Tuesday night we had planned a group outing to a local beit midrash (a monthly gathering that happened to be this week), but we learned that in the summer they scale way back and it was just going to be a discussion (with no guest or prominent speaker) of the weekly parsha. I can do that at home and I'd been invited to a group dinner before that came up and I'd declined, so I decided to un-decline and go do that.
( socializing )
First was a former co-worker (and boss), her husband, and their kids. They belong to a different congregation, but they randomly decided to check us out. I haven't seen them in a while, so it was neat to be able to talk with them. I hope we see more of them. (And I'm past due to have lunch with her.)
While I was talking with them someone who looked vaguely familiar came up to me and said "hi Monica". Think think think... who is this? She said her first name. Think think think... aha! She moved away from Pittsburgh 15 years ago and I haven't seen her since; she just happened to be back for a family simcha. (She also confessed that she wasn't sure who I was until she heard someone use my name, and that confirmed her suspicion that she knew me.) I got a card from her with an email address, so we'll at least have the ability to not let this go another 15 years.
We had a visiting scholar this Shabbat, Joel Lurie Grishaver, a big name (I gather) in Jewish education. He's an author, founder of a publishing company, and organizer of CAJE, a big annual conference focusing on Jewish education. Most of his books seem to be aimed as kids and parents, but he did not make the mistake many do of speaking only to them. He spoke Friday night and gave a class Shabbat afternoon.
( Read more... )
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magid Saturday.
Thanks! Yummy!
Today we stopped at a GetGo which had a big sign saying "get in, get out, get going". It took me longer than I expected to get my few items, and I commented to Dani that there's little their slogan can do to compensate for a slow customer ahead of you in line ("wait! I have 37 cents in here somewhere!"). Dani pointed out that maybe it's not a slogan but instructions, which some people do not follow.
Last night ralphmelton and lorimelton had their
annual December party. It was a lot of fun, and it was nice to see
people I haven't seen in a while. There was, as usual, plentiful food,
including some really tasty orange cupcakes with chocolate icing.
Tonight Ralph, Lori, and mrpeck joined us for dinner,
which was pleasant and low-key.
Erik saw the vet Friday morning. All is going well, and they pulled the feeding tube out. He has to go back once more (there's still a dressing on, in large part because of said feeding tube), and then things should be back to normal. He's eating a lot more and was up to 7.1 pounds Friday. He's also now eating dry food, so there is hope of weaning him mostly off of the canned food.
Some school guidance counselors (and probably parents) are lobbying the College Board to split the SAT into multiple tests because it's too long. I don't remember it being overly long; on investigation I found that it's 3 hours, 45 minutes now. This is a test intended for people who want to go to college. If you go to college, you'll probably find 3-hour final exams (possibly worth half your grade) to be common. Sounds like students should get used to it now.
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unspace:
Cuteness Overload.
I wonder if LJ's addition of tags is going to cause people to change the way we partition our posts. Will we tend toward more-numerous, tightly-focused posts, for the benefit of tagging? Or will we keep doing what we already do and if a post has a dozen tags so what? Time will tell.
Earlier this week Dani and I got email from a friend saying, roughly, "so-and-so from the old net days is in town; we've never met or anything, but how about we all get together for dinner?". This sounded just off-the-wall enough to be fun. The person's name was vaguely familiar (Dani spent more time on the relevant newsgroups than I did), but "put random unknown geeks in a room together and see what happens" can be fun sometimes. (This is different from "have dinner with $net.celebrity", where the participants don't feel equal.)
She told me that Steve Roth, a member of our congregation and the CEO of the company I've worked at for the last four years, died suddenly that afternoon. This is a real shock! The timing is especially sad as, after two or three decades in the field, he was about to see all his research and development efforts bear real fruit.
This news made me sad Sunday night, but I was able to somehow build a little fence around it and contain it for the duration of the evening. I'd occasionally wondered how hard it is to not mourn on a festival (or Shabbat); now I have some insight into that. Several of the people who stayed for torah study knew him, so I wasn't the only one struggling with this.
This morning during Yizkor (the memorial service said four times a year, including on Shavuot) it really hit me. My rabbi talked about him, and about the tragedy of the timing (among things, his son was being confirmed that night), and even though he didn't eulogize (he was talking more generally) I found it very hard to fight back tears. Steve was a colleague but not someone I actively considered a friend, but still, it hurts. I expect the funeral tomorrow to be a real challenge.
My manager called in the morning to give me the news. I had intended to save him the heartache of delivering the news by telling him I already knew, but something in his voice told me that he was about to deliver carefully-prepared words and I shouldn't derail him. So I didn't.
I managed to somehow set this aside for most of the day and evening, acknowledging the sadness without being affected by it. Tonight, as I read the day's email from work, it hit me again. This is not going to be easy.
Edit: Obituary.
lensedqso.)
Harkening back to a recent entry:
how
lightsabers work (link from ralphmelton and
mabfan).
Ridiculous food challenges just got even weirder:
15-pound
burger challenge -- if you and a friend can eat it in three hours
it's free; otherwise it's $30. Ugh. On the other hand, if you go into
it blowing off the challenge from the start (and get the wet condiments
on the side), it's not a bad price for a week's worth of meatloaf for
the right person. (I got the link from nsingman.)
Emails
'pose threat to IQ' (link from brokengoose).
Well, at least a threat to the ability to write
correct English. "Email" is not a counting noun! C'mon,
journalists should know better! (I know -- many of them don't.
But that doesn't mean I'm not going to criticize.) Easy way to tell that
the phrase "an email" is wrong: substitute by analogy. Do you send "a mail"
(physical) to your pen-pal? Email is the mass noun, like mail; it is not
the instance, like a letter.
I was reading something recently and saw a reference to Rabbi Micha Berger. Rabbi? When did that happen? I feel bad that I failed to notice somehow. (While we don't talk often, we're occasional correspondents and I have been a guest in his home. He wasn't a rabbi then.)
anastasiavThere is much in this question that is not specified, but oh well. Is a computer a toy? Can I be a self-aware computer that can surf and use email? :-) Nah, didn't think so.
I suppose the most likely answer is some sort of game-playing device (mind games, like chess, not shoot-'em-up action games). Gotta keep the brain active, after all, which argues for a game with some complexity. (I don't actually like playing chess; that was just an example.)
2) Tell me about your favorite (typical or specific) day at Pennsic.
I like the visit-with-distant-friends days best. I always look forward to spending time with Steffan and Elspeth, and Dof and Thora, and Yaakov and Rivka. I try to get at least one visit of several hours with each of them, though they don't tend to be on the same day. There are other people I'd like to be able to visit but either they don't come any more or they do but they're hard to find or we just never connect.
3) Is there someone in your life whom you regret losing touch with? If so, how do you imagine that person living their life today.
I miss my friend Mike. We used to hang out a lot, and he did me many kindnesses when I was laid up with a broken leg. I did not do nearly enough to repay that when he later had a broken arm, and I feel bad about that. But I especially feel bad that we have drifted apart in the last few years, and that my attempts to contact him have failed. (I've tried email, phone, and paper.) I hope he's doing well, but I know that he sometimes just withdraws from the world for a while and I suspect that's what's happened.
4) If you could scientifically prove that God exists, how would that change your outlook on the world? What would you imagine the experiment that proves the hypothisis looks like? Would you do the experement if you knew there was a chance the hypothisis might be disproven? ( Read more... )
5) Its 2055 and you win a Nobel prize. Which category do you win for? ( Read more... )
On the original schedule he was going to read torah next Saturday morning. Last week I asked someone else to learn it on contingency (i.e. you'll probably get to do this but you might get bumped). (This is someone who explicitly volunteered to do stuff on short notice; we'd know a couple days out if he was going to get bumped. So it was a request for speedy work, not possibly-wasted work.) On Wednesday he told me oops, he'd forgotten about a commitment that would keep him away that day. So I started to look at the portion myself, because I can't ask anyone else to do possibly-wasted work. Fortunately, I'm now off the hook; I asked the associate rabbi if he could do it (he'll be there anyway) and he said yes. I'd rather have more than a week to learn a portion, even a short one.
This afternoon I went to a friend's baby shower. There seemed to be a "classic Pooh" theme going, and, of course (the baby being a girl), enough pink to set off allergic reactions. :-) It was a fun afternoon; it was nice that so many of her friends could be there.
There was one game (showers are required to have games, apparently). The hostess had taken the names of everyone who would be there and looked them up in some sort of "meanings of baby names" book. She grouped them in batches of ten or so and we were to match the names to the meanings. Of course, many of these so-called meanings are hokey rationalizations applied after the fact, not the origins of the names, but you expect that from a book that attempts to attribute meaning to every name. (Y'know, sometimes a Susan is just a Susan...) Anyway, I looked over the list and said to myself that hey, I know a lot of the relevant cognates in at least three source languages (English, Hebrew, Latin), but that even so, I didn't know half of these names. So I filled in the ones I knew and guessed the rest. I was surprised to get 29 or 41 right, which I gather was the highest score in the room.
No, I have no idea of the basis this source had for saying that my name means "advisor". I can't even get a language connection out of that one. I completely missed "Cara" ("beloved"), but could have gotten it if I'd made a logical leap from the madrigal "Matona mia cara". Duh. I was minorly proud for getting "Barbara".
Speaking of languages (sort of), my friend dglenn
has a question
about language structure and resulting expressiveness, with a geek
twist that made me giggle. Hebrew speakers in particular might be able
to help him out.
I had planned to go to a going-away party for a friend who's moving to the west coast, but I've been losing a fight against a headache all evening, and I don't think the noisy environment will help. I hope to connect with him before he leaves town. Worst case, he'll be back in a few weeks to arrange for packing and moving.
Dani and I have decided to buck the Hallmark tradition and have a nicer-than-usual evening some other night in February. Besides, until Saturday he had a choir practice scheduled for tonight.
Actually, we also had a nicer-than-usual evening last night.
ralphmelton and lorimelton got engaged at the
end of the last Sunday dinner that fell on February 13;
Ralph had slyly arranged for things to run late so that he could
propose just after midnight in front of some of their friends.
So they made an especially-nice dinner for friends last night to
celebrate the anniversary. We had risotto with goat cheese and
salmon, spinach salad with fruit, and two homemade desserts:
chocolate truffles and a concoction of ladyfingers, raspberry mousse,
whipped cream, and (I think) alcohol. It was all fabulous.
Yesterday afternoon we joined a crowd of people helping out an older friend of ours whose basement recently flooded. There was stuff to be thrown out, stuff to be cleaned up, and stuff that said friend had to look at so we'd know how much effort to put into saving it. That last was, of course, the bottleneck. There were a lot of papers that had gotten wet but were now dry, but that might have started to grow mold. A lot of those papers were records from her parents. Lesson learned: store papers of that sort neither in the basement nor in the attic. (I lost some papers once to an attic with a leaky roof.)
My synagogue is running a trope class, which started last Wednesday. (It runs for six weeks.) Some of the people in the class are good-naturedly grumpy about my taking the class because I'm a "ringer". I pointed out that there is plenty I don't know about trope and I expect to learn things in this class. That said, I haven't brought the book in from the car yet. :-) (After this week's class, probably.)
At work, today was largely a day of putting out fires. They weren't usually my fires, but often I seemed to be the only person who knows where we keep the fire hose. This must change. :-) (This will change, as some of the people involved are new hires who are responsible for learning this stuff. But knowledge transfer has not been orderly.)
Yesterday a repairman was supposed to come between 8:30 and noon. Dani and I agree that a phone call at 2:10 saying he'll be over soon, with no prior contact (and no ability to track him down), does not meet expectations. Now, to see if Sears agrees with our assessment that we're due expedited service if we reschedule through them... And to prevent Dani from salvaging anything useful from a morning spent at home, the meter reader who was supposed to come between 8 and noon didn't show either. Whee. (At least Dani is set up to work from home fairly easily. I'm not.)
The reception had a higher ratio of SCA people to relatives than I expected. Boy, is it weird seeing SCA people in formal (non-SCA) dress. There was also the challenge of remembering people's real-world names in conversation. :-)
Just in case we didn't get enough food at the reception, there was a post-revel for some of the guests. This group seemed to include the SCA crowd and assorted friends of the bride's family who hadn't all been at the reception. (This party was hosted by the bride's mother.)
Over the weekend Dani's computer died. It had been sending up warning flares for a while, so this was not a complete surprise. So Sunday and Monday he went shopping, and to my surprise actually came home with a machine. Usually we have to special-order computers. (He had started by browsing Dell's site, but they wouldn't even ship until this coming Friday, so he decided to shop locally.) Amidst all this we learned that a party we'd been invited to on Monday, that had then been cancelled, was un-cancelled, but we found out too late to do anything about it. Oh well -- some other time.
Sunday afternoon I got a call from someone at VW who, after confirming that I've bought a car this year, asked if she could pay me $15 to take a customer survey about my experiencies. I told her I'd be delighted to do so. :-) Alas, the survey was more concerned about features than service, but that's ok too.
I began to catch up on the D&D log. (Ralph, I hope to have something posted in the next several days. Sorry for the delay.) I've commented before about how I enjoy the shared-world-fiction aspect of this.
I also pulled together some notes for tomorrow night's Worship meeting, where I'm going to give a summary of this summer's Sh'liach K'hilah program. Half the members of the committee have asked me about this individually, so I don't think people will mind spending meeting time on it. :-) Meanwhile, I've learned that the winter weekend session will be in LA and that it appears it won't actually cost an arm and a leg to get there.
We've been watching DVDs of Babylon 5 and West Wing alternately. We're nearing the ends of seasons 4 and 3 respectively. We have the first season of 24 to watch yet, and season 4 of West Wing ships at the end of the month. At the rate we watch TV, this'll hold us for a while.
Saturday's mail brought an anticipated wedding invitation. I was surprised by a Saturday-morning ceremony; I thought they were doing afternoon or evening. And I will have to decide how I feel about a reception on Shabbat that's being held in a restaurant, rather than a privately-rented hall where there are fewer issues. Hmm. They're friends and I really want to be there for them.
Saturday night we held a party for tangerinpenguin,
who will soon be leaving town. While there were several
people who couldn't make it due to holiday-weekend plans,
we still got a bunch of people and, as far as I could
tell, everyone had a good time. Someone made a nifty cake,
in the form of an open book with a jungle motif, in honor
of his new employer. Saturday was a hot day
and we don't have central AC, only window units; we did
the best we could to keep the place habitable but
found myself thinking "the engines canna take more of
this, captain!" a few times. :-) Realizing
that we couldn't possibly know all of Chris' friends, we
made it open-invitation -- and still only got one person
I didn't know. Also got a few people I hadn't thought
to directly invite, so I'm glad we took that approach.
It's been a very hot and muggy weekend. I emptied the dehumidifier three times yesterday, which is a record. (It's rated for 40 gallons/week and the tank is about a gallon and a half, so we're still nowhere near capacity. There's a scary thought!) I was rather insistent that we were going to run the AC in the bedroom last night. Dani objects to open bedroom windows and ACs/fans, saying they're too noisy, but that resulted in unacceptable conditions Saturday night. And, y'know, sometimes I should get a turn at comfort.
Sunday we joined ralphmelton, lorimelton
and her parents, mrpeck, and two others who I
think are not LJ-enabled for an early dinner before some
of them headed off for fireworks. Someone referred to
Ralph as the grill-meister, and I have to concur. I
do not have the grilled-meat clue, and I am envious. :-)
(We didn't go to the fireworks, not being big on crowds and noise. We watched two more episodes of B5 instead, but they were ones without fight scenes, so we can't say we watched a different kind of fireworks.)
Wednesday night is the next meeting of the worship committee. The rabbi can't actually make it (double-booked), but in this case that's ok. The single agenda item is to teach the committee about the structure of the Friday service in some detail and then assign parts for the service we'll be jointly leading at the end of the month. In my opinion members of this committee should be fully conversant with the service and able to lead it from the siddur without lots of extra annotations like "tell them to stand here", and some people couldn't do that when we led a service last year. So I'll try to teach them, and we'll see how it goes. This is certainly material I can teach on my own, so if the rabbi were going to be there I'd defer to him but there's no need for him to come.
tangerinpenguintangerinpenguin will soon be leaving us for greener pastures a couple thousand miles away. Please join us at a going-away party on Saturday, July 3, beginning at 7pm at our home in Squirrel Hill. We'll have munchies of various sorts (if you have a favorite feel free to bring it along), and Dani just returned from Origins so there may be some new games floating around.ginamariewadePennsic. :-)
Ok, that's because of the people who show up and the cool stuff they bring with them. It's not much for sight-seeing if you aren't already part of the SCA. But in thinking about this question, I realized that I'm not much of a tourist. I mean, for similar reasons, I could say my grandmother's house (well, except that she is no longer living, so technically you can't go there), but that's because of the ties I have.
2. Who is the most inspiring person you have ever known?
For overall effect on my life, my father. For recent in-depth effect, my rabbi.
I've talked about my father in other recent entries. He encouraged me to be smart, which has less to do with scores on standardized tests and more to do with the way you go about solving problems and answering questions. And he's a good person, easy to talk with and spend time with.
My rabbi is amazing. He taught me that it's not inconsistent to be Reform and be observant. He encourages study and analysis, and is willing to study one-on-one with me. He's intelligent and articulate, and when I'm on the bima what's in the back of my mind is "I hope I can be a tenth as good at this as he is". So he pushes me to get better, to think about ethics and behavior in ways I didn't previously, to study more, to consider more observance -- much of it without realizing he's doing so, I suspect.
3. Were you ever bullied as a child?
Oh heavens yes. A lot. One of my classmates in particular was a real bully starting in first grade; he would pull necklaces off me (breaking the chains), hit, try to trip, and sling insults. The teachers were either ineffective or unwilling; I'm not sure which. There were many conferences with both parents, to no avail. The physical aspects eventually died down when an enlightened principal gave me blanket permission to fight back in a particular way. Specifically, I was using large-print books due to a vision problem, which meant I had special books that were about four times the volume of the regular text books, and he specifically told me to hit this bully with one of my books if I needed to. (I lamented the fact that I was not strong enough to wield the dictionary. :-) )
Non-physical bullying was a staple all through school, because I wasn't pretty, I had an obvious physical defect, I wasn't into the sports/cheerleader thing, and I was smart. This is an eperience that many of my (current) friends shared.
4. What are your ten favorite words?
Interesting question. I wonder if this is anything like what you had in mind. :-) (No, those aren't the words.)
Think. Question. Passion. Justice. Compassion. Connection. Fun. Life. God. Ginger. :-) (Hey, I had to throw in one silly one. But it's one of my favorite ingredients...)
5. What do you want to leave as your legacy on this earth?
That the world was in some way a better place because I was in it.
I hope I have a significant impact on my family, friends, and immediate religious community. If I am very lucky, some of what I do will have broader ripples. Maybe through my writing I can bring encouragement or insight to people I don't even know. Maybe through my involvement in the Jewish community I an lead other Reform Jews to take religion more seriously. Maybe through my music I can make people smile or think or sigh contentedly.
The rules:
1. Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I'll ask you five questions.
3. Update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4. Include this explanation.
5. Ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.
lefkowitzga, tangerinpenguin, alfiechat, arslan_ibn_daud, and others.lefkowitzga, lyev, rani23, tangerinpenguin, and lrstrobel. Missed seeing a few people at either party.
