amusing family memory

I was talking with a friend about an impending drive across the country, and this somehow made me think of my own family's cross-country move. I was three at the time, so I don't actually remember it, and anyway, I didn't have the interesting part.

My mother took the kids and perhaps the dog (I'm not sure who got the dog for this) and got onto a plane. They wanted to keep the car, though, so my father and a friend of his drove. The family folklore is that they made the excellent time that they did by simply driving straight through. According to what I was told about this while growing up, the car was pretty much always in motion and the passenger slept as needed.

Except that I just today put a few facts together. My father's vision is worse than mine; he has never been licensed to drive at night, and he's pretty scrupulous about that. They made this trip in November, when nights are longer than days. I strongly suspect that the other guy did not drive 14-hour stretches (I mean, how many people do, especially as part of a longer trip?). They were a couple of (roughly) 25-year-old guys.

Do I really believe that they drove through at the speed limit, rather than taking stops to sleep and gunning it? I may have to call my father on it, out of earshot of my mother. :-)

short takes

This morning's roads were not nearly bad enough to justify the traffic conditions. The CD I was playing in the car looped. My normal commute is about 15 minutes (20 on a bad day). Feh.

I'm currently trying to learn to chant a torah passage that, if I'm successful, will be the longest one I've learned. This is true for most of the readers in this service (the annual local women's service), and they've told us to do as much as we can (so long as it's valid) and we can fill in the rest from a chumash if necessary. But I'm really trying to do it. And I've got good motivation: <geek> near the end of my section is the following trope sequence: pazeir pazeir t'lisha-g'dolah </geek>. That's fun! This is frilly show-off stuff, if I can just get there. :-)

I think the next president of my congregation likes me even though I've been a thorn in his side on some policy things (nothing personal). By law I'll be stepping down as worship chair in May, and I'm not currently on the board, so he wants to make sure that I have a leadership position I'm satisfied with. I told him that completing the Sh'liach K'hilah program and putting that learning to use, especially in worship contexts, is my top priority -- but that in the meantime he should put me on the budget committee so I can do my nit-picking early. :-) (If he was hoping I'd say "so, tell me about the executive track", he'll just have to be disappointed.)

Monday I got mail from Amazon UK saying that my copy of Blake's 7 (season 2) had shipped. It arrived today. I'm impressed! It's not as if I paid for any sort of expedited shipping; I just got lucky. Pity that I have other things I need to do in the next couple days, like work. :-)

Tonight's dinner featured grouper sprinkled with black pepper and cumin and pan-fried (use a non-stick pan and you can skip the fat). The recipe suggested a side of corn with bell peppers (I used red), green onions, a little cumin, lime juice, and honey. (The recipe called for cilantro too, but alas there was none to be found last night.) There was more cumin in the fish than in the corn, but Dani thought the corn was too spicy (and ate the fish without complaint). How odd. I liked both, and they did work well together.