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!