Monica

He usually crawls under the covers at night and is often there in the morning. In the last few weeks he has started returning there immediately after his breakfast. (I don't understand how he breathes under there, but obviously he does.)

Serendipitiously, 15 minutes after seeing that scam I saw this excellent tutorial on password management by vonstrassburg. No, not the "how to choose a good password" hints you already know, but, rather, how to deal with the fact that that doesn't really work. I particularly like his suggestions for managing the database file.

From browngirl: Mordor or Iceland? Match the pictures to the source.

I have recently been participating in a small discussion of renaissance music notation... on a mailing list for Jewish worship. No, I didn't start it, but I could hardly let those comments just sit there... And now I have pointers to other editions of Salamone Rossi's music that seem worth investigating (Don Harran in particular). The edition I have is funky; the music is fine, but it's a transcription of a 19th-century French edition and Hebrew transliterated into French phonemes breaks my brain. I transcribe pieces from this book if our choir is going to do them. (What I really want to see is a facsimile edition...)

This tiny horse (link from anastasiav) gave me a serious case of the "aww, cute!"s.

Some iGoogle plug-in served me this cat picture, and all I could think was "yeah, I've had days like that". It's tempting to turn it into a userpic, but I don't know whose property it is.

Erik sometimes makes a squeaking sound now where I would have expected a meow to come out. He still has a full-voiced meow, so it's not like he's caught kitty laryngitis or something, but it's still odd. Embla's normal mode is a sort of chirp (I've only heard her actually meow two or three times), but this sort of thing is new for Erik. Weird.

The adults had obviously done some research. During dinner they said "please tell us about the SCA" and "so what about the house on the flatbed?". I googled both of us later and the page for the little house on the flatbed does not come up in the first half-dozen pages of results, so I'm not sure how they got there. (Of course, my home page does, from there you can get to my page of SCA links, and from there...) I, lacking information beyond her first name, had done no such research; I hope I was not socially deficient in these modern times.

Both Dani's and my desktop computers have been gradually getting sluggish over time. Dani went shopping and found that we could each triple our memory for $50. Ah, much better! Dani was kind enough to install mine for me. (We have a clean division of labor when it comes to household IT: he does hardware and I do system administration. Things go more smoothly when we do not try to switch.)

Dani did another hardware installation this weekend: late last week the water flow to the shower head was, suddenly, extremely diminished. Advice found on the internet suggested banging on the head and/or pipes to shake loose any gunk that might be in there; we decided not to do that without replacement hardware on hand, 'cause some water is better than none at all. (I should mention, in passing, that it took me a couple tries to find any useful information here. Who knew that some people try to deliberately reduce flow to their shower heads? Err, isn't that what the tub knobs are for? But I digress.) In the end, Dani bought a $5 head and simply replaced it; the new one is actually better than the old one. (Another in the "who knew?" department: you can spend $100 on a showerhead. It had better be gold-plated, water-softening, temperature-regulating, and massaging, for that price!)

A week ago Monday I took all the cats in for checkups, and two got blood drawn for tests. Tuesday night I got a message: um, err, we lost some of it. I had the last appointments of the night, and apparently one vial got left in the centrefuge... so I had to take Erik (I'm glad it was Erik! He's easy!) back to be stuck again on Wednesday. They were apologetic, but sigh. (Everyone's basically normal, locally scoped.)

Shabbat morning was a little more rabbi-heavy than usual. Both of our rabbis were there (until it was time to leave for the later service, anyway). We also had our incipient third rabbi (yes, now it can be told... we were looking for an educator and got one who's also a rabbi; mabfan, you know him). And our associate rabbi's aunt, who is also a rabbi, was visiting. I'm glad that day's lay torah reader isn't one to get spooked easily. :-) (Though he might not have known about the last; I was introduced to her Friday night, but I don't think she mentioned her background Saturday morning.)

The third rabbi will be focusing mostly on education (including adults). He's an excellent teacher, and I'm looking forward to having more chances to learn with him. I presume that our adult-ed program is going to get a boost; yay!

( Read more... )

If you want a set of questions, leave a comment asking for some. (It may take me a few days to respond.)

( and one by night )

( gratuitious cat pictures )

I missed the first episode of the new TV show "Pushing Daisies" but caught the second. Wacky! Surreal! Fun! The narration as commentary is a nice touch. Yeah, that it's written by the person who did "Wonderfalls" shows; I hope "Pushing Daisies" fares better. ("Wonderfalls" was great for about 8 or 9 episodes, then sucked for a couple more, and was then pulled after 13.) I'm also watching "Journeyman", about which I'm undecided.

We drove through the rockslide zone of Route 28 on the way to visit my parents today. No rockslides were in progress at the time, and it looked like last week's had been completely cleared. The news had said inbound lanes would be completely closed for the weekend, but we saw continuous traffic while we were driving outbound so we didn't look for an alternate path home. It turned out that one lane was open. That was fine for a Sunday, but I'll bet it sucks for commuters right now. That said, rockslides suck more.

Two Shabbatot ago a first-time (in our minyan) Israeli torah reader asked me to be his checker. I expressed concern that I wouldn't be able to keep up; he said he reads holy texts slowly. His "slow" was too fast for me. Then this past Shabbat a different reader asked me to check for him and I figured this wouldn't be a problem; I had just a bit of trouble keeping up. Both times I was checking from the new Plaut (oodles better than the old Plaut), and using a magnifying glass to be safe. I conclude that my problem is Plaut + magnifier, not necessarily me, and I should only check when I can do it from larger Hebrew text such as what Trope Trainer produces. (I'm not the only torah reader in our group who uses that software, and in fact I have been handed TT output to check from at times.)

Without saying anything about the merits of Al Gore's work, I do admit to being puzzled by how this is a peace issue. Of course, in political processes all bets of rationality are off, but still... isn't there a more appropriate category in which to consider his work?

I heard a cute story recently: One night at dinner the seven-year-old girl asks her parents "where did I come from?" Oh crap, the parents each think; we thought we had a few more years before we'd have to deal with this. They exchange glances and then fumble through a discussion of birds, bees, and what happens "when mommies and daddies love each other very much". The girl says "oh" and everyone sits in silence for a few minutes. Then she continues, "my friend Becky comes from Cleveland".