Monica

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?

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?

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.

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.)

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.)

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.)