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.

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.

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.

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.

I appear to have fallen under the weather. I should have known something was up as early as Friday, since I had trouble singing at Kabbalas Shabbos and my left lymph node was swelling and tender, which seems to always happen when I'm about to come down with something. Staying up way too late on Saturday night must have been the last straw, because I was feeling ooky for most of yesterday. My voice had recovered enough last night that I was able to sing normally when I suddenly got invited to a sheva brochos meal at the home of Baruch and Batya (friends of Avraham and Becca). But when it came to bedtime, I could barely sleep at all because my nose and throat were so dry. A mosquito also took to snacking on me, and I couldn't use my usual tactic of warding it off by running the fan, because flowing air and parched sinuses do not mix. So I spent most of today bed-ridden, crawling out only to eat and work. A shame because there were some errands I really would have preferred to get out of the way. Treating myself with copious amounts of food and water seems to be doing the trick, though, and I predict a decent night's sleep tonight.

Some of you have been bugging me for pictures for a very long time. I've finally caved in. You can see the photographs I've taken by visiting my section of flickr. Enjoy.

Success! Trying though it was at times, I've replaced the hard drive in the iBook and now it's contentedly churning its way through a Mac OS X installation. And I only have a very few little leftover bits and pieces! :)

So on late Monday afternoon, Becca calls me up and tells me that Seth will be getting into town in about an hour. This was the first I'd heard of this, and I'd hoped to have my iBook fixed before I saw him next so I could give it to him. So while I waited for him to arrive, I started the long process of taking the laptop apart. When Seth called me from Becca's house, I'd gotten about a third of the way through the crunchy outer shell into the chewy center and was becoming exhausted by the trying steps of disassembly.