Happy New Year!

October 4-5, 2005

The past two days are the beginning of the Jewish New Year, and for as long as I can remember I have always missed work on both the first and second day of the new year so I could go to services.  This year was no different, and since I still have the biggest dining room between my parents and cousins in Chicago I had a New Year's dinner last night.  Isaac surprised me by wanting to be a big part of cooking--this year he helped with the flourless chocolate cake, matzoh balls, and the snap peas, although he drew the line at chopped liver (in the cuisinart in the photo at the left). 

The thing I don't understand about making these big holiday dinners is how on Earth women would get everything done without collapsing:  as it is Isaac and I only made a small fraction of what we all ate:  my mother made the chicken soup, pot roast, and noodle kugel (pudding), Eleanor made challah and honey cake, my cousins brought tsimmes (root vegetable stew?) and Mike brought wine:  if I had prepared all of that myself I would have been cooking for days, instead of just the night before and the day of the dinner.  I called my grandmother a few times for help during the afternoon and learned the secret (?) of putting seltzer in matzoh balls...who would have thought?  But I can't even count the number of times she must have gone through the whole process of making this same dinner all by herself.

During the services I did have a funny physics flash-back, though:  I had a part in the services this year (which seems to happen most years), and usually when I have a part I end up worrying that I won't remember when I have to go up, or I worry that I won't remember to do something during the part I have (it's a different part every year).  Anyway, this year my part came near the beginning of the first service, and once the part was over and I was back at my seat I relaxed and thought that it was nice that I didn't have to worry about it anymore.  This is exactly the same feeling I had just last week when I gave a talk at the NuINT05 conference--my talk was on the morning of the first day, so once the talk was over I went back to my seat, breathed a sigh of relief, and realized I could actually spend the rest of the conference paying attention to the rest of the talks instead of worrying about or working on my own talk. 

This year seems to be harder than any previous year to actually not "work" on this second day of Rosh Hashanah:  tonight's dinner is just leftovers so I don't have to cook, the kids are at school, and instead of doing any one of the fun things I can imagine doing (reading a book, playing music, taking a nap) I couldn't resist logging on and seeing if there was any late-breaking news from work.  For the moment all is calm so I think I'll stop here and take out the mandolin which still might be in tune from last night's jam session.