last few days

[cellio]

Friday at work I completed a big merge of my project's code to the main branch in source control. (Yeah, two hours before leaving for a four-day weekend, but I'd done a lot of testing first.) I've learned some new things about Perforce (source-control system) and our build system. I have also learned that while I can do this sort of configuration management, I really, really want us to hire someone who actually wants to do this stuff on a regular basis.

This morning I was asked if I could read torah next Shabbat. ("How much?" "As long as it's a valid reading, I don't care what you do." "Ok.") This does get better with practice; I don't think I would have been able to learn a non-trivial chunk in less than a week a year ago. Cool.

Thursday we got email from our Hebrew instructor. She is, alas, sitting shiva in Israel, so she sent mail to tell us that (1) class was on anyway as originally scheduled and (2) we'd have the sub again. Only three people showed up; the sub told me that happened at the last class (three weeks ago) too (different three people; that was the night my in-laws were in town, so I missed it). The sub is good, so I hope she's not taking that personally. The bad student I previously wrote about wasn't there, so we actually covered new material. I suggested to the sub that she send email to everyone with the assignment and what we would be doing next week; with luck this will innoculate us some against "but I don't know this!" whines from people who miss classes and don't do the homework. We'll see.

I had a nice conversation with the sub on the way out of the building, and then for half an hour after that, about theology, observance, the local community, learning languages, and the like. That was pleasant. (And hey, we now have each others' email addresses...)

Today we visited with my family. They do Christmas, so Dani and I still do the gift thing with them for their sake. My parents got me two more volumes of Rashi's commentary on torah (yay!), and we got a bunch of other goodies. In a moment of "oh, you did that too? oops", both my parents and my sister got us nice tea assortments. Tonight we cleaned out the tea cupboard (I've been meaning to prune it for a while); who knew that tea had sell-by dates? (This revelation came when considering a box that neither of us remembered buying.) Mmm, new, fresh tea.

We got my sister an iPod (nano), which she was pretty excited about. She does not have a computer, but she has access to several nearby (her kids, our father, and if worse comes to worst she can come to our house, though it's farther for her). She has a long commute and no CD player in her car, so I figure she'll spend an afternoon loading a bunch of CDs onto her iPod and be good for a few months before needing to do it again. Not having a computer of her own shouldn't be a huge hardship, despite the protests of her kids. (We bought her an adapter to charge it from house current and an adapter for playing in her car.)

My father just got a laptop (Macbook), apparently prompted in part by the thought during their trip to Italy that it would have been convenient to have. (Duh; if I'd thought of it I would have lent them my iBook for that trip.) So he's now playing with Leopard, 'cause that's what came installed. He mentioned that he still has a G3 machine (predecessor to his desktop machine); I wonder if it can run iTunes. :-)

Tomorrow I'm getting together with friends to play a game of "Dogs in the Vineyard", an unusual role-playing game I previously wrote about. This should be fun!

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Thank you to everyone for these really helpful replies - and to cellio for allowing me to hijack her LJ, too!

[cellio]

You're welcome! I have no problem with the "hijacking"; one of the big features of LJ, IMO, is the opportunity for actual conversations to spring up. It's many-to-many, not many-to-one as in the comments of most blogging sites. It feels like more of a community this way.