I heard a new word this weekend, referring to certain breeds of terrier: "verminator". It made me giggle, but I knew exactly what she meant -- which, I suppose, is the purpose of language. :-)

What is it with cats and plastic, anyway? All of my cats like to lick plastic. (They don't ingest it -- just lick.) Embla likes to rub against it. Huh?

Saturday I had lunch with the Orthodox (Chabad) family we visited once before. It was a pleasant afternoon. ( Read more... )

Yesterday we got together with other members of our Pennsic camping group to make some camp furniture. We have two problems to address: we need more seating, and we need places to put the miscellaneous clutter that accumulates on the tables. So we made chests, specifically sized to work well for seating at tables. Some people actually built them Saturday; Sunday was sanding and painting. Note for future: sawdust is, or behaves like, an allergen. Oops. We had fun, and the chests are very spiffy -- comfortable to sit on and good for storage. We made two "one-seaters" and one double (it's three feet long). The double will require two people to carry, but the singles are light enough to be moved by one person.

After dinner and the departure of most of the people, Dani and I stuck around for a while to play games with Alaric. The first game we played was Vinci (I forget who publishes it). It's a neat game, though I think it plays rather differently with three players than with the max of six. You play on an abstract map of Europe, and you play a civilization with two arbitrary characteristics (such as "extra points from grasslands" or "extra points from resource spaces" or "get extra temporary soldiers at the start of each turn"). On your turn you expand/attack, then score based on your position, then pass to the next person. Units that you lose due to conquest are not replaced, so over time your ability to score decreases. When you think you've reached the point where it's no longer worthwhile, you declare that you are going into decline and get a new civilization to play on your next turn. Your tokens from the previous civilization stick around, and score, until blown away by the other players. When someone reaches a certain score threshold you complete the turn and then high score wins. I ended up with civilizations that were fairly straightforward to play, and won by a few points. I would enjoy playing this game again with more people; I think more players would force faster turnover.

After that we played Carcassonne; I'm not very good at it, but it was fun. Sometimes I think I will never get a handle on the strategy for claiming fields. We played with an expansion that included some new tiles, all of the "double or nothing" variety. For example, by default, at the end of the game, a partially-completed city still scores some points; if it contains a cathedral tile then it scores more points if complete but none at all if incomplete. I haven't played enough to know if this actually adds anything, or if it's just needless complexity. I suppose it can work well if played hostily -- that is, play a cathedral into someone else's city that you think he won't be able to complete.

This weekend we watched more of B5 season four, specifically the end of the shadow war. This seemed abrupt in the first run; it seems even more abrupt now. I assume, but don't know, that if JMS had known he had a fifth season, he would have carried this war through this season and into the fifth, and focused more on the Earth and Minbari civil wars. That would have made a much better story, I think. We were both struck by how well the end of "Into the Fire" could have worked as the end of the series -- not that that's where he would (or should) have ended it, but in terms of the storytelling, it had "major wrap-up" written all over it.

Another show where watching the DVDs reinforces a past impression is West Wing. Watching season three on DVD so soon after the broadcast of season five emphasizes just how much better the show was in the prior season. I think season four might have been weaker than season three, but five was much much weaker than anything that came before. Sad.

Friday night my rabbi gave a wonderful sermon. At the oneg I told him he should put it on the web site so it could be shared more widely (he does this very occasionally), and he said he had done it all from notes, not a written copy. Drat!

My torah portion (for the Shabbat after next) is in pretty good shape. I was able to do the whole thing, with some hesitation but no non-recoverable errors, from the unpointed text tonight. Not cold, though; I practiced for a while before doing that. I'm meeting my rabbi for study on Wednesday and I'll chant it for him then (he asked to hear all of us).

A new vegetarian restaurant called Zen Garden opened yesterday a few blocks from home. Unfortunately, while they're usually open until 11 on Saturdays, last night they closed early due to some logistics stuff. (They got a lot more people than they expected, they said.) So we'll have to check it out some other time. Soon, I hope; I picked up a menu and it looks pretty good. And an all-vegetarian restaurant means I don't have to worry about cross-contamination in the kitchen; I can eat there and be confident of kashrut issues.

Tonight we watched two more episodes of Babylon 5. We've now covered up through "A Distant Star". There have been many episodes that I'm enjoying more on the re-watch (actually re-re-watch, and sometimes re-re-re-watch) than I did before. Some of it's time (been a few years); some of it's picking up subtleties that I missed before; some of it's probably the absence of commercial breaks.

My scanner is acting up. It might be time to bite the bullet and just acknowledge that scanner technology has improved significantly in the last, um, six or seven years. :-)

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. :-)