Purim, Programming, and Potables

Thursday night was Purim, and as always, services at Shir Hadash were fun. This year’s theme was “Sesame Street” (or perhaps I should say “Rehov Sumsum”); the Cantor wore an Elmo costume, and the Rabbi was Moishe Oofnik (though the costume looked exactly like Oscar the Grouch), and they used Sesame Street tunes throughout the service. I was amazed that there were some tunes that neither Diane nor I recognized immediately — I would have sworn that all of Sesame Street was graven indelibly in our brains, but I guess time heals all wounds.

I spent most of Thursday and too much of today working on my Sash project; the whole idea when I started this project was to come out with something which would save me time in entering and tracking trips on my Notes calendar by doing timezone conversions for me and putting all of the data on one screen. Well, it’s mostly working (finally) — time and date calculations are a pain — but I don’t think I’ll ever save one percent of the time I’ve spent writing the code. If I harden it a bit more, though, others can benefit — and I’ve definitely learned a lot in the process, and that was, of course, part of the idea.

Wine of the Day

The wine wasn’t very popular on my flight from Hartford to San Francisco last month; for some reason, no one wanted to drink much of it on a flight leaving at 7am. But the flight attendant didn’t want to have to repack it, so she gave bottles to many of us to take home. Normally, I would have gone for the white wine, but it was a Chardonnay, so I took the red instead, which was a 1999 Morandé Pionero, a Chilean Valle Central Merlot. We finally got around to drinking it this week, and were quite pleased (even though we had it with chicken and pasta, normally dishes which would take a white). I’d happily take another bottle, though, just between us, I’d rather buy it than take a 7am flight to get it!