Monica

Last week, when I helped lead services, I received many compliments. In that situation it's always hard to tell where something is on the scale from "just being polite" to "heartfelt compliment", so it's best to not get too excited (though of course compliments feel good and I assume there's at least some degree of positive feeling involved in any such). However, I'll give a little more weight to the several people who approached me this week to tell me how much they enjoyed my singing last week, and to the multiple people who apparently told my rabbi this. Woo!

Thursday morning I led part of shacharit, as I mentioned before, and then led mincha at my congregation. I seemed to be more at ease with some of the text Thursday evening than I usually am. Repetition helps. :-)

This morning's study and service were back up to their usual numbers. My rabbi is back in town (yay!), but came back with some sort of bug (oops). I hope he's well enough to keep the appointment I have with him on Monday.

Today was the first day of Pennsic set-up. I got a message from our land agent that my house is in place, but that they managed to break the jack on the trailer hitch. Sigh! This is the second time that has happened. So it's in our camp, but it's not moving out at the end until I can replace that jack. I'll find out more when I go up there tomorrow. Last time it took 3-4 weeks for a mail-ordered jack to come, though I took the first web-based supplier I could find so maybe I can improve on that. The first thing to do, though, is find out how it failed so I know whether I should be buying a different jack. (That is, did something stupid happen, like driving it without raising the jack, or did it fail in a situation where it shouldn't've?)

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 .

Shabbat was low-key, which was a nice change after the road trip the previous weekend.

Sunday we went up to Cooper's Lake to deal with flat tires on the house trailer. (In theory we were also going to deal with hornets, but we didn't.) The house had sunk down a lot since last fall; this fall we will have to jack it up well beyond what we think will be needed. We ended up removing the two flat tires, as they had popped off the rims so we couldn't just reinflate. We have two spares (or will tomorrow; the place I ordered from accidetally shorted me one and promises a replacement ASAP), so this is a problem we can solve after Pennsic. Just as well; it turns out that most places that repair tires aren't set up for trailer tires. Different equipment, apparently.

Sunday we noticed that someone apparently hit a corner of our house, probably with another trailer. (The scraped paint goes fairly high.) Whoever it was scuffed up my fresh paint job and broke off one of my fake stones. Sigh. I'll fix it after Pennsic.

We got the results of our property-tax appeal. They lowered our assessment slightly, but not nearly as much as they should have. They knocked off half or a third of the cost of the central air they mistakingly thought we had, and near as I can tell they did not consider our comparable sales at all. Grr.

Tonight is D&D, where maybe I'll blow things up and feel better. :-)

Somebody at Sunday dinner (can't remember who now) asked about the little house I use for Pennsic. Here is a link. The pictures are out of date; we added some decoration this year. I have the new pictures scanned now (yeah, actual film -- no digital camera yet), but I haven't updated the site yet.