Month: December 2022

Shocked, Shocked!

Diane and I just came home from the Shir Hadash Hanukkah Festival of Fun, where we ran the Dreidel Tournament.

This was the first time the congregation had held an event like this, so we had no idea how many participants to expect; in the end, there were about six kids who played for the championship trophy at one table.  It took nearly an hour for a winner to emerge; we finished just before Havdalah began, so the table was already empty when I took a photo to memorialize the occasion.

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After Havdalah, we had latkes (of course) and salmon (a surprise).  There were drinks, of course, including some seasonal cocktails; I felt compelled to try the “Spinning Dreidel” (Blue Curaçao, Triple Sec, Peach Vodka, and Sprite), which was incredibly sweet.

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Hanukkah doesn’t actually begin until tomorrow night, but the Rabbi and his family are leaving for Puerto Rico in the morning, so we started the celebration early!

Social media musings

I’ve been using Mastodon for a couple of weeks (I’m @davidsinger@sfba.social if you want to follow me there) and am beginning to feel like it’s where I want to follow “the world” on social media; it’s certainly more hospitable than Twitter these days.

I haven’t closed my Twitter account nor even stopped the automatic tweets when I post to this blog, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been an active tweeter. Twitter has been useful to communicate with companies when all else fails – but lots of companies are leaving Twitter, so that may not be true much longer.

Facebook has always been where I interact with family and friends, and that hasn’t changed much; it’s not a news source for me and never has been.

Of course, I still do a lot of blog reading (and writing), which I don’t see changing any time soon.

And speaking of learning things on Mastodon, today I found out that Tom Lehreŗ has made all of his albums available for free download on his site at tomlehrersongs.com.

The site says that it will be shut down in the not too distant future, so if you want to download anything (including sheet music and lyrics as well as the songs themselves), don’t wait! I downloaded all of his albums already.

Shabbat Shalom!