Livre d'Or

I've had a good month for seeing friends I don't spend time with often enough. I managed long phone chats with hatam_soferet and lethargic_man, and jack and I managed to get most of a weekend with doseybat and her mother and pplfichi, and the wonderful 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 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.

Last weekend I spent Saturday at the beach with 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

...To nou on turning 40! 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 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 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 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 nanaya and 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 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 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 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 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.

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 )

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 withagreatlove, and have made some progress towards plans with khalinche. I had some really cheering conversations with hatam_soferet and rysmiel and 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 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.

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 blue_mai's mother's funeral, having started 2014 with joining 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 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 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).

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 jack, some gardening (for we are boring middle-aged home owners now), and a really fun visit with ghoti and cjwatson Saturday evening. The very good thing about being boring home-owners is that we have awesome neighbours.

darcydodo, whom I hadn't seen in far far too long, had a work reason to come to Scotland. International conferences are definitely one of the major perks of academia. So anyway, I went up to Edinburgh to meet her, and we travelled back to Cambridge together, and it was brilliant.

( diary )

Wow, spending extended time with darcydodo is so very, very good for me. We caught up properly on eachother's lives and gossipped about all our mutual friends and debated religion and politics and hugged and it was just amazingly wonderful.

I've had a couple of weeks of eating lots of tasty food, doing particularly well with Chinese, and in the company of excellent people.

( diary stuff )

swaldman made a very good point about Clovember:

I'm not especially interested in what my friends are wearing either. However, the idea has encouraged a number of my friends, some of whom had nearly-dormant blogs, to actually post frequently. Most are talking not just about what they are wearing, but about their daily life. And I like this!

I haven't been participating in Clovember, partly because I haven't actually figured out how to take selfies, and partly because I'm nervous about the cutting edge of facial recognition technology and worry that having photos of me here would help search engines to link my DW to my offline identity. But I am definitely appreciating seeing posts about people's daily lives, the kind of stuff that's mostly moved to FB these days. Which in turn encouraged me that it's worth making this post, even though it's mostly about how I've been spending my weekends lately.

I don't know how many times in the last 10 years I've titled posts something with the theme of my friends being awesome, but it's still true.

( social whirl )

And you know another reason why my friends are wonderful? I've not only been too busy to be online for most of the past week, but I've had technical problems with internet at home so haven't even briefly checked in. (Turns out that my router had somehow reset itself, not to factory defaults but to some other combination of settings, so nothing could find the wireless at all and I assumed the internet was out. Even after I'd figured that out troubleshooting was fiddly, but anyway, I am back online.) So while I was completely ignoring the internet, everybody went on having highly civilized discussions about contentious topics like death, disability rights and sex even without me being around to moderate, so thank you all. I will try to get back to your cogent comments over the next few days.