cellio | Entries tagged with family

( Thanksgiving )

Friday we (I rode with Robert) headed out to Darkover Grand Council, a science-fiction convention in Timmonium MD (near Baltimore). The name is a bit misleading; while the con has its origins as an MZB con, the amount of Darkover content has dwindled over the years. I'm not a fan of the series, but I can still find reasons to go to this con. It has the strongest music track I know outside of cons dedicated entirely to music. So I go to perform, and I go to listen. And I go to visit with friends.

( people )

( Clam Chowder )

( On the Mark )

( so *that's* where they keep the cushy rooms!, and hotel misc )

We had a new "interim" CD at this convention. Some of its contents will eventually go onto a "real" live CD, but that will be a couple years away and we wanted to have something for people now. So we did this one on the cheap (allowing us to sell it for $10), but had enough decent material to fill up a CD. It was fun, and it includs a bunch of stuff that we haven't previously recorded.

( Shabbat challenge: probably boring to most readers )

On the way to the con on Friday, the biggest challenge was the dense fog in the mountains. (I couldn't see the car in front of us, and we were following pretty close. Fortunately, I was not driving. Had I been, I would have had to wait it out, and then hope I could get to the con before sundown.) On the way home, however, traffic was worse than usual. It was still much worse going in the other direction; we counted a ten-mile stoppage at one point on the turnpike. I'm not really sure what caused our erratically-slow traffic; we saw two accidents and one near-accident, but there were also just some standing waves in the traffic. (Near-accident: note to driver: if your wheels are going up onto the jersey barrier, you are not centered in your lane.)

All in all, it was a fun weekend!

Addendum: extra bonus -- two nights completely free of the usual snoring soundtrack!

Thanksgiving with my family was good. My nephew was well-behaved (surprise!). Everyone is doing well, and the meal was pleasant. My mother's stuffing rocks!

Note to self: Kim might like a Wacom tablet to hook up to her Windows box. Find out what that means and if that's a unique descriptor.

In a few minutes I'll be leaving for the con. I'm looking forward to music and friends.

A post in a community for Jewish converts (and converts in training) raised this question: the poster has a disabled sibling and has in the past been the person who accompanies said sibling to church on Christmas. (The rest of the family is in the choir.) Is this behavior permitted, required, or forbidden of a Jew?

Much of the feedback so far weighs in on the side of "required -- family is family". Someone cited honoring one's parents (the source of the request), and a couple people mentioned protecting a life (the sibling is apparently in real danger of injury without someone there).

I, on the other hand, am leaning toward "forbidden", though "permitted" is a possibility. Definitely not "required", though.

The issue is complex. While the sibling needs a caregiver, that's a service that can be hired -- so there's no apparent need for the poster to do it personally. Of course it's important to honor one's parents (this comes up a lot in text), but the talmud also teaches that if a parent asks you to transgress the Torah, you must decline (Bava Metzia 32a). This raises the question of whether attending another religion's worship service -- on its second-holiest day, to boot -- is avodah zara, forbidden worship. Is it enough if you don't intend to worship? What if you don't participate? What if you don't listen? That is a complex question with varied answers depending on circumstances, ranging from exactly what will take place to the strength of your own Jewish education and commitment, and you really need to ask your rabbi for a personal ruling.

I think the experience of facing this issue is valuable for the conversion candidate, actually. As a member of a minority religion (that sometimes faces hostility from others), sometimes you are going to have to make choices between your religion and your family/friends/society -- things like this, or resolving Shabbat issues with your employer, or various other matters. Finding out how you will handle those choices before it's "too late" -- before you convert and acquire new obligations -- seems useful to me.

I assume that most conversion candidates face some sort of religion-vs-world-at-large test during the process, but I don't actually know.

Busy weekend!

( Simchat Torah )

( SCA: baronial investiture )

( Sunday with family )

( Sunday dinner )

All in all, a fun and busy weekend.

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?

I was pleasantly surprised to get my fish for free tonight at Giant Eagle. They have a policy that the first improperly-scanned item is free, but I did not experience a scanner error. I experienced an error in programming the register that generated the label for the fish. (That'll teach me not to look at the package they hand me before putting it in the cart, I guess.) That apparently counted. I wasn't trying to get groceries for free; I just wanted to not be charged double the posted price. But I'll take it. :-)

Dani's sister and her husband visited last night on their way from DC to Toronto. The husband is an extraordinarily picky customer; had I remembered this, I would not have suggested a restaurant that we'd like to be able to return to. :-) But it all worked out and the waitress we had was amazingly good (and flexible). I presume they got off ok this morning, as we did not receive distressed calls at work asking for clarification on the directions out of the city. (On the way in they set aside our directions for something they thought would work better; it set them back about an hour.) So either they got off ok or they were too embarrassed to ask for help.

I was reminded tonight that a lot of conversation works only because of shared references. My friend Yaakov was explaining this to me once in the context of allusions to Saturday-morning cartoons: since he has been an Orthodox Jew all his life, he has never seen Saturday-morning cartoons. He just doesn't have that shared experience. Similarly, those who are geeky about computers, or D&D, or science, or whatever can make cracks that only similar geeks will understand. This came to mind tonight when Dani made a very funny, very obscure comment that only music-history geeks will get, and I realized that we do this sort of thing much more often than we might think.

(Ok, I'll try to explain it. He was talking about some goofy-sounding accounting principles (that is, I say they're goofy and he says they're not), and I made a comment about red ink. He said that writing a number in red signifies that it has two-thirds the stated value, kind of like Canadian money. Certain medieval music was written in both black and red notes, where the color of the note alters its value. Black notes are bigger.)

I returned to work yesterday to find that the HR folks wanted to move me and my office-mate to a different office. (They have a new hire they really want to put in our space. And after we finally got the white-noise generator! Well, I guess he'll need it...) So they moved people out of a different office (I require a cave) and moved us into it today. I think both of the people who got bumped got worse space than what they got kicked out of; I hope they don't hold it against us. We didn't initiate this, after all, but we're now in better space than we were.

1. If you were running for president, what would the major points of your platform be? ( Read more... )

2. What is the best job you've ever had? What did you like about it? ( Read more... )

3. Aside from religion, what is one aspect of your philosophy, beliefs, or lifestyle that has changed significantly in your life? What motivated the change, and how did you go about it? ( Read more... )

4. When you were growing up, who in your family did you feel closest to? What was the best thing about that relationship? Are you still as close to them now? ( Read more... )

5. Consider the following scenario: ( Read more... )

In some organizations I frequently hear the phrase "children are our future", usually right after a demand for other people to provide child-support services. I generally perceive this as arrogance on the part of the parent (it's almost always a parent) making the statement, and withdraw whatever help I might have provided. (Sometimes it's just misguided and can be gently corrected.)

In the SCA, for example, where I hear this phrase a lot, children aren't our future: recruitment is. College kids are the best candidates for "our future", if we have to choose a demographic target. Kids who are dragged along to SCA events by their parents won't necessarily stick around when they're old enough to stay home on their own. On the other hand, lots of people who see us in parks and the like get curious and turn into active, contributing members of the organization.

Any social organization will ultimately stand or fall based on how interesting it is to adults. Because there's no obligation to participate, and kids turn into adults. So while you certainly don't want to drive away families, no social organization is ultimately well-served by the "children over adults" mentality. Don't place roadblocks, of course, but don't revolve around children either.

(Aside: In the case of the SCA, the best thing we could do would be to find ways to integrate children into regular activities. Special children's activities, off in a separate room somewhere, are exactly the wrong approach. The kids are isolated from the organization instead of becoming part of it. I'd bet those kids are more likely to bolt when they can, too. Of course, there's nothing wrong with parents forming a babysitting cooperative for the younger kids, but that should really be up to the parents, not the officers of the organization. And, of course, children who participate in the general activities will be expected to behave, and some parents have trouble making that happen but refuse to remove the kids. So I'm talking about an ideal here.)

People sometimes say "children are our future" in religious contexts, and while it's more justified there (there is generally more of an obligation to participate, at least), I still don't think children's interests automatically trump everyone else's. Balance is important, both on its own merit and for enlightened self-interest: if you drive away the single people and young couples before they have kids, those kids won't become part of your congregation later. So if children are our future, then more care of the potential producers of said children is called for.

On a broader societal level... well of course in one sense children are "our future", in that if no more kids were born the race would die out in 100 years. But mere children aren't enough; educated, functioning children are our future. Kids that aren't cared for appropriately are a net loss, not a net gain. And there are an awful lot of such kids around already. One of the best things we as a society could do would be to make birth control freely available to all who seek it, worldwide. It's a pity the far right doesn't see it that way; they seem to have enough power to stomp on aid toward that end.

Within my lifetime I have seen a sharp increase in what I call the "cult of the child". This is the attitude that children can do no wrong, that children should be allowed to behave badly because it's part of their "actualization" or some such, and that society owes parents. Parents with this attitude do a major disservice to all parents, and if I were a well-behaved parent I'd want to slap these folks upside the head. One otherwise-intelligent friend even told me that because he has kids and I don't, he's contributing to society and I'm not. After all, he says, when I'm old and in a nursing home I'm going to need nurses and cooks and whatnot to take care of me, and he's producing that. Hmpf. In addition to all the logical flaws in that statement, the whole thing is downright arrogant. Having kids isn't the only way to provide for one's future. And if you aren't going to regulate their behavior, having kids does harm to the rest of us.

I think people who want kids (and can care for them) should have them. While I could wish for more of a decline in the rate of growth of world population -- I'm not excited to see another doubling in my lifetime -- I don't agree with the folks who apparently want everyone to stop having kids at all. That's just silly.

But I also think that people who don't want kids should be left in peace, not demeaned or pressed into service or ostracized because "family-friendly" has turned into "childless-hostile".

That's refreshing. On Sunday I ordered a couple of books from Amazon third-party sellers (neither urgent), and B5 second season from Amazon directly. Monday morning I received mail from one of the marketplace sellers telling me my book had shipped, and I got similar mail from the other Monday evening. (Both of these are books that I came out of the tikkun with recommendations for.)

Sunday afternoon we went to my niece's graduation party. The balance of guests was not what I expected. I was assuming there would be a flock of 17-year-olds and a smattering of folks our age, mostly relatives. As it turned out, the kids were all migrating among many parties, so at any given time the adults outnumbered the kids by, oh, 5 to 1 or so. (Graduation was Friday night, so this was probably the prime party weekend.)

Many of the adults were from the church choir (my father and Kim both sing in it). I noticed that most of the choir members were wearing red, so I asked my father about it. Sunday was Penticost, which I suppose I could have worked out on my own if I'd thought about it, and there is a tradition of wearing red for the holiday. (I think the reason had something to do with an association between the holy spirit and fire, but I didn't quite catch it. Education welcome.) I'm glad that the red shirt I pulled out of the drawer that morning had a spot of something on it (so it went to the laundry pile). I would have given an incorrect impression without meaning to. I much prefer that my incorrect impressions be planned. :-)

I found myself in the uncomfortable position of balancing kashrut concerns against being kind to my family. They went out of their way to make sure none of the side dishes contained dairy so I could eat the meat, when I would have preferred to stick to the dairy/veggie dishes instead. (They also made sure to put meat and cheese cold cuts on different platters, segregate the ham from the turkey, and so on.) I could see that I was going to upset my mother if I didn't eat the meat, though, so I did.

(I'll eat meat meals in my parents' home, and for that matter in my friends' homes, so long as the basics are observed (species, no dairy, etc). I want to be able to eat with my family and friends. In a situation where there's a variety of food, both meat and non-, however, I'll avoid the meat. Most parties are like that, for example.)

Sunday evening we had a lovely dinner with Ralph and Lori (mmm, brownies!) and then played a new-to-us card game that I've forgotten the name of. It was entertaining, whatever it was. It involves cards in rows and columns where you rotate cards to try to make edge patterns line up; if you do that you get to remove cards, which have point values. (The object is to maximize points.) There are enough unusual conditions to make the game interesting while not being so many to be hard to track. Most card games with individualized cards fall down on the latter point for me -- Magic, Illuminati, Chez whatever, etc.

Sometime during the evening it rained, which I didn't think much of at the time. I was surprised to come home to a dark house. Fortunately, we knew where the flashlights, candles, and mechanical alarm clock were, so this was not as inconvenient as it might have been. Pity I can't read by candlelight, though, but it was late enough that this wasn't a real hardship.

Panasonic scores points for at least one model of VCR. I'd noticed before that after brief power outages I had to reset the clock but the programming wasn't lost. A five-hour outage is more than the backup can handle, apparently, so this time the programming was lost -- and the VCR told me that in big letters on the screen. Definite UI points there for warning me that they'd violated an expectation I might have had. (Mind, I was going to check anyway, but still...)

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. :-)

Friday night there was a bat mitzvah at services. I would be really, really happy if the congregation would institute two rules for Friday-night b'nei mitzvah: (1) no "parental greeting", and (2) the kid's d'var torah must be longer than the thank-you section. ( small rant )

Saturday morning one of our occasional attendees (a young man) told me that he's moving to Arizona in a couple weeks. It sounds like he's connected with the community there, which is good. I would be intimidated by moving, alone, across the country. I wish him well, and I told him to send email when he gets there.

Saturday night after dinner we went to

lefkowitzga's to hang out and play games, including the longest hand of Uno I have ever played. I was getting droopy around midnight (and knew we'd be meeting my parents in the morning), so we left around 12:30 or so.

Today was my father's 65th birthday. Our anniversary was a couple weeks ago. So we all went out to brunch and each of us thought we were treating the other. It was pretty funny. They gave us a nifty cheese knife and a very good vegetable peeler (Cutco). Good tools in a kitchen make a big difference! We took the cheese knife (along with some cheese) to Ralph and Lori's this afternoon; the knife was excessive for the soft cheese we were bringing, but the geek factor of playing with sharp objects prevailed. :-)

This afternoon was the annual bunny melt (and high tea). It was much fun, and we had vast quantities of food. The cats mostly behaved, though one of them (I assume Louie, but I didn't see it) attempted a close encounter with the remains of the fondue and was tossed across the room for his sins. Or so I gather; I wasn't in the room at the time.

I discovered this afternoon that I am still having hardware problems. My CD burner won't burn, and reading from a CD in the drive for more than about 30 seconds (I was attempting a software install) causes the machine to reboot. More side effects of the meltdown, I presume. It's all under warranty, but I don't want to be without my machine for several days again. Given that it's followup from the last repair, I'd really like it if I could make an appointment for a specific time to get it looked at. In other words, I want to wait in line at home. I'll bet I can't, but tomorrow I will call and ask.

Tonight Dani and I watched two more episodes of B5 (first season), "Signs and Portents" (important episode) and "TKO". I didn't care for "TKO" the first couple times I saw it, but this time it worked pretty well for me. (I never disliked the shiva plot; it was the martial-arts plot that didn't do anything for me.)

I had a geeky moment with the former plot. There is a point where someone says she's going to recite the "mourner's prayer" in English instead of in Hebrew. Last time I asw this episode I remember thinking, on hearing the English, "hey, that's not the mourners' kaddish". This time I recognized it for what it was (El molei rachamim). Cool; I'm getting literate. :-)

Wednesday night I went to a seder hosted by friends from my congregation. Dani was too sick to go. I think I woke him up when I asked him to drive me over there; oops. (It was before sundown and I had food to contribute.) It was very pleasant, and it included several other people from my congregation who didn't have anywhere else to go, so I wasn't the odd person out at the family gathering. (The only family were the couple, her father, and their younger son, who is in college. The older son lives in California.) ( seder geeking )

Then Thursday it was off to Toronto. Fortunately, Dani was feeling much better. Crossing the border was innocuous in both directions, though the US guard looked at us funny when we said we were married. You would think that no one would be surprised by last names that don't match these days. (This was also the first time I had to show photo ID. Dani always has to show his green card, but they've never challenged me before.)

( Thursday's seder )

Talk of SARS is everywhere in Toronto, but it doesn't seem to be keeping people from going out. Friday we accompanied Debby and Tucker to a crafts show; it was smaller than last year's but well-attended. And Saturday night after Shabbat we went to see Second City (fun show), which was also well-attended. I thought our brief brush with the outskirts of Chinatown on Friday was a bad idea, but it wasn't prolonged and I think it was ok.

Saturday morning I went to Beth Tzedec (Conservative) for services. I was met at the door by a security guard who directed me to the SARS instruction sheet, which said, basically, "no kissing (not even the Torah), no handshakes, kiddush is cancelled, and don't enter this building if [list of conditions here]". We heard some horror stories from Debby (who works in a hospital) about entire congregations, workplaces, etc having to go into quarantine because of contact with one person, so I guess that makes sense, but it still surprised me a little. I mean, if I'm in the same room as someone and breathing the same air, does it really matter if I shake his hand?

( more about services )

We spent most of the time there being "on" with various family members. While visiting is preferable to being bored because everyone is off doing stuff and we can't really go anywhere, it's also wearing. I really wish there were a practical way to visit with Dani's family in smaller doses. We visit with my family several times a year, in 6-8 hour doses, which works well -- but they're local, so we can.

I also wish some of his family would come to Pittsburgh occasionally; the burden shouldn't always be on us to go there. Looking ahead, next year's seders are on Monday and Tuesday, which means there'll probably be pressure for us to come up the previous weekend. I think I'm going to lobby for driving up Monday, hitting the two seders, and leaving Wednesday. I probably won't get away with it, but I can try. (I won't give the effort four vacation days, so if we extend the trip it will be by going up Sunday.)

( random travel notes )

I learned two new euphemisms during this trip:

"highway maintenance ahead"; yes, the sign was orange. That's putting a positive spin on construction, I'd say.
"unprotected contact", which seems to mean being within 15 feet of someone without wearing a full-body condom. (Well, mask, gown, and gloves; they don't seem to be doing the hats and booties.)

I have these pseudo-relatives (godparents, actually) in California. We've been exchanging fairly generic gifts in December for as long as I can remember. They're fairly generic, because we don't really know each other. (I try to put some thought into it, of course, and I assume they do too, but everyone's operating on old data.) They were college friends of my parents, and there was regular contact when we lived in California, but we moved to the Pittsburgh area when I was three, so I don't remember much of this. I've seen them once since then, when I was 14.

For years I've wanted to find a polite way to stop mailing gifts to each other, because it seems kind of pointless when we don't really know each other. But I've never been able to figure out how, so inertia has carried me forward. (It's easier to keep sending gifts than to broach the subject.) I have no way of knowing whether their feelings are similar. I tried asking my mother for help several years ago, figuring that she knows them better than I do, and her advice was to just leave it alone.

So this year, for either the second or third year in a row (can't remember about 2000 now), I didn't receive anything from them. They have been slow to pick up on changes of address in the past, but I know they have my correct address because they've sent thank-you notes for the gifts I sent them. They also sent us a wedding gift two and a half years ago, which might be the last thing I received from them. (Yes, I sent a thank-you note promptly.)

But now it gets weird: I received a thank-you note yesterday for this year's gift, and in addition to the standard content they said that if I'm ever in California please come visit, and here's a phone number, and they have plenty of space in their house now that they're empty-nesters. What the heck? Does this mean they want a closer relationship with me? How do I balance that against the lack of a gift?

So have they stopped sending gifts, or have they been sending them into a postal black hole and they think I'm rude for not sending thank-you notes? Do I respond to their letter without saying anything about gifts? Do I respond and say I didn't receive anything? Do I not respond? Other than this invitiation, which is unlikely to apply because I don't have any reason to go to California, the letter would not demand a response.

I'm not going to call them. I hate phones unless I already have a relationship with the person on the other end. That conversation would be awkward.

And I find that I'm not really inclined to try to develop a relationship with these people. They seem like perfectly nice people; I have nothing against them. But to develop, let alone maintain, a friendship, you need either common interests or easy and frequent contact, and we don't seem to have either here. So shrug. I think even my parents have dropped down to the exchange-letters-in-December level, so if they're not staying in closer contact, what would it mean for me to try?

I don't think Miss Manners covers this one.

Today we went to my parents' house to do the holiday get-together. (The rest of the family is my sister and her two kids.) Things went reasonably well, though both of my parents were more distracted than usual (my father by a football game, and my mother by a string of small things). So we didn't spend all that much time talking, which was unfortunate. I can sort of roll with stuff like that because I've known these people a long time, but I could tell that Dani was feeling somewhat on the outside and I didn't know how to fix that.

My parents gave us a George Foreman grill. Woo hoo! I wondered if they were fishing for possible reactions at Thanksgiving when they showed us theirs, but it turns out they bought this for us back in August, before we ever saw theirs. I'm looking forward to using it. It looks like a good size for two people.

They also gave me the first season of Babylon 5 on DVD (I suspected they would, so I held off buying it). They gave Dani an anime movie (on DVD) that I have failed to retain the name of. We got my mother a season of X-Files, my father Band of Brothers (but it's been delayed, so we had to give him a promissory), and my sister the Back to the Future trilogy and the first season of Buffy. It was the year of DVDs in our family. :-) (We all acquired players within the last year, so this was forseeable.)

(There were other gifts, but it's not my intention to catalog everything here. I am pleased that almost all of the gifts we brought were well-received.)

Dinner featured a lamb roast (I really like lamb), which my mother hasn't been making much lately. My sister doesn't like lamb, so they threw some chicken into the GF grill for her. It's about as fast as nuking, I guess, but a lot more tasty. My spice cake went over well. My sister seems to have had a Martha Stewart moment; she fabricated a train out of candy, crackers (small ones for wheels), and assorted other stuff. It was novel. Apparently she got the idea out of that Pilsbury cooking magazine that we both subscribe to; I haven't yet read the recent "holiday desserts" issue.

My father is currently wrestling with DSL from Verizon (sound familiar?), apparently the only carrier serving their town. (I just sent email to Telerama to check on that, as he hadn't heard of them.) He had some problems getting it set up, and spent a while on the phone with a guy with a script, and eventually he got a connection. Then he rebooted the machine, and ever since he has been getting an error (number only, no text -- I thought Macs were supposed to be better than that), and no network connection. And whatever is happening is also hosing his modem, so he can't dial out. I hope he's able to get some help from Verizon tomorrow. Dani and I tried to debug it but didn't get very far. Oh, and one oddity: they have to put some sort of special "filter" hardware on every phone in their house because DSL messes up the phone line. I knew that Verizon required something like that back in 1999, but I was told that they'd eventually fixed that. I wonder if, when they enter new service areas, they start by recycling all the hardware they've stopped using elsewhere. :-) (My parents' town only got DSL recently.)

My niece has become rather sullen and rude, particularly in the last year or so, and I don't know why. I hope that going away to college next year fixes it, rather than making it worse.

Thanksgiving with my parents, my sister, and her kids went well. (My niece and nephew are still self-centered brats in a lot of ways, but oh well.) I enjoy spending time with my parents. So many families are messed up in various ways that I'm very glad I can say that.

We tried to pry some gift ideas out of various folks, with partial success. (If anyone can tell me the name of a series that ran on HBO, exists on DVD, and was described to me as "kind of like Saving Private Ryan", I will be grateful.)

Food was yummy. My mom made a new dish in the "yam" niche; it had applesauce, yams, brown sugar, oatmeal, and other stuff that I've forgotten. That doesn't sound like an especially promising combination, but it was very good. Sweet, though; I think I'd cut the brown sugar back if I made it.

We never got to the pies. That's fine; I didn't go hungry. :-)

Tomorrow morning I head off to a con (Darkover) with the rest of On the Mark. We have two performances, and I think we're going to sound great. I'll be back Sunday night.

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

There was also an interesting question at Torah study on Saturday, but that'll have to wait for another time.

My niece (Kim) is a senior in high school, which means she is in full college-search mode. A couple nights ago, my mother told me that Kim was accepted at Seton Hill and offered a scholarship for 50% of tuition. Not bad, but isn't September the wrong time of year for that? I thought you spent the fall applying to colleges, got word around February or March about acceptances/rejections, and made a decision around April or May. It strikes me as odd that a school would offer admission nearly a full year in advance of when the student will enter. (No, Kim hadn't applied for any early-admission programs, and she'll be graduating high school in May like you'd expect.)

My mother didn't know how long Kim has to respond. I suppose it could be a ploy to get kids to commit early, before they've heard back from other schools, but I'd be kind of surprised by that.

Kim really wants to go to St. Vincent, which is actually related to Seton Hill, but she'd accept Seton Hill as a second choice. (I think my sister is relieved that Kim has given up her aspirations of going "somewhere far away" for school.) Of course, at $17k per year for tuition alone, she's going to need to come up with more scholarships or other financial aid, but I think she'll stand a good chance of qualifying.

That's cute. I accidentally got an old email address back -- not that I really intend to use it for incoming mail.

Once upon a time, I had a dial-up Unix shell account from Telerama. Customer support was pretty poor. Eventually I moved my shell account (and email) to JTAN, which provides fantastic service for $99/year. No dialup, but I don't care. (So Telerama has come a long way in the customer-service department, it would seem.)

The new Telerama DSL account comes with two mailboxes, and I wanted one for the occasional piece of mail that I want to send to or from my machine directly. Mostly I will ignore incoming mail to this address, just like I've done with the Verizon address. You should not send me mail at Telerama. (Use pobox.)

When they set up my mailbox this afternoon, they gave me my old ID back. mjc@telerama.com lives again. :-)

I used to use "mjc" everywhere, because that's what the CS department at CMU handed me. (This was an improvement over my CMU TOPS-20 ID.) When I eventually signed up for pobox.com forwarding, "mjc" was taken so I took "cellio". Since then, I've used "cellio" everywhere. I've come to prefer it, actually. I don't like my middle name and don't use the initial (or name) if I can possibly help it any more. The person my parents named me after (for that name) is now dead, so I don't feel like I have to worry about offending her. And I think I'm probably the most internet-savvy Cellio out there, and I got there first, so if my father or a cousin or something wanted that ID from any service we both use, tough. :-)

( Inlaws, storm aftermath, and 'Sunday dinner' )

Is there a word in English to designate the person who is my husband's brother-in-law? Saying that he is my brother-in-law implies, to me, that either he is my sister's husband or my husband's brother. The person I'm describing is my husband's sister's husband.

I don't need this word often, but the person in question comes up in conversation just often enough to cause me to trip over this too many times.

Current Mood: curious

We are back from Toronto. (I haven't begun to catch up on my friends yet.) The trip was mostly pleasant; I always enjoy spending time with Dani's sister (Debby) and many of his other relatives. Debby is especially nice and considerate; she asked me up front about restrictions for Shabbat and Yom Tov (the holiday, Pesach day) and also about food during Pesach, and she made sure that she wasn't going to put me in any awkward positions. She even went out and bought special kosher-for-Pesach food that she wouldn't normally have bought. She remembered pretty much all of the details, which is pretty impressive for someone who is not herself observant. Extremely considerate and impressive, especially as my own husband, who lives with observance, seems unable to keep certain basics straight such as that I won't go out to a restaurant on Shabbat. (Yes, this came up while we were there. Sigh.)

The first seder was with Dani's father's family -- actually, this time, hosted by one of Dani's father's wife's kids (follow that?). Dani's father and wife are still in Florida; this is the first time they've not been in Toronto for Pesach since I started going there. The theme of this family's seder always seems to be "let's race through this and eat", which I find disappointing. (We don't even do the second half.)

The second seder was hosted by Dani's mother and was smaller (her, us, Debby's family, and two friends). Dani led the seder, though "leading" in this case is about herding cats, as we always go around the table reading the haggadah. I guess he got to pick which songs we sang. It was fun (and the aforementioned friends are neat people), though the family's home-brew haggadah leaves out a lot of parts that I probably would have inserted myself if I were leading (like all the brachot!).

I guess between the two I got one more-or-less complete seder. It's not ideal, but shalom bayit and all that...

The people from the first seder usually go off to watch hockey playoffs after dinner, but this year it's too early for that. They taped "West Wing" and we were there when the people still remaining decided to watch the show. I had never seen it before, but it was good! Cleverly written, and fun. I'll have to check it out. (I'd heard of the show, but somehow had the idea that it was a medical show -- west wing of a hospital. It's actually about the (ficticious) president of the US and his staff.)

Friday Debby wanted to go to a crafts festival, and I don't accept the second day of holidays [1], so we went along. Saw some neat stuff, though I didn't buy anything. I almost bought a very nifty stained-glass nightlight for the bathroom, and if I had remembered in time that Canadian dollars are much smaller than US dollars I actually would have bought it, but I spaced on the price and thought it was too high. Oh well.

Saturday night after Shabbat we went to see a new play called "Belle", about two ex-slaves in the Reconstructionist era. It was very episodic and somewhat lacking an overall plot. Debby and Tucker (who go to a lot of new plays) said that's the trend these days. I don't care for it, personally.

[1] One-day holidays are extended to two days outside of Israel because of calendar uncertainty. I hold (as do pretty much all Reform and many Conservative Jews) that now, in the 21st century when we know precisely when the new moon is, we do not have this uncertainty and thus do not need the extra day.

Saturday morning at Torah study we were talking about "peace offerings" again, so I asked how often this was done. Was this a special occasion, or did you do this any time you wanted to eat meat, or what? (The rabbi had said something in passing about how this was your chicken for Shabbat.) He said it's a good question and he's not sure; he believes that if you were in the "temple district", so to speak, then yes, you had to take it to the temple as a korban, and give the priests and God their shares, before you could eat it. If you were farther away, though, he's not sure; he said it didn't seem likely that people were expected to come from all across Canaan, let alone points farther away. (Of course, in the desert no one was that far from the mishkan, so this wouldn't have been such an issue.)

Perhaps ironically, my mishna study group, which is doing Tractate Pesachim, has just gotten to the practical details of how so many lambs can be slaughtered in such a short period of time. Every Jew was required to bring a lamb on erev Pesach, which would then be eaten at the seder. Obviously people could team up (you can't save leftovers), so that's one per large family or perhaps pair of families. But that's still an awful lot of lambs, and they only had a few hours in which to perform the ritual. I'm curious about how this will play out...

Friday night we had a guest speaker who is involved with the Holocaust Center in Pittsburgh. (I didn't know we had one.) Sadly, he was not a very engaging speaker; he kept talking about his opportunities to get to know survivors and so on, some of whom were there that night, and I found that I would have been much more interested in hearing them speak. Oh well. Sometimes the pulpit guests work out well, and sometimes they don't. It frustrates me when I realize that I've lost the opportunity for a good sermon from my rabbi to one of the ones who didn't work out. (Ooh, I feel like such a groupie! But it's true; I almost always find what my rabbi says to be very interesting, and I look forward to his talks.)

Saturday my parents stopped by shortly after I got home. They were in the neighborhood and wanted to drop something off (Dani's Christmas present, as it turned out), and I invited them in for lunch. (On Shabbat I try to make sure there's extra food in the crock pot, so I have the option to bring someone home from services.) This was the first time they'd heard kiddush and motzi and stuff, and my father ended up asking me a bunch of questions about Shabbat. I think it's pretty nifty that he wants to know about this stuff. Among things, we went partway down the "what is forbidden work?" path.

Saturday night Dani and I went out to Prince of India in Oakland. We'd never been there before, but we had a coupon from the entertainment book and I'd been craving Indian food, so we tried it. I thought the food was pretty good, though not as good as Sitar. The service was slow. And we ended up not using the buy-one-get-one-free coupon because when we got there we saw a sign in the window that said "dinners half off 7-10pm". It's kind of the reverse of the typical early-bird special, I guess. We asked if that applied on a Saturday night and they said yes, so we took it. (The coupon doesn't stack with other offers, in case you're wondering.)

The food in general was pretty good; the papadam was excellent. I want to learn how to make that, but I've never seen a recipe. (This is that thin wafer made out of lentils. It usually has a bit of a kick from pepper. This certainly did.)

We went to my parents' today for Christmas. (They're Christian; we're not. But they are pretty attached to the dinner and gift exchange, so we go.) We were having trouble figuring out what to get my parents, and ended up giving them a gift certificate for a vacation. They've gone on a bunch of bus tours -- a few days in Atlantic City, a weekend of shows in Toronto (Phantom twice, I think), and assorted things like that. So we contacted the company they buy these from, found out what one of these will cost this coming year, and bought them that. I always feel funny buying people gift certificates (or giving money), but in this case I think it was the right thing to do. They seemed to appreciate it.

They got me a digital camera. Woo hoo! It appears to be complicated enough that I couldn't just pop the batteries in right then and take some pictures; I should read the manual first, which I'll probably do tomorrow night. But I am so looking forward to being able to screen my shots immediately and retake them if they aren't good! Not to mention the instant gratification -- not having to use of the roll of film before getting use of the pictures will be a big win.

They got Dani a copy of Civ III, but Dani didn't understand the family ground rules about obvious gifts and proximity to Christmas, so he bought himelf a copy a few weeks ago. They're in the process of exchanging it for a different game that reviewers who like Civ III seem to also like. (Europa Universalis II, for those who are curious. I've never played it.)

The new machine is now on the network, sort of. (It can see the network but the other machines can't see it.) Dani named it "Hub2". Gee, how creative. :-) (Also inaccurate...)

Last night Dani and I went to a party to celebrate Larry's 60th birthday. (I had no idea he was 60 until we got the invitation; I was guessing mid-50s.) The party was very nice, and I got to see some people I haven't seen in a while (ex-Claritechers and SOs).

Alison was there and seems to be happy; the startup she joined (formed by two Claritech VPs) seems to be doing very well in the funding department. (They still need customers.) If David had actually let them do their jobs at Claritech, things probably would have turned out differently.

Mark was there. He seemed to be tired and worn down, but not nearly as bad as he was at the end of the Claritech thing. Things seem to be getting better for that group now, too. (Hi guys. :-) )

Services this morning were a lot smaller than usual because lots of people are off at a big UAHC convention in Boston. I've got to get to one of those someday; people always come back from them energized. (It's a mix of lectures, workshops, and services, with (among things) lots of singing. Oh, and reportedly one of the biggest collections of Judaica for sale in a single location.)

This afternoon I took a nap for a couple hours. At one point the "snoozons" were pretty heavy in the living room: Embla was sleeping on the couch, Baldur was sleeping on the other recliner, I was sleeping on a recliner, and Erik was sleeping on me. :-) But I felt a lot better after I woke up.

I have to figure out what to get my parents for Christmas. They are hard to buy for. In an unusual turn of events, I actually have some ideas for my father but not for my mother (usually it's the other way around). The only thing my mother has mentioned is something that would really be for both of them, and would also manifest as a gift certificate so they could pick out the item (they would have to). I don't like giving gift certificates, but maybe that's what I'll end up doing in this case. Dunno. At least my sister and her kids are still easy; the kids are still addicted to Nintendo-type games. (The new thing this year is something called a "game cube". I have no idea what makes it different from the previous generation of Nintendo machines.)

I also have to figure out -- soon, as it has to be mailed -- what to get my godparents. It's a frustrating situation: we have basically no contact, and I'd be happy to just end the gift-exchange thing entirely, but my parents think they would be hurt by that. But we don't really know each other, so every year we exchange generic gifts based on insufficient information. Sigh.

Tomorrow night is the first night of Chanukah. I'm going to make some latkes to take to Sunday dinner. Ralph and Lori get to figure out what goes with latkes. :-)

Thanksgiving dinner with my family was good. My nephew (Zachary) is still loud, self-centered, and generally obnoxious, but he has mellowed a bit. He is now merely an obnoxious pain in the ass, rather than an unbearable obnoxious pain in the ass. Kim (my neice) seemed to be more sociable than she has been the last few visits, which is good. I can't believe she's a junior in high school already.

My parents had a painting that Kim did not too long ago. She is a really good artist, at least when copying. She did an oil painting from a photo that looked *very* nice.

Dinner was quite tasty, as usual. There was some maternal angst because the turkey was taking "too long"; she thought the timer should have popped up an hour or so before it did. We checked with a meat thermometer and the timer was right; it just takes a while to cook a large bird.

D&D Tuesday night was fun. We didn't make much "plot progress", but we made "character progress" and it was fun to play through some of the interactions. I think I'm getting a better feel for how to play my character.

I'm headed out tomorrow morning for the con. On the Mark only has one performance this year (not our usual two), and it's Friday night. So we'll be able to relax the rest of the weekend. Clam Chowder will have its usual fabulous Saturday-night performance, I presume. Yaakov will be there this year (he wasn't last year), and I'm looking forward to chatting with him. He said we'd talk about the synagogue board thing; he's a past shul president, so he's familiar with the inner workings of at least one type of synagogue. (I had sent him mail and he suggested talking in person.) Maybe he can advise me.

Monica

Thanksgiving weekend

Thanksgiving

learning experience

weekend

short takes

short takes

questions from ommkarja

children are our future?

Sunday (mostly)

short takes

weekend

last few days

gift protocol

family visit

Thanksgiving

weekend (yeah, yeah, it's already Tuesday.... cope)

this isn't college-admission season, is it?

on user IDs and middle initials

Saturday

(no subject)

back from Toronto

Shabbat report

family visit

weekend misc

(no subject)

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