On Thursday night of the day of the Parker bris, Seth was working all evening, so I joined Rachel and her friends for a night out. Our first destination was the local office of Nefesh B'Nefesh where they were throwing a reunion barbecue for recent immigrants who'd come over with their help in the past year or so. I met up with Rachel at her apartment, where she introduced me to Adelia and reintroduced me to Alina, whom I'd met at the bar the previous night. I also got to meet Rachel's month-old kitten, Meeko, for the first time.

We dawdled at Rachel's apartment for a while as Adelia and Alina hedged about their decision to go to the barbecue. We finally left a little after the event was scheduled to start, which didn't bother us as we planned to arrive fashionably late anyway. We had to walk almost the entire breadth of the downtown area to get to the stop where we could pick up the right bus, and the pace was slowed by the crowds in the sidewalks of Yaffo street. This gave me the opportunity to chat with Rachel and get to know Adelia and Alina a little bit. When we finally got to the bus stop, the cheerful banter continued, but we started to get pretty darn impatient after waiting for around 15 to 20 minutes. We were just starting to walk away and hail a taxi when our bus finally arrived. The bus took its time wending around the city, and there was still a good bit of walking after we got off the bus, so by the time we reached the office building, we were all hungry for some grilled meat. The Nefesh office was decorated with banners and pictures advertising all the happy olim (immigrants), including a big banner starring Rachel and her sister. This banner had been plastered to the sides of half the busses in the country a couple months ago, but Rachel had missed witnessing these ads personally since she'd been visiting the US at the time.

The barbecuing was taking place on the office's balcony, which was crowded with people elbowing to get the next ready piece of food off the grill. The burgers were taking very long to cook, so we settled for hot dogs for our first helping. I saw a few faces that were vaguely familiar, but no one that I knew well. The other girls, particularly Rachel, bumped into more than a few people they knew, but we still wound up munching our meat in our own little circle rather than mingling much. It didn't take long for Rachel and Alina's friend, Erica, to join us. While we'd gotten to the party about an hour and a half late, Erica had arrived almost as soon as it started and had been waiting for us since then. We hung out long enough for two rounds of food off the grill and a platter of melons before deciding to seek a more exciting venue.

After a long and winding bus ride back across town, our enlarged group arrived at O'Connell's, a kosher Irish pub close to Seth's house. I got a nice rich Irish draft beer that I hadn't tried before, and Rachel educated us in the custom of tossing the peanut shells on the floor. I conversed mostly with Adelia, Rachel, and Erica, on topics ranging from family and relationships to music and beverages. Rachel showed me a cute fishtank screensaver on my cell phone that I hadn't realized I had, and we were treated to an appearance of the ultra-rare mermaid animation. It didn't take long for the cameras to come out and take goofy pictures. After a while, we were joined by Rachel's sister, Jackie, accompanied by her boyfriend, Eric, and Seth's friend, Berko, thus ending my status as the only boy in the group. We shared a plate of spicy chicken wings, and wound up our adventure sometime between midnight and one. Seth finished work at about this time and he met us outside the bar to wander around town some more, but we didn't find anything fun, so I broke away and went to bed.

It's been a long time since I've been out socializing with girl friends, almost since the middle of my college years. It was certainly great fun to get back into that swing.

The one problem with Tzfat is that (as far as I can tell so far), there's practically no social life for an American-born single looking to change the single status. Now that I'm equipped with the right gadgets to take my job with me away from home, I'm ready to wander around in other cities and restart some sort of social life. So when Eliyahu invited me to Shilo for the bris for his new baby boy, it was the perfect excuse to haul myself out to Jerusalem for a little getaway.

On last Wednesday night, I took the 9pm bus out of Tzfat and arrived in Jerusalem at midnight. After walking from the central bus station to Seth's apartment, I met up with Seth, who had just gotten off of work. He took me to a bar named Yehoshua which the owners of Seth's restaurant had recently bought. A group of Seth's friends were there, including his lovely girlfriend, Rachel. Having the right connections, Seth was able to get plenty of drinks for us on the house. I was presented with a shot of whiskey, after which I ordered a Guiness which I drank at the table with some of Seth's friends and coworkers, and then joined Seth and Rachel at the bar where I finished off with a shot of arak.

Since I had to get up for the bris in the morning, I left the others at the bar and went to bed. In the morning, I was still groggy from the previous night's travels, but I jammed in a shift of work before I left for the station to catch the bus to Shilo. Unfortunately, I timed things just a hair too close, and I missed the bus by thirty seconds. I was able to knock on the bus door as it just started to pull away, but the driver just looked at me and shook his head.

I sent an apologetic SMS message to Eliyahu, thinking I was going to miss the bris, but as I was strolling away from the bus station, I got a call from one of Eliyahu's friends who promptly offered me a ride to the bris. I had to grab a cab to get to the necessary rendezvous point, but I wasn't spending my bus fare anyway. After a few fumbles, we found each other, and arrived at the bris just in time for the cutting.

The ceremony was over quickly, and at the breakfast that followed I was able to schmooze with some friends I hadn't seen in quite a while. The bagels were good and it was all very nice. Some of the people at the bris had been on the bus I'd missed, and expressed their sympathy with the bus driver's refusal to open up. The baby's name is Binyamin Chaim. The rest of the daylight was spent travelling back to Seth's house and working.

I've officially had it with GNU Mailman. Not only is its interface hopelessly cluttered with a bajillion cryptic options, it's just downright flaky. It usually works just fine, but whenever it suddenly decides to not work, it gives no warning whatsoever nor any feedback on what went wrong, and the only available remedy is to attempt random voodoo with the above-mentioned cryptic options. The truth is that Mailman is just not designed for what I want it to do. By default, the lists created with Mailman are discussion-style lists where all members are expected to participate by posting messages to the list. But for RCBMP, I need to provide an announce-only mailing list, where only one person sends messages and all the normal subscribers only receive the messages. I've had to twist Mailman's arm viciously to get it to behave as an announce-only list, and I'm sure I've screwed up something stupid that's buried somewhere under that huge pile of poorly documented and mysteriously interacting configuration directives.

So I've decided to switch the RCBMP mailing list to Dada Mail, which provides announce-only mailing lists by default. I've installed it already, and I only have to import the subscriber list and archives from the Mailman installation before I can flip over to the new list manager. I expect Dada to be a much better fit for my needs.

Last night, the first rainfall of the season fell on the Upper Galilee. About a month early, but I'm not complaining at all. The lovely humidity seems to have finally healed my persistently dry nose and throat. The gentle drizzle started sometime in the wee hours of the morning and left the world softly soaked by the time I got out of bed this morning. Now the landscape is shrouded by a fog that drifts in and out to alternately hide and reveal the mountains on the horizon. I love fog.