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watersword: Keira Knightley, in Pride and Prejudice (2007), turning her head away from the viewer, the word "elizabeth" written near (Default)
Elizabeth Perry

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order in the court

Wednesday, 20 March 2024 11:02
watersword: A ship at sunrise, with the words "not all those who wander are lost" (Stock: wandering)

I'm working on this year's Haggadah, and finding it difficult for a variety of reasons.

  1. I thought I'd try moving the core & supplementary texts into Scrivener and assembling them in a collection, and that was super frustrating. I think I'm pretty good at Scrivener, and I still think this is a conceptually good approach, it's kind of how I approach poetry submissions, but it did not feel like I had made my life easier either now nor in the future, so now I'm back in Word, which I object to on pure principle, but I might as well take advantage of Past Me's hard work in the Styles pane.
  2. I'm going to a friend's Seder this year instead of hosting, and I promised to send her a draft ahead of time so we can make sure it works for her and this is giving me weird performance anxiety.
  3. I have so much poetry I could include and I can't decide what to cut even though I suspect that S.'s other guests will not be thrilled by the non-traditional content.

    a. Some of the poetry, e.g., Marge Piercy's "The Cup of Eliyahu", is longer than I actually want, especially that late in the Haggadah, but how do I excerpt??? See also Primo Levi's "Passover".

  4. ( the real problem, cn middle east )
  5. Also I'm sick of Garamond but every other typeface is worse.
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the beeswax season

Thursday, 7 December 2023 16:20
watersword: Graffiti scrawl of "ignore this text" (Stock: ignore this text)

I managed to get my hands on some dark rye flour, and just pulled the first loaf with 15% of the flour replaced with rye out of the oven. It smells great, I am so excited to be on the path to recreating the bread of my heart (a specific loaf from the kosher-style deli in my hometown) even a little. I will never get the exact loaf, not least because I generally make boules, not bâtards, and their dough is almost certainly not as high-hydration as my house recipe, nor is it cold-fermented. But that's okay. The madeleine evokes the memory, it is not the memory itself.

People are coming over on Saturday and Sunday for latkes, albeit for lunch not dinner, but I will take "sharing the experience with people at the wrong time" over "doing the thing alone at the halakhically correct time" any time, no question. (I generally don't feel this way about lighting Shabbat candles, maybe because that's traditionally something that happens in a private space anyway, and also doesn't have a ritual meal. Ritual meals are for sharing!)

But tonight I will get a falafel wrap at the middle eastern/pizza place nearby, because somehow Hanukkah snuck up on me and I am not prepared to fry things after the long work meeting that will cap off my day. Plans include cassola, green curry crisp tofu, a trip over to the fancy donut place I have been meaning to try, and hopefully an expedition to get some fish & chips. The really good fish & chips place has no indoor seating, which ....no. Not in December.

But anyway: Hanukkah sameach if you're celebrating!

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