Blog/July 2010/July 9th
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July 9th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!
Happy birthday, Mom! This week's edition has the usual collection of ups and downs, but B"H more ups than downs. The weather has turned the corner, and we are firmly in summer's grasp here (temperatures hovering between 30-35C). The first NBN plane-load of the summer with new olim landed this week. Planning vacation time. Working hard. And the details follow, as usual.
On a somewhat "down" side, the Insidious Ceiling Leak has reappeared, after a couple weeks of abeyance. Either my hack-around repair did not really work, or the leak has another source. Next phase: chisel away the leaking part of the ceiling to see what can be seen from inside -- since there's no obvious problem. I have mentioned before how much I hate dealing with plumbing, right?
Even more of a downer, Sarah is getting ready to go to Argentina for three weeks (at her grandfather's invitation). Our guiding light will dim somewhat; but carry on we will as best we can. We hope her trip will be enjoyable and that she returns recharged.
However, all is not lost! Since Daniela is not going to leave us, we decided to take a couple days off this coming week and make a family vacation (minus Sarah). We'll have to give you details on that next week, since at the moment it's not clear just what we're going to be doing.
And I finally managed to fix the problem I've been working on at work for the past two weeks. This is important, because it was a defect which would prevent our product being shown outside the company, and I wasn't at all certain I would be able to fix it. But -- B"H! -- I found a work-around, and it looks like we'll be able to demo the product next week as we had planned.
In further good news, I returned to work on the translation of the Mishne Torah to English. I've enlisted the assistance of several people (including Daniela) to help in the quite enormous task of making a fitting translation. I hope to have completed a reasonable first edition of the introduction in a couple weeks. So if you want to help, let me know. If you happen to be a TeX programmer who can help with some layout details, that would be extremely helpful!
This week's somewhat aggressive devar-torah was inspired by three events. First was the arrival on aliyah of some of our Seattle acquaintances on the first NBN flight of the summer. Second was the most recent in a long series of discussions I've had over the years with another acquaintance who says he wants to make aliyah, but always manages to find an explanation why he can't do it "just now". And finally, a conversation I had with a bus-buddy of mine. He made aliyah from Morocco about 25 years ago, and we had an interesting and inspirational discussion about what aliyah means. The summary of our conversation: refusing to make aliyah, though there are no serious obstacles any more -- is tantamount to spurning God's gift to His people, and saying "that's very nice, but I don't need Your gift". How can that be a good thing?
Various and sundry:
- On that topic: a group of elderly Jews makes a trip to Israel, which they called 'the chutzpah mission'.
- Obama's political experiment
- That our Prime Minister's security detail lost their guns in transit does not make me feel particularly secure.
This week we've several of Daniela's friends staying for shabbat. We also will have over friends who just returned to Maale Adummim from Ra'anana -- welcome back! They can expect: apple/almond salad with curry dressing, salmon salad, roasted eggplant, hummous, matboucha, vegetable soup, stuffed chicken, roasted veggies, quinoa salad, carrot kugel, cookies, meatball cholent, salads.
Until next week,
Shabbat shalom !
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