random bits

[cellio]

I should know better by now. Every now and then -- just infrequently enough for the pain to have worn off -- I get the idea that I can stop by the Giant Eagle on Murray on my way home from work to do the grocery shopping. This is, in principle, not out of the way, unlike the Giant Eagle I usually patronize. However, this only works if (1) the store actually has all the stuff I want and (2) the checkout lines aren't horrendous. When I had my third failure only one aisle past produce, I decided to cut my losses, pay for my vegetables, and go to the better store. (For the record: ginger root, fresh cranberries, and Listerine. I don't begrudge the cranberries, but the other two surprised me.)

Dani and I have decided to buck the Hallmark tradition and have a nicer-than-usual evening some other night in February. Besides, until Saturday he had a choir practice scheduled for tonight.

Actually, we also had a nicer-than-usual evening last night. ralphmelton and lorimelton got engaged at the end of the last Sunday dinner that fell on February 13; Ralph had slyly arranged for things to run late so that he could propose just after midnight in front of some of their friends. So they made an especially-nice dinner for friends last night to celebrate the anniversary. We had risotto with goat cheese and salmon, spinach salad with fruit, and two homemade desserts: chocolate truffles and a concoction of ladyfingers, raspberry mousse, whipped cream, and (I think) alcohol. It was all fabulous.

Yesterday afternoon we joined a crowd of people helping out an older friend of ours whose basement recently flooded. There was stuff to be thrown out, stuff to be cleaned up, and stuff that said friend had to look at so we'd know how much effort to put into saving it. That last was, of course, the bottleneck. There were a lot of papers that had gotten wet but were now dry, but that might have started to grow mold. A lot of those papers were records from her parents. Lesson learned: store papers of that sort neither in the basement nor in the attic. (I lost some papers once to an attic with a leaky roof.)

My synagogue is running a trope class, which started last Wednesday. (It runs for six weeks.) Some of the people in the class are good-naturedly grumpy about my taking the class because I'm a "ringer". I pointed out that there is plenty I don't know about trope and I expect to learn things in this class. That said, I haven't brought the book in from the car yet. :-) (After this week's class, probably.)

Comments

[akitrom.livejournal.com]

Until I visited THL Rufina in Pennsylvania, I'd never seen the Giant Eagle chain. When I heard people talking about it, I had pictures of people buying groceries from, like, Gandalf, flying along from town to town.

What's trope?

[cellio]

If you come to Pennsic you may also encounter Giant Eagle. A friend in Carolingia takes joy in messing up their data-mining efforts: here's someone in Boston who has the store discount card (for a chain that doesn't exist in Boston), and in August he runs up $3000 of groceries on it and he never touches it the rest of the year. :-) (Well, as long as you've got a card anyway, you may as well share with everyone in your camp, right?)

What's trope?

Trope is the cantillation system used for reading Torah in synagogues. It's traditional to chant rather than read; there is a system of musical notation, though it's not the symbols you're used to from any other kind of music. I've learned a lot of it on my own and some by taking a class in a para-rabbinic program, but I'm still taking the local class. There'a always stuff to learn, both core material (I don't know all the symbols yet) and nuance. Besides, I've been lobbying for this class for more than a year.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

There's a Giant Eagle in Frederick MD now (Barony of Highland FnordFoorde)...