Blog/December 2013/Dec 20th

Dec 20th not new, but relevant devar-torah

Hi, again!

What a long week! The unexpectedly strong snowstorm brought Jerusalem to a stand-still. But the weather-induced shutdown did not affect only the capital; we on the periphery were also shut-in, because the entrance to Jerusalem from our side of the hills was closed. So a mere four days after the snowfall, we finally were able to get out of our fair town and to Jerusalem. It perplexes me: we can send emergency relief to the Philippines, but can’t seem to clear the roads in our capital city in a reasonable amount of time. Curious, isn’t it?

Sarah had been stuck at home for three weeks already, and finally had enough. She likes being in her room, don’t get me wrong; but she does like to leave the house once in a while. So after being stuck in the snow and being sick, and on ḥanukah vacation, she was quite ready to get back to school and get out and see friends.

Daniela and Jeremy don’t quite understand what the big deal is — after all, they get real snow where they are. And Daniela’s “turned the corner”, celebrating her quarter-century birthday. Mazal tov to her, and many more! We can’t believe our firstborn is that old.

Our guests who came here for a “pilot trip” only to be stuck at our house almost the entire time, went back to the Olde Country this week. I hope they were able to get enough information to make an informed decision, and that they don’t think all Israeli homes are as freezing as ours was.

At work they were frantically trying to understand why the “new, improved” code was ten times slower than the old. So my boss drafted me into the effort, and in a couple hours I figured out what the problem was and fixed it. They had spent a week to no avail. Not that I’m trying to toot my own horn, or anything — but I often have no clue why people think the way they do, looking for exotic solutions when the culprit is something mundane.

Though to be truthful, I’m experiencing something like that myself as I spend many hours trying to uncover the source of some bizarre problems in 8th. I find that getting rid of “compiler optimization” helps in most cases, which doesn’t make me feel any better — it makes me feel there’s some underlying problem that the optimizations simply uncover. More on this next week, B”H.

And I haven’t posted any political stuff in a while, here in the blog; so here goes:

• Europe’s love-hate relationship with Israel
• Obama’s fall from grace
• Saint Mandela
• Kerry’s a prime candidate for Mr. Potato-head. Or is that “potatoe”?
• The snow makes the Knesset cancel discussions. We need more snow-storms!

Ah well, I need to get started cleaning the house, which managed to get very dirty with the mud being tracked in. So excuse me until next week, won’t you?

It’ll be a very quiet house this week, just the three of us. We’ll have:
cauliflower soup, schnitzel (turkey and veggie), steamed artichokes, corn salad, lentil salad, roasted beets, sweet-savory ful (fava-beans), veggie chili, rice and sorbet.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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