Entries tagged with sukkot

Entry tags:

short takes

Congrats to all the folks behind SpaceShipOne! Commercial space flight for non-billionaires in my lifetime has just gotten more likely. Woot!

Here's a perfect gift for certain types of geeks: Klein Bottles. Be sure to read the guarantee.

This is a fantastic hack (link courtesy of dglenn). Some urban explorers in Paris found some unused tunnels and caves below the city, so they built a cinema -- with restaurant and bar. Their mission: to "reclaim and transform disused city spaces for the creation of zones of expression for free and independent art".

Random bit from the instructions for my new sukkah: What's the Hebrew word for the day you take the sukkah down? ( Read more... )

I use a strand of small white lights to light my sukkah. (Got 'em cheap one year on Boxing Day. :-) ) The box is long since gone, but I remember that it proclaimed that these were the sorts of lights where one burned-out bulb does not take out the entire strand. This is, now, demonstrably true, but I am at a loss to explain the failure mode that results in all lights in the first third of the strand -- and no others -- going out simultaneously.

Entry tags:

Sukkot, Shabbat

Sukkot and Shabbat both went well for me, in a mostly low-key way.

( Sukkot )

( Shabbat )

So far we've been able to have all our at-home meals in the sukkah. (It looked like we might get lunchtime rain today, but we didn't.) Tomorrow we're visiting friends fron the congregation for lunch, and then we're having guests for dinner. That'll be nice, since we didn't have any guests for Yom Tov or Shabbat. Once again I have failed to invite my highly-allergic-to-cats rabbi over for a meal in the sukkah, though there might still be time. (That is, there are still days before the end of the festival, but he tends to be pretty busy. Next year I need to remember to invite him, oh, before Rosh Hashana.)

Entry tags:

Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur was a good experience this year.

( this is long )

This afternoon I put up the sukkah. Yay new sukkah! I got one surprise, and maybe before next year I'll ask a friend with the right tools to help me. I ordered an 8x8 sukkah frame, the kind with the metal poles (technically "tubing") and connectors that you just hand-tighten (no tools!). I had gotten the impression that it was about 7 feet high, but it's really 8. If I had paid more attention to the packing list I would have figured that out two weeks ago when it came. The problem with an 8-foot-high sukkah is that I'm 5'3". Even standing on a ladder, it was difficult for me to get the s'chach (roofing material) up there. (Ok, it's not a big ladder. I have this thing about ladders. I really want a sukkah I can put up with a step-stool.) I'm hoping that a certain friend of mine has saws that can cut metal, so we can just lop a foot off of the vertical poles. Later -- I got it up for this year. And hey, it meant I didn't have to cut down the lattice I use for the walls this year. :-) (I had the hand-saw ready.)

So now I have a sukkah big enough that we can theoretically have guests more than singly or pair-wise (if friendly), though I still only have the one card table. I may pick up another card table and a couple more folding chairs. (The size increase was a side-effect; the goal was a free-standing sukkah that's easy to put up, and I succeeded there.)

Entry tags:

last few days

Apropos of nothing... this essay by

dglenn on no longer being special in the modern era resonated with me.

Tonight's D&D game was a lot of fun. The party is slogging through some difficult terrain, and the visual imagery has been effective for me (both terrain and monsters). This is going to be a several-days trek that will wear the group down over time, but I think that's the right thing from a story perspective. Sure, if Frodo and Sam had had the ability to teleport straight to the heart of Mordor they would have, but had they done so Lord of the Rings would not be the classic it is. I play these games for story and character, and for me the story demands the trek.

Ever since we moved to our current house I've been building my sukkah using 2x2s, rope, and existing structures (a fence and a trellis). That's nice in a lot of ways, but it's a bit of a challenge to set up alone, and some of my infrastructure is hard to use. Meanwhile, a couple years ago our Pennsic group got a new shower frame made out of no-tools-required pipes that just slot together, and I think that's pretty spiffy. So today I ordered a tubular sukkah -- passing on their walls, as I've prefer the lattice I've been using for that. This gives me a free-standing sukkah that should go together very easily. Woo hoo. Who wants to come for dinner during the festival?

It was nice to get back to Sunday dinner after missing a few due to Pennsic. We began to see distant flashes of lightning not long after we finished eating; then we started to see really impressive lightning bolts with lots of forking that just lit up the sky. It was a very pretty storm (I wish I'd had my camera with me), and the liquid component was short-lived. It did a decent job on the humidity and didn't knock out our power. What more can you ask of a storm?

I moderate a mailing list that's a filter on an unmoderated SCA list. I reject messages that (1) clearly should have been sent privately, (2) are off-topic, (3) are flame-filled, or (4) duplicate other messages (the 17-replies-to-a-FAQ problem). Most of the time, I approve pretty much everything that comes in. But since Pennsic there have been a lot of rejections, first because of an accusation someone made that got a lot of people riled up, but then because of an inane thread on laundry. Yes, laundry. Not just things like how to clean tent canvas, which I believe to be on-topic for an SCA list, but discussion of dividing chores, whether it's ok for men to do laundry (!), horror stories involving bleach, and stuff like that. Sheesh. I hope that ends soon.

Entry tags:

short takes

Welcome to

siderea, aka Tibicen -- SCA person, early-music geek, and interesting writer. Apparently the Boston crowd sucked her into LJ. :-)

Last night my rabbi gave a class/discussion on mourning, funerals, etc. This was for the group of people who may be called on to lead shiva minyanim (services in a house of mourning), or who might help out those families in other ways. I didn't learn a lot that was new, but I think it was useful to pull all the information, and all the people who might need it, together. And we were given books, and books are never bad. :-)

I came home to find that there was no West Wing episode. I'm glad NBC ran a message on the bottom of the screen during the replacement show. But I was surprised: I can understand pre-empting a show for a baseball game that you're airing, but near as I can tell, they decided to pull West Wing because they didn't think it could compete with someone else's broadcast of the game. So did they think the Law & Order episode they showed could compete, or was it an old rerun and they were giving up on viewer share that night?

I wonder if Nielsen et al have changed the way they do ratings. In these days of TiVo and VCRs (often multiples), I can't believe they're only interested in people who watch the broadcast live. Yeah, we fast-forward through the commercials when time-shifting, but it seems like that's still better than not seeing them at all. So live is best, fast-forwarded is not worthless, and not watching the show at all is worthless.

We finished watching the second season of West Wing a couple nights ago. (Now we wait until April, if past performance is an indicator of future trends.) I'm impressed by this show, and the last episode of that season was very effective even though it used some techniques I normally consider cheesy. It was well-done, both in the writing and the direction. I hope the show doesn't go into a death spiral with Sorkin gone.

I went to services this morning at Tree of Life, where lulav and etrog were provided for pretty much everyone who wanted them. I still cannot hold a lulav, an etrog, and a siddur (prayer book) in a useful way. Fortunately, I'm starting to memorize the responses. :-)

My brother-in-law-once-removed [1] called tonight asking for computer advice. He said he was sitting in front of a dead machine, he had the Windows 98 CD in the drive, and how does he boot from that? This spawned several mental threads: (1) Define "dead". (2) Hey, aren't you a Mac snob? (3) Beats me, but I think Dani has done this. I opted for #3 and gave the phone to Dani. :-)

[1] My sister-in-law's husband. I know that English doesn't distinguish between Dani's sister and Dani's sister's husband in the "-in-law" thing, but it still feels weird to call him my brother-in-law when he's not related to either of us. I mean, if my brother-in-law is married to my sister-in-law, doesn't that sound just a bit too much like incest to you? It does to me.

This Shabbat is Sh'mini Atzeret (cue chorus of "what's that?"s -- goljerp did a good job with this here). In the Reform movement it's also Simchat Torah. In my congregation, this year, it's also the b'nei mitzvah of my rabbi's twins. And, due to unfortunate timing, it's also baronial investiture, a once-in-every-several-years occurrence in the local SCA group. I want to be able to spawn clones in the morning and sync memories at the end of the day, darnit!

Entry tags:

short takes

Someday I will figure out how one properly decorates a sukkah; the only decorated ones I've seen have been done up with stuff made by the kids in the family/congregation. If I decorate, I want adult decorations. Whatever those would be. But at least the strands of small white lights (bought on December 26 one year :-) ) are pretty. And, more importantly, provide ample light to see dinner by.

So far it's a one-splinter year for the sukkah. That's pretty good for me. :-)

For bizarre reasons, yesterday I found myself needing to know how to say "purple dinosaur" in Hebrew. My dictionary was of no help on "dinosaur", so I ended up settling for "reptile". Not the same thing, but good enough in context.

I found out recently that my parents have never, in their entire lives, eaten Indian food. Wow. Chinese food was a novelty for me when I was growing up, but I thought that was just due to the local restaurant options. No, my parents just haven't explored a lot of unusual foods. So we're going to take them to an Indian restaurant in a couple weeks. (And no, I haven't asked them about sushi yet.)

I've been getting a lot of spam lately for Vicadin, whatever that is. From googling it appears to be either a painkiller or a psychadelic, but I'm not sure which. (I suppose the latter is a type of the former, for some people.) Did it just come onto the market or something?

Entry tags:

dinner++

Tonight we went to Sitar (which does not seem to have a web site; tsk) with friends. It's an Indian restaurant with a nice variety of tasty dishes. Definitely recommended. Alas, they did not have the goat that Dani was seeking, so he had to settle for lamb. I got tandoori fish (I'd never heard of non-chicken tandoori). On reflection, that probably wasn't smart kashrut-wise; I failed to remember that a tandoori oven is clay, not metal. Oops. A couple other people got vegetarian dishes, so we were able to share.

The descriptions of dishes, while being passed, suffered some signal degradation: "one of the lamb dishes", "vegetarian something-or-other", "meat, um chicken?, with spinach", and so on. Fortunately, we were all somewhat aware of what had been ordered, so we only needed to disambiguate, not fully specify.

Later my mother called to try to figure out when we can get together. (Her birthday is Saturday.) This turned out to be challenging:

Her: Saturday?
Me: It's Rosh Hashana. Sunday?
Her: Your father has [schedule conflict]. Next Sunday?
Me: Well, Yom Kippur is that night, but we could do lunch.
Her: If that's a problem, what about Saturday the 11th?
Me to self: Do I want to explain to them about eating in the sukkah?
Me to her: Um, that's Sukkot. Let's go back to that previous Sunday...
Her: What's Sukkot?
Me: One of several holidays that are going to complicate this exercise for the next few weeks. :-)

Later I ended up explaining Sukkot to her anyway (quickie version) and she said it sounded neat, so if we decide that next Sunday doesn't work, they'll come out for Sukkot lunch or something.

Entry tags:

that was odd

Several years ago, I wrote an article for an SCA newsletter on how to build a yurt (aka ger), the Mongolian round semi-portable structure. I and some friends built one for camping in at Pennsic, so I wrote down what I did and shared it. Every now and then I get random questions and/or thanks from people who've found the article.

The most recent message is from someone who said he does "Roman and Bible reenactment" and had just built a yurt. (Unknown: what a yurt has to do with either.) Its first use was to be for his sukkah. He closed with "Shalom in Jesus".

Um, ok. A Christian? A "Jew for Jesus"? A re-enactor whose re-enactment extends to holidays?

I wrote back to thank him for the message and answer a question. And just to be helpful, I pointed out a couple halachic issues he might consider in using a yurt for Sukkot. I did not translate the Hebrew for terms that a Jew or a scholar would likely know. I didn't really expect to hear from him again.

He wrote back, citing a tertiary (at best) source for alternate interpretations. He also gave a cite for a round, domed sukkah in Amsterdam in 1722. This doesn't match up with anything either of us is trying to recreate, of course, but it sounds interesting. (Not interesting enough to go out and chase, though. It's a curiosity to me, nothing more.) He didn't say what they used for the roof cover or how it was attached.

He also described himself as Jewish, messianic, and a karaite. I didn't know there were still karaites out there. I'm not certain what the combination of messianic and karaite means, but I'm not going to ask him.

Karaites were a "sect", for lack of a better term, that accepted the written law but none of the oral law. They spent Shabbat in the cold and dark because they interpreted "kindle no fire" as "have no fire" rather than "light it in advance". It sounds like it must have been miserable. I thought they all died out several hundred years ago. Maybe this is a "neo-karaite" in the sense that we have "neo-pagans" who aren't tied to the original pagans?

Entry tags:

sukkot

(no subject)

I put the sukkah up tonight after work, and actually got it done before dark. (Well, I was stringing lights in twilight, but that's ok -- the lights were turned on. :-) )

I attribute much of the ease of setup to Ralph's lesson in knots last year. (Now let's see, was that wrap twice and frap thrice, or the other way around? No matter; it's solid enough for a temporary structure...)

Entry tags:

house,
sukkot

communication error

Argh. That was close.

Our garage came with an ameteurish "wood-burning stove" that we have never used. It was, essentially, a 55-gallon drum with a chimney and a barrel of wood scraps. The previous owner of the house used the garage as a workshop. We use it to store cars.

A couple months ago our garderner asked if we would be willing to sell it to him and we told him to just take it (so long as he didn't leave a hole in the wall). We also told him he could have the wood pile. When Dani and I talked it was about taking the barrel and the box of wood scraps, but apparently, either Dani said or the gardener mis-heard "clear out everything". The stove etc disappeared during Pennsic, I think, and I didn't pay much attention.

This morning something in the back of my head told me to make sure all the parts of my sukkah are in good shape. (Sukkot begins a week from Friday night.)

You see where this is going, right?

Fortunately, the gardener still has the expensive roof part, which -- as a roll of laced-together bamboo really ought to have set off the "this might be important" alarm, but didn't -- and he will return it tomorrow. The other important piece is gone, though, so I will have to fabricate a new corner post. Fortunately, it isn't expensive in dollars, just time. (Three corners are anchored to existing architecture; the fourth is a free-standing post with braces and stuff.) Just what I needed, a project to be done in the next week.... I'm pretty inept at carpentry, too. Someone competent could probably make this part in 10 minutes; when I did it before I think it took a couple hours.

Entry tags:

sukkot

(no subject)

Today was sunny and around 70 degrees. The sukkah is now down. :-)

Entry tags:

sukkot

of course it is...

It's raining today. It's probably going to rain all afternoon. Maybe *next* Sunday will be a good day to take down the sukkah...

(We don't have good outdoor lighting, so it pretty much has to be a Sunday. Last year we got snow before we got a suitable Sunday.)

Entry tags:

sukkot

oops

I've been meaning to pick up a new calendar for 5762, but I haven't yet. Pinsker's usually closes at 6, which is before I'm in Sq Hill most days, but today I noticed that it was 5:50 when I hit Beacon & Murray so I figured I'd stop. I was just getting out of the car when I remembered that it was the second day of Sukkot, so they'd be closed. Duh! (As you can probably tell, I don't agree with the ruling that we have to add an extra day to holidays outside of Israel. It made sense once, but it's 2001 and we know precisely when the new moon occurs, and thus when the new month starts, and thus exactly when the holidays are.)

Entry tags:

misc

The weather's been nice the last couple days, after that cold snap last week. Good sukkah weather. :-)

Monday night we had Gail over for dinner. We had orange-roasted chicken, curreid vegetables, and rice. (Gail really likes this veggie dish. The secret is in the curry. There are lots of different "flavors" of curry; McCormick isn't your only choice.) Last night we had Ralph and Lori over, and we had broiled lamb chops, squash with apples and raisins, and molases cake. I think the cake probably needed to bake for a couple more minutes, but it came out ok otherwise.

Ralph, Dani, and I started to play a Rio Grand game that Dani picked up recently. I forget the name of it; it's a commerce/economic game set in renaissance Amsterdam. It seems like it will be fun; I'd like to play a full game sometime.

Sukkot services were lightly attended Monday night and Tuesday morning. I guess a lot of people are just worn out after the high holy days; I dunno. It is a busy time of year; I mostly feel it in the non-Jewish parts of my life, because I have less time to do things like catch up on email. I guess that's normal.

Rabbi Gibson asked us who from Jewish history we would invite to our sukkot. (There is a tradition of symbolically inviting certain people -- the patriarchs, Moses, others -- so this is building on that.) There are a bunch of people from history I'd love to have conversations with -- some of the traditional guests, but also some of the sages, particularly Rabbi Hillel, who had a lot of good sense, and Rabbi Akiva, who didn't even learn the alef-beit until age 40 and still went on to be a key player. (I find that inspirational.) The name I actually mentioned, though (because we were trying to avoid repeats and these had already been mentioned), was the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of chassidism. It'd be way cool to learn about joy and spirituality from him.

Which reminds me. After attending services for Simchat Torah (a very festive holiday, or at least it's supposed to be) at my congregation for several years and always feeling kind of left out by the way they structure things, I'm going to seek out someone else's services this year. This brings to two the number of holidays I don't want to do with my own congregation any more (the other is Purim). I really do like my congregation, but that doesn't mean everything they do works for me. So I guess I'll go to Tree of Life this time. I bet Chabad would be really great for men, but I'm not sure how they feel about women in general, let alone women who aren't part of their community already. (Orthodox, in general, discourages women from attending services and pretty much forbids active participation.)

D&D tonight. I'm really enjoying Ralph's game; it's been too long since I played. (I'm behind on Larissa's diary, which I've been posting to

ralph_dnd, but I'll try to catch up soon.)

Current Mood: happy

Entry tags:

sukkot

sukkah

Ralph and I built my sukkah today. (He had asked if he could help, which sounded like a fine idea to me.) He used to be a "knot geek", as he described it, so he taught me some simple lashings and stuff. (My sukkah is tied together, not nailed or bolted. I like it that way, and it doesn't require tools.) I didn't really know anything about knots before today; my previous model had been that a sufficiently large quantity of rope will hold anything together and square knots are functional.

I bought a new s'chach (roof) mat this year; cruising the neighborhood with hede clippers in hand was getting tedious. This is, essentially, thin strips of bamboo tied together sort of the way venetian blinds are, except that there's no need to "draw" them. It makes a nice roof, and at the end of Sukkot I can roll it up easily and store it for next year.

Ruth Reilly has a huge pile of bamboo she's trying to get rid of. The Levinsons (next door) apparently took a bunch for their roof, but I already had my mat. (And anyway, the mat is easier to store.) Too bad she didn't start asking around a couple weeks earlier.

The holiday starts tomorrow night. We're having Gail over tomorrow for dinner and Ralph and Lori Tuesday. Wednesday is D&D. I haven't planned beyond that yet. Maybe we should invite the Tuckers later in the week, as they aren't really capable of building their own. That way they'll get to eat in a sukkah at least once. (I try to provide the opportunity for Jewish friends who will care and who don't have their own.)

Entry tags:

sukkot,
tv: trek

rain and Star Trek

Last night it started to rain as I was walking home from services. I was pretty soggy by the time I got home. (The sky had been clear in the morning, so I didn't take an umbrella.) I decided, given the weather, not to start putting up the sukkah last night like you're supposed to. I went out to the garage to gather all the parts, and carried out the new s'chach (roof covering) from the front porch where it was delivered yesterday (obviously by gentiles :-) ), so maybe that counts as "starting to put it up". Whatever. I guess I have a project for Sunday afternoon, rain or shine.

So last night Dani and I watched the first episode of the new Star Trek series, Enterprise. It looks promising; I'll give it more time. The characters are interesting; the plot had holes you could drive a truck through. So we'll see. I never watched the original series (just an occasional episode here and there), so I don't really know the back-story with the Vulcans. Were they that hostile/patronizing by Kirk's time? Or is this new ground?

(Aside: there was a glitch in the broadcast -- looked like problems with either the cable company or the uplink. Did anyone else have that happen? Not a big deal; we lost maybe a minute of the show and it doesn't appear to have been a critical minute. I'm just wondering if it was my cable company or a broader problem.)