For Science!

Okay there's another one! I didn't know about it until today but I am attending the interesting presentations. They include: beta-barrel folding and insertion into the membrane, (restriction of) water as a means to do even more cool things, nanogels, and self-assembly of viral capsids.

Also, I went to the Chabad port-a-Sukkah for lunch today, both to eat and to finally perform the shaking of the lulav. Mission accomplished.

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So Monday was originally the day I planned to be with the Boy, but that plan got nixed because my parents decided, without telling me, that we were going to spend Monday cleaning the house in our old neighborhood. Because bad renters not performing maintenance, and we'd like it to be rentable. Also some of our furniture, which did not fit in California, will fit in Erie. So we put them in a Uhaul to go to Erie.

There was black mold in the basement, and then guys roto-rooting the storm pipe. There was dust. There was humidity. There were lights out all over the place. It was not a fun day.

Also, I ordered a cake.

Aunt E, with whom I was staying, made spaghetti and meatballs for dinner and Uncle S and Aunt L showed up for desert and conversation! It was a pretty good end to an uncomfortably gross day.
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Although, in my defense, the great and holy festival of Sukkot, blessed be it, has begun.

Sukkot it one of those week-long holidays that were, in the days before atomic clocks and instantaneous communication, lengthened to eight days. The reason was that the official calendar-keepers in the capitol would send out runners to announce the holiday, which works in a tiny country like Israel. Once you have a Diaspora going, you might not get your runner until the second day of the holiday, so you'd do the whole thing a day off unless you were given an extra day of leeway. Of course a two-year-old can spot the flaw in this plan, to whit: people are not stupid, and can keep calendars and just start the holiday on their own on the correct day. Nevertheless, in modern times the seven-day holidays are eight days long.

I went to Chabad, and also drove J. I do not like J much, because he is wrong on practically every issue is there is, but he has no other way to get to Chabad. In order to not argue, we have agreed that he is only allowed to talk about whatever book he has been reading lately while in my car. This works, if only because we have the same taste in sci-fi/fantasy novels.

Baby Israel (pronounced: Yees-raw-el) is officially a toddler now. He has figured out this walking thing and is toddling around on his own two legs.

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The Saturday next, which was August 10, my family and I went to the Aufruf (pronounced: oof-roof). We Jews have broken up the Torah in such a way that if you read a bit of it every week for a year, you get to the end and then rewind the whole thing and start again. Obviously this plan only works if you read the designated portion each week, and in general, that is what happens at Jewish services. There are certain blessings said in regards to reading the Torah, and then other optional blessings: the blessing for a woman who has just given birth, the blessing for a sick person, and of course, the blessing for people who are about to get married. This last is said only rarely, because, well, people do not get married that much. So the Aufruf refers to reading the Torah and then saying the blessing for people who are about to get married. And then throwing candy at the couple.

(There was this one kid, who was maybe four, and could not throw the candy. He waited until Yaakov was conveniently sitting down hold the Torah, which is a good thirty pounds worth of scroll, before walking up to him and beaning him in the head with a candy. It was cute.)

As an unexpected bonus, it turns out that my cousin A and his wife J go to that particular Shul, so we were able to see/talk to them at the bruncheon. It was nice.

Then I walked over to the house of the Boy, and spent basically all day there, or at least until after sunset at 9:30, when we went out for ice-cream at this place that makes delicious ice cream.

[flashback wavy screen effects

I will continue to report things that happened, and things that are happening.

I was just at the hair-cutting ceremony of the local rabbi's second-youngest son. (The youngest hasn't figured out walking yet, although he is pretty solid on crawling.) I had never been to one of these before, and it was, to my not-entirely-religious eye, bizarre. But I shall record the logic behind it for purposes of cross-cultural talking.

( Weird Jewish Thing )

Today is the forty-seventh day of the Omer, which is six weeks and five days into the Omer. And two days until Cheesecake Holiday. Also, JJ came up this weekend. Since he doesn't have an electric blender-mixer, we made some cheesecake bars for him to take back and eat on the appropriate days.

( Cheesecake )

Today is the ninth day of the Omer, which is one week and two days into the Omer.

I really need to get MW to send me the recipe for Grasshopper Cheesecake*.

*No actual grasshoppers are used in the making of this cheesecake. Because that would be Gross.

Woo, it is This Damned Holiday, and were are past the second night, when we begin counting the Omer. So now it is Omer-counting days:

Today is the fourth day of the Omer.

Also we have switched over from the rain prayer to the dew prayer. Of course, we would still love rain, but since Israel rarely gets summer rain, we pray for something there's an actual chance of getting.

Me, I'm waiting for weather control. :D

So first it was Sukkot! That is Jewish Thanksgiving, a harvest festival. The Chabad here puts up a massive Sukkah. It has the superstructure of a party pavilion-tent, only instead of a tent up top it is palm fronds. It is quite large enough to seat 60+ people, as I know because that many showed up on the first night. It was madness.

Then it was my birthday! That happens on October 6! I am now one year closer to having to get my own health insurance :/ This year, it happened to fall on Saturday, which is Shabbat, the day of rest. The Boy got me a vidya game which I luff. :D

Then it was Hoshana Rabbah, the last day of Sukkot! Part of the service on this day involves walking around the synagogue seven times, and then beating the lulav to bits. Why? It's Tradition!

Then it was Simchat Torah, the holy day where we celebrate finishing reading the Torah, and start again at the beginning. Once again, I went to the Chabad. They were still boozing up in preparation for the actual dancing when I left, but man, I am tired.

Thank goodness the holidays are over now until Khannukah (which is itself not actually very important, and only known because the Christmas marketers wanted to be multicultural), and the holy days over until Passover in the spring.

Whew!

The thing about this wedding was that weather is unpredictable. I am sure that neither of my cousins planned to be married on the hottest day, but that was what ended up happening. As a result, it was the fastest wedding.

It was also quite amusing, for a silly reason. There was a little platform under the khuppa, which is a Jewish word for the tent-thing under which the couple stands during a wedding ceremony. As part of the ceremony, the bride has to walk around the groom seven times. There was not enough room on the platform for more than two people in any direction, so Alan had to keep moving to make this possible. I think it is kind of poetic - instead of the bride's life revolving around her husband, they revolve about each other like a binary star.

Anyway, then various readers did a fantastic job reading the Seven Blessings. Because this is Judaism, the first blessing is the blessing over the wine, of which the happy couple partake.

Then Alan stepped on the glass, and everyone quickly rushed back inside to the AC. And food. (They had blueberrytinis. I was so happy!)

Alan had the derpiest smile on the whole time. It was so cute. And now I am related to more people.

I had a chance to talk to my relatives, both new and old. Being in California is hard for keeping up with the family. Aunt E is doing all right. I was worried because her husband died earlier this year, but the only thing about her is that she is old. I saw many of my other cousins as well, and talked a little to each of them. My mother's side of the family, which this was on, kind of sprawls out sideways, so there are lots of cousins.

:D

Today is the thirty-seventh day of the Omer, which is five weeks and two days into the Omer.

My roommates are such enablers. To whit:

Me: And then I will use Lulu's toaster to toast the bread, and I will steal some butter, and I will have buttered toast.
Liz: Here's the butter! [passing it over]

Such. Enablers.

In other news, Science! is hard. This was the message at seminar last week; and although I had not thought about it before, it is very true. Evolution has made us into beings that can unconsciously observe, make incredibly fast decisions based on those observations, and most of the time, not get eaten by the tiger. Science requires that we wait until we have all the data to make decisions - which in turn, requires that we know what 'all the data' even means. Scientific thought is difficult, counter-intuitive, not easily within the realm of human understanding.

And so teachers do students who object to, say, Newton's First Law a huge disservice when they act like it ought to be easy. Anyone can see that if you throw a ball it falls down and then it stops; but the First says that in fact it ought to keep moving in the same direction and at the same speed - except that on earth we have things like gravity and friction to deal with. It took a genius (certifiable, but still a genius) to realize that the natural state is not lazy stillness, but inertia. Because Science! is hard.

The rest of the seminar was about how to teach children science! despite the fact that to our common-sense world, the idea of things like relativity and atoms and even germs are really, really weird. It was a good seminar.

Science!

I have sadly neglected you, the people who follow my journal. This is bad, because wonderful Things have happened.

1. It is no longer That Holiday. It is, in fact, the eleventh day of the Omer, which is one week and four days into the Omer.

2. My schedule has worked out such that I get to go home on all the weekends. Last weekend, it was kind of drizzly Friday like we get only rarely in California, and then it cleared up a little, and I saw a rainbow. :D

3. Today, I was given a plant. The internets told me that the greenhouses (which apparently we have) were doing an open-house. So I went, and got a tour of their rare orchids, and on the way out they gave me a plant. I was going to refuse, being as I kill plants, but the options were cacti, which survive without water, and milkweed, which has weed in the name. I took the milkweed, because butterflies.

4. I went to a seminar. I shall not explain, save to say that it's a new approach to drug design. A wild and crazy wacko approach, but one which seems to get previously-impossible results. So there is that.

5. The one about the AIDS. I'll explain later.

6. Bees! On lupins!

. . . And many other interesting biogeek Things.

ONWARDS!