My mind, and the places it goes

Having a love-hate relationship with FrameMaker 10 right now. I love the program. I'm just hating building these templates. Please, chapters, *please* number correctly.

(If anyone out there can help me wrangle these templates, I'd really appreciate it. I *thought* I understood what was going on, but no such luck.)

I knew I was in trouble when the PM running the 10:45 meeting I was in got to the QA report and said, "Jenny, I got your e-mail."

Because my brain then went, "I need to make you mine."

-- We're having what I've termed "snizzle": could be snow, could be drizzle.

-- Due to the weather, many of my coworkers chose to work from home. Because of them and the coworkers traveling for various reasons, the office is really quiet today, to the point that I was the first one in the office today.

-- I have discovered some games for my phone that are addictive (Ticket to Ride, Where's My Water?). I am now looking for people to play Ticket to Ride with.

-- A fanfic project I've been pondering for a while just became both easier and harder due to a casting spoiler. ::ponders some more::

-- We have achieved Purim costumes for Muffin and Squeaker. Tried them on last night, and they were adorable.

-- Speaking of Purim, this year I thought ahead and got mishloach manot items at BJ's when I last went. I just need a couple of items and we can assemble them.

-- Speaking of assembling, check out the new Avengers trailer from Marvel UK. It's really cool.

-- Today's date makes me think I should be humming Sousa music all day. So does Sunday's date.

-- It's 1 March and already my grocery store has put out Passover food. This is ridiculous.

-- With the warmer-than-usual weather we've been having, the trees are confused and some of them are budding. So, of course, I'm having my annual Spring allergy attack. Spring allergy attacks should *not* start in February.

-- It's Thursday, and I have no clue what I'm making for Shabbat.

Today is the US federal holiday observing New Year's Day, so I am off work. Last week, I had the day off in observance of the federal holiday for Christmas. And the week before, we had Friday 23 December off. This means we had three weeks in a row that were four-day weeks. This led someone in a meeting to propose that we always have four-day weeks, and I said there was halachic (Jewish law) basis for this. We say in halacha that three incidents can be considered a chazakah (precident). So three incidents of four-day weeks in a row could, in fact, set precident.

However, I don't believe my company follows halacha when creating the corporate calendar.

-- Not that I'm complaining, but what's up with the weather? It's been in the 60s all week.

-- Food that identifies itself in quotation marks concerns me. (I took the picture below in my office a couple of weeks ago.)





-- mabfan typed something into a text message that was supposed to be an interjection. Autocorrect changed it to "Krasnodar!" I have now adopted this as a new interjection

-- Today I am murdering trees in the name of scienceaccuracy. I need to check old screen shots against new screen shots and replace the ones that need replacing. Since I already took a bunch of new ones for book A, and I need to replace the ones in book B, it's easiest if I print both books (each under 50 pages) and then go page by page and find the newer versions in book A. I feel bad about the tree deaths, but it's either that or make my eyesight even worse by peering closely at the screen all day.

So, as an explanation for why I had to run out and pick up lunch yesterday before the company-sponsored lunch (during a Day of Many Meetings), I said, "I keep kosher." And everyone seemed to perfectly understand what I meant. This is not an uncommon occurrence. It wasn't until today, however, that it occurred to me that it is a phrase that elides a lot of information, uses a word to mean something other than what it traditionally means, and includes a non-English word. Yet my coworkers were not at all confused.

The sentence seems simple. Three words. But only one of them -- "I" -- is straightforward. "Keep" does not usually mean "observe" in American English. "I keep kosher" is not like "I keep birds as pets" or even "I keep time for races" (though I guess it comes somewhat closer to the latter use of "keep").

And "kosher" is a concept that is first of all mostly unfamiliar, I would think, outside the Jewish world. I presume that if I had the same conversation with someone outside of an area that has a decent-sized Jewish community they might not recognize the word. The root means "appropriate"; Judaism 101 suggests "fit, proper, or correct" as definitions. Though "kosher" has made it colloquially outside the Jewish world, the actual details of what kashrut is are not widely familiar.

I'm not sure what specifically caused me to think about this, but there you have it.

-- This morning, when mabfan and I headed out to work (the first time I'd been out in daylight since Saturday afternoon), we saw a large tree in front of one of our across-the-street neighbors had been felled quite impressively by the storm. It didn't look like there was any damage to the house itself, which is good.

-- We have the best friends. During our power outage yesterday, friends who had power offered us the use of their home if we needed to decamp due to an extended power outage. Later (before the power was back), they brought us a pizza for dinner, since they live closer to the kosher pizza source and were able to get to us (we have no car and the T was offline all day, so we were stranded even after the storm had abated).

-- To their credit, the T was up and running this morning and the commute was straightforward. Those on the Green Line D were more out of luck, but that's not atypical due to the abundance of trees lining the D line tracks.

-- This morning, coworkers were greeting each other with queries of how they had weathered the storm. Some are still without power, but mostly folks seem to have come through the storm pretty well.

-- After a brief walk to the post office, I'm pondering a "historical plaques" photo essay based just on what I find walking within a couple blocks of my office.

-- Years ago, osewalrus shared his chemistry-based explanation of the kosher laws, using "milchigons," "fleishigons," and "treifons." Today I learned about something that fits perfectly into the schema: lardons. (Yeah, most people probably already knew about this; I'm kosher-from-birth, so what do I know from pig fat?)

As I mentioned in today's column, I have a job! I start on 18 July, and I am quite looking forward to it.

-- As I alluded to last week, I again have the "Early Erev Shabbat, Too Much Stuff to Do Before Licht Bentchen Blues."

-- While doing some of my Shabbat cooking on Wednesday night while mabfan was out at Town Meeting, I started composing a new musical: "Vegetable Cooking Spray!" (the more health-conscious sequel to "Grease!"). Two songs from it: "You're the Bowl That I Want" and "Greased Bundt Pan" ("Oh, greased bundt pan/I'll bake a lemon bundt cake in you.")

-- The reason I was cooking on Wednesday was that last night (since there was no Town Meeting, the issues having been covered in two nights) mabfan and I went to see a real movie, in a theater (or theatre) no less. We saw "The Social Network," which we'd both been interested in. Good film, and a fun night out thanks to very good friends who gave us the gift of babysitting. We left them with a sleeping Muffin and Squeaker, so they had a relaxing evening of videos while we had a night out.

-- We went to see the movie at the Chestnut Hill AMC, and on the way out of the movie we saw a bunch of folks lined up to see the midnight premiere of "Harry Potter." As we walked back to the Chestnut Hill T stop, we saw all sorts of people in Gryffindor scarves. It took me a minute, but I realized why Gryffindor was the most represented house: Gryffindor shares its colors with Boston College, which is within walking distance of the cinema.

-- Today I attended a mandatory seminar at The Work Place (mandated by the MA Department of Unemployment Assistance. I'd been concerned, because a Friday class in Standard Time, even a morning class, makes things tight for Shabbat prep (which is another reason I cooked on Wednesday). But much to my amazement, and very much appreciated, while we started ten minutes late to accommodate late arrivals, we ended at 10:57, giving me time to do the errands I was worried I'd have to skip if the class went long.

The last week or so has been more than a little crazy:( See what I mean? )