Hatam Soferet

...terrible flight mix-up, and my poor mama came ALL THE WAY TO HEATHROW to get me, and spent hours in the airport getting more and more frazzled and worried and trying to find me, because about 6.30am my phone rang, and I staggered out of bed and it was mum going "WHERE ARE YOU???????" to which the answer was "America..." and now I see she tried to call me at 5.41am but I didn't hear it...

...well, you can imagine. This is a lesson to me (and to you, by extension): email your mum your itinerary as soon as your travel agent emails it to you.

jillt is the bestest ever and I love her squillions.

I spent a golden weekend in Cambridge (Cambs, UK, not MA) with my best friends in the world ever. livredor, pseudomonas, darcydodo and I have been the Brotherhood since college, sharing more or less everything between us in some way or another. This weekend livredor came back from Sweden, pseudomonas was in Cambridge anyway, I came up on the bus, and we phoned darcydodo on account of her being in California.

Since we left college and beastly geography got in the way, livredor and pseudomonas and I haven't been together very much. This weekend we did fun things - we had ice-cream and tea and cherries and shabbat and went punting and walking and to the botanical gardens and to the second-hand bookshop and on a picnic, and saw lots of people, lethargic_man particularly and many others, but we were together, and that's worth all of the above and then some. The few days a year we have together stand out from all other days as bright, beautiful times with the friends who know me best and whom I love most.

I got up at 5am today to catch a bus to Philadelphia. The 5am part wasn't so great, but the Philadelphia part was fun. I was assessing the Torahs in a shul, which means taking a whole lot of notes regarding the conditions of the sefer with an eye to estimating how much it'll cost to restore them.

They had six Torahs - three bad, three good.

One was in basically good condition but for the seams, which someone had stuck together with duct tape. People, please - if your sefer's seam breaks, either use artist's or archivist's tape, or don't tape it. The duct tape had not only dried up but had left hideous, hideous stains, which probably contain elements of non-kosher animals as well as being a ghastly orange-yellow - and the seams still need to be fixed. Overall gain negative.

Two were hugely satisfying, because the text and klaf were in lovely condition, really fine quality, and nicely written - but very, very, very dirty. So dirty that they looked to be in awful condition and perhaps beyond restoration, but hurrah! the dirt will almost all come off, and they'll look like new Torahs by the time I'm done with them. I was very happy about this, because it was such a nice surprise for the shul! Instead of two Torahs headed for retirement, two high-quality sefarim which won't cost too much to repair...nice!

One was in a terrible condition, but it was a Czech Memorial Scroll, so you'd sort of expect that. It would be fiendishly expensive to repair - it had extensive flaking, which I'd guess came from being stored in a damp warehouse by the Nazis - but those scrolls are terrific educational tools, there's all kinds of history/geneaology/shul-twinning things that can go on. Sometimes they have enough sentimental/historical value that repairing them is worth the expense. After all, these were scrolls that the Nazis collected up to put in their museum of Jewish stuff - they were supposed to be the last things that were left after the Jews had all been killed. So restoring them to use carries a pretty powerful message.

Two were in truly terrible condition, really beyond repair from a financial perspective. They had been designated Junior Scrolls, which meant they were hanging out in the Hebrew school area. It's not clear what they're used for; they can't be being read from since they're largely illegible. One of them had crumbs and sesame seeds in it. I'm a little bit concerned by this; it seems to me that these scrolls ought to be retired, because it doesn't seem to me that the educational benefit outweighs the indignity. What do you think - am I over-reacting?

There was a collection of Russian cantors visiting the shul - mostly Russians who got here and became cantors (some of them had been opera singers in Russia) - they were doing choral stuff for fun. I listened to them for a bit; they were very nice to listen to indeed. Unusually for a choir of cantors, they had excellent blend. Every other cantorial chorus I've heard has had simply awful blend - prima donnas all trying to out-prima-donna the rest. So to hear a choir of cantors singing like a choir was a treat and a half!

Philadelphia seemed very pleasant, the bits of it I saw. Another nice city to add to the list of Nice Places I've Seen. My favourite bit was the statue of Mr Penn on top of the city hall, because it used to be against planning laws to build higher than his hat (this was revoked twenty years ago to encourage business growth). I found this charming.

Journey back marred by the movie - the screens were not showing anything, but the soundtrack was playing: a mixture of very loud music, indistinct speech, screams, and gunshots. At 5pm! It doesn't seem appropriate to be showing people getting killed for fun on public transport, especially during the day. This is basically why I prefer taking the Chinatown buses when I can - no nasty movies.

But when I got home, my W had made supper and it was ready and yummy. A good day.

Urgh. To Brooklyn to collect klaf for Anschei Chesed's megillah. They could have posted it, but time's getting on, and I thought I'd feel happier once I had it for sure.

Let's just say I have a tremendous capacity for getting hopelessly, stupidly lost. I walked about forty blocks further than I should have done, and then MTA weren't running trains to Manhattan from the appropriate subway stop. By the time I got on the train I was snuffling horribly, and didn't have any tissues :( must've annoyed the heck out of everyone.

They also didn't have some of the stuff I wanted, and the bookshops I went into didn't have any of the books I wanted. Not a good day. But I have the klaf, which I suppose is the main thing.

I flew back to the US sat directly in front of a clutch of overly merry Estonians. The one behind me was using my armrest as a footrest, so I leaned my elbow on the armrest quite legitimately and innocently and was of course terribly shocked to find that I'd speared a foot with my elbow. Warned by the previous flight's experience, I'd brought sandwiches, and didn't even attempt the Stir Fried Chicken (which included turnips - ?!). The salad had been reduced to a green slime. O British Airways, how are the mighty fallen!

There was a family in the row ahead of me whose video screens were broken, and I got to listen to them soundly berating a crew member for refusing to shuffle all the other passengers around so that they could have four seats together with working video screens - the crew actually had the insolence to think that getting meals served to two hundred people should take precedence over getting two small girls plugged into a video. "What are we supposed to do with them?" the parents asked angrily.

Long journey back from Newark dragging fifty-odd kilos of stuff (books mostly, and chocolate) (that's somewhere around a hundred pounds, for the metrically challenged). Some nice people helped me on the stairs when the lifts were broken - there's something to be said for looking puny. I could've done it, but it was much faster to be helped. BED, nice.

Woo ha, the DSL is back. Nice.

After a week of hideous rain, rain and wind so heavy that the water appeared to be running uphill, Succot has arrived in beautiful sunshine and fantastically mild temperatures. An October Succot normally entails coats, sweaters, scarves (I remember a Succot in Oxford when we tried to eat bread with gloves on) and so on, but today I had lunch without even a sweater. We don't have our own succah, but fortunately there are a number of communal ones within a short walk.

Riverdale is vastly prettier than Rego Park. I went to shul today (or yesterday, if you will) and yesterday (or the day before), and the walk involved a LOT of trees and green space. I was very happy. Tomorrow I shall be riding. I might not normally bother going, what with having work, and thus needing to attend a 6.45 minyan, but my etrog suffered a fatal accident. So did W's. I shall make marmalade this weekend, and what with etrogim being $15 apiece (and that's cheap in this country, just so you know), it'll be some of the most expensive marmalade ever.

I walked into Manhattan this afternoon, on account of having an appointment which could not be rescheduled (it didn't involve anything unsuitable, so no reason why not). From 236th to 97th is ten miles, and it was mostly quite a nice walk, except the part below 180th as far as Central Park was unbelivably featureless and boring - block after block of low-income housing, broken glass, the occasional dollar store - I fell to wondering - are there no subway stops round there because it is so boring, or is it so boring because there are no subway stops? Certainly passing a subway stop was a major event.

In the interests of staying at least vaguely hydrated over the fast, I drank so much water over shabbat I could barely move and spent time lying on the floor like a plastic bag. Then we tried to go into Manhattan on the subway to catch an Eicha reading, and I sweated it all out so I'm thirsty already. Shabbat was very nice apart from the bloating: [Unknown site tag] was back in town, and as if that weren't enough of itself, she'd brought about five zillion books with her. Talk about spoilt for choice! Livredor or fiction?

In other news, the vacuum cleaner has been restored to health, which may not sound like much, but just you try not vacuuming at all between Pesach and 9 Av and having to do it with a brush and dustpan, and just see how nice it is when you finally get all the shmutz up. Yay.

So far, I'm enjoying what I'm doing, pretty much. Okay, it's only scraping differents sorts of yuck, but there are interestingly many different sorts of yuck.

I'm not enjoying the commute. It's steamy hot hot hot outside, and in the stations it's steamy hot hot hot plus full of train hotness. You wait for the train and get soaked with sweat. Then you get into the train and it's cold cold. You think OOOOOHHHHHHNIIIIIICE for a few minutes, and then as the sweat starts drying, you supercool and start shivering. This happens every time you change trains. I take four trains and have a half-hour walk.

Need. More. Energy.

Now I can fall asleep standing up on the subway without falling over when the train stops. Beat that, livredor!

We went to Boston for the sedarim. We'd planned to arrive Friday afternoon, but rather miscalculated and ended up arriving decidedly after sunset (although before dark). Oops. So we held like Rabeinu Tam temporarily, and made like Shabbat begins at dark instead of at sundown (emergency measure for when you're stuck on a bus at sundown - not to be used when you just didn't finish cooking in time). The downside of that is that you can't finish at dark on Saturday, you have to hold off for 72 minutes.

First night seder was what you might call "funky" - the kind where you have lots of energetic young people and Read Sources and Talk About Issues until 3am. Second night seder was what you might call "heimish" - the kind where it's small and cosy and there are a couple of small children and you read the seder and it's ever so civilised and you finish around twelve despite not starting until half past nine. Both very nice. At first night, there was the MOST AMAZING CHAROSET EVER - a Moroccan recipe featuring dates - and there was lots and lots left over, which I ate continually in sandwiches for the next two days. Very mmmmm.

My main problem with Pesach is lack of chocolate. I could murder a Twix right now. I would murder it by EATING IT! CHOMP CHOMP!

And I got a lift back to NYC, which was nice but involved getting up at 4.30 - and we still got caught in the traffic. I'm glad my commute isn't three hours on the motorway each way.