This will be no surprise to anyone ever, but Montreal in winter is COLD. I went outside after a shower the other day, and my hair FROZE. With actual ice in it.
Unrelatedly, here is a picture of a mezuzah I wrote today:
Available here.
Mirrored from hasoferet.com.
I thought that crash was just Them Upstairs dropping something.
Turns out it was the mezuzah falling off my bedroom door. I’d taken it off for a Hebrew school on Sunday, and apparently not stuck it back on hard enough.
I found the mezuzah case some hours later, in the middle of the hall. That’s where the dog leaves things she’s stolen.
It’s empty.
I can’t see the scroll anywhere.
Since mezuzot are made from parchment, and parchment is first cousin to rawhide, and the dog loves rawhide, I rather suspect that the dog has eaten it.
There are few things more annoying than discovering that the dog has eaten your mezuzah. Perhaps first among them is discovering that the dog has eaten your very small mezuzah that it took you hours and hours to write and the accompanying realisation that you will have to do it all over again.
The moral is: use nails instead of sticky pads when attaching mezuzot.
Mirrored from hasoferet.com.
I was going to give a class on checking your own mezuzah, but it got prevented by weather. Today I found the notes I’d made for it, so I’m typing them up.
But I’m not putting in the pictures here because that’ll take hours of scanning and photographing; if you want those you’ll have to get me to come give the class.
Anyway, this is what we would have covered:
Is the mezuzah written on parchment, or printed on paper?
Does it have all the words? (checking using a tikkun; checking using the internet)
Are all the original letters there? (flaking, damage)
Are they still in good repair? (cracking)
Theoretical interlude: why repairing letters out of order is problematic
Technical bit: checking to see if the letters have their proper form (this is the bit that requires lots of training and practice, but there are some things that you can see straight away, like letters which are connected, or really egregious malformations).
Such a class is not going to equip the average mezuzah-user to say “Yes, this mezuzah is definitely kosher,” but it will equip said user to know if their mezuzah is not kosher, or if they should be worried.
As ever, for more information I heartily recommend the book Tefillin and Mezuzos: A Pictorial Guide by Yerachmiel Askotzky. You can buy it here at his site.
Mirrored from hasoferet.com.
It's a good idea to wrap the scroll in something before putting it in the case; it protects it from dust and other airborne yuk, and to some degree from moisture. R' Askotzky at stam.net recommends wax paper. Some sellers will roll them up for you in plastic wrap. 
This applies particularly if the case is openwork, even more particularly if it's going to get painted over. On the whole, it's better to take the mezuzah down before painting.
And when it was finally extracted from the case, see what had happened!
Left: it's not nice to roll it with the writing on the outside. Neither is it nice to roll it top to bottom. It's supposed to be rolled side to side; if you roll it top to bottom and then hang it, the writing lies sideways instead of being upright.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
