The High Holy Days planning committee met this afternoon at Shir Hadash; one of the high-priority topics was sending out the invitations to those congregants who have honors at one of the services (Rosh Hashanah is less than a week away). I got the last bits of information I needed and fired off the program to send the invitations, and the replies started coming in right away.

And then I discovered that, in my zeal to convert the services schedule file from Excel to Google Sheets, I had messed up the dates in the file, so the invitations for Yom Kippur honors had the wrong date (and, in some cases, the wrong times!). I sent out a correction, but it wasn’t completely successful – we’re still getting responses from people who wonder what the actual times and dates are.

I’m tempted to send out another correction, but I wonder if it would make things even worse.

After I finally left Shir Hadash, I drove over to the Apple Store to pick up my laptop – I’m still not quite sure where it’s going to fit in the grand scheme of things. My original thought was to attach it to my external drives and 4K monitor except when we’re traveling, but the more I think of doing that, the less I like it.

For now, I’m just migrating my old laptop’s contents to the new machine and I’ll use it in the kitchen (and when I travel). It would be nice to be able to attach it to the 4K monitor and use it for photo editing at home, but I’m not sure it’s physically feasible without moving a lot of devices around.

And we booked our travel for our spring trip to France; we had BA vouchers to use, so we’ll be traveling via Heathrow, but I can hope that the security lines there will be shorter in May, right?

My new MacBook Air is supposed to be delivered next Thursday. I’m planning to use it mostly as a desktop (so I have to migrate my existing Mac mini to it) but it will also travel with me (so I have to make sure everything that’s on my existing MacBook Air gets copied, too).

I’ve just started figuring out the least bad way to do the migration; it seems like the smart thing is to copy everything from the existing Air to the existing Mac mini and then build the new machine from the mini. But I have a couple of weeks to figure it out.

Or I did. Today, I got an email from Apple telling me to come in and pick up my machine! But I decided not to do it today because I was very busy getting the High Holy Day Honors ready to go, which required dusting off code I hadn’t seen for a year.

I couldn’t resist fixing one of the many infelicities in the code – for historical reasons, it uses an unholy mixture of files in Dropbox, Google sheets, and even local CSV and Excel spreadsheets. I changed the code so that the data from one of the local spreadsheets is now in a tab in my master Google spreadsheet, which will make it easier to find and update next year.

Tomorrow, we have a High Holy Days planning meeting; I should be ready to send out the Honors after that meeting (maybe even before).

And then I can go to the Apple Store and pick up the new Air and really get confused.

I had big plans for today – I was going to get caught up on Quicken, wine bookkeeping, refill the wine refrigerator, and work on the High Holidays honors for Shir Hadash.

I got caught up on Quicken and put the wines we bought yesterday into CellarTracker, but the rest of the plans will have to wait.

I wrote a program a while ago to help me pick which wines to move into the wine refrigerator (based on how far along in the drinking window a wine is and how many bottles I have of it), but I noticed that the list showed the same wine in several places. I’d reworked the program a few months ago to take the inventory information I get from CellarTracker and put it into a simple sqlite3 database to figure out which bottles to move. It seemed to work well, but today I realized that CellarTracker returns the information in order of acquisition, so that if I bought the same wine a few times, it wouldn’t be consolidated.

It should be easy to consolidate the data in the database – all it would need is a few GROUP BY clauses in my query. I looked at the statement I was using to query the database:

select
  type,
  ready,
  whereitis,
  b.label,
  beginconsume,
  endconsume
from
  (
    select
      min(n, n * (now - bc) / (ec - bc)) as ready,
      label,
      beginconsume,
      endconsume
    from
      (
        select
          count(*) as n,
          julianday(beginconsume || '-01-01') as bc,
          julianday(date(endconsume || '-12-31')) as ec,
          beginconsume,
          endconsume,
          julianday('now') as now,
          vintage || ' ' || wine as label,
          type
        from
          wines
        group by
          label
      )
    order by
      ready
  ) r
  inner join (
    select
      type,
      vintage || ' ' || wine as label,
      location,
      location || ' ' || bin as whereitis
    from
      wines
  ) b on b.label = r.label
where
  ready > 0
order by
  ready desc;

and I realized that it would be a whole lot easier to rewrite the logic in simple Python than it would be to figure out how to fix the query.

So I did.

Doing the work in Python may mean that the program runs slower than doing it in the database – on the other hand, I only run the program once a month or so, and it only takes a couple of seconds when I do run it. And next time, I might be able to figure out what I’m doing!

One of our favorite local wineries, Silvertip Vineyards, is closing down and selling their inventory at half-price. They’ve been holding sales and tasting events at the winery, deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, every month for the past few months – today was the first time we’ve been in the area for one of those events.

Going into the Santa Cruz mountains on a Saturday afternoon is always a challenge because of beach traffic. Silvertip was kind enough to open at 9 – we didn’t leave the house nearly 10, but that still put us onto Highway 17 well before it got crowded.

We enjoyed the tasting and bought a couple of cases of wine; by the time we were finished, it was late enough to go to Silver Mountain and Burrell School and pick up our shipments there, too.

As we drove home, we saw how packed and slow 17 South was; I’m happy not to have had to contend with all the beach-goers.

Silvertip will probably have monthly sales on the 3rd Saturday for the rest of the year; they also ship, and if you’re a local, they may be able to deliver or arrange to be open for a pickup at a more convenient time. I’ve really enjoyed their wine – and at half-price, it’s even better.

In a normal year, I would have started working on the High Holy Day Honors at Shir Hadash in July. There would have been meetings with the Rabbi and the Rabbi’s assistant; there would have been other discussions with the Temple President; I’d probably be creating new handouts for new readings.

This isn’t a normal year. There’s a new sheriff Rabbi in town, and he’s been making a lot of changes to our services ever since he arrived in July; the High Holy Day services are no exception.

We’ll be holding services on our own campus for the first time since we’ve been members of the congregation (we expect a significant number of members to livestream the services from their homes, which should let the rest of us fit into the space available). Rabbi Nico wants the services to flow better, so he’s reduced the number of honors at each service (which means getting rid of almost all the readings from the prayerbook); the plans for that just got finalized this week.

I spent some time at Shir Hadash this afternoon to do a walk-through of the plans with the High Holy Days chair and the Temple President and President-Elect. It’s going to be exciting! I still have to get the Honors invitations out to people, but it won’t be until after Shabbat.

To prepare for the new year, I finally finished the peppermint bark I’ve been hoarding since December – Trader Joe’s already has pumpkin spice products on the shelf, so a new supply of peppermint bark can’t be too far away, can it?

Shabbat Shalom!