw caps because it lets me save the leftovers more easily. :-)