Blog/June 2014/Jun 6th

June 6th (See this week's devar torah)

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Hi, again!

Another action-packed week at the Aaron home! The last “yom-tov” for a while, “shavu`ot”, fell in the middle of the week. Apart from celebrating the holiday with friends, we brought on a new employee, sent a request to the “Chief Scientist”, and were generally busy.

Shavu`ot is mostly widely known as “the dairy holiday”, though it has nothing to do with cheese and milk; it celebrates the giving of the Torah at Sinai. In any event, we had a pleasant dairy meal in the evening at one of our friends’ places. We had a barbecue for lunch, and for “third meal” we had a pareve “pot-luck” with members of our weekly “Hebrew group”. So we had one of each kind of meal, and a generally pleasant time was had by all, I think. And Dinah did make us a delicious cheesecake.

Sarah ended school for the holiday, but she had a “work assignment”. She was given the (paid) task of photographing one of her classmates’ engagement parties. That was a long evening for her.

On Sunday our neighbor the fix-it-man came and repaired our spastic washing machine, B”H! He’s awesome, and we’re glad to have an honest repairman close by. Our gardener also came with his crew, and both Esther and I think the garden’s never looked so good!

Also on Sunday our new employee started, and we had her come to our house two days in a row in order to bring her “up to speed” as quickly as possible. Since we don’t have a physical office somewhere (right now), we need to have people who can work independently, from their own homes. I’m happy to say that our newbie seems to be able to work on her own, and seems to grasp what we tell her well enough. Of course she’s got a lot yet to learn, but that’s ok; we get to shape her knowledge and work patterns to suit us. However, training someone takes a lot of time and effort; let’s hope we won’t have to expend too much more effort on that.

Esther’s been working on putting content into the new website for 8th. She also did most of the preparatory work for our application to the “Chief Scientist of Israel”, a governmental agency which helps Israeli start-ups with some kinds of funding. If our request is approved, we’ll have more flexibility for hiring contractors and patents and those sorts of things.

I split my programming time between working on 8th itself, and working on the project for my “other company”. I made progress on both fronts, even though it was a short week. The main work on 8th is related to getting a cross-platform “GUI” (Graphical User Interface, e.g. what people see) running well. I had to abandon several other options, and am working on integrating a library I hadn’t heard of before; it’s interesting, but time’s a-wastin’ and I need to finish this up, pronto.

Odds and ends:

• Apparently, East Jerusalem's Arabs would mostly rather be citizens of Israel. Big surprise (not)
• 12 ways the US administration has failed its ally Israel
• Workers, unite! Seattle passes a law enforcing a $15/hour minimum wage. No doubt that will be excellent for Seattle’s economy, no doubt at all…
• And Israelis can now advertise on eggs. The pictured egg says “advertising with eggs”, but can also mean “ballsy advertising”. Take your pick…

The weather was a roller-coaster this week. It started fine, but got extremely hot (38C+) for the holiday; now it’s below normal (24C) and will slowly rise over the weekend to normal range (28C). An odd summer, so far — but we’re happy to have the cooler weather in the meantime.

It’s “back to normal”, just the three of us. After having the yom-tov in the middle of the week, we need some quiet-time. On the menu:
roasted chicken with chimichurri marinade, roasted potatoes, zucchini with mushrooms, beet salad, cabbage salad, roasted eggplant, veggie chili, rice, egg salad, and fruit.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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