cellio | Entries tagged with people

Some time ago a friend asked me when my birthday is because he had the "perfect" gift for me. (We don't normally send gifts to each other, but this was an exception.) I'd forgotten all about that until a package arrived recently.

It contained a very nice, hefty flashlight with a good solid grip. That was a little puzzling, but there was more amidst the packing peanuts. The package also contained a copy of the book Defensive Tactics with Flashlights, apparently written for police officers. This looks like a fascinating read (I'm not very far through it yet), and it tickles that "hand-weapon" interest that goes back to my SCA fighting days. As a pedestrian I've sometimes found myself contemplating the defensive properties of umbrellas, too. (And, I learned from Google, "flashlight tactics" is apparently a thing. I had no idea.)

Then I turned the flashlight on and was surprised by a blue beam. A very powerful blue beam (LED). Looking more closely: ultra-blue. That is, it's a "black light". Why is that interesting? Because I see into the UV spectrum, so that light does more for me than for others.

I'm impressed by my friend's ability to combine odd bits of trivia about me in this way. Nifty!

I used to think that henceforth I would only ever go to a church service for weddings, funerals, or educational historical recreations. But I failed to consider one other case, and now add ordination to that list. My friend M (who can identify himself if he wants, or not) was ordained this weekend as a Roman Catholic priest, and I was pleased to accept his invitation to the ceremony.

I am in awe of M, who gave up another career to enter the seminary several years ago. I couldn't really see the other three new priests clearly, but I think he was not the only one of that approximate age. I'm not saying it isn't noteworthy to do something like this right out of college, but making a profound change later in life strikes a particular chord with me. So seeing M achieve this, and seeing the joy and solemnity and sacredness all mingled together in the room, was pretty special.

The service was held at St. Paul's, a huge cathedral in Oakland. (It surely seats several thousand, but I couldn't tell more specifically.) They had a diocese choir, which was able to fill the place, and brass and percussion and of course organ. The pulpit is large, and good thing -- I think there were at least 75 people involved in this service (though not all at once, mostly).

I am not fluent in the high-church Roman Catholic mass (Wikipedia helped some), but this appeared to be most of a mass with a substantial ceremony occupying the center portion. During the ordination ceremony Bishop Zubick (the local bishop) spoke individually (but publicly) to each of the new priests, adding a personal touch that showed that he knows them. (I understand that when he came to Pittsburgh he declined the usual bishoply residence and asked for an apartment at the seminary instead.) Two of the four are returning to their school in Rome for graduate studies in the fall; the other two (including M) begin local assignments in a couple weeks. These assignments were given out during the ceremony; I had assumed that the priests knew in advance where they were being sent, but it turned out they learned when we did. I guess it reinforces that pledge they had each made to serve the church and the bishop no matter what. (It didn't actually say "no matter what", but there were words of some gravity.)

The mechanics of running this service were interesting. It was very smooth, and while most religious services are not on this scale, there's stuff to learn here for people running smaller ones. I'm going to talk about that first, and then I'll go into the geeking (for those who are still reading :-) ).

( service mechanics )

( geeking )

I met Caitlin sometime in the late 80s or early 90s when I was traveling a lot in the East Kingdom. She was graceful and kind and more than competent, and I always enjoyed conversations with her. I wish I had had more chances to sit and chat with her; it was always time well spent. The world is a little darker without

msmemory in it.

I find I have no other words right now, other than those about the unfairness of it all.

( gaming )

( SCA afternoon )

( cookout )

And tonight, to celebrate Dani's birthday, we went out to Casbah for dinner, where we learned that sitting on their (enclosed) patio during a thunderstorm still poses challenges, primarily acoustic. (But also some dampness because it's not completely enclosed; we ended up asking to move to another table partway through the meal.)

One of Casbah's standard appetizers is a cheese plate. The specific cheeses vary, but you can always get an assortment. Tonight all three of the cheeses we got were clear winners. Dani wrote the names down, though we've tried in the past to find cheeses we've eaten there and it's never worked out so far. Maybe this time will be different, but I'm not holding my breath.

Marian of Edwinstowe, more recently known as Old Marian, died last night. Marian had long been a fixture in the SCA when I joined. I met her at my first Pennsic, where she and Johan ran the Sated Tyger Inn, which was selling tasty period food long before most people were trying to cook such. That inn closed, and some years later she (and Chiron and maybe others) founded the Battlefield Bakery, where she continued the tradition.

I didn't know her especially well but I visited her bakery every Pennsic and, during the years I travelled a lot in the East Kingdom, I encountered and spoke with her quite a bit. She was gracious and friendly and always had time to spare for me and countless other nobodies (as I was at the time). I always enjoyed talking with her.

I remember when she resigned all of her awards. She made a point of telling the orders a year in advance -- so, she said, that there could be no question of whether she had done this because of some snit or disliked royalty. This was typical of the care she showed for others' feelings.

I regret that I did not get to know her well. Even so I will miss her, and her friends and family will miss her a thousand times more. The society is a poorer place today.

( Read more... )

Damn damn damn.

During Pennsic we learned that the reason Baron Len and Baroness Anna were absent (he was baron when I joined the SCA and she soon joined him on the thrones) was that she was in the hospital with a mysterious malady. Later in the week we learned that it had been diagnosed as pneumonia. She was in the hospital, being treated. That's supposed to be treatable these days. (She was not extremely old or in very poor health.)

In the last week there have been a couple messages on the baronial mailing list saying "still in ICU, still no visitors allowed". (I was watching this go by while out of town.) And today we got the message no one wanted to have to see.

What's especially sad about this to me is that, about a year and a half ago, Len fell ill with something mysterious. She was there for him and helped him recover once he got a diagnosis. Things were getting better. And now, after all this, she was stricken.

Len and Anna welcomed me into the SCA when I was a clueless college student, and taught me grace and maturity and how to live in society. If I learned a tenth of it, I count myself lucky.

( assorted )

Sunday was a planned work day for my Pennsic camp -- specifically some house repairs. Last year we replaced several sections of siding that had gotten mushy because we didn't know from day one that caulk is important. There were some sections we didn't get to last year, so we attacked those this time. Dani and I had done a scouting mission and several camp members had gotten together two weeks ago to prime and paint plywood, so this "should" have been easy. That noise you hear is heavenly laughter. :-)

When we did that scouting mission (a month or so ago) there were lots of wasps or hornets swarming around. (I was disinclined to get close enough to armed insects to determine which these were.) We've had nests before, so I brought up some chemical weapons this time -- and we found nothing. Ok, we found an occupied bird's nest (they can stay until Pennsic), but no wasp/hornet nests at all. That's great, but a little mystifying.

First lesson learned: a power inverter works better if you have the cables -- or, failing that, if the cables are not in a car at a gaming convention in Columbus. Oops. We were so careful to make sure I had the box before Dani left for Origins; it didn't occur to either of us that the full-looking box was not actually full. Fortunately, alaricmacconnal is handy with copper wire, which he was able to pick up on his way up to Cooper's Lake.

Second lesson learned: the circular saw really is too big for the power inverter (I think the person who thought it worked last year was mis-remembering), but a jig saw is good enough to make straight cuts in plywood. (A lesson we learned last year is that you can't really measure for the replacement piece until you've removed the old piece, which means cutting on site.)

Third lesson learned: rain is wet. :-) Ok, we already knew that, and we knew we were gambling some on the weather. We got rained on twice, but each time only lasted about 15-20 minutes and people were smart enough to come down from the big metal ladder. :-) A bigger storm rolled in as we were finishing, so we got to drive home in that.

We've had some impressive storms in the last few days. I don't think we got the predicted hail this afternoon, but on both Saturday and Sunday there were some pretty fierce winds and impressive light shows.

After I got home (and cleaned up) Sunday night I was able to visit with college friends from Seattle for a couple hours. I'm not certain they had had their first kid when last I saw them, and they were in town this weekend to drop him off at CMU's pre-college program. Wow -- been a long time. It was good to catch up some (though it was incomplete).

SCA friends, both serious researchers, just got back from their month-long honeymoon in Scandinavia. One of them works at my company, so yesterday he was chatting with folks about the trip. When I joined the conversation, another coworker said to me "ask him how many pictures he took".

Wait, I said, let me try to guess first. I asked the coworker how many museums he went to, and he said "one or sometimes two a day", but they lost a couple days to travel. So, I said, average of one museum a day for 30 days? He said that was about right, and volunteered that almost all of them allowed photography. We had already established that he was using a digital camera, not film.

Ok, I said. I'm going to estimate that you took between 250 and 500 pictures per museum, probably closer to the former. (The other coworker's eyes get big.) So, I continued, if I take the conservative number for now, that's 7500. I'm guessing you took a few picturs of scenery and stuff but not a lot (other coworker looks startled), and I did start with a conservative estimate. So, let's say between 9000 and 10,000 pictures total (other coworker's jaw drops). How'd I do?

He's not sure, but he knows it's at least 9000 and he thinks not as many as 10,000. :-) The other coworker asked "how did you do that?!". I said "you just have to know him". (Besides, I showed my work.)

( long )

I'm writing this from LaGuardia, where it's past the official boarding time and the plane isn't here yet. I suspect we'll be late.

Last night after Shabbat magid came to visit and went to JP Lick's for conversation and ice cream. (This seems to be canonical; I've gone for ice cream and conversation several times this week.) We sat at a table outside (the weather was good, not too hot nor sticky) until an employee kicked us out and we noticed that it was 12:30. Oops. :-) I don't mind; I hope magid didn't have any early-morning plans.

Several times over the week when classmates have asked me what I was planning to do that night (or what I'd done the previous night), I've said things like "have dinner with friends". People have commented on my having local friends as if it's unusual; they always want to ask where I know them from. Usually I've said something vague like "college" (technically true of some of my SCA friends, though we didn't necessarily attend the same schools) or "mailing lists". In the age of the internet, is this still that unusual? While it's not true that I know someone in every city, the last several times I've taken a trip, I've had a connection to at least one person on the other end -- even though that hasn't been the purpose of the trip. But, all that said, I found I wasn't ready to broach the SCA or LiveJournal with my classmates.

To continue the theme, when we finished up today around 12:30, I gambled and called goldsquare (who I'd failed to connect with earlier in the week). I had a 4:00 flight and was calling from Newton, so this was dicey and boiled down to "are you free right now?". Which he and his sweetie were, and we had time to have a bite in Brookline before they kindly dropped me off at the airport. I enjoyed meeting her and catching up with both of them. (Though I hadn't met her, I felt like I knew her at least a little via goldsquare's writing.)

6:04 and my 6:15 flight is just starting to board. More later.

Later: left 45 minutes late, arrived on time. Either they pad the schedule drastically or we caught one heck of a tailwind. :-)

The Tanakh I brought with me (JPS Hebrew-English, the larger of the editions I've seen) is the perfect size for supporting my iBook on the dorm desk (to get the screen closer to my eyes and the keys up a little). This feels almost, but not quite, sacreligious. :-)

Thursday night about half of the students (and one of the faculty members) went out for dinner. I had hoped everyone would come, but most of the students are local and thus have other obligations (spouses, kids, etc). It was a nice dinner with those who did make it.

That's turning out to be a key difference between this program and my experience of Sh'liach K'hilah. In SK, no one was local: almost everyone stayed in the dorm on campus, the days started early in the morning and ended late at night, we were with each other most of that time, and there were basically no outside distractions. The group had a real chance to get cohesive. Here, two-thirds of the students disappear soon after classes end at 4 or 4:30, only a few of us are staying in the dorm, and while I'm enjoying my interactions with most of my classmates as individuals, the group isn't really gelling strongly. That's not better or worse, just different. On the plus side, it's giving me time to spend with local friends. :-)

After the dinner tonight I met up with siderea (yay!). We walked around the area near the Hynes T stop, including 15 minutes in the Boston Library (it was near closing time). It's a neat place -- a library with a strong secondary identity as a gallery. Tonight they had a nifty exhibit of miniature books (I mean really tiny; they used coins as size indicators in some cases). Some of the miniature books came with miniature magnifying glasses, which was a nice touch. Some of the books were a little larger and I could imagine one actually holding them and reading rather than just showing off. After we got kicked out of the library we walked around the area some and then spent a while sitting in a cafe talking geekery. :-)

Part of the T is out of service, so for the last few stops heading back to the school we got kicked off the train and transferred to a bus. For all that the trains do a good job of communicating upcoming stops, the bus I was on sucked. There was a banner-style digital sign up front that was dutifully scrolling date and time past us twice a minute. Once I saw a request that people give up seats to the elderly. But it was not used to name upcoming stops -- and since it was stopping at the T stops, not on every corner, that would not have been burdensome. It irked me because I had not memorized the map (hadn't anticipated the problem) and I would not recognize my stop at night from inside the bus. The bus was packed, so walking to the front to ask the driver wasn't going to happen. I had to ask other passengers (characteristically, most did not know what stops we were passing), which was frustrating. I wonder if this was a failure of the system or a failure of that particular driver.

First, thanks to "Mr. Fixer", as he is known on LJ, for calling and talking me through my emacs issues (on the Mac). It turns out that there are three ways to launch emacs (different emacses) on this machine; one I didn't know about and the other two were clashing over the .emacs file. For my own future reference: running emacs from an xterm works, and so does running from the Mac shell if I use the "-q" option to surpress the .emacs file. (Since the .emacs file is for a different version, with settings for fonts and colors that don't matter when running in a shell, that's fine.)

I discovered tonight (when trying to install a mouse driver hakamadare clued me in about) that I don't know the root password for my machine. Err, oops. I wonder how I can fix that. (Maybe I'm lucky and the person I got the machine from remembers.)

Wednesday night I joined Andrew and his family (sorry Andrew; I can never get the user name right on the first try), mabfan, and gnomi for dinner, conversation, and ice cream. I had a good time. How can you not, when in a single evening you can geek about halacha, science fiction, comics (that was mostly mabfan, TV, and music? :-) Mabfan or Andrew, please remind me of the name of that TV show you were so excited about getting on DVD?

Much time was spent trying to find a way, within halacha, for someone (I won't out you here) to read the new Harry Potter book on Shabbat. (Some of my suggestions were rejected because they would involve waiting until morning; apparently solutions that don't involve starting by quarter past midnight aren't interesting.) I hope you find a solution, but if not, I suspect a 22-hour delay isn't fatal... :-)

Erik (one of my cats) is staying with a friend while I'm here, and apparently he's very comfortable in her house. She can offer him avian theatre (we don't get many birds visible from cat-accessible windows), and he quickly established his place in the household. Good, as he'll be going back for Pennsic in a couple weeks. :-) I miss the cats, but knowing they're in good hands helps.

Never mind the academic stuff: I'm beginning to wonder if I would have the physical stamina to attend this school if I lived in this city. That's one steep hill! I'm staying in a dorm at the top of the hill for this program (so no biggie), but the houses up here are all in the multi-million-dollar range, so ordinary people don't live here. (Actually, I wonder about the people who live in some of the humongous houses up here. Are they insanely rich, or large families or other groups? Some of these places look like they'd easily be 10,000 square feet.)

There appear to be no vending machines on Hebrew College's campus. How odd.

I've had a few instances of an odd style of encounter here, and I wonder if it's a Boston thing or if I'm just unlucky. I have asked people on the street (or in the T) what should be simple questions (e.g. "which of these intersecting streets is Center?" when there's no sign), and people who seem to be from around here don't know. In the example I just gave, it was a group of students who'd just gotten off a city bus. On the T, I asked someone who seemed to be a regular T rider (based on overheard conversation) "does this train go to Government Center" (a big stop), she said she didn't know, and then she got on my train (after I got the answer elsewhere) and rode it past that stop. There have been a couple other cases, too. Is this a "don't wanna talk to strangers" thing, or what?

(Tuesday afternoon will come later.)

Tuesday night we had planned a group outing to a local beit midrash (a monthly gathering that happened to be this week), but we learned that in the summer they scale way back and it was just going to be a discussion (with no guest or prominent speaker) of the weekly parsha. I can do that at home and I'd been invited to a group dinner before that came up and I'd declined, so I decided to un-decline and go do that.

( socializing )

( public transit in Boston )

( Read more... )

While I was in Boston I got to see a few people. :-)

( Read more... )

( Leigh Ann Hussey )

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.

Monica

nifty gift

an unusual shabbat

RIP Caitlin

weekend round-up

Marian of Edwinstowe

Yom Kippur wrap-up

random bits

baruch dayan ha-emet

weekend

Pennsic prep (mostly)

pegged him

Pennsic

in transit

other notes

interlude: non-class stuff

local friends

Open Beit Midrash: small worlds

social butterfly

last few days

Baruch dayan ha-emet

Shabbat

weekend and random bits

random geek notes

more about Steve

a very sad day

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