erev Yom Hodu

The Hebrew word "hodu" is the root for "thanks". (Aside to Ralph: yes, "modah" is the same word with different grammatical dressing.) It is also the (modern) word for "turkey". Heh.

Seasonal humor: Mishnah Hodu (go to the second entry in the digest). It's not as funny as the Halacha of Xmas, but the latter is not yet in its proper season and the former is still pretty good. (For additional fun, continue on to the third digest entry, on the hermeneutics of the stop sign.)

Tomorrow we will go to my parents' house for Thanksgiving, and then Friday morning I head off to the Darkover convention near Baltimore with Robert and Kathy. I'm looking forward to all the good music, and to seeing Harold and Becky, dglenn, Clam Chowder (the group not the soup), and many other friends. I hadn't realized it until recently, but this will be my 20th year for this con.

This year I am thankful for many things (in no particular order):

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short takes

Hey, LJ finally fixed the bug with ordering of memories. Memories are useful to me again!

Lately, a larger proportion of my spam is about enhancing body parts (primarily one I do not possess). The hot stock tips seem to be on the decline, though the various flavors of the Nigeria spam continue. I guess spammers weren't getting a lot of hits for investments in a shaky economy. I remain glad that I do not use a browser (or equivalent, like Outlook) to read my non-work email; spam is bad enough without flashing "porn porn porn!" in 72-point red letters while playing supposedly-appropriate background music. :-)

On Sunday Dani was arguing that we will have a mild winter because "tomorrow's weather will be basically like today's", iterate until done, and it was about 70 degrees on Sunday. I took the opportunity to mock him for this on Monday, when the temperature dropped nearly 30 degrees in three hours (and the day ultimately ended with snow). He's just got to learn the limits of simplistic logic. :-)

On the Mark is going to sound great at Darkover this weekend. Sunday's practice went very well. We have two surprises for our fans at the con, one positive. (The other is that we'll be taking a year off -- but we'll be back, so I don't want to call that "negative". It's just reality; people get busy and groups need downtime.)

Monday's choir practice was more focused than other recent ones. The director was keeping things on track, and a habitual "problem child" wasn't there (which I'm sure helped the director). I'm skipping the next several practices because I won't be at the next two performances (one in a week and a half and one in mid-January).

We went into last night's D&D game with a disagreement on the table about what to do next. I think one player is still convinced that we can do what three of us think is currently very foolish. The question was deferred last night, though, because one player couldn't make it, and we were not about to do something high-risk without everyone there to steer his own fate. So we got the outcome that I wanted, but not through the means I wanted. Once that was settled the game was a lot of fun. (My fun in the game is augmented by extra-game character-development activities, mostly achieved via email, private geeking with the GM, and the game journal.)

Conversation snippet:
Me: Does tartar-control mouthwash actually do anything useful, or is it just a marketing scam?
My dentist: It makes the tartar softer, which makes [hygenist]'s job easier.
Me: Hey, that's worth something. If [hygenist] is going to poke sharp objects at me, I'd like her to not be frustrated.

The salad bar has returned to the Giant Eagle across the street from where I work. And there was much rejoicing. :-) (Well, some rejoicing. In order to rate full-scale rejoicing they have to restore the yellow hot peppers.)

I almost had a chance to meet sanpaku, before he suffered car failure. Eventually I'd like to meet more of the people whose journals I read.

Welcome to LJ to zachkessin, an SCA friend who moved to Israel this summer. There is now a new SCA group in Jerusalem (he and kmelion are the people I know), and they're having their first feast tomorrow (Thursday). Good luck, guys! The parts of the menu I've seen look great. (No, no turkey, for anyone who was wondering.)