bunnies and music and Torah, oh my

Sunday afternoon was Ralph and Lori's bunny melt. It was lots of fun! Think "high tea" combined with the ritual sacrifice of post-Easter half-price chocolate bunnies. (They don't taste the same if you pay full price.) After they are dispatched, they go into the fondue pot. Yum! Laura tried to decapitate some peeps, but peeps don't cut, they just slosh aside. I think she ended up just tearing them apart.

Sunday evening the two newest members of On the Mark, Ray and Jenn, joined us for dinner and discussion. We didn't actually play any music; we went through some of the current repertoire and discussed how we can change things around to best use Ray and Jenn (and fill holes left by Andrea). Both of them have good solid voices (altoish and baritone), and Jenn plays flute, and Ray plays lots of things. I'm excited about all the new possibilities and am looking forward to actually playing! (And discussing the rest of the repertoire over time.)

The reason that Andrea has left the group is that she's been commuting from 4 hours away for this academic year and that's too much of a strain. She expects to keep working there; this started out as a one-year gig but it's working well for her so she's going to stay. We also just learned a few days ago that she's now engaged to someone out there, and they plan to get married later this summer. I'm happy for her! (I've met him and he seems like a nice guy, though I didn't know at the time that it was more than a casual friendship.)

So I guess we probably won't be doing that local concert in July after all; the plan had been for Andrea to return to Pittsburgh for June and July and do that show with us before leaving for good.

Last night's choir practice went well. I was nervous about having, effectively, lost last week due to various people being unavailable, but I think we'll do a decent job at the performance in a week and a half. We have one more rehearsal. "Halleluyah Halleli" is sounding pretty good, which pleases me because it's fairly new and it's one of my favorites. (I've been wanting to do Rossi for a while and finally got the book.)

This shabbat I realized that our morning minyan's upcoming shabbaton (think retreat) is my "birthday shabbat", so to speak. (That Friday is my "3rd birthday".) I've been learning a little of that parsha anyway so I can chant it at Tree of Life that week (on Thursday morning, and perhaps Monday as well). So I sent email to my rabbi asking if I could chant torah at the shabbaton. I'll be seeing him tomorrow for talmud study (yay!), so maybe he'll have an answer for me then. That would be cool. He's been saying for a while that he wants to train some adults to chant torah, but so far he hasn't done anything (visible) about it. I don't know how much I should push; I've reminded him a couple times that I'm interested. Friday night someone other than the rabbi chanted, but I haven't found out yet how that came about. It does give me a good hook for my request, though.

20 years ago

This weekend I got a phone call from the Tartan, the CMU student newspaper. When I was a student I was news editor and then editor in chief. During that time, among many other things, I wrote some of the earliest articles about CMU's budding plans to team up with IBM to put a computer in every room and on every desk. It was 1982; this was revolutionary.

The person who contacted me is doing a 20-year "retrospective" piece about that, and about what computing was like on campus back then, and how the students felt about all this, and so on. Some of his questions were too detailed for me to really be able to answer 20 years later -- like, yeah, I know that some students were upset (I think the main objection was financial, followed by the corporate-versus-educational role of a university), but I don't really remember how many or how vocal they were any more. But I did find myself thinking about computing at CMU when I was a student.

Here is part of the email I sent him: ( Read more... )

misc

Dani and I went to Casbah tonight to celebrate our anniversary. It was very nice. I got the halibut with cream-tomato sauce (described as "tomato fondue") over herbed riscotti, which was fabulous. Dani got the lamb in mustard sauce, which he thought was good but not as good as the fish. We also had a plate of assorted French cheeses with names I can't even spell, let alonr pronounce, and two of them were excellent. Dani wrote the names down so we can go looking for them.

This morning we had another air-conditioner contractor in. Based on a tip we got from my brother-in-law ("Mitsubishi ductless"), we found this particular contractor (who actually wants to sell us "Fujitsu ductless" for about a third less). The way it works is they put a unit on an outside wall (up by the ceiling, where it's out of the way), run a small duct through that wall to the outside of your house, and run that down to a compressor. It's not a central-air solution, but this contractor thought that two of these (in specific locations) augmented by a ceiling fan in the hall would cool the second floor. I have no idea what this costs, but he'll send us a bid. Meanwhile, one of Dani's coworkers told him that window air conditioners have gotten much quieter recently, so we may try to go browsing. I don't know how Dani will evaluate noise, though, and he's the one with the noise complaint. I can sleep through a running window AC with no problem. Snoring bothers me; white noise doesn't.

We also had a plumber in this morning to look at a drainage problem we're having. He's convinced that we need to dig up our yard (and tear up our patio, and tear down our fence so they can get the equipment in) and replace the main sewer line. We declined. They want to charge us $10k (excuse me, $9995 -- sound suspicious?) to do this work; that's an awful lot of semi-annual $100 visits from people with snakes. I am curious whether there is a solution that involves blasting high-pressure water through the line periodically to clear out gunk, but I didn't think of that until this evening.

I came home tonight to find the bulb in the light socket under the basement steps "broken". It was off, so I thought it was burned out. I grabbed the bulb to start twisting, and a hunk of glass came off in my hands. (The plumber was working there, so I'm betting he bumped it with his snake or something.) This left me with the question of how to remove the remnants of the bulb from a socket that might or might not be live right now. (Hmm, which way is it toggled?) I couldn't trace the line to the breaker box, so we ended up having to power-cycle the house. Whee. But it's fixed now. Needle-nose pliers are your friend.

I think I will be disappointed by the end of the TV show "Earth: Final Conflict". With 5 episodes to go in the 5-year arc, the final battle with the aliens does not seem especially imminent. The final episode of the series is called "Final Conflict", suggesting that this is where the fight will occur. I had kind of hoped that the fight would happen a bit earlier so that we could see the effect of all of this on the people of earth (assuming earth wins the battle, of course -- this is Roddenberry, so I bet they do). I think we're going to end with a firefight and no afterward. That's disappointing.