We’ve got water!
We spent a big chunk of Friday wrestling the pool together, then finally got the water flowing Saturday afternoon. It’ll probably take another couple of days to get it filled. In the meantime, I’ll be setting up the pump system (we got a sand filter this time around) and getting some yard work done. I’ll probably put up a detailed post about the process next month. Check out the Instagram post for pictures until then.
Reading
I picked To The Last Man back up this week. Not sure why I stopped reading it, but I did for a while. It’s a very good story.
I’m stuck using my HP laptop until I get my big machine back. I have Firefox installed on it, but I didn’t bring all of my plugins over. That means I’m using the default home page, which is a collection of regularly-used site along with a section marked “Thought-provoking stories.” Some are less…current…than others, but almost every day, I find some very interesting articles.
Big Think had a piece that caught my eye. “Why Historians Can Only Give Jesus A One-Sentence Biography.” It touches on both religion and history.
When I worked as a funeral escort years ago, I often handled Jewish funerals. They were simultaneously easy and hard. Easy, because there was only one Jewish funeral home and one primary Jewish cemetery. Hard, because they tended to have more cars than other processions and because of a couple of tricky intersections and junctions. But one of the things I really enjoyed about them was hearing the cantors sing the service. I don’t understand Hebrew, didn’t understand it then, but the chants captured my mind as I considered that I might be hearing it sung the same way it had been sung two thousand years ago.
But how do young Jews learn to chant Torah before their bar and bat mitsvahs? For decades, it was under the tutelage of an elder at the synagogue or cassette recordings that they’d listen to at home. Then in the late 90s, along came TropeTrainer, a cutting-edge software package that did everything a Torah reader could want.
If you’re at all interested in languages or tech history, check out “His software sang the words of God. Then it went silent.” at Input. Note that the piece is three years old. The revised version of TropeTrainer is apparently active now.
Writing
I’m inching toward starting a second draft of Ghost. It feels wrong to consider a second draft before I’ve finished the first one. But I’ve wondered if I haven’t written myself into a corner at this point. I know what needs to happen, but I don’t know if I can make it happen given the world I’ve constructed so far. And if I need to change the world, I may as well rewrite the parts of the story that establish the world.
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