Monica

My parents have a bread machine, which at the time they really wanted -- they eat a lot of bread, and they like having it fresh. But, in talking with my mother a couple nights ago about what food we should bring when we go do the Christmas thing on Sunday, I learned that they don't use it much. My mom said she's gotten in the habit of being lazy, and she has to remember to buy bread-machine mixes when she goes shopping, and she's been forgetting. It's not as if she doesn't have recipes, she said; it's just habit.

I don't know whether to buy them a huge pile of mixes, or give them a box of assorted pre-measured ingredients (3 cups of flour in a ziploc, half a cup of sugar, a pile of yeast packets, etc) and some really, really simple recipes. :-)

Over the past week or so I have come to realize that thermostats are fundamentally mis-designed. At our office, as at most offices, we have access to heat and AC year-round; there's a thermostat somewhere, and when reality doesn't match the setting you get a correction. (This past summer the AC failed several times, so it was sometimes over 80 degrees, but that's not part of the design.)

But during these in-between seasons where it might be 60 one day and 75 the next, what you really want to be able to do is specify a range. For example, if we drop below 66 turn on the heat, if we rise above 72 turn on the AC, and if we're between those two *do nothing*. Blasts of cold air to bring it down to the upper 60s when the weather outside is winter-like are just plain incongruous.

On a different note, I went to Simchat Torah services last night at Tree of Life, and that definitely worked out better than my past experiences at Temple Sinai. I'll keep doing that for this particular holiday. (No one actually danced at ToL either, but at least people seemed to be enjoying themselves.)

Their turnout for Simchat Torah was better than ours was for Sukkot. I wonder if that's the holiday or the congregation at work. (I think the congregations are about the same size.)

Sunday Dani and I spent some time visiting with the Horowitzes. (Laura invited us over to visit their sukkah, but then it was so cold that we spent most of the time inside.) You know, we really ought to see them more frequently given that we live a block away...

On Saturday we had some people over to play games. We were hoping to play Age of Rennaisance or History of the World, both of which are for 5-6 players, but we ended up with 7. (If we had gotten 8 or 9 people, we would have split into two groups.) The only games we have that work well for 7 are Diplomacy (yuck) and Civilization (good), so we played Civ. We decided we wanted to have more conflict in the game, so we ignored the advice in the instructions to use the map extension and just played on the main map. We still didn't get all that much conflict; people were just more motivated to get advances such as Agriculture, which let you make do with less land. Things might have been different if one player hadn't had to leave before the game was over, though; while we're all basically nice people who don't wantonly attack each other, it's easy to wantonly attack an abandoned position. So instead of us all picking on each other in the end-game when land was really scarce, we all picked on ex-Robert. :-)

We also played a quick game of Merchants of Amsterdam, a game Dani picked up recently. (Dani, Ralph, and I had played part of a game a week earlier.) The game seems to be mis-callibrated; the balance of money is about right in the early stages, but in the mid-game it's way off. Bidding games should be resolved by who has the strongest bid, not by who can hit the bid-timer most quickly. If we play again we'll probably switch to written bids, which loses some of the interactive character of auctions.

The season premiers of both "Earth: Final Conflict" and "Andromeda" were on Sunday night. I've enjoyed E:FC pretty much all along (there were some weak spots but the overall arc was interesting); I'm not sure I like the twists they introduced for the beginning of this (final) season. We shall see. Andromeda, which ended last season with everyone all but dead, actually worked reasonably well. There were definitely places where I could not suspend disbelief, and a lot will depend on what they do next, but it's working so far.

Both of these shows have Roddenberry's name splattered all over them, but there's little indication of how much of this was actually his work. Did he write up broad outlines only, or script it in more detail, or what? I could do with less of the name-dropping hype, but oh well. I fast-forward through credits and commercials anyway.

Well, I do watch opening credits once per season, because they always change from year to year. Speaking of opening credits, I hate the theme music for the new Trek show. I feel no need to roll *those* credits in real time again.

Sukkot is over, but now it's freaking cold here. I hope we get a warm Sunday before the snow comes so I can take the sukkah down.