Shabbat at cynara_linnaea's

I drove in a torrential downpour in order to get to cynara_linnaea's house, and there was tons of traffic on I-195 and on route 9, but I made it before Shabbat, and we even got to early minyan.

There are 2 women's sections- one in the back downstairs and one in the balcony. We went for the balcony and were the only females present. cynara_linnaea said that usually there are more people...

The rain was off and on all weekend, but there was no sun and I was starting to go crazy. I don't do well with a lack of natural sunlight, and I had just gotten my new polarized lenses and wanted to try them out, which I couldn't if there was no sun.

But I had a lot of fun talking with cynara_linnaea about life, and talking to broadwayquene, who I've never really spent an extended period of time with before.

I also got to lein. Not just any leining, but the easiest leining in all of the Torah. Parsha naso has a lot of long readings, and mine was no exception, but I had the 6th aliyah, which is part of the channukah reading, the same paragraph repeated over and over with the sacrifices brought to the mishkan. I was lucky- some of the paragraphs actually do have tiny variations you have to be careful of, but mine were identical besides the names of the people. I messed up once at the beginning, and after that I was fine. And of course everyone was like "you lein so well!" Not so much. Usually with that late notice [night before] I can't learn it so well, but I practiced 5 times as much as normal, since it repeated that many times.

I had atcually been in that building once before at a NFTY event, but I hadn't realized. Minyan Shalem basically rents/borrows space from the Reform shul there.

And last night we went to Ta'am China, since there are no kosher restaurants in RI besides krispy kreme which doesn't really count. No one besides Yosef can make a meal of doughnuts, and even he can't pull that off any more.

And when I checked my e-mail, I saw that Ben had finally e-mailed me!!! I know I shouldn't be so excited to hear from my thesis advisor, but I was. And yay!

Duckpond 4.0

So first there was the flood. Then there was the duck.

Yup, that's right, our backyard was, for a brief period of time, a duckpond!!!

( duck! )

This post is dedicated to superducky1 for what I think are obvious reasons.

Can one be an archaeologist without an archaeological hat?

So when I was with Bess and Cat and we went to Ben & Jerry's, I also tok the opportunity to buy myself a hat for the dig [you need something with a brim.]

I decided to take pictures, since I don't have any good recent photos of me. Maybe one of these will become my new facebook pic. Tell me what you think.

( no, it's not a fedora... )