(no subject)

I spent yesterday working at lettering on a Torah, and woke up this morning feeling wobbly and coughy and awful, from which I conclude that spending all day hoofing around the metropolitan area and lettering was Too Much Too Soon. So I have spent today indoors (except for a picnic lunch in the garden) with my bosom companion the Lishkat ha-Sofer, turning more of his choppy rabbinic Hebrew into English. He doesn't use punctuation very much, which is annoying; really his only tool is the full stop, which. He uses in funny places. To make. Conceptual breaks in a sentence. Where the rest of us. Would use a comma. Or not even that.

In other news, my contract for the sefer Torah has arrived, modified to my satisfaction and theirs, which is supersuper, and this week (tomorrow night) the sofrut halakha chevra is learning chapter 11 in the Keset ha-Sofer, which deals with the prohibition on erasing the holy Names of God. Basically you're not allowed to; the discussion mostly deals with what exactly counts as a holy name and what doesn't, with convoluted examples of legal loopholes which can sometimes make the difference between salvaging four days' work and having to ditch it.