(no subject)

Sedarim in Boston.

I generally respond to queries of "What do you do?" with "I'm a sofer," sofer being a term people are at least vaguely familiar with, as opposed to soferet which tends to require explanation. I discovered that in Cambridge MA this is a bad idea, because people invariably responded "Oh, you're in software?"

I got to read Shir ha-Shirim too, because the shul didn't have Shir leyners, so I shared the reading with the shul's resident knows-how-to-do-everything. I wasn't expecting a chance to read. I was happy.

(no subject)

We found an expensive cellphone lying in the street today. The phonebook entry entitled "Me" routed itself back to the cellphone, so we tried the one labelled "Daddy," and Daddy was able to put us in touch with the owner of the phone, and they are now happily re-united.

As our reward, we found matza meal. Matza meal is flour which has been mixed with water, baked into crackers, and ground up again into something which is essentially flour.* Leaving aside the question of why on earth one would want to do this, the fact remains that matza meal is a Good Thing to have on Pesach. There was none to be had in Riverdale; even the Glatt Kosher Shop was sold out, and the proprietor thought there was none to be had in the shops or in the markets or in all the gardens round...anyway, down the hill there's a greengrocer's, Spanish-owned I believe, it's in the Spanish area anyway, and we go there because the veg are so much nicer than up here in Jewtown where they don't eat real food...I digress; the greengrocer's had a whole shelf of Pesach things, and the shelves were covered over in paper in a terribly Pesach-dik way,* and there was matza meal and cake meal and Pesach cakes and chocolate matza, and all kinds of good stuff. I've made brownies.

And I remembered, this afternoon, that I'm reading Torah on Wednesday, and it would really be a spiffy idea to get on and learn it, being as how it's the Song of the Sea, with special tunes and special typography and all kinds of bells and whistles, and it's a long piece, and it's really a good plan to leave more than two days for learning something like that...

* It handles more or less like flour. Presumably it's chemically altered, but it looks the same.
** an essential part of Pesach preparation for many is lining all shelves with paper, plastic or foil.

(no subject)

I didn't mention how the day before Pesach was crazy mad, largely because I wasn't blogging because it was, uh, crazy mad. We were on the way to Boston, but stopped off at Mar Gavriel's for a Megillat Shir-ha-Shirim-finishing session. The poor boy had been up more or less all night writing like crazy, because the Megillah, if it was going to be useful, needed to be finished before the festival started, since one can't legitimately write on festivals, and he wanted it to be ready to read Saturday. So he was completely exhausted, but had a finished Megillah, and after a bit of erasing and correcting and general fiddling, he had a kosher finished Megillah as well.

Shir ha-Shirim doesn't have to be read from a written scroll; most of us read it from books, but it's certainly rather cool to read it from a scroll, and being a Man With Scroll apparently makes one very popular...when the Mar is blogging again, I shall link to his post detailing his adventures as a Man With Scroll. From what he tells me, it was read many times in many places and was generally a Jolly Good Thing, and demonstrates that with enough dedication, one can go from more or less nothing to a finished scroll in about six weeks. Shkoiyach!