Cubs Win!

Oct. 9th, 2025 11:37 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
The Cubs won and have tied up the series with the Brewers. The Saturday game in Milwaukee will determine the winner.

This is better than I expected.

Thankful Thursday

Oct. 9th, 2025 11:37 pm
mdlbear: Wild turkey hen close-up (turkey)
[personal profile] mdlbear

Today I am thankful for...

  • Getting more walking in. One kilometer or so is pretty sad, but it's what I can do these days.
  • My folding cane. (I was going to say "canes", but the others seem to have been lent out to other family members.)
  • N finally getting her book published. Get The World As It Ought to Be at Smashwords. (More info and more links tomorrow when I'm less brain-fried.)
  • Not having a fixed mininum target number of gratitude entries. See above.

Cubs Win!

Oct. 8th, 2025 10:33 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
The Cubs beat the Brewers tonight by a final of 4-3 so they survive for another day.

They scored four in the first, chasing the Brewers' starting pitcher, Quinn Priester, who had been quite good for them, but not tonight. The offense then pretty much went to sleep for the rest of the game, leaving the pitching staff to nurse what started as a 4-1 lead to the end of the game.

Remarkably, this trick worked.

Tomorrow's game is a night game, so I am hoping that the remote parking lot is open. :)

Off to the Playoffs

Oct. 7th, 2025 09:51 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
After having managed to miss all three of the Wild Card games that the Cubs played at home due to work, I am (as the song says) "taking the afternoon off" tomorrow to go to game 3 of the NLDS tomorrow. The weather is going to be seasonally chilly from the look of things and I am trying to decide how much coat I need to wear.

The Cubs are currently trailing the Brewers 0-2 in the five-game series, so it will be win tomorrow or stay home. (I'd say "go home", but the Cubs *are* at home, so...)

We'll see how it goes.

The correct Group Code!

Oct. 7th, 2025 04:03 pm
ericcoleman: (Default)
[personal profile] ericcoleman posting in [community profile] filk
We were given the wrong group code at first. This has been corrected.

FLC is the correct code, it is good from the 25th to the 29th. If enough people come in on Thursday, we will make something happen that evening.
https://filkconbobulated.org/hotel.html
ericcoleman: (Default)
[personal profile] ericcoleman posting in [community profile] filk
We will be playing the Writer/Composer and Performer nominees. You can find all of the info at this link, oh, and you can vote, but I would wait a week.

https://www.ovff.org/pegasus/2025finalballot.html

Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.

filkcast.blogspot.com

Back to College Tomorrow

Oct. 6th, 2025 09:30 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
Ball State had a short break or a long weekend, depending on how you define it. K had located a bus service that runs directly from the campus to Oak Brook, which meant that coming home was much less of an adventure, so she got home Friday evening and will be heading back at noon tomorrow.

All things considered, this is too short of a visit, but it's been fun.

RIP Terry Garey, 1948-2025

Oct. 6th, 2025 01:08 pm
bibliofile: Fan & papers in a stack (from my own photo) (Default)
[personal profile] bibliofile
I knew Terry a little, mainly from LiveJournal and then WisCon.

She was this amazing person, a good writer, a poet (founding member of the Lady Poetesses from Hell), librarian, and longtime science fiction fan. Formerly of the Bay Area and Minneapolis primarily, and many other places in her youth.

Progress

Oct. 5th, 2025 10:03 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
The things that *needed* to get done today got done today. Everything else, well, it's making some progress.

I'll take that.

Done Since 2025-09-28

Oct. 5th, 2025 05:26 pm
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
[personal profile] mdlbear

Mixed, as usual. Four walks (which sounds good except that the total was only 2.9km), a little work on the HSX website (fixing a busted link counts, right?), and a little work in the recording studio (with disappointingly little to show for it). Pretty sure I'm not getting enough sleep, either, although it's been somewhat better now that I'm using the duvet and duvet cover (a bit of a weighted blanket effect?), and going to bed a little later.

Lots of difficulty with motivation. Nothing new there, either.

N and G are going to be gone for two weeks (plus a bit) at the end of the month. I have been looking into "personal alarm" buttons/pendants, in case I need emergency help. Somewhat problematic.

Here, have an amusing link: Portlanders mock Trump by posting pics of peaceful weekend activities in ‘War ravaged’ city | The Independent.

Notes & links, as usual )

Minor Annoyances

Oct. 4th, 2025 11:07 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
Huh. I wonder what I did wrong.

It looks like the track names for the new CD didn't get written onto the CDs. They did when I burned it from WaveLab, so I am confused. But I will figure this out.

In the meantime, I have ripped the CDs locally and submitted the track names to Gracenote, so that should improve the situation for people who buy the CD and rip it themselves.

Life is one long learning experience...

Pre-release Sale

Oct. 3rd, 2025 09:55 pm
billroper: (Default)
[personal profile] billroper
It's still Bandcamp Friday (for a little while, at least) and I figured out how to post the Amy & Me album for digital presale. This means you can buy it now, get three tracks now, and the rest will be available on the release date when we get to OVFF.

Learning experiences! They're fun.

Bandcamp link

Yom Kippur

Oct. 3rd, 2025 04:07 pm
cellio: (Default)
[personal profile] cellio

Yes. More like this, please.

Today is busy, building the sukkah and preparing for Shabbat, so brief notes will have to suffice for now.

I had no length expectations for Kol Nidrei. Ran about 2.5 hours, including a speech from the synagogue president which is pretty common. Before the service started, someone from the congregation played the Kol Nidrei melody on a violin; I recognized the styling and ornaments from the much longer version Temple Sinai does on cello and piano. Shorter and before the service was nice. I assume there is a "thing" about people expecting to hear the Kol Nidrei melody on bowed strings, but I don't know more than that. I thought it was just a Reform thing (Sinai and Rodef both do it during the service).

The essays in this year's seasonal book from Hadar were helpful, and fit nicely in that block of time between getting home and going to sleep.

Being able to spend the entire day in synagogue makes a big difference to me. I'm glad my new synagogue doesn't have a long stretch of down-time mid-afternoon like some do. We had classes and discussions -- optional and small, as most people left, but we didn't have to. Nice.

Morning service was somewhere around 5 hours (I didn't notice exactly), not including Avodah and Eleh Ezkarah which followed after a short break (5 minutes? 10?). For Avodah the rabbi interjected a lot of teaching, and he really encouraged people to try the prostration which was done by the people (not just the kohanim) when this was an actual service in the temple. He taught us how to do it and was very encouraging, so I tried it and am glad I did.

After, I was chatting with someone else who had tried it for the first time, and said that I came from a Reform background and had not expected to connect with the Avodah service until that year during lockdown when my synagogue was closed and I went to an Orthodox synagogue. "But," I said, "there was a song I'd heard a week before that also helped set the stage" and she immediately said "Yishai Ribo". Yes. So we chatted about that for a bit while waiting for classes to start.

For the afternoon haftarah reading (the book of Jonah) they had about a dozen teenagers chanting it, taking it in turns. It's great to see that many teens who are interested.

Hineni is in exactly the spot where it makes sense. (Contrast with my Reform experiences.)

Most of the service leaders were lay people who were very good -- strong voices and able to lead singing, mindful of what they were saying, evoked kavanah. Afterwards someone who knows I'm a new member asked me what I thought about having lay leaders instead of the rabbis (this also happens on Shabbat) and I said this is a positive thing and while our rabbis are great (I've seen both of them lead; they are), it's important to empower other qualified leaders too. Most of the Reform world seems to not agree with that perspective, which might be why the person asked.

By the time we got to the Amidah in Mincha I was ready to be done with the many-times-repeated Vidui sections. I didn't want to not be thinking about wrongs; rather, I wanted to be thinking about different wrongs after going through these ones so many times already. We human beings are very creative, alas, and since some things on the standard list do not resonate for me, it feels like I could be spending that time reflecting on things that do and that aren't on the list. (I ended up just focusing on the ones that seemed more directly to be areas for improvement.) For next year, perhaps I'll look for alternate lists to being with me for when the standard list is no longer sparking the thoughts it was designed to.

This is a placeholder for something I meant to talk about in my Rosh Hashana post too: differences between the individual and public Amidah, public is not just for listening but also has congregational singing parts, and I think Reform threw the baby out with the bath water, realized the tub was empty, and filled it up with other stuff instead of getting some of this goodness back. I will try to come back to this soon.

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