cellio | Entries tagged with people

Friday night I had not one but two cases of "guess who I ran into at services".

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... )

I got a nice surprise in the mail from

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.

From unspace: Cuteness Overload.

Someone at MIT is doing what looks to be an interesting blog survey. It appears that, even though they ask people to spread the news via their blogs, they didn't anticipate the resulting demand on the server. So it may take a few tries to get the server to talk to you.

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.)

Thank you everyone for the condolences.

I went to the funeral today. It was packed! There was no real mingle-space; it was go in, sit down, wait for service. So I didn't get a good sense of who all the people were -- many coworkers, probably some colleagues from CMU and maybe elsewhere, and of course family. Oh, and I assume some people from the congregation, though I didn't spot anyone I knew.

My rabbi gave a really good eulogy, blending the many aspects of Steve's life. Ok, I've never heard him give a eulogy before so I have no baseline, but it sounded good to me. (This was my first Jewish funeral, too.)

The burial was private, but my company had arranged to take over the back room of a nearby restaurant so we could spend some time together. I didn't realize until I was leaving that we'd spilled over into a second room, which would explain the apparent absence of people I'd expected to see there.

Steve's Hebrew name was Tzadik. It fits.

I went to tonight's shiva minyan and it, too, was packed. We ended up holding it out on the porch because of geometry and weather. I wonder if the first night will have been abnormally large or if it'll be that big every night. (I've seen this go both ways.)

I held up well through all of this. I think I've gotten past the first couple stages. What's supposed to come after denial and anger? I think I've made it to acceptance, actually; I mean, it sucks and things are going to be rough, but he's gone and there's nothing to be done about that.

I think part of why this hit me kind of hard was the timing. ( Read more... )

When I arrived at my synagogue Sunday night for Shavuot, services were still going. (I had failed to make the beginning, so I was aiming for the late-night study.) The synagogue director intercepted me in the lobby. "I need to talk to you before you go in there." I was puzzled.

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.

Happy 05/05/05. (First pointed out to me by

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.)

1) If you were a toy, what toy would you be?

There 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... )

My rabbi was at services Friday night. I didn't expect that; he's still recovering from surgery and we weren't expecting to see him so soon. He's taking it very easy and he didn't come Saturday morning, which is probably good. Don't want him pushing himself.

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.

I should know better by now. Every now and then -- just infrequently enough for the pain to have worn off -- I get the idea that I can stop by the Giant Eagle on Murray on my way home from work to do the grocery shopping. This is, in principle, not out of the way, unlike the Giant Eagle I usually patronize. However, this only works if (1) the store actually has all the stuff I want and (2) the checkout lines aren't horrendous. When I had my third failure only one aisle past produce, I decided to cut my losses, pay for my vegetables, and go to the better store. (For the record: ginger root, fresh cranberries, and Listerine. I don't begrudge the cranberries, but the other two surprised me.)

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.)

My friend Gail had her baby last night. The girl is healthy but premature by 10 weeks, so she gets to spend the next several weeks in the hospital while she finishes growing. I really hope everything works out ok; I know how much Gail wants to be a mother. So far, so good.

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.)

Saturday was the wedding of two friends, Krista and Ben. The short ceremony was nicely done; I hadn't realized that the groom is a preacher's kid until I saw that his father was conducting the service. Krista got a laugh by looking around the room with a glare when they got to the "if anyone has any objections..." part.

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.

I don't think I had previously noticed that in the torah scroll the entire story of Bilaam, from the first solicition for his services through the talking-donkey episode through the curse attempts, is one long paragraph -- no breaks. It spans several columns. It's usually my job to roll the scroll to the correct place before the service, and I usually navigate by the whitespace (not being particularly fluent in Hebrew).

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.

tangerinpenguin 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.

The principle of transitive coolness applies, so if you've received this invitation and there's someone you want to bring, please do so. Please help us spread the word. (Loose hints about the number of people who plan to show up would be helpful but are not required.)

If you need the address, send me email or reply to this post. If you're a friend of Chris, feel free to link to this invitation. (That's why I left it public.)

1. What's the best place you've ever been, that others can visit?

Pennsic. :-)

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.

Shortly after midnight someone suggested that as a motto for the year ("2004: looking good so far"), or its variation ("...doesn't suck so far"). I like it, though I prefer the more positive spin. :-)

We went to a party that had a younger and rowdier crowd than we're used to. We had considered going there for a while, trying to find out if a certain traditional party was actually being held this year (we hadn't heard), and then ended up not hopping anyway. Still, we got to spend time chatting with assorted friends, which was nice. We saw

lefkowitzga,

tangerinpenguin,

alfiechat,

arslan_ibn_daud, and others.

Today we went to the traditional new-year's-day brunch and party ("replace all those electrolytes you lost last night"). Good food, good company, less game-playing than last year, and maybe a few fewer people (not sure). I was pleased that one particular family did not show up -- bad parents resulting in bad kids makes for no joy for everyone else. Enjoyed seeing (among others)

lefkowitzga,

lyev,

rani23,

tangerinpenguin, and

lrstrobel. Missed seeing a few people at either party.

We came home and watched the rest of the first DVD of Infinite Ryvius, which we found out in episode $4 is pronounced re-VAY-us, not REE-vee-us as we had thought. I think we'll order the other two DVDs. Then we finished off the last two episodes of B5 season 2, though we failed to find the gag reel advertised in the Amazon product description. Bummer.

Tomorrow I plan to install my new scanner and, for once, take a leisurely approach to Shabbat dinner. (No rushing home from work! Yay!) I'm going to use our new warming plate for Shabbat lunch; we'll see if that gives me good options that the crock pot doesn't. (The crock pot is all about moist foods, while the warming plate can accommodate drier ones like roasted chicken.) Saturday promises an interesting D&D session as my part of the party decides what to do about rescuing the other part. I've got some ideas that could prove interesting. :-)

I'm making good progress on the Torah portion I'm chanting in two weeks, but I need to spend more time on that in the next few days too.

Shabbat services were crowded on Friday. Our congregational choir and a new youth choir participated. I don't know how much of the crowd was due to that, how much was due to the bat mitzvah family, and how much was due to general ebb and flow. Lots of good music, which was nice.

Saturday's torah reader in our minyan was reading (and leading part of the service) for the first time since his bar mitzvah. It went pretty well, and I succeeded in getting him to sign up again. It gets easier over time, but it can be hard to get people to give it a shot. Gotta take the long view, though; I think in another year or so he'll be one of my regulars. (I want at least three more regulars than I currently have.)

Saturday night we went to two parties. First was a Chanukah party hosted by friends from shul; it was fun and I'm glad that Dani seemed to be comfortable talking with folks. (He's gone with me to this party for the last few years, so he's getting to know people at least a little.) I had forgotten that a lot of people would be opting for food suitable for vegans; I had not anticipated people asking if the (soft) mozzerella in the salad I brought was tofu. Yeah, I guess when it's cubed it does look like tofu; I just think of tofu as something you cook, not something you eat raw.

Then it was off to

ralphmelton and

lorimelton's holiday party, which was a lot of fun. They have a good party house; it supports several smaller areas for conversation, but there's enough room that everyone can also glom together. It looks like Lori spent a week baking. :-) I got to spend time chatting with ex-co-workers I don't see much any more; I think Ralph and Lori are the key that keeps the Claritech gang together. I'm glad they're doing that.

This morning we ran into

celebrin in the restaurant we usually go to for brunch. It took several moments for my brain to process the context problem -- she doesn't live here (she's visiting) and it was pre-caffeine, and initially we saw the group from across the room, too far for my vision. (She also got spiffy new glasses and hairstyle since last I saw her.) Then once I made the connection I utterly blanked on her real name, and felt funny introducing her to Dani as Celebrin, so, um. I hope I didn't look too stupid.

Tonight we will be hosting dinner. I worked backwards from dessert; the sufganiyot (doughnuts traditional for Chanukah) are parve, so this allowed me to get the brisket to go with the latkes. Thanks to

goljerp for the brisket recipe. Dani will just have to save the sour cream for some other meal; I've got plenty of latkes, and I generally can't go more than a few days without making fish anyway.

browngirl sent me a wonderful, funny, twisted holiday card. "Tentacles", indeed. You realize that I can't put this one on the mantle in the living room, right? :-)

I like some of the twists I've seen that "tell me something about yourself" meme take. The winner so far, in my opinion, is "Ah, there's so and so... she was active in the movement to ban canned spinach back in the 70s" (in a protected entry).

I've been interviewing a lot of job candidates lately (programmers). We do group interviews, and I'm finding that I'm much more comfortable being an interviewer in that kind of setting than I am in a one-on-one session. I would enjoy doing more of this, and I think I've been providing useful feedback. (I wonder how the candidates would feel to find out that they're being screened by the tech writer. I think it's perfectly reasonable... in fact, I've considered volunteering to take some of our phone-screen load.)

And now, time for Shabbat (and Chanukah).

The Hebrew word "hodu" is the root for "thanks". (Aside to Ralph: yes, "modah" is the same word with different grammatical dressing.) It is also the (modern) word for "turkey". Heh.

Seasonal humor: Mishnah Hodu (go to the second entry in the digest). It's not as funny as the Halacha of Xmas, but the latter is not yet in its proper season and the former is still pretty good. (For additional fun, continue on to the third digest entry, on the hermeneutics of the stop sign.)

Tomorrow we will go to my parents' house for Thanksgiving, and then Friday morning I head off to the Darkover convention near Baltimore with Robert and Kathy. I'm looking forward to all the good music, and to seeing Harold and Becky, dglenn, Clam Chowder (the group not the soup), and many other friends. I hadn't realized it until recently, but this will be my 20th year for this con.

This year I am thankful for many things (in no particular order):

( Read more... )

( Shabbat )

( party )

Shabbat was good. Attendance at services was light because lots of people (including the senior rabbi) are away at the UAHC -- oh, excuse me, now URJ (Union for Reform Judaism) -- biennial convention. (Why is it "biennial" rather than "bi-annual"? I've never heard of an "ennial" event.) ( Read more... )

I invited a friend back for lunch on Saturday. (I had actually invited her Thursday night, so I knew to make some extra chili.) She brought along some salad and pita, and we had a good time. She and Dani hit it off.

Saturday afternoon our friends (and my former coworkers) Erik and Bridget appeared from DC. A surprise party was being planned for a mutual friend, ( Read more... )

The lunar eclipse was during the party. It was cold outside, but there was a nice garden (well, nice in different weather), so lots of people were outside watching it. I tended to pop in and out, using the windows to track progress. Watching the moon turn red was neat; I'm glad we didn't have cloud cover. And the party had hot chocolate, so being out in the cold wasn't too burdensome. :-)

We had On the Mark practice this afternoon, and then Sunday dinner this evening. I must now gush about dinner. It was a turkey-stuffing casserole (with veggies) from a recent cooking magazine that Ralph clued me in about, and it was wonderfully tasty. I had missed this one in my browse through that issue of the magazine, but I have now marked it for future use. Only one ingredient substitution is needed to make it kosher, and I think I even have some turkey breast in the freezer at the moment. (I'll have to check. I had some before the freezer thawed, and I think I've replaced it.)

Cooking for my party is going reasonably well. This afternoon (after practice) I made the salmon gefilte fish. (The store doesn't usually have the salmon variety, so when I saw it I grabbed it.) I also bought more tart shells for the cheese/onion tarts; I made a bunch last week, but not enough. The spinach balls are done. The pantry is populated with pop, beer, juice, and assorted non-perishables. Lori has offered me much cake goodness. One more shopping trip and a bit more cooking and I should be set.

I went early to services on Friday so I could sneak a peek at the sefer torah I'll be reading from next week. The rabbi asked me which scroll I wanted to use, the one with the clearest text (which is heavy) or the lightest one (which has less-clear, though acceptable, text). I told him that I don't have hagbah (the job of lifting the scroll overhead for the congregation to see), so I had a clear opinion on the subject that was subject to veto. :-) (Apparently the person doing hagbah can cope, though, so I get the good text.) I tripped in a few places reading from the scroll on Friday, but I'm now in pretty good shape from the practice copy (in the tikkun), so I think it'll be fine.

Last night we went to Kathy's PhD party. She successfully defended her thesis a couple months ago and officially gets the degree next month. She commented that she has spent more than a third of her life in grad school. That's kind of a scary way of looking at it. I don't think I would have the stamina. (Or the financial wherewithall, possibly.)

The party was a mix of SCA people, coworkers, and relatives. Often those kinds of gatherings fragment, with the SCA people talking about things that are utterly cryptic to the others. That didn't happen as much last night, and the relatives and coworkers didn't bolt early. That's good.

I'm thinking of having a birthday party this fall -- round number and it's an excuse for a party at our house, so what the heck. I hope we can achieve a similar dynamic, because I'd like to invite a mix of people.

Johan and I went up to Cooper's Lake last week to inspect the trailer and make sure the new jack will fit. (It will, but we need to go back with different tools to attach it.) On the way up, we made a stop by the Highland Park water filtration plant, which is really his project (lead engineer). It's quite impressive -- very pretty, and you'd never guess that there's a water-tratment plant inside if you weren't looking for it. It really blends into the park. A particularly fun part is the babbling brook; you see, they need to aerate some of the waste water before it can proceed to the river or wherever it gets dumped, and this is usually done by piping it over chunks of cement and stuff in a chamber. But this is a park, so he got authorization to make a pretty brook with rock beds and stuff. While we were standing on a bridge looking down on it, a couple of people out for a walk joined us and he was explaining to them how it worked. They were very complimentary, and they thanked him for keeping the park pretty. After we left, I asked him how it felt to have fans. :-) It really is an impressive project, and I gather that he's gotten engineering awards for it. While I love what I do for a living, there's got to be something neat about doing something that has an immediate, positive impact on the community in which you live.

Oh, and a link, courtesy of Johan: http://www.toostupidtobepresident.com .

It figures. Yesterday I saw that one of Amazon's affiliates had the second season of B5 for $50 (which is about half of the list price, though copies are easy to find at about $70). So I ordered it. An hour later another affiliate showed up with it for $40. Oh well. Then today another affiliate showed up with it for $26! But I've already ordered it, so too late now. And the memories of chasing the best price and nearly getting burned through half.com are still fresh, so I'm not going to feel too bad about missing out on the $26 copy. (They all claim to be new copies, by the way.)

We're most of the way through the first season. Tonight we watched "Grail" and "Eyes", along with the JMS commentary on "Signs and Portents".

Last night

lefkowitzga came over and we traded Hebrew tutoring for illunination tutoring. It was fun! She has a good hand for painting, too. (I don't, especially. I'm pretty good at design, but my implementation has always been so-so.)

My neice is graduating from high school next month. I wonder what an appropriate gift is. She's been pestering her mother for a laptop computer, which is way beyond her mother's means. She's not going to get it from me, either, but she hasn't dropped any smaller hints. (I was really thinking closer to $100 than the $1000+ that would be required to fulfill that wish...) I don't like giving gift certificates, but that might be the best move. When all else fails, feed the book habit. :-)

Stolen shamelessly from half the people on my friends list, it seems:

If I'm on your friends list, how do you know me? (I know that in some cases it's obvious.)

Also, if you feel like it, please give a tiny little blurb about yourself. Tell me where you're from, what you're interested in, a little relevant information like that.

This includes people reading this who don't have LJ accounts; I'm told some of you are out there. :-)

Sunday lunch with Ralph and Lori was fun. Deanna and Eli were in town for Carnival, and Carl came, and two new people, and all of the regulars. We had 14 people in all, with a huge bowl of pasta with veggies and chicken and a truly massive strawberry-rhubarb pie. Everything was yummy and the company was good.

We had to leave a little early because we had errands to run. First up was a trip to Home Depot, where we stared at things in the plumbing aisle and tried to guess what part we needed to replace in a broken toilet. A helpful employee suggested a 99-cent part, which turned out to be right. Dani tried to pattern-match from the other two toilets in the house, but the innards of all of them are different. Meanwhile, I tried to apply logic, which only gets you so far. (My logic appears to have been correct if we were willing to set aside a part. But finishing a repair job with parts left over, other than the ones you replaced, is always a little suspicious.) Eventually we made what turned out to be a simple repair and all was fine. Yay us -- not completely repair-impaired. :-)

Then it was on to the taxes. Dani had already done most of the data entry, so this consisted of stepping through the interview in TurboTax so I could check his work and we could both see each question one more time. This caught another $1500 in deductions; I'm more anal-retentive than he is about such things. We ended up owing an acceptable amount of money, which means our withholdings are fine and we don't need to muck with them. (I don't want a tax refund; I want to owe. A refund means I made an interest-free loan to the government.)

We needed a few things from the grocery store. We had tried to stop on the way home from Home Depot, but the lot was completely full and we decided that was a bad sign. Later was much better. This is not the store I usually go to, so after picking up a bag of apples I began looking around for walnuts (which are near the produce in my regular store). Dani pointed to the rack immediately above the bags of apples, which was full of bags of walnuts. I guess the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle knows its customer base. :-) (Apples and walnuts are the main ingredients in charoset, which is a food needed for the seder. This is, in fact, exactly why we were buying these particular ingredients.)

In around all of this was getting the kitchen ready for Pesach. In the morning I had cleared out most of the remaining chametz that wasn't going to be in closed cabinets for the week. I brought the tubs of other dishes and utensils up from the basement, but won't open them until the rest of the cleaning is done. I kashered the things I need to switch over; I think next year I will buy Pesach flatware, because this is a nuissance and you can get flatware pretty cheaply these days. I've cleaned some of the relevant surfaces; the cleaning lady is coming today to do the rest, including scrubbing the oven and stove-top. Then tonight I can finish up. (The cleaning lady will also take care of the dining room and living room. We don't bring food into other rooms, so I don't have to do anything there. And since I would never eat crumbs off my floors or out of the spaces under the stove burners, I do not feel a burning need to do more than ordinary levels of cleaning there.)

On Wednesday we drive to Toronto. First seder is at Dani's mother's apartment. The second is at Debby and Tucker's, where we're staying. (Debby is Dani's sister.) So I imagine that we'll spend a chunk of Thursday helping with cooking, which is good -- I can feel useful, as opposed to just showing up in time for the food. :-) We're supposed to bring charoset for both seders, so I guess we'll make that Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. It doesn't take long, but I don't want to try to make it at the other end lest we get held up in traffic or something.

Ray Tucker (SCA: Guido Aldina, husband of Esperanza Halevi) died last night. He had been sick for a while with a respiratory problem, and was in the hospital a couple weeks ago when it got bad. So we knew this was coming, though we didn't know when.

I called them last evening to see if we could visit, but Esther said he wasn't up for it. She also said that evenings in general are bad (I wish I'd known that earlier), and we should come on Saturday. I guess she wasn't expecting this to be quite this soon either.

Esther has family and a good group of friends here in town, so I imagine she'll get through this better than many would. But they were married for an awfully long time, and this has got to be rough.

I'll miss him. He was a neat person -- generous and courteous, with eclectic knowledge and a sense of humor.

Monica

Shabbat

weekend and random bits

random geek notes

more about Steve

a very sad day

short takes

interviewed by anastasiav

weekend bits

random bits

assorted bits

weekend bits

last few days

[Pittsburgh:] going-away party for tangerinpenguin

interviewed by ginamariewade

2004: looking good so far

weekend

quickies

erev Yom Hodu

weekend

weekend

short takes

short takes

meme (who are you?)

busy Sunday

Ray

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