Monica

We had the usual Thanksgiving gathering at my parents' house today. Everyone seems to be doing well overall. The nephew was sometimes snarky but usually well-behaved. The niece was sometimes quite rude to her mother and my parents; while some of her frustration was provoked, some of it was either gratuitious or, more likely, connected to something else that I never saw (past differences or the like). But this was pretty much limited to part of dinner; the rest of the time they were not interested in interacting with us. Oh well; I guess this is the surly stage or something. Things have been worse.

The niece is going to study in Italy next semester. I'd hoped to hear more about that from her, but she wasn't being talkative. Oh well. (She's a junior in college.) My mother was expressing the usual grandparental concern about her being "all alone" on a big trip, but I suspect she'll be fine -- and that even if she's not, she's probably not receptive to advice right now.

My parents are talking about going to Italy for a week or so while she's there -- not to bother her, they said, though if they can see her they'd like that. I'm glad that my parents are thinking more about travel; it's something they've enjoyed in the past, and then they couldn't for a while because their elderly dog was sick. The dog has passed on, which is sad, but that does leave them free to travel now.

There was a lot of good food. My mother made the turkey, stuffing, cranberry relish, mashed potatoes, honey-glazed carrots, and sugar-snap peas. Either she or my sister made the yam/oatmeal/sugar/not-sure-what-else casserole. I made a salad (lettuce, some veggies, apple, mango, hard-boiled eggs -- went over well) and bread. All of this is sounding reasonable so far, right?

And then there was dessert. For calibration, there were seven of us. Given that, I think my mother's apple-nut cake (large pan -- 10x13?) would have been sufficient. But my sister wanted to contribute something, so there was a mixed-berry pie. But that might not be enough, so my mother also made a huge poppyseed cake. (Alas, this one was dairy so I didn't have any.) In other words, there was enough food for each person to have the equivalent of half a pie. Fortunately, the poppyseed cake, at least, will freeze.

We're going to Toronto this weekend to visit Dani's relatives and, more specifically, attend a birthday party for his mother. I'm going to go back to the congregation I visited over Pesach (Beit HaMinyan) because they seemed friendly. Their web site mentions a "lunch and learn" for this Saturday, but no one answered the email I sent them about it so I don't know if it's "advance reservations and real food" or "kiddush++ and everyone's welcome". So I'll wing it.

I like Dani's mother (and his sister, with whom we'll be staying). One thing I don't care for that seems to be a family habit is their style of "party games". For example, the first time I attended their seder I was told -- with no advance warning -- that I had to sing a song. I don't know any Hebrew songs, I said; they said sing anything, and they suggested I sing something I sing with On the Mark. Later I realized just how unusual and inappropriate that was, but at the time what did I know from seders? (I'd been to some and never seen this, but to enough that I knew singing in some fashion was normal.) Other gatherings have involved treasure hunts or going around the room answering some question. While this sort of thing is fine in some contexts (most notably, my Shabbat morning minyan -- where passing on the question is also always an option!), I don't really like this sort of thing at family gatherings. At least not when there are outsiders present.

The invitation to this party includes the following instruction: "bring a saying or two that you used to hear when you were growing up". On the face of it that doesn't seem outrageous, but I find I'm resenting it a little anyway. I don't know what this is going to turn into, but I'd rather not play. And I can't tell whether that will offend my mother-in-law (whose party this is), or if this is something her daughter thought up and she doesn't care one way or the other. I guess I'll try to tease that out before the party Saturday night.

It doesn't help that no obvious candidates come to mind. My family didn't really run to trite sayings when I was growing up, or if we did they didn't stick. I suppose I could make something up, but my MIL is in regular contact with my parents and it would come out eventually.

It's such a stupid little thing. It doesn't matter and I shouldn't feel imposed upon. But I do.

I talked with Dani's sister tonight. She mentioned that she and her family will be going to Israel for Pesach (one of their children is there for a year). Everyone else will still be in Toronto for the holiday, but this somewhat changes the dynamic. This is, potentially, an opportunity to do something other than going there.

I wonder if Dani would be willing to stay in town and we'd hold a seder. I wonder if I'd find people to come if we did. I suppose the safe thing would be to hold one on the second night, assuming that (1) a first-night invitation would not be a problem and (2) some of those folks would come on the second night.

Or Dani might conclude that the other in-laws need to be paid off with a visit. Don't know yet.

[Ah, good. My home network connection is happier than it was last night when I tried to post this...]

( daily tasks, cooking, romance, nosy questions, cats )

Shabbat services were well-attended this week. I think we have a significant number of interfaith families in the congregation, so I wouldn't have been surprised by sparse attendance.

This morning my rabbi asked us to mention, during this darkest part of the year, something that brought light into our lives. Most people mentioned family in some form. He pointed out that where there's light there's also darkness, and certainly all families have times of strife (including Yaakov's family, which we read about one final time this week).

My family is pretty good in that department; there are some tensions and disagreements, of course, but mostly we all get along pretty well. I'm lucky to have parents who still love each other very much and other family members who are doing ok. My niece still needs some basic socialization, but oh well. (Her younger brother, who used to be a real brat, has grown up considerably, and is better behaved than she is at the moment.)

We visited them this evening for dinner and exchange of loot. (It's not my holiday, but it's theirs. I can play along to keep them happy.) Everyone seemed to be happy with what we got them. We had one challenge: my parents had hinted that they'd like a new card table and chairs, but it's not practical to wrap that. So we stashed them on the porch, and I wrapped up a deck of cards. When they opened that I said "and here's something to play them on" and we brought in the real gift. That went over well.

My father had asked Dani to bring his laptop along (it's a Mac running Panther). They spent a while playing with it before dinner, and he liked a lot of what he saw. So the copy of Panther we got him went over very well when we gave it to him later.

On our way home, several blocks from my parents' house but not yet on the highway, I observed to Dani that the car felt a little bumpier than I know this road to be, and asked if he had a flat tire. (I had a specific nominee based on the feel of the ride.) That was in fact the case. It looked like it might be fixable with an air compressor (at least for the nonce), so I called my parents to ask the location of the nearest gas station with air. They said they had a compressor, so we went back there. (At tonight's temperatures, driving on it and risking damage to the rim seemed like a better idea than changing the tire.) It turned out, though, that the tire has problems beyond what a refill can solve, so I suggested that we're paying AAA for five service calls a year and it's awfully cold out. It didn't take much to convince Dani that we could wait inside my parents' nice warm house for someone to show up and do this for us.

We were promised service within the hour and someone showed up 45 minutes later. With the right tools (a real jack rather than the toy that came with the car, and a power ratchet set instead of a hand wrench) he had the tire changed in just a few minutes and we were on our way. It turned out that my parents know the guy, because small towns are like that. In the process of digging out the doughnut Dani stumbled on the air compressor that he'd forgotten he had (and I never knew about). Heh. Not that it would have helped this time, of course, but it's useful to know that it's there.

Today's Halloween, so I've been assuming that costumed children (and some non-costumed non-children, based on past years) would show up on our porch seeking sugary tribute. I saw nothing in the newspaper about scheduled hours for this, so I applied the power of Google. I wonder whether this means that the web really is pervasive, or if people who have kids (or otherwise care) have alternative sources of information. Silly me; I just naturally assumed that this was one of the jobs of a local newspaper.

I did buy some sugary tribute; we'll see how many people show up before we leave for dinner with friends. We didn't get a lot of people last year or the year before; it's possible we have a a reputation as the house that hands out weird stuff due to Dani handing out comic books for a few years in the past. On the other hand, we might just live on a low-payoff street; the houses are more spread out than a few blocks over and I'm not sure how many neighbors participate.

This afternoon we visited with my parents (and sister and one of her kids, though said kid preferred the computer's company to ours). My parents are taking the death of their dog (about a month ago) pretty hard. Thor was a 14-year-old golden retriever; they'd had him since he was 2.

They had him cremated, and my mother showed us the urn that contains his ashes. I'll have to look that one up in Miss Manners. I mean, what's the proper response? "It's a pretty urn"? "I'm so sorry" (but I said that already)? Silence? (Oh, and a wise move: they seal the urn, so accidents that don't involve breakage are harmless.)

I knew that dogs could be trained to do a lot, but I was surprised to read about the assistance animal that called 911, barked persistently into the receiver until the folks on the other end reacted, and then unlocked the front door for the ambulance crew when his owner fell.

We had a visitor Shabbat afternoon, and the three of us played games for a few hours. Aha -- that's a good way to spend (part of) long Shabbat afternoons! (I can't just read all day -- I get headaches from eyestrain.) Of course, with the change of seasons and now the time change, long Shabbat afternoons are going to be much less long for a while. But I must remember this come summer and try to arrange for it on a regular basis. Besides, I like having company and I have friends who like to play games, so what's not to like in this plan?

Friday night at services someone was wearing a Kerry/Edwards button -- transliterated into Hebrew. Some words should just not be transliterated into Hebrew. "Edwards" is one of them. Boy did that look funny.

Four times during the Jewish year it is customary to recite Yizkor, a prayer in memory of the dead, as part of morning sevices. It's traditional for people whose parents are both still alive to leave during this, but my congregation urges people to stay. I feel a little funny doing so (not clear why -- it's not like I have a traditional background that's at odds with my current synagogue), but I stay because my rabbi wants me to.

Mourning non-Jewish relatives is a little strange anyway. The practice that has evolved for me, though it's kind of odd I suppose, is that I say kaddish on the appropriate dates for the two grandparents who died since I became religious, but not for the other two. One of the other two turns out to have died three days (on the Jewish calendar) before one of the others, so I mentally include her at the same time. The fourth, my paternal grandfather, died when I was a child and I don't even know the date. And I liked him, and I feel funny about leaving him out of the "formal" observance completely.

This Shavuot during yizkor it struck me: I don't know the date, but I do know that he died in May, and Shavuot is usually in May (or early June), and I'm going to be there for yizkor anyway... so it seems logical that, for purposes of private observances (e.g. memorial candles), I should observe my grandfather's yahrzeit on Shavuot. That also creates some degree of parity -- each of the grandparents who died long ago is getting added onto something else, but no one is getting forgotten. (Not that I would forget them in any case -- but I mean formally.)

When did you first discover the net?

In college, and in stages. I first encountered the idea of email in 1979; I knew there was a bigger world out there, but as a student I was limited to campus email addresses. In, I think, 1982 I got a job with the CS department, which as a side effect got me my first account on a machine with ARPAnet access. I discovered the SF-Lovers digest, but little else, and I didn't know anyone outside the university who had email. In 1984, after I graduated but while I still had a legacy account, CMU got Usenet and I got sucked in for a while. (There was no reader on the box on which I had an account; I read articles directly out of the spool directory over the network for long enough to decide that this was interesting, and then wrote a reader.)

What inspired you to pursue a career in technical writing?

I blundered into it by accident, really. I headed off to college in pursuit of CS. CMU didn't have an undergrad program at the time; what you did was to major in applied math and load up on CS courses. Well, the CS stuff was cool but the math was frustrating; for a program with "applied" in its name it seemed awfully uselessly-theoretical to me. While angsting about this I talked with someone who said "you have an aptitude for writing; why don't you do that?". I said "what, journalism? you can't make a living doing stuff like that". Then this person told me what technical writing was, and that sounded nifty and I ended up changing majors. I took almost all of the CS courses that I would have taken as a math major, by the way.

My first position out of school was at a startup as half tech writer, half programmer. Eventually the company got larger and the management structure got weird and I had to choose one, and because of things that were going on at the time I chose the programming route. I remained a programmer through one more job change, and come the one after that I realized that I was an adequate programmer but could be a good tech writer in the right kind of position. I found a company that was looking for a tech writer to document programming interfaces and software design and such, which was perfect. Now that's the kind of position I seek out, and so far I've been decent at crafting a position to fit what I can offer.

If I ever find myself irrevocably writing "application software 101" -- you know, "from the file menu choose 'save', type a file name into the dialogue box, and click on the 'ok' button" etc -- I think I'll have to take it as a sign that something has gone very, very wrong, and maybe it's time to bail.

Who has been your greatest influence?

My father. Both of my parents are great -- they were always there and supportive when I was growing up, very nurturing, and so on. But my father, in particular, is the one who was always challenging me to think harder and to do things I didn't think I could do (ranging from riding a bike to solving polynomial equations). My father is very smart, and he realized that I could be smart too but that's not just about schoolwork. He taught me to be analytical, inquisitive, and persistent, and I think two of those stuck pretty well.

If you could live at any time and place in recorded history, when and where would you live?

There are lots of places I'd love to visit, but for actually living, I don't really want to give up the benefits of modern medicine, instant communication with a large number of people I'd never know otherwise, the (pretty-much) guarantee of a comfortable home and ample food, and the ability to pursue whatever interests me regardless of class, gender, family background, etc.

What do you think is the best way for the US to balance the need for national security and individual privacy? ( Read more... )

You know the drill: if you want a set of questions, ask. You'll update your journal, including the offer to propegate.

Saturday's D&D game was a lot of fun. It was a sub-group (two characters are currently elsewhere), and we got to do a lot of role-playing and story, and some nice little character bits came out. It was quite nifty. I think being (largely) unconstrained by time helped, too -- most sessions are on weeknights and people have to worry about getting to bed at a reasonable hour. Here, we could just play until a natural stopping point. (We're at the point where we need the other two players now.)

I talked with my parents yesterday. I enthused about some of the recent loot, particularly the scanner. They said that my nephew, who had seemed utterly indifferent to the DVD we bought him, went home, watched it, and was happy. That's good to hear. The kid still needs to learn some basic manners, though, like "thank you" and at least feigning interest in gifts.

I was surprised to learn that my parents knew basically nothing about the show 1776, either stage or movie. (I said this to a friend last night who said he didn't know it either, but he didn't grow up in a musicals-intensive house in one of the 13 colonies, so that's not surprising.) I remember seeing the movie as a kid; I mistakingly thought my parents had taken me. (We also saw it on a school outing.) The CLO is doing it this summer, which is what brought this up, and now I'm thinking that Dani and I, and maybe some friends, should go. I've never seen the stage version. I worry a bit about having my illusions shattered -- some other things I remember fondly didn't work out so well on more recent viewing, and maybe I should leave well enough alone. But it's probably safe.

Study with my rabbi today was very good, in a hard-to-summarize way. Maybe there'll be a separate entry later. (Aside: according to the talmud, God prays. This prompted me to say "what and to whom?" before my rabbi could continue. We've looked at "what", and then had to stop. In a sense, that's the less-interesting question.)

Most people were back at work today. Naturally, the single person who understands the part of the software that is currently getting in my way is out for a few more days. Oops. Tomorrow I begin plaintively asking not-so-random developers "do you know anything about [module]?". :-) (It's got to be pilot error; no one gets this right on the first try near as I can tell. If I figure out what that error is, then not only can I move past it but I can also improve the documentation.)