Monica

Last week was the Origins game con. The folks running it seemed pretty disorganized this year and I was tempted to bail after the train wreck of registering for games, but we'd gotten a non-refundable hotel room so we pressed on. In the end we played some good games, played one game that sounded good but is definitely not for us (better to find out this way), and met up with someone I met online to play a game we hadn't been able to get into (which was a highlight, both the game and the person). There's an open gaming area and some people bring wagons full of their own games, it turns out.

I like role-playing games more than Dani does and I wanted to play some, so one day we split up for half a day and he played crunchy games that are more his style. That worked out. (I'm glad the schedules aligned, especially with all the registration snarls.)

Games

• Four Years to Mars (run by the designer, who worked for NASA): players are competing to complete contracts (aided by research specializations) to advance on eight technology tracks. Action cards allow players to interfere with each other. It was an enjoyable game that I needed a magnifying glass for (for the cards).

• Sanctuary: this had been one of our top goals and registration thwarted us, but I ended up in a Discord conversation with another attendee (comiserating about registration) who offered to bring the game and play with us. He'd only played once (new acquisition for him) so we all figured it out together, but we all had a good time and making a friend in that vast sea of attendees was nice. As for the game: it's similar to Ark Nova but different enough that we bought a copy. Players are building animal sanctuaries using tiles that have animals, buildings, or special projects. Many tiles have placement requirements, so you have to think about where on your map to place things as they come out. Some of Ark Nova's chokepoints are smoothed over, but I wouldn't say it's a substantially simpler game, just different.

• Wizard Miners: light card game with individual decks and lots of player interactions, but a tendency to dogpile on whoever's leading at the moment.

• Viticulture World: "World" is an expansion on the base Viticulture game, which we've never played. This is a worker-placement game where you are planting vineyards, harvesting grapes, and making wine in order to fulfill customer orders for victory points. The expansion adds some complexity and more stuff to keep track of; I suspect the base game is stronger by itself.

• RuneQuest: I hadn't realized RuneQuest is still a thing; I last played in the 1980s. Chaosium was there and running a few one-shots, so I played one and had a lot of fun. Combat is still pretty lethal. The magic system felt more coherent (and everybody still has some magic, unlike D&D). I played a hunter with a "shadowcat" sidekick and that was fun. Another player ran a priestess who (once per whatever-period-of-time-before-you-get-rune-magic-back) could summon an earth elemental, which was very effective in a boss fight. The characters were pre-gens and I don't know what "level" equivalent they were; we had some real skills so we could succeed in the adventure, but it felt like we were low-to-mid. I bought the (new) RQ "starter set" (convention discount).

• RPG Games on Demand: they run several sessions of this throughout the convention. Each game master comes prepared with two games, one of which will be run (players' choice), which mitigates the problem of a GM being stuck with too few players because the game didn't appeal. Players, in random order, choose a game from the offerings; I was more than halfway back in line and my first couple choices were full, but I ended up in a game of Last Train to Bremen. You're playing the members of a somewhat dysfunctional band that made a deal with the devil for fame and fortune -- and are now trying to outrun the devil 'cause the price has come due. There's a lot of improv, gradual revelation of secrets, and making stuff up out of whole cloth in pursuit of the story -- we had a running reference to "the Motel Express incident", for example, and kept building on it. This is not a game I would have sought out; there's more inter-player backstabbing and conflict than I'm used to. But we had a group that was quite capable of separating characters from players, so we players had a lot of fun while our characters were sometimes screwing each other. Never played a tabletop game with a safeword before. The core mechanic of the game is Liar's Dice. Weird but fun. It made me think very vaguely of Dogs in the Vineyard.

• Last Spike: lightweight train game with track-building and investment shares, under an hour. We both enjoyed it and sometimes you really don't have time for Railways of the World or its ilk, so this fills a niche.

• Free Ride (USA map): another fun train game with dynamic contracts where players can definitely interfere with each other, either accidentally or intentionally. The game rewards diversity of cities you visit, so that pushes you to build more rail or pay for access to other players' tracks.

• Inventions: Evolution of Ideas: I'm just going to note that BoardGameGeek gives it a complexity rating of 4.59 out of 5 and that feels right, and when the person running it thought the timeslot was three hours instead of four, neither of us felt moved to correct him.

• Tales of the Arthurian Knights: you're knights of the round table, setting out to fulfill quests (that take you to specific locations) and having encounters along the way (individually). Encounters are usually resolved by rolling against one of a dozen or so skills, which you can advance over the course of the game. It's a choose-your-own-adventure game but multi-player. Aside from reading from the big tome for your fellow players and the occasional case of one player choosing a target location for another, there wasn't much interaction. I found the tome a little hard to manage. We didn't have time to finish our game and I'm not sure what winning looks like.

• Railways of the World: not new to us (we own it and play with friends), but wow were we both outclassed. We're casual players; the Train Gamers' Association (which runs most of the train games at Origins) is full of people who can sit down at a map (which they already know in detail including where the best routes are for track), look at the starting random distribution of goods to be delivered, and plot their first several turns and do the cost-benefit analyses. It's...different.

• Forges of Ravenshire: dice-drafting worker-placement economic game. There's an interesting mechanic where, on your turn, you place a die (doing its board effect) and take a (different) die, also doing its board effect, but the color of the die affects what you can do on your own board. You have specific artifacts you're trying to build, for which you need to accumulate the right resources. This description sounds like lots of other worker-placement games but it felt well-done. We did not have time for a complete game. (The previous game at the table had run long and we were getting kicked out precisely at our end time.)

• Out of Thyme (prototype, to be renamed, run by the designer): your team is exploring Pluto, trying to locate and collect artifacts (the story is about time travel), and the game itself is timed: you have (in the first game) 90 minutes, but things you do and things that happen to you can cost you minutes off that clock. So it's a real-time time-flavored game, which is cute. Each player has a different role with some special abilities, and there are events every round that affect everyone. I had fun and our group had a good discussion with the designer about some details. One thing a couple of us pushed back on is that, currently, the time is managed by a web site or app, and you can't just use a kitchen timer or the like because you need to be able to easily subtract two minutes or whatever. But app/web-based games are a turnoff -- not just the Shabbat issue, but also that these things don't tend to stick around forever and if I buy a game I expect to be able to keep playing it. I'm not sure what the designer could do instead, but it was clear this wasn't the first time he'd heard this feedback.

Unpub

There is an area in the gaming hall called Unpub, for game designers to playtest their designs and get feedback. We played two games there, both of which I enjoyed (maybe more than Dani). Both are looking for publishers, not going the Kickstarter route. I think there's kind of an unofficial NDA with Unpub (photography is banned) lest it interfere with publication attempts, so I won't describe the games, but we played Cafe Hoppers and Nova Raiders, both under an hour.

Hotel

This year we stayed at the Sonesta, which is connected to the convention center by a skywalk. (On most mornings we just walked across the street, but it was nice to not have to cross that street at night.) The room was unusual -- very high ceilings, a chandelier (!), and I think because we were in a corner, an actual hallway from the door to the main room. The room was also not made for short people: I had to propel myself into bed (the mattress was too high for me to just sit on), the adjustable shower head was too high for me to reach, and one peg for holding a towel was also too high. Wow. There was also an oddity that there was a comfortable chair for sitting and reading, but no nearby light -- not an issue with a phone or tablet, but when I wanted to read actual paper on Shabbat I had to move heavy furniture.

The decor signals higher-end, security is good, and the people at the front desk were helpful and attentive to customers as you'd expect from a good hotel. Incongruously, there was a mound of used linens on the floor between the elevator and our room on our arrival day, which on day two acquired a pizza box on top. That was all cleared away on our last day there. Weird. We were also never visited by housekeeping, though we did not have a "do not disturb" sign. I guess if housekeeping had come to our floor earlier they might have done something about the mound. I don't know what to make of all this.

2027

There was a lot of disorganization and poor communication this year; I gather there have been some shenanigans with the organization that runs the convention and they might be thrashing. This left me feeling iffy about next year -- and then they posted the dates, and next year Shavuot is right in the middle of Origins, which is a problem. We don't know what we're going to do yet -- maybe Dani goes alone, maybe we skip a year, maybe we find some other game conventions to go to, or maybe we go and I take a day off since I see there's a Chabad a mile from the convention center. We don't need to decide now.

Shavuot is the holiday about the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai (matan torah). There is a tradition of late-night study called tikkun leil Shavuot, or colloquially, a tikkun.

The Pittsburgh community has -- I'm told this is very unusual -- a community-wide tikkun for the first few hours, from 10PM to 1AM. There are about 25 one-hour sessions (spread across the three timeslots) with teachers from across the local Jewish spectrum -- rabbis, cantors, and educators; Orthodox, Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative; from synagogues, schools, social services (like eldercare and prison support), and other Jewish organizations.

I went to a session called "relearning Leah" that was very good. We only had an hour and there was a lot of discussion, so we were mostly in the Torah text about her deceptive marriage and children and didn't get much into the midrashim. Something I noticed for the first time in how Leah explains the names for her sons:

• Reuben: "It means: 'GOD has seen my affliction'; it also means: 'Now my husband will love me.'"

• Shimon: "This is because GOD heard that I was unloved and has given me this one also".

• Levi: "This time my husband will become attached to me, for I have borne him three sons."

And then (B'reishit 29:35):

She conceived again and bore a son, and declared, "This time I will praise GOD." Therefore she named him Yehudah. Then she stopped bearing.

The first three were born of, and named for, her distress, and each time God gave her another son. With Yehudah she seems to have come to terms with her situation; she doesn't name him for distress but instead praises God. She seems to be happy with her four sons despite everything. I don't think God would punish her for that, so I think the fact that this was her last son in this batch is more like closure, maybe. Later Leah produces, by proxy and directly, four more sons, named for luck (Gad), fortune (Asher), "my reward" (Yissachar), and "a choice gift" (Zebulun) -- all positive/praise, not distress.

I also went to a session called "Midnight midrash: outlandish stories of Caesars, magic, and mosquitos", because how could you not? This rabbi did "midnight midrash" last year too (different topics) and I really liked his teaching, so even though I try to go to new-to-me teachers at the community tikkun, I went to this because of last year. It was both fun and educational, but I think I'd have to reproduce the handout to explain why.

I changed synagogues last summer, so this year found out for the first time about Beth Shalom's traveling tikkun. After the community-wide one ended, about twenty of us headed to our rabbi's house, where we learned some Rambam on laws related to teachers and students. Around 2:30 that ended and about eight of us headed to the home of a congregant who planned to study all night and then, with whatever stragglers were left, go to the dawn holiday service before crashing. This congregant's tradition is to study a different minor prophet each year in detail. This year it was Habakkuk, which I probably hadn't read in its entirety since I was in high school. Unlike many prophets, Habakkuk isn't preaching to Yisrael; he's exclusively interacting with God and he initiates. I would summarize it as: Chapter 1: why is this bad stuff happening to us? Chapter 2: don't worry; God will afflict the people who are afflicting you and you'll be ok in the end. Chapter 3: a psalm in praise of God. There are, of course, a lot of details in there, and we had a good discussion that I can't summarize. We reached a natural pause around 4:15, at which point I was fading, so I left at that point (I was not the first, at least) and I don't know if they dove into more commentaries or looked at something else. I wonder how many made it to the early-morning service.

Last week we were in St. Augustine and visited the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park. We were hesitant, suspecting hype and fluff, but I was pleasantly surprised. The exhibits -- on things like ship construction, navigation, the indigenous populations, and guns -- were generally calibrated at a pretty basic level, but I learned things. We heard a particularly entertaining story -- sources unknown -- that no, Ponce de Leon wasn't so gullible as to think there was an actual fountain of youth, but painting him as such was beneficial to some of his rivals.

There are a lot of peacocks in the park and they are pretty used to humans in proximity. One, in pursuit of a mate, came to within about five feet of me.

Here are a couple of pictures (of other birds) that show the tail fan better:

The peacocks I saw would display their finery and then sweep back and forth in about a 180-degree arc while aimed at the hens they were trying to attract. I'd never thought to wonder what the backside looks like. The birds are wise to keep the focus on the front:

When not on display, that tail is quite a lot to drag around:

The park has a walking path along the shore. I'm not sure what kind of bird this is, but I enjoyed watching it.

The park anticipates animal visitors too. This sign made me laugh:

My father had an ancient Macbook -- not sure what he used it for, since he had not one but two newer iMacs as well as a couple tablets, but my mother said he did use it. A few months ago she asked me to dispose of it safely. I was eventually able to guess the password so I could look around. I didn't find any recent data on it but I made a backup just in case, then tried to wipe it so I could recycle it.

This laptop was running one of the feline operating systems (Leopard, I think). When I tried to wipe it, it asked for the installation CDs. CDs! How quaint. Uh, I didn't get any of those. I sought wisdom on the Internet but the Internet can be fickle, so I set it aside for a while.

Today I took it to my local Apple store to see if they could help. I asked if they could either wipe the disk or remove it so that I could recycle the rest of the hardware. While the friendly tech who was helping me tried to wipe it, she commented that she hadn't seen a Blackbook in such good condition for a long time. (I had not previously heard the name "Blackbook". Cute.) She wasn't able to wipe it either and asked if she could take it in back to extract the drive. Apparently she attracted some onlookers who also hadn't seen a Blackbook in a while (or maybe ever, judging by the ages of some of the people I saw).

She came back a few minutes later with the now-separated laptop and hard drive, and told me that if I was getting rid of it anyway, the store could recycle it for me. I was happy to save myself a trip to the e-waste folks, and if doing it this way helps even a small bit of it be reused rather than dumped in a landfill, that's a nice bonus.

A sticker on the hard drive indicated that it was manufactured in 2007. (That tracks with what I got from the OS.) Aside from being old, slow, and unable to run a modern operating system, the machine worked fine, which is pretty good for hardware that's old enough to drink. I'm on my third Mac Mini, and each replacement has been due to obsolescence, not hardware failure -- unlike the string of PCs I had before switching from Windows. I wonder how long my father's iPad (which I now have) will last.

Last year we replaced our roof, which unlocked solar panels. (We didn't want to put in panels and then have to lift them to replace the roof. And it turned out that the provider wouldn't have put panels on a roof that old anyway.) Permits and supply chains and inspections and the actual work took a while, but everything was installed and paid for before the tax year ended. It took until last week to get through the utility company's inspection so we could turn it on, and we finally got our "permission to operate" confirmation yesterday morning.

I didn't expect much in the middle of winter, especially on a cloudy day like today, but yesterday when it was sunny we returned more power to the grid than we drew, and today we're doing ok now but it looks like we'll be pulling from the grid overnight. (The battery is getting close to its "do not drop below" point, that being a buffer in case of actual outages.) I have never been so involved in power usage...

The battery has been on since it was installed; we didn't have a power outage during that time, but I assume it would have kicked in if so. 'Tis the season, so I was taken by surprise the first time I got a notification on my phone from my battery saying "National Weather Service says there's a storm coming so I'm charging up to 100%", because of course it does that. This is a whole new world for me. :-)

We got a bunch of snow on Sunday and paid someone to clear the sidewalks, but as expected, there was a lot more snow overnight. This morning I noticed that someone had done another pass on the public sidewalk in front of our house -- nice! I suspected our next-door neighbor, who's done that for us before (and I return the favor if I get outside first, though he usually beats me), but he said it wasn't him this time. He did, however, start shoveling my front steps at about the time I went out to clear a path from our door to the public sidewalk, which is how I found out he didn't know who did the sidewalk in front of both our houses. Later, when Dani and I were shoveling the back sidewalk and mini-driveway, he showed up again to help. After he helped us he proceeded up the block.

A bit over a year ago, we had a furnace emergency on a very cold day -- contractors had nicked the gas line, so service was cut off and couldn't be turned on until someone from the utility could inspect the repair, which in the end happened at 2AM. The neighbor three doors up noticed the activity going well into the evening, came by to ask if we needed any help, and upon learning that it was a furnace problem, immediately offered space heaters and said to call at any hour if we were too cold that night. I was touched that someone who I've only had occasional sidewalk conversations with both noticed the possible problem and offered help unprompted.

I'm very glad to live in a place where neighbors look out for each other.

In my last post I talked about the sudden death of my Android phone (again) and my pursuit of an iPhone, which was stymied not by Apple but by T-Mobile. That was Thursday. On Friday morning I returned to the Apple store soon after opening time, this time with a backpack full of auxiliary hardware (tablet for an authenticator app, old mostly-broken phone that could still take a physical SIM card, iPad for Apple login on another device, and by the way my existing phone charger to confirm I didn't need to buy a new one).

It took almost two hours, but we got past the T-Mobile hurdles so I could walk out of the store with a working phone. I'd already decided there was no way I was buying it from T-Mobile (and I suspect it would be locked if I did), and neither I nor the employee who was helping me felt good about "buy it here, take it there, hope they do the right thing". I have many colorful things to say about T-Mobile...later.

For the locals: Mikey in the Shadyside Apple store is fabulous. This was customer service way above and beyond what I've experienced at other tech providers. Mikey was knowledgeable, empathetic, and cheerful even when T-Mobile was screwing with us. I really hope the feedback I gave on the customer-service survey contributes to Mikey getting some recognition. And this is in stark contrast to previous phone vendors, who, if you can get a human at all, will just tell you to ship the phone back to them at your expense, or buy a newer model, or otherwise do what is convenient for the vendor but not the customer.

I bought the iPhone 16E; it's the most affordable current model, but it's still a lot more than I've paid for a phone before. On the other hand, Dani has had his current iPhone for a lot longer than I had my previous Pixels (both of them). Maybe a mid-range phone costs $100/year and the replacement schedules are different between Android and iOS.

So, the actual iPhone. I've used an iPad, so I was a little familiar with the environment, but using a phone is different in some important ways. There are definitely things I'm not used to; some might be better, some worse, and many merely different and I just need to get acclimated. Initial stream-of-consciousness impressions:

Setup was pretty straightforward, carrier issues aside. No surprises from the first phone call and first text message. I couldn't import anything from my dead Android phone, but the iPhone knew about apps I had installed on the iPad, so that helped. I can access anything in Google's cloud storage by installing their apps (e.g. for photos). I haven't figured out if I can recover text messages.

The default keyboard does not include period and comma on the main screen. What the hell? Is this why so many text messages blow off punctuation?

I am used to a global "back" button, not just for browsers but for everything -- pop out of map navigation (while staying in the map app), go back to your photo gallery from looking at an individual photo, etc, with the top-level "back" being "exit the app". Apple does none of that -- they rely on the individual apps to provide navigation, so if an app doesn't have the "back" concept, you can't do anything. And apps, of course, can and do change the UI -- maybe there's a "back" button and maybe it's in the top left corner, or maybe you're expected to navigate by controls across the bottom for different views, or maybe it's something else. Android apps had those variations too, but there was always the phone-level "back" button. I miss it.

There's also no "home" button (take me back to the desktop). You leave an app by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. I sometimes have to try a couple times; I haven't yet found the magic "sweet spot".

There is a gesture, also involving swipe up from the bottom, to see all the apps that are running and allow you to really close individual apps. This was the third sticky button on Android. I haven't quite figured this out on the iPhone yet; sometimes I stumble into it, and often the screen shakes at me to tell me it didn't understand what I was trying to do. Learning curve... Also on the learning curve: apparently on the iPhone you swipe left to dismiss notifications, not right? Neither is better; it's just an adjustment.

Settings are weird. A lot of apps don't have any control for accessing settings, even when apps clearly have settings. I had to ask Mikey about that. It turns out that the system-level settings -- where you control things like display, sound, passcodes, etc -- also has a section for app settings. To add a non-default calendar to the calendar app, instead of using the non-existent in-app settings, I go to Settings -> Apps -> Calendar and poke around in there. On the other hand, some apps do have in-app settings, so you have to hunt around for them.

Apple is very much still in the world of "we think this design is intuitive and therefore you don't need any assistance". I had to do web searches to find documentation on what some of the glyphs mean. There's a "control center" (similar to Android) where you have quick access to things like toggling Wifi, Bluetooth, and dark mode, and changing brightness and text size and volume, and a bunch of other stuff. The iPhone offers more options than Android and the layout is highly customizable. They have some cute ideas, like apparently there's some tool for "identify the music that's currently playing", which I think means in your environment and not Spotify, but I haven't explored it yet. Almost all of this involves graphics not text, though, and not all of their choices are as obvious to me as they were to their designers. There are three "disconnected box around a thing" glyphs; one's a QR-code scanner, one's a "tell me what this thing is" (uses camera and probably AI), and I'm not yet sure what the third one is.

This is me, so we have to talk about visual accessibility. This was the very first thing I tested in the store on Thursday, 'cause if that didn't work, nothing else mattered and I'd have to head back to Androidville. Mixed review here: adequate with some compromises, but there is more work to be done here. Specifically, fonts: there are two font-related toggles, normal/bigger and normal/bold. These affect displays in apps that pay attention to them, which they don't have to. Also, apparently the OS is not an app in this sense; nothing I did changed the text labels for the apps on the home screens. The text is "one size fits all". Yeah, you can reportedly magnify your entire screen, but that's not what I want (too much collateral damage). I mitigated this by changing the desktop from their colorful interferes-with-text wallpaper to solid gray. Unlike my Android devices, the iPhone doesn't have a built-in library of wallpapers; there's the default, or you can use a photo, or you can set a solid color. So, solid color it is; I'd've preferred something with a little more character (but also legibility), a balance I struck on Android, but oh well -- it's just wallpaper, not something important.

There was something small and light gray that Mikey had to point out to me in the store (would have missed it entirely), but I can't now remember what it was. I suspect there will be more of that sort of thing.

Ok, apps. I was migrating from Android, so I couldn't just bring all my apps with me. There are iOS versions of most of the apps I used (not always identical), so I just had to look them up individually in the App Store and install them. Initially I did this from memory, which was frustrating, but then it occurred to me to ask my Android tablet if it could tell me about apps that weren't on that tablet but that I'd used. The answer to that turned out to be "yes". Some things I haven't found equivalents for yet; this will be a background process for a while, I expect. Critical stuff is mostly in place (I need to have a conversation with my bank about their app); nice-to-haves are trickling in.

I'm trying out some of the native Apple apps, particularly ones that could replace Google apps. Some differences are strange: in the Apple calendar app, how in the world do you get it to show you a month view like Google Calendar? I can get it to show me a couple days at a time (in list form, like a week view but not all week), but I want the month view. I haven't tried out the Apple apps for photos and maps yet, but plan to soon. The note-taking app seems fine so far. I can't imagine using Pages, Sheets, or Keynote on a phone, but they came pre-installed.

I couldn't figure out how to use Apple's email app with multiple accounts, but that's ok; I used Thunderbird on my Android phone, so I'll just install...what do you mean there's no Thunderbird app for iOS? (Beta coming soon, they say.) Ok, I found another client that'll do. Still hoping for Thunderbird later; I liked it on my previous phone and also use it on my desktop Mac.

My Android phone had a fingerprint reader for unlocking. It was flaky, so I often ended up having to enter my passcode. This iPhone has Face ID, and so far it's worked flawlessly for me. I asked Mikey how to temporarily disable it for situations where I'm worried about it being used against me (hostile agent has physical possession of your phone -- we can all imagine scenarios, I'm sure), and he pointed out that it always requires the passcode after restart. Good to know.

Speaking of restarting... I had to search the web. Mikey did tell me how to turn the phone off, but apparently I'd misremembered. On my old phone, a long press on the power button brought up a menu; on my newer Android tablet, you have to do it in software as far as I can tell; on the iPhone both are possible but the physical option involves both the power button and a volume button and then an on-screen slider. I guess people don't restart (or turn off) phones very often?

It's only been a few days (and one of those was Shabbat, a no-phone day), but so far the experience of actually using the phone has been smooth. It feels comfortable and even pleasant at times. My Pixel's 5G connection was sometimes flaky and would drop out at the most inconvenient of times (like while trying to navigate); I haven't taken my new phone on any big outings yet, but so far I'm not seeing these problems when out and about. There are some initial weirdnesses, but I think I'm going to like this a lot better than my Pixel.

More thoughts later as I settle in.

If you are in the US, don't have employer-provided health insurance (hello layoffs, among others), and are thus buying your insurance on healthcare.gov or the state marketplaces, you might want to read siderea's series of posts on the subject soon: introduction, A health plan is a contract, and HSAs and bronze/catastrophic plans (so far). Technically you have until January 15 to sign up for 2026 insurance, but if you want insurance coverage in January, your deadline is Real Soon Now -- December 15 in most places, but earlier in some states. (I'm in PA where it's December 15; I haven't been tracking other places but Siderea mentions some in the introduction.)

Something I had missed is that for 2026, the government has admitted that bronze plans (with the lowest-but-still-high premiums) are inadequate, and you can now set up a Health Savings Account (HSA) with those plans. It's extra paperwork but can lead to savings on the money you were going to have to spend out of pocket anyway.

At the shabbaton I led a text-study session that I called "Avram before Lech L'cha" (which was the week's portion). It was designed to be interactive, so this is a summary of how it went. Don't expect answers here, just interesting observations.

I started by saying that in the first three torah portions, God singles someone out for assigned tasks. The first is Adam, and there were no other options yet. The second is Noach, who was "righteous in his generation", a qualified statement. (Best of a bad lot?) Then comes Avram, and it just says God commanded him but the text doesn't tell us why.

We had a discussion about possible reasons, and then we looked at the first source. Almost all of what I brought is from Bereishit Rabbah (roughly contemporary with the g'mara, c 300-500 CE). All translations are from Sefaria: ( Read more... )

Yes. More like this, please.

Today is busy, building the sukkah and preparing for Shabbat, so brief notes will have to suffice for now.

I had no length expectations for Kol Nidrei. Ran about 2.5 hours, including a speech from the synagogue president which is pretty common. Before the service started, someone from the congregation played the Kol Nidrei melody on a violin; I recognized the styling and ornaments from the much longer version Temple Sinai does on cello and piano. Shorter and before the service was nice. I assume there is a "thing" about people expecting to hear the Kol Nidrei melody on bowed strings, but I don't know more than that. I thought it was just a Reform thing (Sinai and Rodef both do it during the service).

The essays in this year's seasonal book from Hadar were helpful, and fit nicely in that block of time between getting home and going to sleep.

Being able to spend the entire day in synagogue makes a big difference to me. I'm glad my new synagogue doesn't have a long stretch of down-time mid-afternoon like some do. We had classes and discussions -- optional and small, as most people left, but we didn't have to. Nice.

Morning service was somewhere around 5 hours (I didn't notice exactly), not including Avodah and Eleh Ezkarah which followed after a short break (5 minutes? 10?). For Avodah the rabbi interjected a lot of teaching, and he really encouraged people to try the prostration which was done by the people (not just the kohanim) when this was an actual service in the temple. He taught us how to do it and was very encouraging, so I tried it and am glad I did.

After, I was chatting with someone else who had tried it for the first time, and said that I came from a Reform background and had not expected to connect with the Avodah service until that year during lockdown when my synagogue was closed and I went to an Orthodox synagogue. "But," I said, "there was a song I'd heard a week before that also helped set the stage" and she immediately said "Yishai Ribo". Yes. So we chatted about that for a bit while waiting for classes to start.

For the afternoon haftarah reading (the book of Jonah) they had about a dozen teenagers chanting it, taking it in turns. It's great to see that many teens who are interested.

Hineni is in exactly the spot where it makes sense. (Contrast with my Reform experiences.)

Most of the service leaders were lay people who were very good -- strong voices and able to lead singing, mindful of what they were saying, evoked kavanah. Afterwards someone who knows I'm a new member asked me what I thought about having lay leaders instead of the rabbis (this also happens on Shabbat) and I said this is a positive thing and while our rabbis are great (I've seen both of them lead; they are), it's important to empower other qualified leaders too. Most of the Reform world seems to not agree with that perspective, which might be why the person asked.

By the time we got to the Amidah in Mincha I was ready to be done with the many-times-repeated Vidui sections. I didn't want to not be thinking about wrongs; rather, I wanted to be thinking about different wrongs after going through these ones so many times already. We human beings are very creative, alas, and since some things on the standard list do not resonate for me, it feels like I could be spending that time reflecting on things that do and that aren't on the list. (I ended up just focusing on the ones that seemed more directly to be areas for improvement.) For next year, perhaps I'll look for alternate lists to being with me for when the standard list is no longer sparking the thoughts it was designed to.

This is a placeholder for something I meant to talk about in my Rosh Hashana post too: differences between the individual and public Amidah, public is not just for listening but also has congregational singing parts, and I think Reform threw the baby out with the bath water, realized the tub was empty, and filled it up with other stuff instead of getting some of this goodness back. I will try to come back to this soon.

The other day, I saw something cute and reposted it on Mastodon:

Overheard, and for Internet old-timers: "Today is the 11,691st day of September 1993".

Someone responded to tell me that Debian has the sdate command "which keeps track for all of us".

I laughed. And then I found that there are also online calculators, for people who don't use Debian.

I am amused, even if -- or perhaps because -- those of us who remember the September that never ended are now a very small minority of the online population. Back then people were frustrated; today it's quirky history. Whatever your online community is -- Usenet, mailing lists, Twitter, Reddit, Dreamwidth, Stack Overflow, whatever -- it's going to change just from the people using it, let alone technology and companies. Don't get too comfortable.

This year I got three (different) tomato seedlings, all container-friendly, along with some peppers and other things. Having failed to do proper research, I allocated the tomato cages pretty arbitrarily. I should not have done that.

The giant tomato plant in the center is a Sungold. It seems to be in the process of conquering my patio, the neighborhood, and perhaps the city. It makes sweet, tasty, orange cherry tomatoes. I've had quite a bounty so far and there's plenty more to come. It was originally on that ledge with the others, but a month or so ago I realized that if I kept it there, I would not be able to harvest without a ladder. (So much for using that trellis.) At least this way I can climb up on that ledge to reach the ones I can't reach from the ground (or at least I hope I'll be able to reach them all!). Wowza. Next year, bigger cage! (They're very tasty, so I do plan to get this type next year.)

The other two tomato types are Patio Choice, advertised as good for small containers, and Mountain Magic. They both produce red grape tomatoes (Patio Choice are sweeter). On the right, not as clear in the picture, are two Cornito peppers and a banana pepper, all still working toward a first harvest. I've moved these around a few times over the course of the summer to try to optimize sunlight.

My mother has never learned to use computers, aside from a smartphone that she uses for calls and texting with the grandkids. After my father died and she asked me to do something with my father's several desktop and laptop computers, she cancelled their Internet service that she wouldn't be using. But she held onto my dad's newest tablet, thinking she could use it to browse news and look at photos. This requires a network connection, so I set up her phone for tethering, set up the tablet to automatically connect to that network, and showed her how to turn that on and off on her phone. (I described this as "turning on Internet for the tablet".)

In the end she found this too difficult and she's never used that tablet, so this week she gave it to me. It's an iPad Pro (3rd generation, 12.9") and comes to me with a keyboard cover and a couple of Apple pencils. I'd already downloaded his Apple cloud backups more than a year ago, so I could safely reset the tablet. I'm new to iOS (I use Android), so I figure this is a chance to check it out before the next time I need to replace a phone or tablet. I'm happy to accept pointers, app recommendations, and warnings. I do have a Mac desktop, but their mobile setup is new to me.

Apple aims for intuitive user interfaces, but that doesn't mean they always succeed. When deleting personal information as part of resetting, I had to enter first the PIN and then my father's Apple password. That makes sense. After I entered the password I hit return, but there was no visible change. I hit return again, thinking it hadn't taken, then tried delete to see if that changed anything, and concluded that it was stuck. I let it sit there for a while. Five minutes later, I got a "no connection" popup. Ok, yeah, now that you mention it I should have realized I'd need to connect it to my WiFi for that to work, but if it had given me any indication of what it was doing ("connecting...") while it was doing it, I would have known (a) that it was doing something and (b) that I needed to fix that. Instead, the interface just gave me a mystery for a while. Oops.

Those two Apple pencils are an as-yet-unsolved puzzle. My mother gave me one that was with the tablet (there's a magnetic connection) and one in a box that she thought was new (my father ordered it but never got a chance to use it, she thinks). The two pencils look identical to me, except that the one in the box is missing the plastic cap that should be on its stylus. The plastic cap from the other one does not fit it -- so they seem to be different, but that's my only clue. The box says "2nd generation". Something I found online describes the first generation as round and the second as mostly round with a flat side (because it was too easy for the first generation to roll off of desks). Both of these have that flat side, so I conclude that my father replaced one second-generation pencil with another, but if so, I am left wondering why the cap from one doesn't fit the other. I have no idea which of these is actually newer; maybe he did replace it (maybe he broke his first one?) and he put the old one in the box the new one came in? So many mysteries.

The tablet is now busy updating from iOS 17.1 to 18.5. Yeah, it's been offline a while.