weekend bits

[cellio]

I heard a great comeback the other day. Someone had moved in with an SO before marriage, and a holier-than-thou relative was giving her grief. The relative reported that she'd learned about this sinful situation from some mutual acquaintance who also disapproves, and what did she have to say for herself? Her response: "Were you... gossiping?"

Sukkot morning there was a bar mitzvah. I wasn't thrilled to hear that; usually that means the bar-mitzvah family takes over and the regular congregation feels pushed off to the side. So that's not a nice thing to do at a service that is the only option for the greater congregation. (On most Shabbatot we have two services, the one the regulars go to and the bar-mitzvah service that the family pretty much owns. I wish it weren't that way, but it is. On holidays we don't do that, though; there's one service.) However, it worked out; the bar mitzvah was very good and gave one of the best talks I've heard from a kid so far. I hope that was intentional -- that a particularly promising student was given the honor of having his bar mitzvah at a holiday service -- but I don't know if it was. They schedule those pretty far in advance, so he would have had to have been particularly promising two years ago.

Today Dani and I went to the Shadyside home tour. We've never been to one of these before. Other neighborhoods have them too (though I've never heard of one in Squirrel Hill). The tour consisted of seven homes, all of which are clearly objects of obsession for their owners. I had assumed the tour would consist of big impressive mansions (there are several in Shadyside), but it was a mix of mostly "normal-person" homes, though with often-impressive restoration work. One small house was obviously a bachelor pad; the "bedroom" was in a loft visible from everyplace except directly below it, with no curtains or the like. Not the sort of place you live with a non-romantic roommate, or your kids. :-)

Tomorrow we are getting a new furnace. It's the sort of thing you shold do every half-century whether you need it or not. :-) Seriously, we think our current furnace is running at about 50% efficiency, and the new one will be abut 95%, so that should bring some relief on the winter gas bills.

Hebrew minutiae: I had to stifle a laugh during Hallel (psalms of praise) on Saturday. (This is holiday liturgy, so not every Shabbat.) Most Hebrew verbs have a three-letter root, and I know that sometimes in the course of conjugating them the first letter or the last letter or even the middle letter can drop out, depending on what it is and the context. I had always assumed those were ors -- until I recognized the word "odecha" for what it is ("I will give thanks to you"), and that the only hint of the root is the dalet. The first and last letters dropped off!

Comments

[cellio]

They won't be venting through the chimney; they told us the new one will produce too much moisture for that. :-) The new one has two changes from what I'm used to there: venting straight outdoors, and running a small drain tube to let water drip out.

We put in programmable thermostats (one for furnace, one for AC) last year. We couldn't tell how much difference it made because we hadn't been previously tracking gas usage, only payments, and the rates keep changing. But I'm sure it did something, and it certainly made me more comfortable. And yeah, glowy interface. :-)