It was a dark and stormy night. We went to bed early to conserve our battery-powered lights and fell into fitful sleep.

We were awakened at 2:17am. The bedroom Amazon Echo greeted the return of power by spinning teal and blue lights around its ring so we’d know it had returned to the land of the living – I jumped out of bed and unplugged it before going through the rest of the house to turn off lights and the TV, and then we went back to sleep.

For twenty minutes – then we started hearing voices coming from the family room. It sounded like characters talking in a movie – and it was. I’d turned off the TV, but not the TiVo or the sound system; the TiVo will only stay on its menu screen for 20 minutes before switching to live TV, and that’s what woke us the second time.

Back to bed for more intermittent sleep, and then up to go to the gym. It was still raining a bit, and it seemed awfully dark, but driving there was easy, and it wasn’t too crowded.

The rains had stopped by the time we got back from the gym, so we went out for a walk to see what the storm had wrought. There were downed tree limbs in several places; we talked to someone who’d lost a big tree in her front yard. And as we neared home, we saw a rainbow over the elementary school.

We haven’t tried to watch Saturday’s SNL again so far. No sense in tempting fate!

Edited to add: the power went out about three minutes after I posted this. PG&E claims it’s the same outage as last night!

We had just started watching last night’s SNL when the power went out. Not surprising given the weather, but still annoying.

Our UPS made it through an hour, and then it gave up, but all was well because we had phones with 5G service, so we ordered dinner from Negeen Persian Restaurant through DoorDash. It was delicious, as always, but as I started to post the photo of our mandatory candlelight dinner, we lost cell service – I guess the tower’s battery gave up.

I took the phone out of automatic carrier selection and it found a T-Mobile signal – who knows how long it’ll stay up?

Not long enough – it failed before I could post this. So we got in the car and drove over to Shir Hadash, which has power, to camp on their network.

It’s like living in pioneer days!

This year, Shir Hadash’s Torah Study is looking at each week’s portion through the lens of Mussar (think of Benjamin Franklin’s plan for self-improvement, but with Hebrew added), using the Mussar Torah Commentary (affiliate link) as a jumping-off point.

This week’s portion is Vayera (Genesis 18:1-22:24); the Mussar attribute that goes with this portion is z’rizut – alacrity. Our lay leader, David Bamberger, led a lively discussion about the portion and how Abraham demonstrated (and didn’t demonstrate) alacrity. I enjoyed it, though I was a little distracted by serving as the Zoom master.

After Torah study and services, we headed to Tony and Alba’s Pizza. There’s a Best Buy across the street; we wanted to see whether they had refrigerators that would fit our space. And, since we were still waiting for University Electric to tell us about availability of the cooktop we wanted, we didn’t ignore the salesperson who asked if she could help us. It turned out that she could help us more than we expected – twenty minutes later, we’d placed an order for the cooktop, with delivery scheduled for the Monday before Thanksgiving. Alacrity indeed!

We took one small step on our journey towards an induction cooktop today – we bought an induction-compatible 8” skillet while we were at Target. Next step – ordering the cooktop!

Shabbat Shalom!

It’s the off-season for Learned League, so almost every day brings four or five “One Day Specials” – single-topic trivia quizzes. I read all of them and usually submit my answers if I have good guesses (or better) for at least five questions (out of 12).

Yesterday’s One Day Specials were on Web Design, Time Inc., Math in Theatre, and David Foster Wallace. I’ve never read any David Foster Wallace, so I didn’t submit that one, but I did answer the others – and got all the questions right for Web Design.

I wasn’t alone in that – 38 players of the 1195 who submitted answers got them all right. Each correct answer earns 15 points. But there’s another factor besides correct answers on One Day Specials: moneying. You have to designate five of your answers as “money” answers – for each of those you get right, you earn a bonus, computed as the percentage of wrong answers for that question. So if 30% of the people answered wrong (or didn’t answer), you’d get 30 extra points. So you want to money the five questions that most people will miss.

I came close – I picked four of the hardest questions. But I thought that more people would know one of the frameworks powering today’s popular browsers (Blink, Gecko, or Webkit) than would know the name of the Weird Al Yankovic song which talks about HTML (White & Nerdy). I was wrong, and finished in 10th place – still by far my best finish ever in a One Day Special.