Social

Sep. 23rd, 2019 05:40 pm
liv: alternating calligraphed and modern letters (letters)
Considering that I'm unemployed I've been remarkably busy lately. Some of that is job hunting, and some is planning for the big festivals coming up, but lots of it is fun.

diary )

Misc update

Sep. 3rd, 2019 05:45 pm
liv: cup of tea with text from HHGttG (teeeeea)
Nothing very exciting to report, but a few nice things going on in my life at the moment.

the past couple of weeks )

So yes, politics is awful, and I'm a bit nervous about how few job leads I have managed to find, but my personal life is just perfect and wonderful currently.

I've also started in earnest on learning things, I've joined this cool Woolf Institute course, and just started the introductory reading, which I'm really enjoying so far. And working on re-learning to read Arabic, with a view to actually learning the language a bit, and I'm getting back into recorder, and I am hoping to do some more programming.

The Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations course follows good practice of asking students to keep a blog of our reading, so I've set up a wallet name blog here. Partly because it avoids having to go through the pain of trying to blog directly on Moodle, I'd much rather use the system that has been an extension of my brain for over 16 years now, and partly because it's about time I claimed wallet name space. I don't suppose anyone will be particularly interested in reading my learning diary, and I'm intending to keep it separate from this pseudonymous blog, but it exists. I've subscribed to a couple of friends' similar public-facing blogs about their studies that I know about. Happy to add anyone else, or to tell you the name if you happen to be interested in the detail of my studies.
liv: A woman with a long plait drinks a cup of tea (teapot)
So, it's been a little over a month since my partner set off on a long roadtrip. social happiness )

So yes, life is good, and I have a huge backlog of stuff to post about, so hopefully I'll get to some of that soon. Thank you all for continuing to exist in my computer and tell me about your lives and thoughts, even while I'm not as responsive as I'd like to be.

Holiday I

Aug. 5th, 2018 03:51 pm
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
I have had such a lovely week! visits and travel; CN: historical Nazis )
liv: A woman with a long plait drinks a cup of tea (teapot)
I've had a really good few months for seeing friends from distant parts!

I love my friends )

Social

Aug. 3rd, 2017 11:57 am
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
I've had a lovely week, really, with a whole range of pleasant social things. I hope this is a sort of foretaste of what my life will be like when I properly live in one place.

social diary )

Social

Feb. 20th, 2017 07:40 pm
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
I've had a good month for seeing friends I don't spend time with often enough. I managed long phone chats with [personal profile] hatam_soferet and [personal profile] lethargic_man, and [personal profile] jack and I managed to get most of a weekend with [personal profile] doseybat and her mother and [personal profile] verazea, and the wonderful [personal profile] angelofthenorth came to stay with me for a few days.

I feel really really blessed by having such wonderful friends, especially when they reach out to me when I'm doing badly at keeping in touch. And several other people have got in touch too and I really do want to get back to them to make plans. And I'm not doing at all well at posting or commenting here (though I'm still reading, definitely, I haven't missed a day.)

slightly angsty )

Anyway, the only way to restart the habit of posting here is to just go ahead and do so. Have a meme which [livejournal.com profile] ghoti sensibly imported from FB: suggest a category and I'll tell you my top five things in that category. Feel free to propagate it if you think it would be a fun thing to do in your own journal.
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
So last weekend I had the most brilliant time: two of my friends who live in the wrong continents were visiting, and in between I got to spend time with my parents and my partners, so it was just about perfect.

diary stuff )

So yay, that was just about the perfect long weekend for me. And it did me so much good to spend time with MK and [personal profile] hatam_soferet, in spite of the awful news I've been walking taller all week.

Life

Aug. 9th, 2015 07:46 pm
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
Last weekend I spent Saturday at the beach with [livejournal.com profile] ghoti and family, which was completely wonderful. I didn't realize it's relatively easy to get to the north coast of Norfolk by public transport; I want to do that more often! But we did proper traditional English beach things, building sandcastles and eating chips and icecream and paddling in the sea.

I had to run back to Stoke for a stone-setting on Sunday. Which was annoying travel-wise but it's important to be available for these things, and the community made a big effort to scrape together a minyan. And the good thing was that [personal profile] angelofthenorth was able to adjust her plans and come up Sunday evening instead of Monday, so I got more time with her, yay. Mostly spent being quiet and domestic, I managed to do a fair amount of working from home so we could just quietly share space while we got on with things. And [personal profile] angelofthenorth was a wonderful guest, she brought me food and made me tea and generally looked after me.

And in a continuation of the theme, [personal profile] cjwatson came up to visit for the weekend. When I moved out of my old house and into the tiny flat on campus I was expecting to give up hosting, but actually I have a few really dear friends who don't mind sharing a very cramped space, and quite a few have visited me since I moved.

Saturday I led a service at synagogue. I was quite pleased with it, I talked about the idea of reward and punishment – this week's Torah reading contains the middle bit of the Shema which says that good things will happen if you keep God's commandments and agricultural disasters if you don't. And I talked about the consolation reading from Isaiah and the idea of exile as punishment for sin, and how that squares with the expression of God's love and Covenant faithfulness in both the Torah reading and the Haftarah. And I was glad to be able to invite [personal profile] cjwatson to a full Torah service given he was curious after coming for Friday night a few weeks ago.

It was a gloriously sunny day, one of the warmest this year. We had lunch at Peaches, who have stopped doing their all-you-can-eat menu for Saturday lunchtimes but had a very sensible prix-fixe menu instead, including their exciting garlic mushrooms. And we went for a bit of a walk in the woods behind campus, enjoying the shade and the hot still air and almost nobody around on a summer weekend.

Today we got up late and didn't do much beyond going out for lunch at the lovely Hand and trumpet country pub. Food was not as good as I've sometimes had there, but that's a high bar, and it was still very good indeed.

Basically I have wonderful friends, and spending time with them makes me extremely happy. Being at home Sunday evening, since [personal profile] cjwatson took on all the travelling that I would normally be doing, I even had time to call my parents, which I haven't done in too long.
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
I took Monday and Tuesday off work, mainly because my friend SA was visiting from Sweden, but it was actually really good to have a decent break.

diary stuff )

I do in fact have some opinions I'll post about soon, but I'm off on another adventure this weekend, going to a music festival. Which is really not the kind of thing I do, but I am pretending to be a much cooler person than I really am...
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
...To [personal profile] nou on turning 40! [personal profile] nou organized a most excellent celebration, including walking under the Thames through Woolwich foot tunnel. I did not know there was a tunnel under the Thames, but [personal profile] nou is really good at paying attention to things like that.

And then we spent the afternoon in the Greyhound pub, a proper trad drinking hole sort of pub, not ye olde, not hipster, just a place where you can sit and talk and drink lager. It was basically too hot to move, though a few people did manage some walks and visits to the local artillery museum. Me, I just had fun talking to [personal profile] nou's excellent crowd of friends. Walking people, geeks, local history people, and a bunch of people from Oxford who all have second-degree connections to me. I was in extrovert heaven, in spite of the heat.

We moved on to a Chinese restaurant in Surrey Quays, Noodle Family. It wasn't in fact the restaurant that [personal profile] nou was expecting in that location, though they confirmed it was the same place when she made the booking. But it served very very tasty food, including things like thousand year eggs and sea-spiced aubergines and Chinese style potato salad made out of raw lightly cooked grated potato in vinaigrette.

I headed to [personal profile] nanaya and [personal profile] alextiefling's after the meal. And in that part of south London it's often easier to get around by bus rather than train or Tube, so I ended up with a change that involved walking past the restored Cutty Sark at sunset. So I got an evening and morning of chatting and catching up with good friends I don't see often enough, as well as being enchanted by their two young kids, the older of whom is just about learning to talk.

...And to [personal profile] adam_in_rabbinical_school whose username is no longer accurate, as he is now Rabbi Adam. The ordination service at Southgate Progressive was amazingly moving; the focus was on the wonderful friendship between our two newest rabbis. And R' Mark Solomon was leading the singing, which is always a treat.

I met up with [personal profile] jack before the service for lunch at a very good Lebanese place, Warda, and for a chance to chat as we haven't seen eachother in three weeks, for various reasons. And the service was, as these things are, full of old friends, including [personal profile] pseudomonas's parents. We stayed on for a reception and dinner, and by about 7 pm I'd just got to the point where I couldn't deal with being out and about for one moment longer. So [personal profile] jack drove us home, and being in my husband's car on the way home is enough like being in my own space that I started to unwind. And we had a couple of hours before bedtime to sit on our new sofa and drink tea and chat (mostly ranting about Princess Celestia and about Git). It is so, so good to be home.
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
After the rather frantic start of Passover, the second half of the festival was relaxing but still sociable. more social diary )

Passover

Apr. 8th, 2015 11:39 am
liv: In English: My fandom is text obsessed / In Hebrew: These are the words (words)
I'm having a really good Passover this year. I want to write it up so I can look back on this week, but it's mostly just boring to people who are not me diary stuff.

religion and social )
liv: A woman with a long plait drinks a cup of tea (teapot)
Things that are very, very good for Liv: time with friends, and new learning. And I've done really well with those these last few weeks. diary catch-up )
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
I do very much love my friends. The minute I post even slightly meepy things to DW, lots of people get in touch. And if there's one thing that cheers me up it's getting to talk to my friends! Thank you so much to everybody who left helpful, supportive comments on my post. Now I have actual plans for meeting up with [personal profile] withagreatlove, and have made some progress towards plans with [personal profile] khalinche. I had some really cheering conversations with [personal profile] hatam_soferet and [livejournal.com profile] rysmiel and [livejournal.com profile] ghoti, and I've started talking to people a bit about means other than email to keep in touch.

good weekend )

And I met my new cohort of students, dear little first years, this morning, and to nobody's surprise teaching is a lot more fun and satisfying than marking.

Also [livejournal.com profile] ghoti made me some gloves for my birthday, and they are awesome because they have subtle owls knitted into them. So now I can go around with owls on my warm hands, this is very pleasing.
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
Well, I managed to finish the December Days meme better than I'd expected! One day I posted late, and then I missed two days right at the end of the month, so I've been behind since then. But I've completed 29 of my 31 prompts. The 30th will be [personal profile] zhelana's request for your favorite moment of the month, which I'll cover today, and I think I'll skip [personal profile] jack's request for talking about board games because I already made a similar post about games and gaming.

I love my friends )

Anyway, happy new year to all of you! I went to the traditional north Cambridge NYE party, where I drank port and dessert wine with bubbles (that's one very Liv-friendly drink, oh my goodness) and talked to interesting people. We had a fit of productivity just before the party and unpacked my dresses that have been languishing in a case since we moved in, and I thought, why not, and put on a shiny OTT one. I had to make a minor repair to it first, very minor indeed but I had been blocked on it because I'm really intimidated by sewing. So I had a Dress with a tight, slightly rigid, shiny purple bodice that does interesting things for my cleavage, and a big foofy black skirt with several layers of petticoats. It's a bit long to walk in but it garnered me a lot of very pleasing compliments. I wasn't the only one who had dressed up so there were plenty of other pretty people to admire, notably [personal profile] khalinche in a marvellous corset and [livejournal.com profile] atreic and [personal profile] emperor in reverse-matched purple and black.

We did the midnight thing, a little half-heartedly in some ways, but there was holding hands in a circle and listening to the radio announcing midnight and playing the recording of Big Ben's bongs, and singing Auld Lang Syne, and drinking fizzy wine, and kissing, even if we did all of those somewhat in a random pile all at once instead of sequentially. I stayed a little while enjoying the party, but not until absurdly late, and walked home admiring the stars and being a little bit tipsily romantic.

This morning I got up about noon, not especially hungover but slightly jetlagged from sleeping 3 am to noon instead of midnight to 8. My wonderful husband made me an elaborate and delicious cooked breakfast while I was still blearily caffeinating myself and browsing bits of Yuletide. So I reckon 2015 has started pretty well!
liv: cartoon of me with long plait, teapot and purple outfit (Default)
[personal profile] silveradept requested: around the end of the month: Things ending, things beginning. And I'm a couple of days behind on posts which means I'm writing this right at the end of the month, not just around it. And, well, I've just come back from [personal profile] blue_mai's mother's funeral, having started 2014 with joining [personal profile] lethargic_man at part of the shiva (memorial prayers in the week after a funeral) for his mother. So my head is very much in lives ending, not just things in general. Which means this post is working out a little melancholy, and I'm sorry this in the slot where I meant to answer [personal profile] zhelana's much more positive prompt for my favorite moment of the month. Might manage that before the day, the month and the year roll over into the new, we'll see.

a time for every purpose under heaven )

And in my personal life I find myself at the beginning of something which is too early to be comfortable talking about publicly, but I am ending the year brimming with joyful hope.

Not entirely on topic, but [livejournal.com profile] siderea has written an absolutely brilliant and inspiring reflection for the end of a year which has included so much awfulness, notably police forces in America going rogue and killing African-American children and young men. I strongly recommend: Long Night (Staying Woke).
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
I did not manage to make a second post yesterday; I'm starting to be in Christmas mode, huddled up with people I care about and I haven't quite worked out how to fit the daily posting into that. With a bit of luck I will manage to catch up after today.

Saturday night I got home in time to be present for most of [personal profile] jack's Christmas party, having had a really flukey journey after leaving the Stoke chanukah party at 5:30 and walking in before 9. It was a lovely party, fairly low key and with lots of people present I really enjoy talking to, including [personal profile] pseudomonas, yay. Then yesterday we didn't really get up until lunchtime, at which point we went to the Carlton to socialize with a small group of friends.

And in the evening I went with [personal profile] cjwatson to a show at the Corn Exchange called Not until we are lost. It's a sort of circus style thing, where they had the audience just milling about in the main space at the CE, and the performers doing essentially trapeze artist tricks on various bits of metal frame scattered through the space. It sounded from the description a bit artsy and pretentious, but it was a really enjoyable show, just for the sheer skill and strength of the artists, swinging from bits of frame and lifting eachother and throwing eachother around and just being gloriously competent and at home in their bodies. There was quite a lot of acting, with the facial expressions of the artists conveying a whole lot of emotion. I'm extremely glad we saw it!

The thing that is wonderful about my life at the moment is being able to spend the longest night cuddled up listening the wind whistling outside. And the sun is coming back, we're about to light seventh candle of chanukah (when friends arrive to join us for the celebration), and it's the new moon of Tevet, so there is going to be more sunlight, and more moonlight, and just generally more brightness and joy.

Anyway, [personal profile] syderia asked me to talk about your favorite pastries. Sorry for being a day late with that! om nom nom )

I wish you all light and joy, whatever you're celebrating at the turn of the year!

[December Days masterpost]

Ungames

Nov. 11th, 2014 04:42 pm
liv: cartoon of me with long plait, teapot and purple outfit (mini-me)
I think it's Wittgenstein or some philosopher of that ilk who has a famous discussion of the fact that it's really hard to define what a game is; any definition you can come up with, it's easy to think of an exception which most people agree is a game. Recently I've been playing a couple of things which are kind of edge-casey, and I wanted to talk about some of them.

gaming )

Apart from trying out new quasi games, I've had a fairly quiet few days. Some good conversations with [personal profile] jack, some gardening (for we are boring middle-aged home owners now), and a really fun visit with [livejournal.com profile] ghoti and [personal profile] cjwatson Saturday evening. The very good thing about being boring home-owners is that we have awesome neighbours.

Hallows

Nov. 5th, 2014 11:22 am
liv: Table laid with teapot, scones and accoutrements (yum)
So, just coming out of my busiest season I managed to fall back into my old mistake of making quite excessive social plans for this weekend just past. There were a couple of events in London, and I thought I'd add on some others to take the opportunity to see friends "while I'm there", and I ended up just a tad over-scheduled.

social diary )

Also, talking of reasons why [personal profile] kaberett is wonderful, they made a new iteration of the love meme. As usual they've realized exactly what the DW community needs at just this moment, and they're moderating and curating the meme with amazing sensitivity. I'm sometimes weird about love memes, but this one is giving me a great deal of happiness. Partly because in my thread people are saying nice things about my brain and my writing and presence on DW and my ethical standards, which are all really nice things to be complimented on!

Soundbite

Miscellaneous. Eclectic. Random. Perhaps markedly literate, or at least suffering from the compulsion to read any text that presents itself, including cereal boxes.

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