Wednesday ("hump day")

Sleep is for the weak and unworthy, right? Or something like that. :-)

I'm finding that when I do finally settle down to sleep, the brain is still going and it's hard to turn it off. And then I'm waking up early with more of the same; I've only been awakened by the alarm once so far, not for lack of trying. I'm running on about 5-6 hours per night here, which is not my norm. I'm not sleepy during the day, but I have to make sure I get a good night's sleep Saturday somehow, because I'm driving home on Sunday. Well, at least Harry Potter and the CD that murmur311 gave me (thanks!) will keep me company. :-) (I packed a bunch of other CDs in case the audio book didn't work, but it did so I probably won't touch them.)

Today was a good day. Our service is in pretty good shape except for two things: we haven't yet done a full walk-through (that'll be tomorrow), and the cantorial student didn't have the tape of weekday nusach for me today. He'll have it tomorrow and this is a forgiving group, so that should be fine. But there's not a lot of time to learn it.

We've done a detailed talk-through of the service, with (as our advisor strongly suggested) post-it notes in the siddur for practically everything, including page cues and the "stand up now" gesture. This is right for a group not used to working together and using an unfamiliar siddur; I'd like to think that when we all go home to our familiar congregations wtih familiar liturgy, this wouldn't be such an issue. But maybe you have to lead a few dozen services before you're that comfortable; I forget. (And certainly when I was leading at Tree of Life I made my own doctored-up copy of the siddur, because neither the siddur nor the congregation was familiar. If I ever get around to learning the weekday shacharit service I won't need to do that, though.)

( shacharit )

( class: b'nei mitzvah )

( class: birth and baby namings )

( class: Jewish education )

( chug )

( class: congregational singing )

( ma'ariv, misc )