Seeking Ferret

Happy Chanukah!

I have days off to be taken by the end of the year, so I took off Friday even though taking off for Chanukah isn't really a thing. I drove up to go see my sister (outdoors, masked and distanced) and dropped off Chanukah gifts for my nieces. We hadn't seen each other in person since shortly pre-pandemic and I hadn't met my younger niece who was born in June in person yet, so I was very excited.

My younger niece is very cute, and she growls, it's adorable. My older niece is somehow two and a half and she played tea party with me and waved various sticks while shouting "Abra kedabra" and mostly just ran around, and I was so grateful to have the chance to spend time with them, and to catch up with my sister.


Apparently this is the Chanukah of awesome Chanukah music by members of the original Hamilton cast.

My cousin's in town for the Holidays, with her two month old in tow. My aunt and uncle hosted a lunch so we could meet him, it was great. He is cute and mostly bald and figuring out the world, and my niece really enjoyed meeting her brand new cousin (second cousin? I think you guys have proved that's the right word), and was shouting "Baby!" a bunch. At least, I think it was baby. It's often hard to figure out what words she's using. There was much debate about whether she actually has a clear word that she uses for my mother, which kind of sounds like 'gamma' i.e. grandma, but also kind of sounds like nonsense syllables.

My niece still hasn't gotten over the crying the minute she sees me thing, but again was playing with me after a couple hours of getting used to my presence. Hopefully that adjustment period will carry over to next week, when we're all spending a couple days at my parents' house for Rosh Hashanah.

My niece's first birthday was... well, it was a couple weeks ago on the English calendar, and it'll be in a couple weeks in the Hebrew calendar, but the scheduling worked out so we had her first birthday party yesterday.

There is this recent thing over the past month or so whereupon as soon as she sees me, she bursts inconsolably into tears. Yay. My sister decided to try to preempt it this time by asking me to send a picture of myself so she could show it to my niece ahead of Sunday to help her acclimate to my terrifying visage. It didn't work, she burst into tears as soon as I walked in the door, yet again. But it eventually worked out, she calmed down and was playing with me by the end of the party. And offering me tiny crumbs of her birthday cake that she didn't want. She is the cutest even if she hates me. And the party was fun, a bunch of my aunts and uncles came over and everyone got to ooh and aah over everything my niece did. She is up to walking about two or three steps before falling down. And naturally, being far less materialistic than her peers, she was much more excited about one of the birthday cards on the gift box than she was about any of her presents.


We've been back to the incessant rain the past couple weeks so I haven't been able to bike to work in about two weeks, but there was no rain today (there's supposed to be a thunderstorm in a couple hours), so I biked in. I realized later that it put me over 200 miles for the year. Last year I only totalled 218 for the whole year. I'm pretty pleased about that.

I have been trying to shove my sleep pattern earlier, mostly with positive results. I've woken up most days this week more cheerfully than usual. Some bumpiness... a few nights where I wake up at 3 in the morning, read for a little bit before I can go back to sleep. But mostly it's been good. And then last night I got home from work at 8PM and was in bed by 9PM, because damn was it a long day at work.

Tuesday night was Puzzled Pint. Mostly the puzzles were eh, but there was one word puzzle that I thought was really elegant. There were strings of letters that were 'double encrypted'... First you figured out the encoding mechanisms the first time, and you decoded to get a series of clues that clued short words. Then you applied the associated encoding mechanism to the clue words to get a new word, all of which were part of a common, thematic dataset. I'll try to remember to link it when it's been posted online.

Tomorrow morning I'm flying with my family to Arizona for a cousin's wedding, which will either be really fun or a giant mess. :P Yay family. I know none of the details of the event because I never actually got an invitation- word passed through family backchannels that no slight was intended. :P My parents took care of the travel logistics so all I know is that I will show up tonight at their home, sleep over, we'll go to the airport tomorrow, and at some point in the weekend there will be a wedding and then I'll be home Monday.

Hopefully I will be recovered enough by Tuesday because I'm seeing the Met's Rigoletto again with ghost_lingering. And I've been thinking of trying to go see Andy Statman's Thursday show next week because I haven't seen him play in a while.

It's been a week of free dinners. :P

We had a party at my parents' house on Sunday for my niece, who at two months was judged old enough to be shown off to the extended family. The guest of honor was alternately cranky and asleep, but it was a good time. It was nice to see family for positive reasons instead of for a funeral. My mother over-ordered food, so I took home enough leftovers for lunch and dinner through Wednesday.

Wednesday I helped a couple friends unmove. They'd moved to a new apartment a couple blocks from their old one, only to realize that the promised two-bedroom was actually a three-bedroom with an unadvertised, unwanted mystery roommate who needed to be given access to their kitchen and common areas. So I helped them move their furniture back to the old apartment until they can find a new place and they bought dinner in thanks.

Thursday my dad and I got dinner at the deli because my mother's down in Florida and my father... is capable of cooking for himself, but is disinclined to it, particularly after a long day of work and an hour and a half commute. And I wasn't going to turn down a free pastrami sandwich.


I have exactly zero Shabbos plans and I am looking forward to cooking for myself and enjoying a relaxing Shabbos of sleeping and reading. I'm in the middle of a nonfiction book on the 1917 Flu, and have Annalee Newitz's Autonomous on deck, which I've heard great things about.

My long weekend kicked off to an interesting start when I woke at 6AM Friday to go to minyan. As I was getting dressed, there was a thunderclap and power went out. Fortunately, by the time I got back from minyan at 8AM, power had been restored by the power company. Because I was starting to think the weekend was cursed.

Because of the rain, Friday became more of a home day than I'd planned. I did laundry, baked challah, cleaned and reorganized the room, restocked the bookshelf that fell down Thursday evening... I did go out to see Ant Man and the Wasp in the morning while the dough rose.

Ant Man and the Wasp summary review: Hank Pym still the worst.

But other than that, it was a fun movie! I laughed more than I did at Ant Man 1, I liked a lot of the size play stuff, and I mean, Hank Pym is supposed to be the worst. And I loved Cassie and can't wait for them to give us Young Avengers.



I had a nice Shabbos lunch at one of the neighbors, see previous post.

Sunday was a lot of family. My uncle died last year from brain cancer and per his wishes was cremated, which has made navigating the rites of Jewish mourning trickier throughout. My mother couldn't formally sit shiva, and there was no gravesite to do the tombstone unveiling at, but in lieu of an unveiling, we had a memorial lunch yesterday at the family's favorite Brooklyn deli. To do the sorts of things that you normally do at the unveiling, getting a chance to remember our lost loved one in a less stressful setting than the week immediately after allows.

It was nice. My uncle had a bunch of friends from childhood that he'd stayed in touch with, and a number of them came and told stories, as did his brother and some other relatives. It was nice seeing everyone together again, in general, and introducing my niece as well as my cousin's one year old to the whole family. It was nice to set aside time to remember my uncle, who was such a great person and deserves to be remembered.


But family can be aggravating. My aunts were fighting over who got to control the menu and the venue, and as a result all the planning that went with that was unnecessarily prolonged and full of passive aggressive manipulations.

And... there's this thing I've sometimes noticed mourners do where you generalize your memories of a loved one as meaning more than they actually did. We had a toast in his honor, a shot of my uncle's 'favorite scotch'. My father turned to me and asked "Did you know he had a favorite scotch?" I have some fond memories of drinking scotch with my uncle, and he had definite opinions about scotch, but he was a curious person who loved trying new things, not someone with a fixed taste and a .

And the lower key actually-getting-to-spend-time-with-my-grandmother dinner has fluctuated between tonight, tomorrow night, and Wednesday night for no discernible reason I can figure out except that my aunt can't make up her mind what she wants to do. It finally settled on tonight yesterday, and then half an hour ago I got a text from my mother moving the location.


After getting home last night, I went for a little twelve mile evening bike ride, including some time on the D&R trail. Beautiful weather, as the thunderstorm Friday abated the heat just the right amount.



I also finished a book.

A Higher Truth by James Comey

So the takeaway I got from this is that Comey is a bureaucrat committed to protecting the bureaucracy over anything political. Or in other vocabulary, Comey is part of the Deep State. :P And he wrote this book because he thinks Trump is a threat to the bureaucracy because Trump is uninterested in playing the bureaucracy's games by the bureaucracy's rules.

Whether you think this is a good thing depends on your feelings about the Deep State. Personally, I am pro-Deep State. As a Burkean conservative I approve of inertia in government, of the institution resisting dramatic change and violation of bureaucratic norms. You might be of the opinion that entrenched interests are keeping some desired political outcome from happening and that we are in need of revolutionary change, and if that is your opinion, you probably don't like people like Comey. But on the other hand, you may not like the people who are presently trying to seize the government and enact revolutionary change by violating bureaucratic norms, either.

The most exciting part of the book wasn't the Trump era stuff, though, it was his stories about his time as Deputy Attorney General under Ashcroft during the second Bush presidency. There's an incredibly dramatic story about a race between Comey and White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez to Ashcroft's hospital bed to see who could apply pressure on Ashcroft over a change in Justice department policy over enhanced interrogation.

I am an uncle! My sister gave birth to her first daughter yesterday morning around 4:30AM.

Baby is super-adorable in photos, at least. I haven't seen her yet. My sister is being standoffish and trying to protect herself from too much family interference in the birth process, which I can respect. She told my mom some sort of delaying lies/half-truths as she was going into labor, apparently to keep her mother-in-law from swarming the hospital and being a pest (My sister's mother in law can be a bit much to take). My parents and her husbands' parents visited the baby yesterday, but I was encouraged not to visit yet. And the naming was to be at my brother-in-law's shul this morning, but my mom said she had the impression he didn't want people there. Maybe Sunday. Maybe later. The best plan is to respect my sister's boundaries.

Later last night, my troll-creationist father explained to me that seeing his squirming, lizard-like granddaughter had inspired him to invent a brand new biological theory I immediately pointed out to him was actually just good old Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny. "It was only discredited three hundred years ago," I said, but I see now that I shortchanged my father. It was only discredited about a century ago, in actuality, although Laurence Sterne definitely was making fun of some homunculus/preformationist-inflected version of it three hundred years ago in Tristram Shandy. My father's genius is a strange beast, unlike my own in so many ways, yet perhaps equally strange in its own fashion. I hope my niece discovers her own strange forms of genius.

My uncle, my mother's younger brother, died this morning from brain cancer. He was first diagnosed about thirteen or fourteen months ago. It's been a slow and frustrating year of setbacks that brings us to today.

He was in several ways the family rebel. Unlike his sister and brothers, he didn't go straight to college after high school. Instead he worked various odd jobs and wandered around in his early twenties, before going to air conditioning repair school and ultimately getting a bachelor's degree in engineering and finding a career as a biomedical devices engineer. He was also a rebel in other ways- my mother describes the menagerie of snakes and birds he kept in the attic when he was a teenager with a bemused wonder. He was the only one of his New York bred family to flee the East Coast, living happily in Southern California. He was a person who always listened to his gut and pursued what made him happy regardless of what other people thought. I always admired him for that.

As the only engineer in the family, he was a role model for me. He gave me advice several times when I was in college about how to navigate the next step on my path to becoming an engineer. It meant so much to me, after I got my first job out of college, to be able to sit with him at Thanksgiving and discuss our work together, engineer to engineer. I think it was the thing that finally said to me that I had made it. He had a knack for solving problems with his hands. At various times he taught me little offhanded lessons about plumbing and carpentry.

He was one of the most intensely curious people I know. He was curious about people, and he loved talking to them and learning their stories. At my grandfather's shiva two years ago, he got into a long and involved conversation with a doctor friend of my father's who used the sorts of devices my uncle made. When he was leaving after the shiva visit, the doctor said to my mother, "I'm sorry it's under these circumstances, but I was really glad to get to meet your brother." My mother told me that during her last visit to see him, a couple weeks ago, he was mentally fading, but he kept being triggered by things he saw and remembering some random fact he would geekily share with her. My mother kept a list on that visit of books he insisted she needed to read, movies he insisted she needed to watch, things she needed to look up and learn more about. And it always went both ways. When I used to discuss science fiction with him, he would eagerly write down my recommendations and I would write down his. The world was a treasure chest for him that he loved to explore and learn more about.


Per his request, his body will be cremated. He was never a religious person, though he was always a proud Jew. Because of the cremation, my mother is not obligated in shiva, which she has mixed feelings about. Death is always hard to navigate, no matter the circumstances. But his life: too short, but always full, I can celebrate. Baruch dayan emet.

I moved into my new apartment a few weeks ago. So far everything has been going pretty well. The move was smooth and straightforward- since a bad experience a decade ago with moving out of a fifth story walkup, I have been a firm believer in lightweight furniture and especially plastic furniture. I can move any piece of furniture in my apartment myself, which is a great convenience even when you're fortunate enough to be able to ask your family for help with the move.

The biggest headache so far has been an incessant and mysterious stream of dead moths in my bathroom. They have thus far thankfully seemed unable to escape the bathroom to the kitchen, but every day I'd clear away several dead moths and then the next day I'd find a few more on the shower floor, in the sink, on the bathroom floor. A few live ones, too, but those were easily dispatched. I think I have finally resolved this problem, though, with a combination of insect spray and plugging up a hole in a windowsill. No new moths in the past four days!

I still need to figure out how to furnish my living room. I guess my decision is really about how often I intend to entertain. I can design my living room as a place comfortable for a group of people to hang out, or I can design it as a place comfortable for me to retreat to. There is some overlap, of course, but it plays into decisions like whether I want to fill all the walls with bookshelves or whether I want to get more couch space. At the moment the room just has a couple of folding chairs and a light fixture, while I deliberate.

morbane asked, when I posted about moving to my new apartment, about where I was moving from. I don't talk about it much, since it feels like a thing most people in my generation aren't very proud of even though it's very common, but since I graduated college almost a decade ago, I have been living back in my parents' home, as a fairly prototypical boomerang kid. I graduated in 2007 at the heart of the financial meltdown. There were very few jobs available in my field and nobody was biting on my resume. Most of my classmates had decided to go on for extra schooling to wait out the disaster, but I was way too burnt out on college to contemplate that. I spent the summer of '07 on my parent's couch watching all of the West Wing on DVD, and then in the fall I finally worked through my burnout and got to job hunting in earnest. I got a job in October '07 about six months after I graduated, but it was a contract work, temp-to-perm promised in six months, and it was only about a half hour drive from home, so it seemed to make sense to stay at home because of the financial uncertainty. Well, eight years passed, the job got more secure the more experience I got and the more I proved myself useful, and I was still living at home. It was time to move out. So I did.

I get along quite well with my parents, and we've gotten pretty good at maintaining neutral corners when we need space. I've owned my own car, too, so I have the freedom and mobility to leave and find additional space when I needed to get away, too. So basically living at home worked well for me and I haven't been itching to leave for the sake of independence, as was the case for some friends who don't get on with their parents as well. My mother's been subtly pressuring me to move out for the past couple of years, though, not because my being at home was disruptive to her, but because she felt like my progression to some envisioned adulthood was being slowed by my continuing to live at home. I'm not entirely sure this was a reasonable fear, though I sympathize with her worry. And my parents, though they did not live at home into their thirties, lived in an apartment building owned by my grandmother until their early thirties, so my mother's comments always felt a little unfair on those grounds.

But it's true that living at home partially exempted me from some chores and rites of adulthood, though only partially. I was mostly not responsible for cooking, as my mother got home from work three hours before I did and was generally responsible for preparing dinner. But I'm capable of cooking, and have picked up the chore at various times when my mother was unable, including a monthlong stretch after my mother had leg surgery. And I haven't paid a rent bill or mortgage payment, but I have paid various other monthly bills, including credit card bills and car insurance payments. I've handled all my own finances for quite a while. And the best part of living with my parents, unquestionably, is the amount of money I've been able to save from rent. I have the resources to buy a reasonably nice house now, and the plan at the moment is treat this year of living in an apartment as buying myself the time and opportunity to scope out the new town I've moved into for possible homes to buy. Or to decide I want to go in an entirely different direction, who knows?

I am managing these new burdens fine. I like cooking! I never really felt all that comfortable cooking in my mother's kitchen, because a kitchen is in some senses a really personal space that you customize to the way you cook, and because my impulse to learn new things by experimentation never really worked well with the kinds of cooking one is asked to do as a member of a family. And also because I'm bad at not making a mess while cooking. On the occasions when I was left at home alone, I'd take over the kitchen and try new things and my mother always teased me on her return upon finding evidence of my experiments. But I have my own kitchen now and I get to try things without feeling judged! I'm mostly still doing familiar recipes, but with tweaks here and there. I tried a new sauce with the chicken I made a few nights ago, and it was good. I baked challahs to freeze for Shabbas today, and they came out pretty well. It's not the first time I've made challah by myself, but the number of times I've done it is probably in the high single digits. But I'm looking to do it more often. Home baked challah adds something to the Shabbas experience.

Getting the portions right for cooking for one is something I'm re-adjusting to, but mostly I just cook too much and end up with leftovers, and that's been convenient too for the nights when I'm not prepared to cook. This is the first time I've ever been fully responsible for stocking a kitchen- in college I always had roommates to share the burden- so I've been doing food shopping in a little-bit-every-day fashion as I keep discovering kitchen staples that I haven't thought to get yet. I started out with a very limited set of spices, for example, and as new recipes call for new ones I'm adding to my collection. I'm spending a little more on food shopping than I'd anticipated, but I think it's mostly because of these upfront kitchen stocking costs. Once I have that out of the way I should be closer on track.

The new town I moved to has a larger observant Jewish community than the one I moved from. My hometown has a single Orthodox shul- this one has four, plus various shtiebls and so on. I'm going through them giving each a tryout, trying to figure out where I'll fit in. So far I haven't really met too many people in the Jewish community, but I have strategies for meeting people, I think this will turn out okay. I just joined a Facebook group for young Jewish professionals in town. And I still have involvement and obligations in the community I left, which is only about a twenty minute drive away.

And the biggest thing improvement in my life is the commute. My commute was on the order of 35-40 minutes each way, sometimes worse when traffic was bad. My commute is now 15-20 minutes. And it's not just getting an additional forty minutes into my day, it's that those forty minutes were the most unpleasant part of my day, with me having to be continuously alert of darting cars in dense traffic. My commute now is almost joyous. I get home less angry and exhausted and am able to be more productive on non-work things, though mostly that productivity has been channeled towards apartment setup stuff. I look forward to being able to channel it in other directions.


I brought my bike over yesterday and filled up the tires. I took a nice bike ride around town today, exploring the environs. The area I'm in now is smaller and less sprawly than the town I moved from- it's pretty nice to be in biking distance of things I might want to bike to. I biked about four miles and then my legs sort of stiffened up... I need to work on my fitness. I think I'm going to try a late afternoon ride after work a few times a week, if I'm up to it. In the Jersey suburbs everything is driving distances and I've gotten out of the habit of regular exercise, Shabbat walking excepted. Being on my own, setting my own schedule completely, I have an opportunity to build better habits.

One of my friends was saying how living alone is a thing he's not really comfortable with. He's always had roommates, and he's also the sort who's always inviting people into his home. I'm an introvert and I definitely need to at least create space where I can just spend time by myself, but I suppose I do need to keep an eye out that I don't turn my apartment into a retreat I never leave and never make space for other people in. That seems unlikely, though. I figure I'll be able to figure out a balance. (and my mother, who's been nudging me out for a while, is now worried she'll never see me again. Which seems unlikely. The past three weekends I have had family obligations- father's day, my grandfather's headstone unveiling, and going home for Shabbos. I'm wondering when I'll actually get a weekend without seeing my family, now that I've officially moved out. You know, I moved a whole twenty minutes.)

But yeah, I'm in the new place and I'm pretty happy at the moment!

Every year when my grandparents hosted a Seder, my grandfather would hide the afikoman for the kids to find. (For the goyim, the afikoman is a piece of matza designated to serve as dessert and the end of the Passover meal. Traditions for it vary, but in some fashion it is typically hidden during the Seder and recovered at the end of the meal in order to conclude it.)

My grandfather would get to the part where he was to hide the afikoman, and he would wrap it in a napkin and then he would place it underneath the tablecloth at the table, immediately to the left of his plate (He was a lefty).

Every year he would do this, and even though me, my siblings, and my cousins were pretty young, we pretty quickly tumbled to this and it became a footrace to the head of the table when it was time to find the afikoman. This being kind of boring, we begged my grandfather every year to hide it somewhere else, and he would tell us he'd think about it, and then he'd hide it in the same place.

One year we got him to promise to hide it somewhere else. He made a show of leaving the room with the afikoman and then he returned to the room and slipped it into the houseplant right behind his chair. So we ran all over the house, hunting for the afikoman, and then eventually we realized that his new hiding place was all of a foot away from the old one.

After that, we let him go back to hiding it under the tablecloth.


(Nobody who spends more than half an hour with my family has any trouble seeing where I got my sense of humor)