Blog/December 2012/Dec 14th

Dec 14th (See this week's devar torah)

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Hi, again!

With thanks and praise to God, we are all free of last week's maladies. Maybe it's a ḥanuka miracle, but whatever the cause we are happy and healthy. This week was a rather frenetic one for us; we seemed to be busy continuously and spent quite a lot of money in the doing of it all.

The largest expenditure was my acquisition of a new (desktop) computer. Since the last one died abruptly a year or more ago, I've been without a standard computer. So I decided I'd build one to my specifications and have a machine which would last a good five years. To do that, I ordered all the parts from a place called KSP, with which I've dealt many times before, because they have the lowest prices around. They called to let me know the parts were in, so I went with Esther to the place to pick up what I had ordered.

When I got there, there was a shortish line of people and my hopes were high. Those hopes were soon dashed as it became apparent that the reason KSP offers such low prices is that they only hire people who do so little, there is no reason to pay them much. The cashier was reasonably ok, but the guy at the parts counter not so much. He moved as though he were afraid that he might unwillingly accomplish something. I've rarely encountered such a complete combination of indolence and insolence in one person! An hour and a half later, I finally had my parts and we were out the door to our next stop: the butcher (who was closing shortly for the evening).

So I dashed out to the butcher while Esther drove in a holding-pattern. I managed to get in and out of the butcher's place very quickly (and got exactly what I wanted to boot). At that point it was getting late in the evening and we still hadn't eaten anything. We soon remedied that, however.

The computer went together without a hitch, but only because I've done this sort of thing many times before. The instruction pages which came with the wide variety of parts, all had one thing in common: no written instructions, only "international" pictograms. Those are fine if you're assembling IKEA furniture which you could figure out on your own anyway, but not so great when the parts have specific and detailed ways in which they need to be assembled. The diagrams were too small and too lacking in detail to be useful, but experience and perseverance won the day.

Sarah's birthday was this week, her twenty-first. She only asked for one thing from us, a meal: "steak and chocolate cake". Hence the prior trip to the butcher. Esther made the fabulous chocolate cake which has become our standard celebratory dessert, while I sliced the meat into appropriate cuts (we had purchased a large cut of entrecote, from which steaks are cut). The celebratory dinner was delicious, Sarah was happy, and later some of her school friends came by to pick her up and take her out to celebrate.

Another night we got together with Jeremy's parents, who made their debut trip to our home. Since it was decided they would come to our house for dinner, Esther chose to make salmon. She went to the fishmonger to buy some fish, but apparently Aḥmed the fisherman was persuasive, since she ended by getting a whole fish -- five kilos -- which we broke down into more manageable pieces. That meal was also a big success and we're still trying to recover from a week of ḥanuka food. Well, only a couple more days to go...

Due to my excessively active week, I was unable to put together the list of Israeli political parties I had hoped to give you; so B"H, next week I'll try to do that.

Mazal tov to my cousin Mitch on his imminent wedding, and mazal tov to my cousin Elana on her son's engagement!

This shabbat we're having dinner at a friend's place, so we only have two meals to prepare: cholent, green beans, corn salad, eggplant, salatim, fruit and the remains of Sarah's amazing birthday cake.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom and ḥanuka sameaḥ (still)!

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