In case you hadn't noticed, I've restored the ability to attach comments to these diary entries. Enjoy.

Yay! Snow!

The weather reports predicted that the whole Galilee would get snow on Wednesday, and indeed, at about one in the afternoon yesterday, the sleet falling from the sky turned into white powdery crystals. It's been snowing on and off since then. None of it stuck to the ground all afternoon, but by late evening there was just enough accumulation to provide fodder for snowball fights among kids ranging in age from five to twenty-five. As I wake up this morning, I see the hills all along the landscape dusted with white like powdered donuts under puffy, gray marshmallow clouds. The houses in the neighborhood are tufted with a layer of a couple inches.

Snow's really a lot more fun when it only comes maybe once or twice a year.

I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to disable the feature that allows you to attach comments to these diary entries for a little while. This ability is being badly abused by horrible nasty people to insert an endless stream of advertisements for their trashy products and services. Since they've suddenly started coming in faster than I can delete them by hand, I'm going to have to modify the program responsible for accepting comments so that it filters out most of the bad stuff with spamassassin. This won't be a difficult change for me to make, but I don't have time to do it before Shabbos, and maybe not even till Monday. So no comments until then.

I started this week with a road trip to Bet Shemesh for the bris of the firstborn son of one of the guys who was learning in yeshiva with me this past summer. Rabbi Rothenburg and his family and a couple other people who learn at Tiferet Moshe piled into a borrowed van very early in the morning and we tried our best to make it to Bet Shemesh in time. Of course, we didn't. The kids got carsick and threw up and we got a little lost once in Bet Shemesh. But we did manage to catch the last half the speechifying, and there were enough bagels left at the buffet to keep me happy.

On the trip back that afternoon, we stopped at Ikea for lunch and to do a little shopping. Going in, I hadn't intended to get anything, but hanging around there somehow awakened my inner interior decorator. I hadn't even known that I had such a thing, but I guess it's a bit of my birthright that's finally caught up with me. Though I was tempted by zany modernistic lamps and decorative photographic prints and the like, I managed to resist buying anything that I didn't actually need. For 400 shekels, I found a decent, black, faux-leather office chair, an item that I should have gotten ages ago. I also grabbed a pair of potholders, a simple curtain rod set, and a plain yet attractive deep-red cloth to use as a drape thick enough to keep the glare off the computer screen in the late afternoon.

The rest of the week was mostly uneventful. I stayed relatively inactive as I tried to defeat the last bits of the cold that started plaguing me late last week. I had my hands full playing sysadmin for a minor job that I got a little while ago to set up a mail server and a web server for a company that wants to start yet another one of those web-based photo-sharing services. The work's not difficult, but it really worries me to try to do computer surgery with a head fogged by a cold.

The most interesting event of the week so far was coming out to Rabbi Shalom Pasternak, the teacher of my Talmud class as of three weeks ago. We were making idle conversation and he asked me if I were looking to get married, so I responded with, "I'm gay." He responded at first with a belittlement of the idea of identifying myself as gay, wrapping it in the silk of mild humor. When I showed that I wasn't going to accept his veiled implication of the essential non-reality of homosexuality, he launched the worn-out lecture about how G-d created us to overcome our desires, marry a woman and everyone will live happily ever after, yadda yadda. I was really in no mood to have a debate, so I just let my eyes glaze over until he'd talked himself out. I am considering choosing some relevant reading material to suggest to him so that he might revise his overly simplistic ideas on the issue.