it should be fall now but it's still hot like summer
happy (day after) labor day to my fellow americans! from those swell folks who brought you the weekend. :D i hope you had a nice long weekend in which you rested from your labors. i went to costco with my sister, by which i mean we went to the store but did not actually go in because it was CLOSED. wtf. on the one hand, retail is (paradoxically) usually open on labor day. but on the other, costco workers deserve the day off too. we went to target and dsw (shoes!) and then she brought me home and i immediately went back out for ice cream.
today was the start of the fall semester at work and i spent a significant part of the day convinced i was forgetting to do something important. i put stuff in my outlook calendar to avoid just this situation and i was still POSITIVE i missed something. no one said anything so i probably didn't. but still. and there are students in the building now! it's kind of nice.
friday was my dad's yartzeit (that's the jewish calendar anniversary of his death as opposed to the secular calendar anniversary of his death) so my sister and i went to services at mom and dad's former temple and then met cousin j-of-j&r for dinner. it was good to see him and catch up and, uh, eat. and services were outside under a tent and they were just really nice and homey. the junior rabbi led them. she's adorable. she gave a, i think it's called a drash? which is kind of a scholary discussion of the week's torah portion. she was talking about building relationships off positive vibes (rather than building a relationship because you and the other person have the same snarky opinions, say) and mentioned that she got to be better friends with someone at grad school when they discovered they were both really into the same tv show. and i of course went "what tv show??" but internally so as not to interrupt. she did not tell us but i want to know. what kinds of shows do junior rabbis squee about?
saturday i picked up some comics and sat around outside because it was really nice, and sunday my sister and i went to plimoth patuxet, formerly plimoth plantation, to see how our pilgrim forebears lived and because we'd never been. it was not crowded. it was also set up for a wedding! behind the visitors' center is a nice event space on the water and they had chairs on the grass and a tent for the reception and it was just really pretty. so there's plimoth village, which is 100% reproduction houses and gardens and furnishings and reenactors portraying actual pilgrims (apparently they didn't call themselves that - they called themselves separatists), and patuxet which is a cleared space meant to evoke the native american settlement that was there before white folks showed up (there's a garden and a very long canoe and the frame of a house so you can see how they were built, and a little pavilion under which one of the local guides was dyeing cord and another guide explained about hunting). so cool, so educational. i learned some shit! it was very hot tho and the reenactors in plimoth village were doing the smart thing and sitting in the shade because they were of course all dressed like it was the 1620s.
(the very long canoe could seat like twenty people but the wampanoag - the local tribe - would also make ones that seated forty. that is a very tall tree.)
and after that we saw mayflower ii (i think mostly because i really wanted to) which like everything else is a reproduction with knowledgeable folks standing around who can tell you what it was like to cross the atlantic ocean in 1620. it was horrible. that's what it was like. the pilgrims actually set sail from england in two ships, but one sprung a leak so they all ended up on the mayflower. 102 people. two dogs. probably some chickens and pigs. belowdecks for SIXTY-SIX DAYS. TWO MONTHS. EFFECTIVELY TRAPPED ON A SHIP THAT WAS NOT BUILT TO HOLD THAT MANY PEOPLE. (well, she wasn't intended to hold people at all. she was a cargo ship.) only two people died and i think that was a miracle. and then they landed off the coast of massachusetts in NOVEMBER and had to wait on the ship until land could be found and houses could be built which could be MONTHS. imagine getting on a ship in england, spending two months on the ocean crowded in with a hundred other people and dogs and chickens and pigs and no indoor plumbing, hitting land north of where you thought you were going, and not being able to get off the ship because there's nowhere to go. and it's COLD and you can't get anything to grow and half of you die over the winter and you stay anyway. i would've gone straight back to england when the ship did. that was an education, let me tell you. and the ship was painted! multicolored stripes! surprise! apparently that was one way illiterate sailors knew which ship was theirs - because they couldn't read the names painted on the bows - plus if the ship was attractive that signaled that whatever she was carrying was also worth something. plus there were a lot of ships named mayflower at the time and this one needed to distinguish herself somehow.
after that we went back to my sister's house and i ordered chinese food and we watched the meg, the first one, which was just as dumb and scientifically questionable as the second one but i think i liked the second one better. the dog made an appearance and was just as adorable and, uh, wet.
today i was walking to the t after work and i saw someone wearing a black suit and a bear head riding a vespa. a bear head like a bear costume head. a discount furry head. SO WEIRD.
today was the start of the fall semester at work and i spent a significant part of the day convinced i was forgetting to do something important. i put stuff in my outlook calendar to avoid just this situation and i was still POSITIVE i missed something. no one said anything so i probably didn't. but still. and there are students in the building now! it's kind of nice.
friday was my dad's yartzeit (that's the jewish calendar anniversary of his death as opposed to the secular calendar anniversary of his death) so my sister and i went to services at mom and dad's former temple and then met cousin j-of-j&r for dinner. it was good to see him and catch up and, uh, eat. and services were outside under a tent and they were just really nice and homey. the junior rabbi led them. she's adorable. she gave a, i think it's called a drash? which is kind of a scholary discussion of the week's torah portion. she was talking about building relationships off positive vibes (rather than building a relationship because you and the other person have the same snarky opinions, say) and mentioned that she got to be better friends with someone at grad school when they discovered they were both really into the same tv show. and i of course went "what tv show??" but internally so as not to interrupt. she did not tell us but i want to know. what kinds of shows do junior rabbis squee about?
saturday i picked up some comics and sat around outside because it was really nice, and sunday my sister and i went to plimoth patuxet, formerly plimoth plantation, to see how our pilgrim forebears lived and because we'd never been. it was not crowded. it was also set up for a wedding! behind the visitors' center is a nice event space on the water and they had chairs on the grass and a tent for the reception and it was just really pretty. so there's plimoth village, which is 100% reproduction houses and gardens and furnishings and reenactors portraying actual pilgrims (apparently they didn't call themselves that - they called themselves separatists), and patuxet which is a cleared space meant to evoke the native american settlement that was there before white folks showed up (there's a garden and a very long canoe and the frame of a house so you can see how they were built, and a little pavilion under which one of the local guides was dyeing cord and another guide explained about hunting). so cool, so educational. i learned some shit! it was very hot tho and the reenactors in plimoth village were doing the smart thing and sitting in the shade because they were of course all dressed like it was the 1620s.
(the very long canoe could seat like twenty people but the wampanoag - the local tribe - would also make ones that seated forty. that is a very tall tree.)
and after that we saw mayflower ii (i think mostly because i really wanted to) which like everything else is a reproduction with knowledgeable folks standing around who can tell you what it was like to cross the atlantic ocean in 1620. it was horrible. that's what it was like. the pilgrims actually set sail from england in two ships, but one sprung a leak so they all ended up on the mayflower. 102 people. two dogs. probably some chickens and pigs. belowdecks for SIXTY-SIX DAYS. TWO MONTHS. EFFECTIVELY TRAPPED ON A SHIP THAT WAS NOT BUILT TO HOLD THAT MANY PEOPLE. (well, she wasn't intended to hold people at all. she was a cargo ship.) only two people died and i think that was a miracle. and then they landed off the coast of massachusetts in NOVEMBER and had to wait on the ship until land could be found and houses could be built which could be MONTHS. imagine getting on a ship in england, spending two months on the ocean crowded in with a hundred other people and dogs and chickens and pigs and no indoor plumbing, hitting land north of where you thought you were going, and not being able to get off the ship because there's nowhere to go. and it's COLD and you can't get anything to grow and half of you die over the winter and you stay anyway. i would've gone straight back to england when the ship did. that was an education, let me tell you. and the ship was painted! multicolored stripes! surprise! apparently that was one way illiterate sailors knew which ship was theirs - because they couldn't read the names painted on the bows - plus if the ship was attractive that signaled that whatever she was carrying was also worth something. plus there were a lot of ships named mayflower at the time and this one needed to distinguish herself somehow.
after that we went back to my sister's house and i ordered chinese food and we watched the meg, the first one, which was just as dumb and scientifically questionable as the second one but i think i liked the second one better. the dog made an appearance and was just as adorable and, uh, wet.
today i was walking to the t after work and i saw someone wearing a black suit and a bear head riding a vespa. a bear head like a bear costume head. a discount furry head. SO WEIRD.