I Can Hear Clearly Now, The Pain Has Gone

Self indulgent complaint about having been sick to follow:

What started as a slight scratchy throat on Wednesday turned into, well, five very unpleasant days.

Normally when the Balabusta gets a cold, she has a sore throat for twenty-four hours, while her chest fills with gunk. Then she coughs and sneezes until the gunk is cleared. Then the cold is over.

On this occasion, the lungs were pretty much clear, and my eustachian tubes got the gunk.

Every time I swallowed, twin jabs of pain in my eardrums. Up and down in intensity, but hard enough at its worst to make me flinch each time. You know how many time you swallow in the course of, say, a minute? A lot of times. More times than you would think.

Advil, didn't work. Throat spray, suggested by the doctor who looked at me for two minutes on Saturday morning, didn't work. NyQuil worked because NyQuil knocked me cold for eight hours at a time, during which time I could not feel my ears. Instead I romped in fields full of golden autumn trees, and walked on ceilings, and argued with long-dead philosophers. They were great dreams. Then I would wake up and swallow.

I looked up middle ear pain. Apparently it's mostly found in babies. This did not make me feel better.

Last night I was nearly hysterical, because this had been going on for five days, and pain that's tolerable for a while gets hard to deal with over a long period of time, and today I HAD to go and spend six and a half hours at a training. No way to cancel unless I was actually in labor, or had surgery. I tried to go to sleep without the NyQuil because I had already taken the Sudafed. (One small blessing, I got to go on a patent-medicine spending spree behind this. I love buying boxes of pills to be taken four to six hours apart. And the nightime Sudafed was on sale.)

Slept shallowly, no more golden trees or philosophers, and woke up swallowing and swallowing desperately, and hurting more each time.

It was one AM. I had to get out of bed in five and a half hours, max. I wandered into the bathroom, took a slug of NyQuil and lay down to read until it kicked in.

Half an hour later, the pressure dropped. No pop, no warning, just swallowed and that time it didn't hurt like crazy. I have no idea why. I went to sleep. My ears are still slightly sore when I swallow, but they have not returned to flinch level, and I got through the day without drugs.

Healthy ears are the best.

Maybe the World's Best Potato

There is a farmer's market Tuesday and Saturday mornings at El Cerrito Plaza. Tuesday we went, and on a whim I picked up some big baking style potatos from one of the organic produce booths.

The guy weighed them and said 'seven dollars', which came out to about a buck thirty per potato, but I gulped and paid, and reminded myself to ask the price BEFORE bagging the produce next time. I also wondered what it WAS with these potatoes. Grown in gold dust or something?

Last night I didn't go to my mom's for Shabbos because my ears STILL hurt, but I got into action cooking a nice little meal at home. We had grilled chicken in the fridge, so that, and green peas, some black olives for nibbles, and what else does the boyfriend want on the side?

"Corn. Corn. Corn? Corn! Corn. Corn." (He's imitating the seagulls from Finding Nemo, in case you were wondering.) Okay, corn, and anything else?

"How about a baked potato?"

That's an idea. I could put them in the microwave. Let's see if the million-dollar-spuds are any good. I mean if they, are, I oughta use them for Shabbos anyway, right?

I baked two of them, and I have to report, they may be the best potato I've ever eaten. The boyfriend not so impressed, but he basically sees vegetables as staging grounds for margarine and salt anyway. The potatoes cooked to an even mealy consistency (this in the microwave, mind), with slightly crispy jackets and smooth, crumbly white interiors. I regretted not having sour cream, (the chicken), but with margarine they were simply superb. Gonna try one with sour cream tomorrow, maybe.

I don't know if I can really justify buying these things again, but they're really, really, good potatoes.

The Speed of Prayer

There have been a number of blogversations going on about tefilah, tehillim, and other good things that start with a 't' sound, by AskShifra and on DovBear and other places, and, well, I'm thinkin' about it all.

First, the basics:

1. I was raised in a Very Reform Shul. (Insert suits, hearty summer-camp Zionism, rabbis in robes but no yarmulkes, an organ, German accents, and the absolute conviction that Yiddish was dead, dead as a doornail, and not a minute too soon. I'm getting nostalgic, but that's another post...)

2. We were taught to read Hebrew with Israeli pronunciation. We were told it was Sephardic. We were told it was better than the awful kind of Hebrew with all those s sounds some of us heard at home.

3. We were not taught to daven. We were not taught to DO much. One of my more baffling memories of childhood is the time the shul let Chabad come and try to get all of us kids in the religious school involved in a weird project featuring Beetle Bailey in tzitzit--I am NOT hallucinating, I still have the flyer somewhere--called the Army of Hashem. I know, they sound like a subplot from Frank Herbert's Dune books. They wanted the boys to wear tzitzit and the girls to light Shabbos candles (this I was already doing), and all of us to daven Modeh Ani. I cannot imagine why the shul agreed to this, or, perhaps more importantly, where they thought nine year old boys going to Temple Emanu-El were going to get tzitzit from. Or what their parents would do if they actually wore them.

4. Then I went to rabbinic school for a year after college.

Despite all of this, I actually can't read Hebrew. I mean, I can read words I understand, and sound others out, but I am horrifically slow. I joked on another blog recently that I regard saying tehillim as a sort of prayer filibuster. Listening to me read tehillim would lead anyone to heal anyone, just to make me stop sounding the words out already. (I have also been known to spend hours in the lady's room, hoping that someone else will have started to lead the Birkat by the time I emerge.)

This has been a long-standing barrier to one of my long-standing goals, which is to begin to daven the Amidah daily. The key problem I've run into each time I've begun is that I only know the first three or four brachot with any fluency, and then I have to read. Correction. Aaaaai. Haaaaaa-vuh. Toooooooooo. Ruh-eeeeeeee.........duh. It takes a terribly long time, and stomps any kavvanah I might bring to the process flat.

Today I discovered that at this site they actually have the Weekday Amidah transliterated. SCORE! I'm going to get a printout and work with this until I actually know the words well enough to start reading the Hebrew properly.

But I would love to get over this problem. Has anyone got ideas? I know the letters, I just can't seem to scan properly. I read English very fluently, can read Latin off the page, French, Spanish--what gives with the Hebrew? Has anyone found anything that speeds them up or gives them more confidence? My Hebrew is not good, but it is good enough that I can follow what's happening in Tanach most of the time. It's just SLOOOOOOOW.

Berries

Also, the boyfriend is one heck of a dessert designer. As I was finishing the last post he walked in and gave me a bowl of raspberries and blackberries from the farmer's market, smothered in strawberry-banana yoghurt.

Gooooood.

The Insider's Guide To Judaism

I explained to my boyfriend that I had read something in "one of the Jewish blog world blogs". He asked, 'how many Jewish bloggers are there, anyway?'

Sometimes I realize, with a small shock, that I am his only window into Judaism. He is not one of these gentile guys who grew up in a town where half his buddies were bar mitzvahed, or dated Jewish girls in high school. The whole Jewish world, the history, lore, behavior and activities of all of us, (twelve or thirteen million?) are viewed by him pretty much only through me. It's kind of a strange feeling. What is not important to me he will not see. What I don't say, he doesn't know.

Sometimes what he sees is reflected back to me in ways that make me uncomfortable. I was chatting with him about the religious schools to which we will (I imagine) send Bubba and Jezebel, and waxing a little rhapsodic about the community they will have as children. And he said, "because the Jewish community has made you so happy?"

Well, there's that. He met me at what was close to the bottom of my relationship with the Jewish world. I wanted some things--a job, justification, my childhood sense of chavurah--more than I could begin to articulate, from 'the community', and I was not getting. I was bitter. I was nuts. I cried myself to sleep more nights than I care to remember because I could not figure out how to be Jewish in the way I wanted to be. Judaism, for him, is something that makes his girlfriend despair a lot. And remember, I am the whole show to him. I am (grin), the most observant Jew he knows.

He's seen other things--the joy I get from the holidays (and also the madness that Pesach produces). He's seen me develop a more comfortable relationship with a shul and a rabbi. But I think his initial impression was that it's hard to be a Jew. First impressions are lasting.

But he meets me on the way. He works on Jewish for me--shooing me off to shul (why, he wants to know, can't I tell him WHEN the service starts?), and he can find lard in a grocery ingredient list faster than I can. For a man who, early in our courtship, forwarded me a Jewish joke he'd read and then asked me what a 'bubbe' was to clarify the punchline for himself--we've come far. Yesterday he snatched a marinade away from me in the grocery store and pointed out that it had cheese in it and couldn't be used for chicken. I'm tellin' ya!

He's getting the rules down. What I'd like to show him, more, is the 'ashreinu' part, the real joy and fun I get from Jewishness. Something to think of, as the chagim get closer.

Gasket Blown

So I hear back from the people who are running the training. Training I was going to was cancelled. If I did not receive notice, they're real sorry. Normally they send out both e-mail and mail notice.

NOTHING on other trainings they might have.

NOTHING about my district's money.

NOTHING.

AAAAAARGH!

The Daily Half-Dozen

1. I have a sore throat. Not feeling particularly chipper.

2. The fella's tires need replacing. The van's in Richmond right now.

3. This is nothing new, but George Galloway is being his usual self, on steroids. The image of Jerusalem and Baghdad as beautiful girls crying out for help from the Arab world would impress me more if I didn't think he'd stolen it from one of Saddam's novels.

4. The training I'm supposed to go to next week still has not sent me anything. No materials, no confirmation, no time I'm supposed to show up. The last communication indicated that I should go to a particular Catholic high school in San Francisco, but NOTHING else.

5. I have a new driving lesson scheduled for Monday after this coming one.

6. The recyclers took our recycling! It's GONE...well, what I could fit in the bins. The fella and I danced with joy. It seems like a sign...of what I could not tell you.

Names Not To Call Children By

So there I am, typing away on a big SCA research project having to do with medieval Jewish names, and the fella happens to ask me what 'stein' means--so I tell him--and then he asks what "Frankenstein" means, and I say I don't know, and I chat on for a bit about the origins of German Jewish surnames.

Apropos of this, the fella declares that if he were to be asked to choose a family name, it would be "Schadenfreude".

I tell him that while he still has some lingering hope of persuading me to take his last name, making it "Schadenfreude" will kill that off right quick.

He says that that's okay, but he and the children will be Schadenfreude. The children, he declares happily, will be Bubba Schadenfreude and Jezebel Schadenfreude.

He has a recurrent interest in "Jezebel" as a name for a child of ours. I don't think he knows her story, he saw the name in a list of 'Biblical names not to give your baby'. He was briefly interested in "Cain" at about the same time.

I've said I will consider Jezebel as a middle name if her first name can be Yentl.

Yentl Jezebel Schadenfreude. Sounds presidential to ME.

The Parakeet is Out

(This is not the parakeet, this is a stock photo. But the parakeet is also green.)

Our parakeet is another inheritance from the machetenim, and had spent his whole life in the old house, except for a few months in a pet store as a baby. The boyfriend drove him over in the van early on in the moving process, and we put his cage by the windows in the front room.

It must be strange for him. He's not used to so much light, and through the windows he can see all sorts of new things. I kept the cage shut until late last week when I opened it to see what he would do.

What he did was stay inside. I worried he would never come out again, but figured he might just need some time to work up the nerve.

Anyway, this evening he decided to get out and explore. He flew around the room several times, landed on various surfaces, sat on the boyfriend's finger, and eventually managed to get back to the top of his cage, where he is sitting and talking about the whole thing loudly.

I guess we're settled in.

Life in the 'Burbs

We went to OSH this morning, and purchased ant traps, also some clear caulk--I think sealing the cracks in the cabinetry will help--and some more Simple Green, plus Simple Green wipes. I have distributed the traps. I keep thinking how much harder this would be if I had children, or dogs, in the house.

The city of El Cerrito refused to take my recycling last week. It was left behind--two giant tubs of it, now turning yellow in the sun--with a snarky form note checked in many boxes to let us know the kinds of sins we had committed. Primarily, I think it is a shatnez issue--we had mixed paper and plastic in the same tub, and bundled paper IN plastic. Also we had included clamshell plastic packaging.

We had also practiced sorcery, settled in the land of Egypt, showed mercy to idolaters, offered peace to Ammon and Moab, made offerings without salt, sheared a dedicated beast, fed the Pesach offering to a ger toshav (since this is August, we had to thaw it out first), delayed payment of vows, barbecued and eaten the flesh of a stoned ox, added to the Written Law, and appointed a king not born an Israelite.

I think we can actually blame that last one on the Supreme Court, but by that time the recycling guy was just checking boxes with abandon.

The recyclers were pretty mad at us about all this sinning, and as I say, they left us with the recycling. A few days later I got a packet in the mail (three WEEKS after we signed on as new customers), explaining how their system works.

Basically, they will only take a few highly resellable kinds of items. No plastic bags. No clamshell containers. No milk cartons. No frozen food boxes. It has to be sorted. Plastic cannot be packaged in paper. Paper cannot be packaged in plastic. We cannot yoke an ox and a llama together when mowing the lawn, or they won't take our lawn clippings. These are the rules.

In San Francisco, you just dump all the recyclables into the recycle bin, and they sort it all out somewhere. Sigh...

The Ants Come Marching Two By Two

They are literally coming out of the walls.

The problem, I think, is that the whole panel of cabinets and sink set into the outside wall of the building seems to be permeable by the ********** ants. They are coming in.

Yesterday they found the sugar. Today things seemed fairly calm until the moment the boyfriend pulled the trash away from the wall and, well, there was a HEAP of them. The boyfriend chose this critical moment to go to work. I ate dinner, and then got down to work. Again.

I have run out of Simple Green, my ant spray of choice. I am now wiping them away with Fabuloso, a vivid purple Mexican cleaning product that smells like industrial lavender, if you can imagine such a thing. Full strength. My hands smell like Fabuloso. The kitchen smells like Fabuloso. I suspect everything I cook for a month will have that slight lavender tinge to it.

Ants are on everything. Mostly in the kitchen, but the boyfriend has found them in the bed. They get on my hands while I'm killing them in batches and walk up my arms. Every time either I or the fella feel something on our skin, we twitch, sure it's an ant.

Tomorrow we go to OSH, and get sonar. And poison. And er...stuff.

Ants Gone Wild

The ant situation is officially out of control. The ants are storming the kitchen. We've run out of paper towels. I've run out of any lingering amibvalence about killing them. The whole kitchen and living room smell like Simple Green.

They found a frying pan left in the sink overnight and went NUTS.

I just found an ant walking on my glasses. I was wearing them.

The frying pan is full of water and Simple Green and now looks like a tragic scene from an ant epic poem, with the bodies of many brave worker ants rolling in the poisoned surf.

I feel kind of ill.

The jasmine bushes I thought were so nice when we moved in? Maybe not such a good idea.

Strings Attached

I like the red string bracelets.

I don't like Pop Kabbalah. I don't like celebrities posing with their red strings. I think the guys at the Kabbalah Center should be--I don't know--is there a Jewish equivalent of getting pied? Maybe they could be smushed in the face with sufganiot. Or stoned with matzo balls. I have no patience with this stuff. It's exploitative, of real Jewish tradition, of Jewish experience, of the people who come to this nonsense trying to find something good for themselves.

Also, the news that Madonna's children are attending Kabbalah religious school freaked me out.

But I like the red string bracelets.

I have a friend who's actually very frightened these people are going to cause serious harm to themselves or others through working Kabbalistic magic without having the slightest clue what they're doing. My feeling is that this is like giving people who failed high school chemistry the directions to make a nuclear power plant. They won't do it. Don't worry. I think she feels it's more like letting those same people poke the buttons at the power plant randomly.

Did I mention I don't believe in this nonsense? Ignore anything above that implies differently.

Anyway, the red string bracelets are pretty, and there is a basic simplicity of symbolism about them that I find really appealing. I like the (original) association with Rachel. I like the fancy-schmancy additions with the silver chains and the little charms, like the one above.

I find that I sort of want one. But I absolutely won't wear one, since even with outfits like ChosenCouture carrying them, they are just SO Pop Kabbalah, unless you actually live in a stone-floored apartment in Safed.

I'm trying to think of some way to reclaim red strings, a way of announcing "This used to be MY culture, and it ain't New Age. Give it back!"

But maybe that's silly. Not like anyone in my neighborhood used to wear them anyway. The Jewish stuff I actually grew up with is STILL not chic.

Any ideas?

Food Update

THE BEANS:

Crock-Pot cooking, combined with NO tomato sauce appears to be the answer. I ended up with pinto beans that have a deep, slightly smoky flavor and no crunch to them at all. The boyfriend ate a spoonful, pronounced them 'mushy', and seemed pleased. My current plan is to flavor them with tomato and pepper sauce and serve them with cornbread.


THE BACON: (We took a little bacon, and we took a little beans...)

At this point I think I've reached a dead end. Allan Scott reports that Eli's Restaurant in Washington has 'beef pastrami bacon', but no turkey bacon.

Aaron's Gourmet has beef fry, and a bad moral reputation attached to its meat products.

I thank everyone involved (you too, Steg), for helping, and will continue my quest for kosher bacon. Onward!

Ketubahs Don't Count. Huh?

The Balabusta is in a mood. Apparently, the ketubah is not a legally binding document if it might inconvenience the man whose name appears on it.

That's about all I can figure out from this.

'Show-off' ketubot declared not binding
Mati Wagner, THE JERUSALEM POST
Jul. 26, 2005

Just before the huppa, in the heat of the moment when passion and commitment peak, the bridegroom may promise the heavens to his beloved, but he does not really mean it, according to what experts called a precedent-making decision by Dayan Shlomo Dichovsky.

Unfortunately, this guy put it in writing. But apparently that does not matter.

In a recent divorce case that came before the Great Rabbinical Court, Dichovsky ruled that a husband who promised to pay his wife NIS 500,000 in their ketuba – the Jewish marriage contract – was swept away by the moment.

He called the sum "exaggerated" and "intended to express the bridegroom's respect for the bride," but lacking any real legal validity. Instead, he set the amount the woman was entitled to receive at NIS 18,000 – after factoring in her right to half of major assets, such as the house, which are owned by the husband.

In other words, not the terms of the ketubah. I am trying to imagine a bais din declaring that the ketubah reflected the bride's respect for the groom but did not mean that she was actually married to him. I especially--and this is where my anger about this is coming from--cannot imagine this being said in a situation in which the wife was seeking a get her husband wanted to withhold. Wouldn't that be EASY?

Prof. Dov Frimer, an attorney and adjunct professor of family law at Hebrew University, said the halachic concept of asmachta was at the center of Dichovsky's reasoning. It describes a situation in which there is a lack of seriousness of intent, a crucial element in both Jewish and civil law needed to form a binding obligation between two parties.

This puts a ketubah on the level of a guy scrawling "I will give Doug my car if the Mets don't win" on the back of a receipt while drunk. This was a ketubah. It was witnessed. How on earth does this man propose to say he wasn't serious? He thought the chuppah was a beach cabana? He thought he was in a play?

Putting Dichovsky's decision in a historical perspective, Frimer pointed out that several decades ago former chief rabbi Shlomo Goren directed rabbis performing marriages not to allow a ketuba of more than NIS 1 million.

Many rabbinic authorities thought Goren had not gone far enough, he said, adding: "Rabbi Dichovsky's ruling takes a major step towards aligning popular custom with the dictates of Jewish contract law and restoring the serious legal character of the ketuba."

I can think of a way to restore the serious legal character! Treat the document as though it were a legal document, and its terms valid. Oh wait, they do. But only if a woman needs to get out of a marriage and her husband won't cough up a get.

It is a common practice, especially among Jews of the Mediterranean region, for the bridegroom and his family to offer exorbitant amounts of money to the bride in a showy expression of affection and esteem. The sum of money is written in the ketuba, which is read aloud under the huppa.

I like regional folk customs. But maybe we could change that one. Instead of writing huge amounts of cash into the ketubah, have the groom stand up in front of the guests and make promises about his behavior as a married man. "Osnat, I love you so much, I will do the dishes every night. You are an angel--I will always pick up my dirty underwear. You are a woman of valor--and so I will take the children to the park every Sunday while you get some rest. We will go to a resort for Pesach every year. My mother will only visit us once a month, and she will call in advance. My dove, my nightingale..." And it wouldn't go into a legal document! It would be the best part of the wedding, as yeshiva bochers struggle to outdo last week's groom in all the helpful things they can think of to do around the house. For the really hard-core, the groom could publicly display his love for the bride by symbolically vacuuming the rug under the chuppah.

In some cases, a rich bridegroom could conceivably be serious about his pledge. But often large sums are touted by young men who are just beginning their professional career.

Rabbi Ratzon Arussi, chairman of the Chief Rabbinate's wedding council, called the decision ground-breaking. But he added that just as Dichovsky protected the man from unreasonable financial demands that threatened to ruin him, so too should the woman be protected.

"If, at the time of marriage, the woman contributes significant sums of money for the purchase of a house, this should be recorded in the ketuba as a dowry," Arussi said.

Sensible.

Attorney Nurit Fish said Dichovsky's decision was a concession to egalitarianism.
"Basically what he was saying was that a women rightfully enjoys equality before the law in the distribution of assets after divorce," she said. "Therefore, less weight should be given to the ketuba."

Less WEIGHT? This is the part that makes me insane. As far as I can tell, the rationale is that a woman has equality before secular law, therefore financial promises given to her in the ketubah can be taken with a grain of salt. The problem here is that halachically a woman does NOT have equality. Husbands have repeatedly been able to withhold gittin, sometimes exacting financial concessions in exchange for giving up their essentially absolute power over the end of the marriage. On these occasions, rabbinic courts have held that there is nothing they can do--essentially because a ketubah is a legal document. Everyone is assumed to have meant what they said, and said what they meant.

But to save this guy's bacon, you should pardon the expression, we will treat the ketubah more as a kind of calligraphied love letter, and less of a binding document.

Look, I think the judge was reasonable enough, and I don't know all about the case. This guy dug himself a hole, and the law was interpreted so he could get out. But I'm going to remember this the next time there's a horrific agunah story, and some rabbi has thrown his hands up and declared himself helpless to help. Women should also be allowed to get out of holes.

Rabbi Voldemort?

So, apparently certain persons are trying to curse Ariel Sharon to death. (Thanks, FailedMessiah, for bringing that to my attention, I really need to keep up on Ynet.)

I initially wrote 'nutjobs', rather than 'persons', but I scrapped that. The question here is not whether I or they believe they can cause death by such means. The issue is that they're trying.

From what they're saying, I infer that they're trying this rather than conventional assassination methods because they believe their target to be too heavily guarded, however, they are taking (ethereal) credit for the assassination of Rabin, also a couple of Israeli public figures they didn't care for who are now dead.

This is obscene. Askkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger is quoted in the above article as saying "Such acts constitute a defilement of God’s name, and they drag the name of Jewish values through the mud." Couldn't have said it better. (Is that why he's the Chief Rabbi and I'm not?)

After all the talk about various Jewish and Christian groups not wanting children to read Harry Potter, because of the witchcraft, this is all I need: Rabbis trying to place an Avada Kedavra curse on Ariel Sharon.

Frijoles and Guilt

I came back to the house to find a nice note from my field project advisor.

Also came back to a house that smells like cooking pinto beans.

This is the saga of the beans:

Among the 388,392,485 items left in my possession by the machetenim was a giant 20 or 25 pound sack of dried pinto beans. The only thing I ever buy 20 pounds of at a time, normally, is rice, since the fella and I both grew up in strongly Asian influenced communities, and I tend to cook something that goes on rice at least two or three times a week. But the beans seemed like a nice possibility. I like beans. The fella regards thick bean soup or beans with cornbread as basically the only non-fleischig meal he considers a real dinner. I determined to cook some beans.

That was just after the chagim, in 2001. I am still trying.

I cannot seem to get the beans to a non-crunchy consistency. They start to fall apart, and turn to paste, and they still have a slight CRUNCH to them. I went online and looked for pinto bean recipes. They all start with "cook a pot of pinto beans. When your beans are done..."

I found folksy reminisces by folks who grew up poor in Texas, but Mama always had a pot of beans on the stove no matter what. Do they explain how Mama cooked them? NO.

I found a webpage by some nutcase woman explaining how dried beans are going to be your friend after the U.S. government collapses and we're all in bomb shelters living off the land. Does she explain what you do to cook the dried beans while fending off the federal shock troops and homeschooling your kids in Christian self-reliance? She does not. "Cook your beans, and then..."

These people are no help at all.

The best help I got was from Latina Magazine, my favorite fashion mag ever, except for the late lamented Mode. Latina occasionally runs articles advising working women not to run themselves down if they get their beans out of a can, instead of cooking from dried like your mother and grandmother did.

Finally got a tip from a coworker. Don't put in the tomato sauce at the beginning. Apparently it has some enzyme that retards the bean-cooking process.

So right now, I have a Crock-Pot full of beans going. They've been going since nine-fifteen this morning. I am hoping for the best. I'll let you know how it works out.

I don't know why I am so focused on this, but for some reason it drives me NUTS that I can't do this.

Frustration--and 43 Other Things

Right now I'm intensely frustrated. I have too many things to do, and so feel as though I'm doing none of them very well.

Basically, these are my goals for the summer:

Unpack
Establish nice household routines so that we can live comfortably in this house
Get ready for teaching in the fall
Get a large chunk of work done on my MA field project
Learn to drive--this could be extended, but I want a license by the end of Christmas break
Finish the STUPID, STUPID teacher induction homework

It's too much. It's too many things. If, say, I were only unpacking and getting the house set up, and ALSO I was getting ready for fall, great. Or if I were unpacking and ALSO working on the MA, great. But it's a couple balls too many. And I feel kind of grrrr. This is the downside of the Balabusta dream. I imagine myself doing millions of things, perfectly and completely, without breaking a sweat, and I can't. Period.

I'm trying to pare down, and be smart.

The afternoon's plans:

Take a shower, get some clothes that aren't what I'm wearing on. --DONE
Go into Berkeley. Get some books. Make some photocopies--DONE
Come home --DONE
Make some cornbread
Do one more standard--two homeworks--for BTSA, and then mail off what I have. I may need to go back to the school site to finish the rest, and I want some positive feedback for what I've done before continuing to invest time.
Clean living room--pick up surfaces, and Swiffer

IF I'M STILL SANE WHEN THIS IS DONE:

Create an outline--not all the materials, but an outline, of my first week of class this fall, which is going to focus on classroom procedures. If this doesn't happen today, it will happen tomorrow.

I think this is reasonable sized.

I've found a weird website called 43 Things. Essentially, you create an account where you can make a list of up to 43 things you're working on at any given time, and then network with other people who share these goals. I'm creating one, trying to include big long-term stuff--get my novel published, stop beating myself up about small failures--with small stuff--get the BTSA homework done!

In the interest of stopping beating myself up, here are some good things I've done:

1. On the very PLUS side, the situation with the dishwasher continues to be GREAT. We have had almost no dish build-up, and certainly not the kind of problems we had at the old house. I currently have a couple of glasses in the sink, and nothing else. It's terrific.

2. I wrote to my Field Project advisor, explained what I was doing, and asked for help with a technical problem.

3. I bought a plastic filing cube yesterday, and organized a whole lot of papers that were lying around loose. This also allowed me to throw away papers we didn't need, that had been in the stacks.

Buy Stock in Costco, Friends

Let's see. Check this out. They pay $17 bucks an hour on average. They sell cheap stuff everyone needs. (I'll deal with the conditions that's made under at some other time.) They have good benefits. And Wall Street is whiiiining, because if they can run a healthy business under these conditions, they're gonna make the folks who lock their illegal employees in overnight look even worse.

Wheeeee!

Quest For Turkey Bacon

Aaron's Gourmet wrote back, and they said:

Dear Balabusta,

We carry all types of kosher products, however, there is no bacon nor any pork products involved.

I've written back, trying to explain. I'm interested to see that they didn't exactly get the drift of my post. I wrote in part:

Hi--I'm trying to find out if there is a source out there for kosher turkey ham and/or bacon.

I think they may have read this as "kosher turkey, ham, and/or bacon", and not realized that 'turkey' is an adjective modifying 'bacon' in this case. I'm starting to realize that this may just be an untapped market. Why? Turkey bacon and ham are selling big these days, they're good quality products, and they would allow kosher cooks a lot of room to make meals that otherwise don't happen. If 'bacon' and 'ham' turns off the core market, how about 'turkey strips'? 'Hickory-cured turkey'?

Now if I had the slightest idea how to start a turkey bacon business, I would see this as a business opportunity.

Actually, there is a product I found in the lists at Aarons called 'beef fry', and based on other searches I suspect this might be some sort of beef bacon. I don't want beef bacon, though. It's really not that great, whereas the turkey is better for you, and has that nice salty crispness.

On an earlier theme, Aarons also writes (as part of a long letter introducing me to the company):

Aaron's Gourmet is also a producer of Kosher Turduckens. A Turducken is a fully boneless stuffed hen (stuffed with a choice of stuffing: vegetable challah or rice with vegetables), which is stuffed into a fully boneless duck and then both are stuffed into a fully boneless turkey, with the same stuffing. A Turducken looks like a plain stuffed turkey, but don't be fooled. This is no ordinary turkey. Just put one on a Simcha table and don't tell the guests what it is. Let them think it's just a plain turkey. When it's time to carve, you ask for everyone's attention and cut it all the way through. Don't be afraid. It's fully boneless. All you hear is: What? Oh! Ahh.

So there you have it.