random bits

[cellio]

Purim was this past weekend. We continued the tradition started last year of having "Esther's banquet" after the evening megillah reading and Purimspiel -- adults-only, food, alcohol, study/discussion. This year we had about 50 people, I think, up from last year, which is good to see. Last year I had brought some homebrew along. I hadn't planned to repeat that this year because there hadn't been a lot of takers -- but then one of the rabbis, in announcing the event to the morning minyan, said "and Monica's going to bring her homebrew, right?", so I shrugged and did. I brought 12-year-old horilka (made with spiced brandy) and some mead, and both were very popular. (They polished off most of a liter of horilka! Last year they drank maybe a cup.) I haven't actually been making stuff for the last decade or so; I guess I should queue up some more horilka in the fall when cider is in season again. (The ingredients in horilka are unprocessed cider, honey, brandy or vodka, spices, and time. Thanks, hlinspjalda!)

I talked with the vet today. The test of Baldur's liver function came back normal. As we were discussing next steps (the ones that could produce answers are dangerous), she asked me just what he eats. There's dry food out all the time and its rate of consumption hasn't markedly changed in recent months, but of course I don't know who eats how much. Baldur has ready access, though. He gets tiny amounts of tuna and canned food; basically he gets to lick the spoon when I feed such to Erik. Baldur wolfed down half a can of food in about 15 minutes at the vet's on Thursday, so my vet suggested giving him real amounts of canned food. I've generally avoided that because it's unhealthy, but y'know, he's 17 years old now -- am I really worried about him picking up bad dietary habits at this point? So I'll give that a try; he enthusiastically ate most of a can of food today (between morning and evening), so we're off and running.

I see that the post office wants to cut a day of mail delivery to save costs. I don't mind the cut, but I think it would be much better for us customers/taxpayers if they chose a day in the middle of the week, say, Thursday, instead of choosing a schedule that sometimes means four days between mail deliveries. I assume that giving up all their Monday holidays isn't on the table. (There actually is a segue from the previous item to this one: this morning I refilled a mail-order prescription for Baldur.)

Dani recently ordered some Israeli CDs, and the MP3 tagging has been strange. Two or three different two-disc sets tagged one disc in English (transliteration) and one in Hebrew, for instance. Sometimes song titles will be one way and performers the other. In one case we got gibberish, presumably a unicode failure or something, and Dani typed stuff in by hand. Any one of those cases wouldn't have surprised me, but mixing it up on the same recording is bizarre.

Comments

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about the different postal days and it seems likely that if they drop a weekday, they will simply lose business shipping. I don't think companies would bother to maintain the Post Office for package shipping if they couldn't use it for 20% of the work week. FedEx and UPS would probably love that idea, though.

[cellio]

Interesting point. I hadn't thought about the effect on business customers. I wonder if they're set up in a way that lets them segregate business and residential delivery. Or, for that matter, how much of their cost is in delivery (the last mile) versus all the flow up to that point anyway.

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

You are asking interesting questions. I would think that stopping delivery for another day is about saving money on the "last mile". My guess is that the long distance trucks would keep running (which I *think* I've seen be the case when tracking deliveries from UPS or FedEx even though they don't deliver on the weekend).

It is also interesting to note that if you order books using the free shipping option from some online sellers, they use FedEx for the long distance part and the package ends up with the Post Office for the last mile. This sort of setup makes me lean towards the last mile being the higher cost of delivery.