Blog/November 2013/Nov 29th

Nov 29th – a devar-torah from 5771

Hi, again!

I’ll keep it short this week, since we’ve a lot of prep-work this shabbat. First: congratulations to my daughter Daniela, for having received her diploma from Stern College. Though she actually graduated (summa-cum-laude) last year, she only got the papers recently.

Second: our emergency-backup daughter Sarah has started following us around for some sort of cinéma-vérité project. We have to learn to ignore the woman with the camera (and that’s not so easy). Hopefully our embarrassing moments will not be on public display. One can hope…

Third: the holiday of ḥanuka started this week. For the second night (which also corresponded to American Thanksgiving, something that won’t re-occur for hundreds of years) we had a crowd over. We were going to make deep-fried turkey, but the heksher we use for meat has no turkey available now. So we did deep-fried chicken instead. Twenty minutes later, we had these bad-boys. Mmm, mmm good! The crowd went wild with anticipation. Two full platters of candied yams were sucked up in no-time. “Those were the best candied yams I’ve ever had”, claimed one participant. I’m dubious about the claim, but they were really good even if I say so myself.

Fourth: Forth. Hah! Well, yes; I made lots of progress on my “8th” project. In turn, I started advertising the upcoming availability of the “beta test”. But I had, stupidly, not QA-ed my website’s contact form in Spanish or Hebrew — and it turns out it only worked properly in English. This is a cautionary tale: first, that JavaScript is a terribly inconsistent language, full of pitfalls (which is one of the motivations for 8th in the first place); and second, check your stuff really, really well and then check it again. Anyway, the contact form is working now in all three languages.

We had lots of people over on Thursday, but we’re alone for shabbat. Just the three of us, having:
butternut-squash soup, fried chicken, bread rolls, green-beans with mushrooms, vegetable chili, coleslaw, roasted eggplant, kohlrabi salad, banana-chocolate-chip cake and pumpkin cake.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom and ḥanuka sameaḥ!

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