Friday/Shabbat – Day 235/236
March 28, 2013
Friday was my usual morning of work and TA training and meeting in the afternoon. Wasn’t feeling so well for much of the day and ended up skipping on the Glee Club trip to Boston. Felt my health would be best served back on campus.
Shabbat dinner was something very very exciting this week. The bi-annual Levine CIS@Shabbat. The dinner for Jewish computer scientists (and Louis Petro #psaklouis). Dinner was lovely, the conversations binary and lively and I felt very much at home. I’ve been getting much closer to Ariella recently, and this was another good chance to hang out together.
Shabbat was Aviva’s birthday and as such a surprise lunch was planned. Ariel Menche, her boyfriend had come in for the weekend and we had a great time surprising her with a loud happy birthday, shortly after she awoke. Lunch went for a couple of hours, again in excellent company, though less nerdy than the night before.
The afternoon was a good ‘shluf’ (nap) before coding again till 5:30AM, when I finally got my latest project complete!
Thursday/Friday – Day 213/214
March 6, 2013
Thursday morning was a complete and utter disaster. Yet despite this I really really enjoyed my day. I woke up on three hours of sleep to go to physics, definitely a bad idea, and from there, straight to my demo and assessment for my networking group project. Needless to say, we didn’t go too well, failing a number of the more difficult tests. I was a bit cut up.
The afternoon however was awesome. First up was a PGC gig singing to the board of trustees, as one of their number was retiring. We were hailed with large smiles and for me, a wink and a smile from Dean Keytack of Rodin. After that I gave Melody Cooke a call and headed over to the music building to find her practising her singing. After a while with the piano, I walked with her while she polished off a few errands and then presented to her the piano in Sweeten Alumni House (a beautiful Boston grand) before running out to Lover’s and Madmen for a hot chocolate and her lunch.
After a few hours of chatting it was a quick dinner and then another gig for the larger dinner for trustees and donors. Though our performance number was short (SATB version of the Red and the Blue), the mixed company of males and females (provided by the girls of Quaker Notes) was somewhat revelatory. Following that we got changed and a few of us went to a sushi bar where some of the guys did ‘sake bombs’ (don’t even ask). After that it was back to my room for one of the longest night sleeps I’ve had since leaving home. Perfect.
Friday I woke up somewhere around midday, coded a little in the afternoon, chatted to friends, prepared dinner for the evening, read a little and then went straight back to sleep. The way I needed my holiday.
Friday/Shabbat – Day 178/179
January 29, 2013
Friday with no classes was a treat. However, that’s not to say I was unoccupied! First thing in the morning I had a meeting with the lovely Miss Amy Miller, my academic adviser. She helped me out a great deal in trying to figure out what I was doing and where I was going and aside from that provided me a bit of an insider view into quite how Penn worked.
The rest of the afternoon was spent meeting with Professors and working on various things, a long lunch at Hillel and then TA training and our meeting. In addition to all that I managed to squeeze in the time to make a salad for a shabbat dinner I was hosting with two friends, Michal and Ben. My only issue was a lack of invited guests. Luckily enough, lunch at Hillel provided me with the opportunity to invite a new friend, Safi Aharoni to dinner.
Friday night came and service was pretty lovely. It was good to be able to unload at the end of the week and just chill! Dinner however was absolutely wonderful. The conversation was spirited, the food excellent and this made for an overall great experience. The next day I attended the ‘sleep service’ till around midday and from there went to lunch at Aviva’s and Michal’s room. This was again a fantastic meal and made this Shabbat one of my favourites since leaving the country. I then hung around with Aviva till late afternoon when we all headed back to Hillel for a few activities before the end of Shabbat.
Following Shabbat, I raced back to my room, procrastinated for a while and, then got on to some work for the rest of the night.