Listen to the Rain

Back in Japan I used to go view the cherryblossoms every year, multiple times a year. I remember sitting by the banks of the Motoyasugawa with friends, tons of people all around us on blankets at 10 a.m. on a Saturday, and drinking sake and eating kushiyaki while we chatted for hours at a time. One time we all went up to Shōbara and had a picnic in Ueno Sakura Park, where a bunch of us rented rowboats and went out on the pond. Halcyon days.

Well, we can't get that experience in Chicago but we do have cherryblossoms here, planted down in Jackson Park. The last couple of years the weather has been cold enough that they didn't bloom, and this year the weather was also pretty changeable but the blossoms were out, so on Saturday morning after sashagee and I woke up late and ate breakfast, her parents brought Laila back from her grandparents stay, and then we all drove down to the Garden of the Phoenix to look at the blossoms. What blossoms there were--Chicago weather being what it was, a couple days prior it had been 26°, it was now 10° with chill winds. What's more, the day before there had been a strong rainstorm that had washed a bunch of blossoms off the trees, and they were on the ground and in the lake when we got there. Some trees were almost devoid of blossoms entirely! Despite that, there were still some trees to be seen:


The most interesting trees were right near the parking lot as we entered. We walked around the lake, where there were some trees but only a couple with enough blossoms to bother looking at, and then when sashagee asked me about the festival that was supposed to take place that day I said it wasn't until 1:30 p.m. (it was 10:15 a.m.), so sashagee's parents drove us all back home and after hanging out with Laila for a bit, they left.

We put Laila down for a nap but she did not take one, and she had enough energy later in the day that she kept demanding we go for a walk, so we went. The temperature had gotten a bit warmer, helped mostly by the sun finally coming out, but that meant when we went to the park there were a bunch of people there and Laila asked to leave after only ten minutes. She still wanted to go for a walk, though, so I kept walking down to Broadway and we went down to the other park further south, and Laila ran around for a while. She told me she wanted to leave once and then changed her mind, and it turned out to be fortuitous because after we had been there for twenty minutes, some of Laila's classmates from gymnastics showed up! I actually got to see Laila play together with some other kids. The cutest part was when two of them were on either end of the seesaw, and the second-cutest part was when Laila was beneath the playground equipment and two of her classmates were up top, and they were all looking for each other. When a bubble-shooting gun came out, they all got distracted and Laila eventually got tired and we went home.

The next day was a lazy day most of the day, but in the evening I had an invite to worldbshiny. I was also invited to go to see The Sinners in the afternoon, but I already wrote about why I didn't go. Since I handled most of that, I took the evening off and walked down to the bar where the party was being held, arriving a bit later, but it turned out that it wasn't too late because poor worldbshiny had her car towed while she was in the movie and had to move the time back. But once I did get there, it was lovely--I spent a while talking to lisekatevans's housemate about sightseeing in London, we all (except me) discussed The Sinners, I had a couple drinks and listened in, and after two hours I called it a night and went home. It's how I used to spend multiple nights a week that way.

I listened to Gorgeous on the way home, just like I used to on summer nights, all those years ago.

We've had it easy the last few years. The temperature rarely got below 0°C, and when it did it was only a small amount and only for a short time. Today, when I left the house the temperature was -31°C (with wind) and I saw almost no one on the way to work. The train was 80% empty when it's usually standing room only by the time I get to Belmont, and then when I got off downtown at Grand the temperature was even worse. My face nearly froze despite all my bundling and it was a relief to walk into the office, where well over half of my co-workers decided not to come in. sashagee was really hoping that I wouldn't have to go out into the cold, but I wasn't going to ask--even though apparently a bunch of my co-workers did--so I just waited and hoped that a message would come through saying we could stay home. None ever did, and so here I am.

Remembering how the conversation I had with my old boss at the end-of-year party where he grumped that basically every other department comes into the office like two times a month. I'm not sure I'd want to go in that infrequently, admittedly--during the summer I enjoy coming in twice a week because I can walk along the river every day--but this time of year, it'd be nice.

The weather also led to me laughing harder than I have in a long time when sashagee sent me a meme about "toddler science" that had the following quote:

Length toddler can run when:

Being chased: 5 miles
Asked to walk: 5 steps

When I took Laila out to the store with me yesterday, I got her all bundled up and ready to go and she just silently put her arms up and wanted to be carried. Halfway to the store she wanted to be put down, so I put her down, she took a few steps over to the gravel and crunched around for a few seconds...then silently turned around and put her arms up.

Well, it being so frozen, I really wanted something warm and filling. I wrote before about the quality of the rotating restaurants at work and didn't want that--I wanted something I'd appreciate. So I went out for ramen:


Ramen-san had brisket ramen, which is the best part of the local ramen place near the Red Line stop up where I live, and it's leaving the menu tomorrow, so I tried it. And it was...good. It wasn't as good as the local ramen place--the local place has big chunks of fatty brisket and Ramen-san had ground-up brisket bits, as you can see in the photo--but the broth and the noodles were both good. I feel like that's the problem with American ramen other than the price (ramen in Japan is like 600円 for a reasonbly-sized bowl, and in America they try to charge you $20). You can get two out of three: good noodles, good broth, good fillings. If you're unlucky you get one out of three. You can almost never get all three. This place had two out of three which is mostly what I hope for.

I got an extra egg though and the eggs were delicious. Slightly melty like they should be but not yet melted into the ramen when it was brought out. Perfect. Still didn't stop me from freezing when I walked back out into the cold, though.

It's been raining basically all day, so there's a constant soft murmur from the rain falling through the leaves of the trees right outside our window. It's somewhat muted by the music playing on the tv, but it's just lo-fi with a cat sitting on a railing of a rural house. Laila is going to grow up getting used to seeing tons of cats with lo-fi music playing and hopefully she'll think that's what tv is.

This is the best tree on the street. Photo taken from my house, hence the other tree in the front, but I think it's a nice framing.

Well, it happens every year.

The liturgy is the same every year, so it's hard to come up with new things to say (probably the same problem some rabbis having during the drash), but there's comfort in that. It's like Passover, like Sukkot, like all the holidays we have done for thousands of years. In good times and bad, in times of persecution and times of leniency, when those who hate us are strong and when they are weak, here and in Israel, it's the same. Even in Jerusalem, they still say לשנה הבאה בירושלים ( l'shana haba'ah b'Yerushalayim, "next year in Jerusalem"). It's nice to submerge yourself into the ritual, when you always know what's going to happen and when it's going to happen: to listen to "Kol Nidre" and then to be sent out to "B'Shem Hashem" on Erev Yom Kippur, to hear "Avinu Malkeinu" and the "Unatanah Tokef" and end with my favorite song, "El Nora Alilah." It's not a Neilah without hundreds of people (would be thousands but there aren't that many left behind at the end of the day) singing along as the gates are closing.

At Break Fast afterwards, I sat with a couple and their teenage daughter, who had a moment of fangirling when she learned I knew worldbshiny. She had seen the Spongebob Squarepants musical that sashagee and I also saw--and which I didn't write anything on here about, searching through my archives--and when I told the daughter that worldbshiny had won a Jeff for her Foley and that I knew here, she was incredibly excited. She actually squealed "That's my first choice!" when I said that worldbshiny sometimes gave guest lectures at Northwestern, because it turned out she was going to college for musical theatre. All of which is to say, the kids are alright. At least the ones willing to stick out YK through Neilah.

The interesting part is the part that's different every year, and that's the classes that happen during the afternoon. There's a gap between the end of Yizkor and the beginning of Neilah, and Mishkan fills it with various seminars and events you an attend. I went to one about "stillness," which was basically a guided meditation session. We all lay on the floor with our knees up and just concentrated on our breathing, in for four, hold for four, out for eight, for about five minutes, and it was one of the only times I've actually been able to achieve 無心 (mushin, "No-mind") while meditating. Then we did facial self-massage, rubbing our temples and squeezing our eyebrows for a few minutes, which felt nice but didn't get me to sink into the activity the way that the first part did. Between each session we talked with a person next to us about our experiences, how we found it and how it made us feel, and what we got out of it, and it was a really nice way to just be for an hour before I went off to the second class.

It's traditional to read the Book of Jonah on Yom Kippur, because of the themes of judgement and repentence--in Hebrew תשובה teshuvah, literally "returning." Like so much of Tanakh when you look at it, Jonah is a bit odd. G-d tells Jonah to go to Ninevah and Jonah immediately runs away, tells the sailors to throw him overboard as soon as they ask what's going on, and when he goes to Ninevah and the people there listen and change their ways, asks G-d to kill him because he's so annoyed about the outcome! So why is this in Tanakh and what message are we supposed to draw from it? Jonah tells us in Chapter 4 that he ran away because he didn't want Ninevah to be delivered from judgement, perhaps because Ninevah was an enemy of the Children of Israel. The sages also give two other reasons: the first is that he thought he would be a laughingstock because if he proclaimed that the city would be destroyed and nothing happened, everyone would think he was just some ranting weirdo on a streetcorner rather than a righteous prophet of G-d; and the second is that if Ninevah did repent, it would look really bad for the Children of Israel, who were told to repent by many prophets and yet consistently refused to do so. But why is Jonah's immediate response the modern millennial humor "Things are bad, death is the only escape"? We spent an hour talking about that as a whole group, because the room was set up as a classroom so the usual practice of breaking up into ḥevrutah wouldn't have worked, but I enjoyed the discussion even though it kept moving on before I could contribute anything.

The next day was the Chicago Marathon, and my sister wanderluster_kp was in town running with nytesenvy as support. wanderluster_kp asked if she could sleep at our place since the marathon check-in was around 6:30 a.m. By the time we woke up she was already gone, but we got ready and headed out in time to see her round the bend at the northern part of the race, around Addison. And it turned out that uriany was there too! He and friends were waiting right near our location and saw wanderluster_kp at the same point. They invited us to go further south to catch her later, but my parents were bringing Laila home so we needed to be there to meet them. After lunch and nap time, my parents and I left again to go down to Chinatown to catch them on the southern leg of the race. It took a while--apparently nytesenvy was having some trouble and had slowed down--and they weren't visible on the tracker any more, but we did see them go back a bit after the end-of-race 15 mph car went by, and then we left again to go toward the finish line. They finished with a time of around 6 hours and 52 minutes, and then we picked up wanderluster_kp and took her back to my house to clean up.

It was a very Chicago day for a marathon, though--bright and sunny in the morning, and gale-force cold winds in the afternoon. Classic.

It is extremely hot in Chicago. There's no wind and blazing sun and the weather app tells me that the effective temperature is 41°C and it's supposed to get even hotter before all's said and done. I'm still inside but it looks like the hottest temperature is going to be right when I have to leave and go home, and sashagee has tasked me with going to the grocery store and pick up an order of groceries and then haul them all the way home.

At least I'll have peach cake waiting for me.

I'd love to say that we had great weather for the weekend, with sunny skies and warmth, but it would be a complete lie. It was cloudy and rainy for the majority of the weekend, with even the least-rainy day (Saturday) still having some rain. Sunday it thunderstormed for most of the day, and there was rain the middle of the day on Monday too. sashagee spent a chunk of the weekend lying down with a headache, but thanks to her parents taking Laila for a ton of fun adventures, we had a baby-free weekend and plenty of time to ourselves.

Saturday, we went to cillic and heather.eisele's Memorial Day barbecue and in the evening, to afschifler's birthday party at lisekatevans's place, and on Monday we went to maptekar and her boyfriend's place out in the suburbs for a last-minute barbecue. A lot of travel involved--train and bus to the fist barbecue, bus and train (actual rail) to the suburbs, and some walking--but worth it.

There's not a lot to actually write about here, though, because most of what happened was "we talked with people and had a lovely time." One of the people who came to the Saturday barbecue was married to a Japanese man, so she brought a soba noodle salad that was delicious (disadvantage of most barbecue--I can't eat it since if it's not pork, it was probably cooked together on the same grill as pork), as well as a farro salad and a bunch of fresh fruit, plus some delicious seven layer bars inside. At the birthday party, while joseph.harnden was telling sashagee how much better I looked now that I was wearing more colors and how she was such a good influence on my fashion, hazel.flowersmccabe was talking to me:

Hazel: "You're wearing...colors."
Me: "Well, I'm a dad now, I changed up my style."
Hazel: "You can be a goth dad."

at the barbecue on Monday, we met someone that maptekar had met through Bumble BFF (which I didn't realize was a thing). She was very reserved, but she's also Romanian, so I figured it was just her being from Eastern Europe. maptekar's boyfriend made some chicken with a honey and vinegar glaze and I had it with a bunch of salad. We would have stayed longer, but since it was a holiday weekend they were running holiday trains, so we had to get back to the city on the 7:32 p.m. train. Next time we'll be able to stay longer.

We were asked at one point if Memorial Day barbecues were a tradition in my family and I said no. But maybe I should reconsider.

Yesterday, sashagee and I woke up at 3:30 a.m. to the sound of Dark Side, threw on some clothes, and climbed into the car with my father to drive five hours down south before the roads got really awful. We stayed off the interstate, taking state route 47, briefly risking I-74 to cross Urbana, then took state route 130 further south. After a stop in Olney (about which more later), we kept going, looking for an even further south and smaller town, and ended up in the central park in West Salem (population 786) with maybe half a dozen other people. We watched as the light dimmed, and looked up with our eclipse glasses as more and more of the sun was covered, until the last bit disappeared and we took off our glasses and looked up at the black sun:


It was astounding. The light faded, but not in the way you're used to. We know instinctively how sunset works--the light fades in one direction as the sky lights up in the other, turning to reds and golds and purples. During the run-up to the eclipse, it faded all at once, gradually getting darker and darker as one by one the birds stopped singing. As the moon fully covered the sun, the crickets began chirping. The temperature dropped. The streetlights came on. The sky above was black but with golden light all around on the horizon, like nothing you've ever seen. I could easily understand why our ancestors took them as a bad omen or thought it was the end of the world.

That bright spot on the bottom is a solar prominence, an arc of plasma many times larger than the Earth. We could see it with our unaided eyes.

The full eclipse only lasted four minutes but it seemed longer. I stayed in Chicago for the 2017 eclipse, which was 87% coverage, but that just meant the sky got a bit darker. It was nothing like this. On the way back, sashagee said that if we won the lottery she'd want to become one of those people who chase eclipses around the world and you know what? I would too.

( Alright, back to Olney )

Laila is asleep, sashagee is napping, it's grey and misty outside, and I'm still here at work. The Shabbat candle-lighting time starts right when work ends. We already did our Shabbat cleaning yesterday. Not much to do now.

sashagee is feeling sick--she's been sick, off and on, for about a month at this point. Laila can tell and she's not happy about it. She has tons of energy, always moving and always climbing and always wanting to go fast, and it means she's constantly testing boundaries and trying to get away with things and sashagee just does not have the energy to deal with it a lot of the time. I can play with Laila after work, but that still means most of most days I can't do much. sashagee already contacted her doctor to try to get some more tests done, and hopefully they can adjust her medication or do something else to help her get her energy back.

After the small number of games I played last year, I decided that this year I would try to beat one game a month and so far I'm...very behind. I haven't even started a new game this month at all and I have less than a week left. Fortunately, the game I want to play is the NES Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which takes maybe three hours to beat and which I ran through probably a dozen times or more during my childhood, so I just need to sit down and actually put in the time. We don't have any other plans this weekend so this should be the time to do it.

Lately I've been into the RPG Break!!, which I kickstarted last year (when the kickstarter happened at the end of a 10 year design process). The game looks gorgeous and while I'm usually not a big fan of OSR games because they're not fiddly and complicated enough for my tastes, Break!! has some things in it that are almost always emphasized but rarely actually given mechanical weight--for example there's a whole section about marching order and how it mechanically affects what you can do! Plus the world it takes place on is hollow, the outer surface has no sun and while it used to have a "sun machine," the machine broke and crashed down to earth and so the world is divided into the Blazing Garden, the Twilight Meridian, and the Whistful Dark. In the far past, the world was ruled by capricious beings called the Unshaped (shades of Exalted), until one of those Unshaped took inspiration from the prayers of mortals and became Regulus, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFUEz-8phDc&t=311s>First Hero</a>, leading mortals to victory. There are cat people who are actually aliens and arrived on a crashed spaceship. It looks like a ton of fun and I can't wait until I get the actual physical book. We had a bunch of snow back when I posted about how cold it was, and since then the weather climbed up to 6°C and it's been raining almost nonstop for days. The streets are wet and glistening in the streetlights now. Alright, Shabbat in a few minutes. See you on the other side.

Happy Halloween everyone! We got costumes appropriate to Laila's favorite movie (Ponyo), got them ready, and then we're not going to go trick or treating today because it's currently below freezing and snow is pouring down. Laila has just recently gotten an awareness of the cold--now if I take her out onto the balcony in her nightdress to say the morning Shema, she'll say "cold!"--and if we put her in a dress and tights she'll definitely not want to go for a walk even if there is candy at the end of it. And if we have to all bundle up in very warm and snug clothing, our costumes are going to be totally unrecognizable. We'll buy her candy and she'll be happy.

And I even took the afternoon off so I'd be able to prepare and get ready for trick or treating! We were going to go to Trader Joe's too and get some shopping done, but we don't want to wait for the bus with a small child in the freezing cold any longer than we have to. We can always go later.

And it's supposed to be 14°C on Friday! Now this is Chicago fall weather. We'll see if we can do that picnic in the park this weekend.

It's currently 35° degrees outside and still climbing. The listed high today is 38°--the farmer's market is cancelled and honestly coming in to the office was probably a mistake. I should have taken a half day and then worked from home the rest of the day, which is what my boss was hinting at yesterday when she said she was going to do the exact same thing today.

At least I get to work from home tomorrow, when the listed high is 39°. At least after that the temperature rapidly drops: 29° on Friday, then 26° and 25° over the weekend.

sashagee's mother and grandmother are here visiting, having arrived unexpectedly on Monday. I say unexpectedly, but it's more that sashagee forgot about it and didn't put it on the calendar. It's not impacting me too much because I've been at the office today and tomorrow, and both have mobility issues so I'm not missing any exciting excursions, just cute Laila time. Which is sad to miss, but I miss that anyway on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I'll go home tonight and get to see more Laila having a great time with grandma and great-grandma.

Alright, time to prep to head out into the Great Erg. G-d made Arrakis to train the faithful.

I said previously that it would get down to 8°C but I didn't go far enough--it was actually 1°C when I woke up today! I brought a smaller coat because the sunlight means it's going to warm up enough later that I should be able to go for a walk on the riverwalk again, but after it being 27°C on Saturday it was quite the change. I'm glad that I don't have to plan anything for this upcoming week. דער מענטש טראַכט און גאָט לאַכט, as the saying goes (der mensch trakht un Gott lakht, "Man plans and G-d laughs"). Or maybe 来年の事を言えば鬼が笑う (rainen no koto wo ieba, oni ga warau, "When you speak of next year, demons laugh"). It's a pretty universal concept.

On Sunday went to a birthday party! Laila got an invitation from the local rebbetzin on behalf of her daughter Bayla, for her second birthday, so we loaded up Laila into the stroller and walked down to the Anna & Fred Doppelt Base Andersonville house at 10:15 a.m. and arrived basically first of anyone. Bayla was very nervous at the beginning but Laila wasn't--she immediately started walking around and smiling at Bayla's grandparents and looking around the house. As more and more people arrived, sashagee and I got pulled into separate conversations. I met someone who actually lives on our street just north of us, though sadly they'll be moving a couple miles west in two weeks. I don't remember the husband's name, but he told me about a pizza-by-the-slice restaurant called Pizza Mania very nearby that has delicious pizza. We talked about languages--the wife works as a bilingual Spanish/English kindergarten teacher--and then a German guy sat down and we talked about soccer, all the while Laila and sashagee were drawing at the back table. Bayla eventually lost her shyness and started roaming around, and Laila made a mom very grateful to her because she sat in her lap, and then the mom's son Shimon, who was about eight months older than Laila, got jealous and wanted to sit in his mom's lap in a way he hadn't wanted to do in months. That's Laila, always bringing people together.

When we left, Bayla waved and said "Bye Laila~." Both sets of parents are hoping they'll become friends with each other!

Alright, big project in so now it's back to work.

We had set an alarm to wake up at 8 a.m. on Shabbat morning, and I did indeed wake up when my alarm went off at 8 a.m. on Shabbat morning...and then proceeded to lie in bed for thirty minutes until I heard an excited "wah!" from Laila's room. This proved to be a mistake, because we got out the door later than we wanted to (out into the -11°C wind...) and just missed the bus by two minutes. We sat in Dunkin Donuts while sashagee drank coffee and Laila marveled at all the donuts behind the counter until the next bus came, and then we boarded it and made the trip down to Ravenswood to Mishkan's main office for baby ShabbatRise and Shine.

Last time I was at Rise and Shrine, Laila spent the first half of the service very nervous and only really got into it around the halfway mark. This time we didn't even arrive until the halfway mark, so Laila spent all the time hanging around us. She only got braver once the actual service ended, the singing stopped, and the people thinned out. Then she latched on to rabrams210 for hugs and ran around for a bit before it was time to go. By the time we left, it was 11:20 a.m. and sashagee was pretty hungry, so we walked down the street to a place called Early Morning Delight for brunch. Shabbat brunch is not really a thing the way Sunday brunch is--generally, Jews go to each others' houses on Shabbat rather than out--but I like sashagee's suggestion that we make it a tradition to go out for brunch after Rise and Shine. Especially if we find more places like Early Morning Delight. Before we even ordered, they brought us out a churro cake slice with nutella and fresh strawberries, which Laila absolutely loved, and then:


The fruit cup came with the omelet without me needing to order it! Now that's service. It was very good, much better than the Greek omelet I got a couple weeks ago where I asked them to remove the gyro meat and it turned out that gyro meat was all that was holding the omelet together. This was the artichoke omelet, with artichoke, roasted tomatoes, spinach, caramelized onion and goat cheese, topped with pesto. It was delicious (which was good because every other omelet on the menu had was treif) and I ate the whole thing. We got a children's quesadilla set for Laila and she ate most of one quesadilla and took at least one bite out of each of the other. She obviously had to make sure they were all just as good as the first one.

With brunch eaten, we took advantage of already being in Ravenswood to go to the Chicago Vintage Fest March Market a couple blocks to the north. Right inside, we found a Thai woman selling jewelry who was happy to hold Laila while sashagee picked out a little purse and some barrettes for her, and we bought them before looking around more. It was mostly clothes, which definitely wouldn't fit me and which sashagee wasn't that interested in, but we did get a set of iron butterfly sculptures that we can hang out on the back! At that point it was approaching 1 p.m., so we waited for the bus, it was a ghost bus, we started walking to the L when another bus came, and we caught that bus and a second bus and made it home and put Laila down for her nap.

Near the end of her nap I noticed that thosesocks had messaged me very early in the morning about not having any plans, and after some consulting with sashagee we had an impromptu Shabbat dinner of leftover chicken nikujaga with hamantaschen for dessert. We all got Laila hugs, I talked with thosesocks about how we'll both be working downtown about three blocks from each other, and everyone went to bed a bit happier.

The next day sashagee wasn't doing super well, so we spent most of the day relaxing and playing with Laila. As I wrote in the baby update, Laila's latest new obsession is drawing. She'll go over to her play area, look down at the paper, and then look over at us while making the baby draw sign and saying "doraw? doraw?" over and over again. She did that a big chunk of Sunday, and I got a video of her drawing with a black marker. Like abba, like daughter. Please ignore that I used the black marker because she drew so much that the other markers temporarily weren't working.

Monday always feels a little like the weekend is leftover for me since I work from home, but because I had to work we didn't have big plans. The biggest plan was take Laila to the park, where she hadn't been in weeks, because the weather see-sawed up to 10°C and it was sunny out, so just after work we got Laila all dressed up and walked to the park where we saw Rabbi jonathanposner613 and his daughter Baila! Baila was very shy--jonathanposner613 said she's going through a phase where she's extremely leery of men other than him or her grandfathers--but we chatted with him a bit. I mentioned that I hadn't immediately recognized him because his beard had gotten much more magnificent since the last time I saw him at the Mishkan baby group. Laila and Baila didn't interact but--Laila reached out to Baila once or twice but Baila didn't respond--but I was talking to sashagee about how cute it would be if they became friends. They're the same age, their families go to Mishkan, Laila's name means "night" (from Hebrew לילה), Baila's name means "white" (from Yiddish ביילא)... but one thing having children teaches you is that the blank slate theory is completely nonsense. If they want to be friends, they will.