Blog/October 2012/Oct 5th
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| Oct 5th (See this week's devar torah) | Comments or questions? Click here! |
Hi, again!
The holiday of sukkot is a very relaxing one. You get to lounge around in the great outdoors, listening to birds and taking in the views. You eat and drink, visit friends and family -- and just take it easy. That pretty much sums up our entire week!
Since many types of work are not permitted during the holiday week (yes, there are exceptions but I'm not going to enumerate the laws here), we end up doing more enjoyable things. For example, one day this week we went on a trip to ʿEin Sataf (there was not very much water there, the picture in the article is a bit deceiving). While there we intended to go see the crusader fort ruins nearby, but ended up taking the wrong path so we just saw pretty countryside instead. Not a problem.
We had visitors, both for the yom tov itself as well as during the week. We plied them with food and drink, as is our custom -- even firing up the barbecue one afternoon. The weather was mostly pleasant for sitting out in the sukkah -- a bit too hot at the beginning of the week, but tapering off to very pleasant by the end of it. We even had short bursts of rain on yom tov, to our surprise. More rain is forecast for early next week, B"H!
I also spent a fair amount of effort (brain-sweat, not physical effort) enhancing my TeX macros to make writing "diverey-torah" and similar documents easier and more consistent. Now I can quote a Biblical verse with the seemingly simple macro \bible(In the beginning...|bereshit 1:1), and it will put the "In the beginning..." in proper quotes, with a special font, and then (this is the magic part) it will figure out how to print the 'bereshit 1:1' appropriately (e.g. "Gen 1:1" in English, or "בראשית א:א" in Hebrew) and create the proper "http:" link for it. I can use the same macro in a Hebrew paragraph or an English one, though of course the quoted text should be different. What this means is that I no longer have to worry about "bad links", since the macro will always create the correct link. I don't have to convert to Hebrew numbers (in this case, א:א), since the macro will do that for me. I've got a similar \law() macro to take care of quotes from Mishne Torah. Well anyway, I'm pleased with the results!
And we also took in the "first Presidential Debate". Well worth watching if you have 90 minutes to spare. I was surprised by how well Romney did (for I did not have high hopes for him), and was more surprised by how poorly Obama did (after all, he's supposed to be a great orator and highly intelligent -- neither being obvious during the debate). After viewing the debate, I feel much more comfortable voting for Romney than I had before. Of course, "your mileage may vary" as the saying goes...
This week we've got guests for shabbat dinner. "New" people who've never been at our house (though I learn with the guy once a week). On the menu: roasted brisket, chicken cutlets, chicken salad with pomegranate, ḥumus, roasted eggplant with ṭeḥina, pickled herring, tuna salad, potato salad, cabbage salad, salt-roasted vegetables, simple cholent, ice-cream, and honey-cake
Until next week,
shabbat shalom and ḥag sameaḥ!
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