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Quote by the very deep Carl Sagan

https://youtu.be/I4eeqpTUCYA

One man's wisdom benefits us all if we can recall it.

Converting to Orthodox Judaism is one of the most intense things one can do. There are many different situations, and exceptions. What I will share is a short overview because I could write much more on this topic.

Let me start with the most important thing which is being generally liked by the community,

This means that you do not form a threat in any kind of way to the community. This might sound obvious but I am also talking about people that are a financial or emotional liability. What this means is that, beyond studying Judaism, you will also have to ‘play’ the social, religious, and political game within the Orthodox community. If you are able to get the support of the most important people within the community (this includes the rabbi) then you are generally speaking good to go. If on the other hand the most important people within the community don’t like you then you might never do the giyur (conversion) with that community, or in that country/region.

This means you need to be able to network and be social with all people no matter how they think or act. You need to be a politician. Therefore, my advice is to read books like: “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. This might sound strange but it can save you years on the conversion process. Additionally, it would be useful to go from time to time to other Jewish communities to network with people there. Remember that you should always dress like an Orthodox Jew but not like a Chasidic Jew when you are not yet jewish yourself (most people find it too ‘fake’ when you haven't converted yet). Sometimes it can be the case that the conversion process is taking too long (over 3 years) and this is where your ‘friends’ from your network can help you out. Communal pressure on a rabbi does have an impact from time to time. And if they are being too unrealistic or too demanding then you might move to a different community (one where you already know people).

It takes a lot of money to convert. You will need to live close to the synagogue (walking distance). You need to have a job which allows you to be shomer shabbat (keep shabbat laws). The problem is that most, if not all, synagogues are located in the city center where the rent is extremely high. Kosher food is also very expensive. Before you start the conversion process you should calculate the cost of living as if you were Jewish already. On top of that you should try to keep shabbat during the winter time (dark very early in some places) to see how it will impact your work.

There are many people that claim to be Jewish but that they can’t prove it. This doesn’t matter at all to Orthodox Jews. If you can't prove it then you will need to convert. Sometimes it is easier to convert if your dead is Jewish or if you have a grandparent that is Jewish. But you still need to convert if you can’t prove that your mother is Jewish. I heard so many stories from converts that have all kinds of different claims. 99% of these claims are wishful thinking. If they do a DNA test then most of them have 0% ashkenazi or sephardi DNA matches. This is totally fine, but please don’t fool yourself. On the other hand such stories might sell very well to the Jewish community. For practical (political) purposes you might want to fabricate such a story like: “My grandfather always respected the Jewish community and lit a candle on Friday evening”. This instills the potential idea that your grandfather might have been Jewish and that you are a” lost Jewish soul”. If they ask you if he was Jewish then you simply reply: “I don’t think so”.

Creating a deadline and boundaries are a must. Do not let this process continue for over 5 years. Also have in mind how much money you can spend on this and keep track of everything you spend. This also includes opportunity cost (You could have spent X amount of money on something else if it was not for the conversion process). An acquaintance of mine left a very well paying job (over 150k a year) to become Jewish. These are difficult decisions to make for a person but you are the one that has to set boundaries.

If you are married then they will ask you simply: “will your spouse also convert?/ live religiously (if he/she is already Jewish)”. If the answer is “No” from your end then they will not convert you. However, there are special routes for cases where the husband or wife is Jewish. They generally speaking will make it easier for you (if your Jewish husband/wife is willing to become orthodox).

#OrthodoxJudaism #OrthodoxConversion #ConversionToJudaism #Giyur #Judaism #JewishConversion #JewishCommunity #OrthodoxJewishCommunity #JewishLife #Halacha #ReligiousConversion

Before any new posts go up, a housekeeping one. This project has been running for a few years now, and the research has progressed. Some of what I wrote in the early posts is no longer accurate. Most corrections already appear as a short note next to the passage they fix, on the original post. A few had not been marked. Below is the full list, gathered in one place.

The Count's biography

In Impressions of Contemporaries, I gave Voltaire's real name as “Francois M Aroute.” The correct spelling is Arouet, François-Marie Arouet. This was a plain typo that went uncorrected for three years.

In Who was the Count of St. Germain?, I wrote, “To reveal a minor mystery, his given name was Leopold.” This was stated as settled fact. It is not. The claim comes from the Rákóczi theory, that he was a son of the Transylvanian prince Ferenc II Rákóczi, and it is one candidate among several, none of them confirmed by the Count himself. He is reported to have hinted at his real origins to the Markgraf of Ansbach, privately, but nothing survives in his own hand. No one actually knows what name he was born with.

Stanislas de Guaita's dates, given in The many manuscripts, were also wrong. I wrote 1860 to 1898. The correct dates are 1861 to 1897. The wrong figure traces back to Barrès's 1898 memorial volume rather than to Guaita's own record. This one already carries a correction note on the post.

The provenance of MS 209

Three more corrections belong to that same post.

“Frank Hollings, a 20th century London writer and antiquary” is not a person. It is a shop, a bookshop on Great Turnstile opened in 1892 by James Francis Hollings Shepherd, who named it after a family friend. After Shepherd's death it was run by William Edward Redway, whose name is the one that actually appears on the letterhead of the sale slip bound into the Getty MS 209 file. The shop survived the Blitz, moved twice, and was eventually sold to Bertram Rota Ltd in 1969. No person named Frank Hollings ever held this manuscript. Wherever “Hollings” appears in the ownership chain from here on, it refers to the firm, not a man.

The ownership chain itself, Favre, then Guaita, then “a certain Madame Barbe of Paris,” then Hollings, was presented as settled history. It is not. Every link after Guaita rests on a single undated sales slip from that shop, written no earlier than the 1930s. The same paragraph that names Favre and Barbe also invents a story about the Count running a “lodge of occult masonry” with Cagliostro as his pupil, a claim with no basis anywhere else. Since writing this, I have confirmed that a real Favre library sale took place, in Sèvres on 15 and 16 March 1896, and that occult material did pass from Favre's circle into Guaita's library around that time, but as a recorded gift rather than a purchase, and with nothing tying it to this specific book. “Madame Barbe” has no trace anywhere I have been able to find. Favre-owned material reaching Guaita by some route is plausible. The exact chain the slip describes is not proven.

On the Wellcome transcription, I wrote that the translation “was carried out for 'Mr. Potier.'” The document's own header says otherwise: prêté par M. Potier, lent by M. Potier. This makes him the owner who lent his copy to be copied, not the person who commissioned the work.

The cipher key

Ciphers & Keys describes the key's gaps, a symbol never filled in for K, no entry at all for W, corrections from “per” to “nom” and from “etc.” to “et,” and concludes that whoever kept the key “did not understand the words they were translating/deciphering.” That conclusion does not hold up. The gaps look much more like an inherited, general purpose cipher kit than a record of confusion, carrying spare letterforms the Book itself never needed. What the key is missing or doubles up on is still accurately described. What I decided that meant is not.

The same post also treats three cipher keys, the two bound into the manuscripts and the Wellcome key, as roughly equal witnesses “from different sources.” They are not equal in age. The two manuscript keys were made alongside the books themselves. The Wellcome key is a solver's own working reconstruction from around 1920, written on older paper stock but not from the period.

The Latin preface and the spirit count

Latin Preface, John King's post, builds a decoding wheel argument on there being 21 spirits named in the invocation. There are not. Counted directly from the manuscript, the four quarters give 5, 6, 3, and 3 spirits, seventeen in total, not twenty-one. The number 21 only appears once names absent from the manuscript, restored in brackets by the published English translation, are added in. The decoding wheel idea was offered as speculation at the time and remains unsupported. No ring, no index, no moving part of any kind appears anywhere in the figures. But the count behind the argument was simply wrong, regardless of what anyone makes of the wheel itself.

The magic circle

Two corrections apply across three posts about the ritual circle: The Circle, The Circle, part two, and The Circle, part three.

I described the east and west devices on the circle as “symbols of hearts with flames.” Under magnification, they are not. Each is a stem with a pair of small leaves, the same leafy flourish used elsewhere in the text as a line filler, arranged so that the outline reads as a heart. They are ornamental flourishes with a heart shaped terminal leaf, not a devotional or flaming heart. Part two and part three both already carry a note on the corner letter question below. This one had gone unmarked until now.

The corner letters themselves were also wrong. I originally read the triangle's three corners as V, P, and T, and in part two noted that P, T, and V are the 16th, 20th, and 22nd letters of the French alphabet, offered as a possible key to their meaning. Neither reading holds up. Re-examined at full resolution, both manuscripts write the third corner as an s, not a t, in the same double loop form the key uses for s elsewhere. The corners read P, V, S, and read that way they spell out, apex first, “Prolonger (ma) Vie Saine,” the Book's own stated goal, in its own words, rather than an alchemical formula. The alphabet position numbering does not fit either reading and should be dropped.

One more correction, also from part two. I quoted the circle's promise that it “will also give you the full understanding of that which is written in my revelation,” and read this as the author claiming direct authorship rather than compilation. That reading leans on a looser translation than the French supports. The line reads l'intelligence du caractère dont est écrit ma révélation, understanding of the character, or script, in which the revelation is written, not understanding of its content. It is a promise about being able to read the cipher, not a claim about who wrote the words.

The Winged Dragon

The Emblem of a Winged Dragon, also John King's, builds an argument from the ink colors of the ASIA acrostic (Alpha-Omega, Sabaoth, Izra, Akorab). The names are described as “all in black ink,” with AGLA also black, and the post suggests that reading AGLA as a stand in for the letter U might indicate the five vowels. The colors are wrong. AGLA is written in red, not black, and the “all black” impression came from faded pigment in one of the two manuscripts rather than a real pattern shared by both. The vowel argument depends on this and does not survive it. The acrostic itself, that the four names' initials spell ASIA, is unaffected and still stands. It is the color argument built on top of it that does not.

The Tea of Immortality

The Tea of Immortality presents the herbal recipe as something the Count himself “recommended to all those who sought this precious gift of long life.” This states the attribution more plainly than the evidence allows. The recipe's proportions are essentially correct: they match, part for part, a real 19th century pharmacy formula sold under the name Species Laxantes St. Germain. What is not established is the direction of the naming. No contemporary witness records a formula from the Count himself, only that he purged himself with self prepared senna, and that the resulting powder tasted of aniseed. Pharmacy formularies of the period are full of preparations named for saints and places that had nothing to do with them, and Saint-Germain is both a common Paris place name and a saint's name. Either the recipe preserves the Count's own formula, or a pre-existing senna laxative already carrying the name was attached to him later. At the moment, there is no way to tell which.

---

That is the list. Corrections from here will be pinned to the post they belong to, as before. This one exists to catch what the notes had missed. If you have been reading since 2023, this is what has changed since that time from research and contemplation.

Monday's MLB game of choice in the Roscoe-verse.

My Texas Rangers play the Seattle Mariners in this fourth and final game of their four-game series. This afternoon's game is scheduled to start at 1:35 PM CDT. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's score and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

- after Anis Mojgani

I love the confusing things about desire, and now I know what I want — to call to your heart and for it to touch back. And just now my skin was all a-wild and all a-flush as if you were here, singing in my veins.

I go to the window. Say goodnight to me, wherever you are, or come into a room I am in.

#poetry

Last week I ordered my proof copy of The Package Trilogy from Lulu.com. I’m still waiting. As of this writing, it’s in North Las Vegas. I wished I chose a more expedient mailing service but I would have to pay way more. The waiting is killing me. I want to make sure the book looks good before making it public.

#writing #book #delivery #Lulu #paperback #publishing #selfpublishing

I am not afraid.

“Most of the old moles I know wish they had listened less to their fears and more to their dreams.”

---

---

People, you know, survive. You gotta survive. But then you have to know when to step away from that survival. Because see, life is not—it's never going to be the same. It's always changing. And it's not always comfortable. And you have to take a chance and a risk and the chance and risk you have to take is on you, right? It's investing in you... The universe is ready to catch you. But you have to take the step

---

#book #quote #poetry #motivation #aom

---

I first came across the matter in the National Library. I was visiting with the type that had absconded from the print room of the Dáil; and taken refuge among the remnants of the Liberty Hall font; those battered pieces of type that claimed to have survived the confusion of 1916. They were hiding inside one of the Library’s manila-coloured boxes, soft at the edges, slightly damp to the touch, and filled with the correspondence of the O’Ranelagh family.

The O’Ranelaghs had not preserved the letters exactly. They had merely failed to betray them. I recognised the distinction at once. It was the same distinction I had noticed in the absconding tittle, whose refusal to blink its way through interrogation had first taught me that courage is sometimes indistinguishable from good manners. It had not made a speech. It had not denounced the authorities. It had simply declined to assist in its own disappearance. The box itself seemed to understand this. It did not announce its contents. It did not boast of rescue. It merely held what had been placed inside it and allowed the years to gather around the evidence.

I was turning over a page of Irish when I stopped. Above one consonant there was a faint wound. Something had been scraped away. Not erased cleanly, but worried off the paper, as if the mark had resisted. Then, between that consonant and the next letter, someone had inserted an h. I asked the type what had happened. At once the box became silent. A capital B pretended not to hear. A long s lowered its neck. Several vowels gathered themselves into a nervous little parliament and refused to record minutes. Only the tittle of a j was prepared to speak.

“It was one of us,” it said. “One of you?” “A dot,” said the tittle. “A mark above a consonant. In Irish they called it the ponc séimhithe. Others called it the buailte. The struck one. The little blow. The sign that softened a letter without making it carry another letter behind it.” I leaned closer to the page. “So the dot was removed?” The tittle trembled. “Removed is too gentle. It was replaced. Removal leaves a silence. Replacement writes over the silence and calls it improvement.” The h stood there, neat and legal, immediately after the consonant.

“It was said to be practical,” the tittle continued. “It was said that machines found dots inconvenient. That Roman type was easier. That keyboards preferred straight lines of characters to small marks hovering above them. They always blame the machinery when they want to discipline a language.” I looked at the scraped place again. I had known from early life that a small mark could be treated as an error, a nuisance, a speck, a thing to be corrected. I had also learned that the smaller the mark, the larger the system required to persecute it.

“What did the buailte do?” I asked. “It changed the breathing of the letter,” said the tittle. “A consonant with a buailte was not the same consonant. It had been altered, softened, struck into another sound. It carried its history above itself.” “And the h?” “The h came after,” said the tittle. “That was its genius. It did not hover. It queued. It entered the line and claimed to be ordinary. It made the change look alphabetical.”

From deeper in the box, one of the Liberty Hall letters stirred. It had known shortages of type. It had seen letters forced into service as other letters. It had seen broken characters sent back into history with improvised limbs. It knew that there are two kinds of substitution: the kind necessity makes, and the kind authority calls progress. “Was it oppression?” I asked. The tittle considered this carefully. Dots are often careless in appearance, but precise in thought. “Yes,” it said. “But not the loud kind. No one drags a diacritic through the street. No one declares martial law against a mark above a consonant. It happens more politely. First the mark is called difficult. Then old-fashioned. Then decorative. Then unnecessary. Finally it is allowed to survive only in heritage, signage, and nostalgia.”

The manila box gave a small archival sigh. I did not close it. Instead, I took out my notebook. There are moments when a thought should not be trusted to memory. Memory, like type, is vulnerable to substitution. One returns later and finds that an h has entered the line, claiming to have been there all along. I wrote: A mark may survive not because it is defended, but because someone fails to betray it. Beneath that I added: Good manners: .the refusal of a small thing to make itself convenient to power.

The tittle of the j watched me write. I could feel its approval, though it did not blink. It would not have been mannerly. I turned back to the page. The scraped place above the consonant continued to trouble me. It was not quite absence. Absence is cleaner than that. This was the visible effort of making something absent. The page still knew where the mark had been. The consonant knew too. Even the h, standing there with its administrative posture, seemed to know it had arrived after the fact.

So I wrote one more note: The buailte was not removed. It was asked to disappear politely. The h arrived afterwards, carrying the paperwork.

I remained in the Library for some time after that. The box stayed open before me. The O’Ranelagh correspondence lay inside it, neither confession nor denial, but something better: a failure to betray. Around it gathered the escaped type, the nervous vowels, the damaged Liberty Hall letters, the long s, the silent B, and the tittle of the j, who had spoken when the others could not.

I began to understand that a font is not merely a style of appearing. It is a theory of permission. The buailte was not only a dot. It was a place above the letter where memory could stand. And if memory is driven from that place, it does not vanish. It waits in the paper. It waits in the wound. It waits in the small refusal of a mark to become convenient.

I closed my notebook, but not the box. Some histories should be left open.

✒️ Sigi

I dreamt tonight about an old friend I’ve unfortunately lost contact with. I didn’t recognise him, because he wore a new face, but my wife did.

As we were speaking, slowly his face changed back to his old one, except older of course, due I think to there being so many years ago I saw him last.

I think.

Sweating and unsettled I woke up.

Salvation in cowboy hats and baseball caps.

The nudge came unexpectedly at 6 a.m. I had told her, “If I'm snoring, just nudge me.” Funny how different it feels from the other side. It isn't just a tap. For one sleepy second it feels like an invitation to be somewhere else.

Un-fixable stuff. :–/

Sleep was deep and satisfying after a looong and rigorous weekend.

Dreams

I was mid-dream about—i was trying to get something from someone... we were outside and...ah! I was with a small religious group. They were some kind of Catholic faith and we had to get an answer from an old priest. There were 4 of them: a senior male, and 3 younger women. I forget why we needed to talk to the old priest... I had a question possibly? or maybe I was preaching and they wanted me to talk to the guy responsible for their relationship with God? I've lost it. But they took me to this big old church. We went to the box office to get in and saw poster of the old priest. The teller gave the man directing us a memorial program, the priest had died. We didn't know what to do. The man could no longer address my needs. So, the group gave me a tour of their church. Lots of long low, yellow hallways filled with odd alcoves with fountains. There was a very very odd alien-looking thing: a fuzzy tree-stump that i was supposed to know what it was but didn't so I just pretended. Then there was the 'muppet' hallway. Each side lined with living bronze sculptures of the muppets and muppet-like creatures. I had to go behind the wall and work them like a puppet so they could talk to me. It made sense i the dream, but i was both the puppeteer and the talent speaking to the muppet. The guide and the women didn't like this. It was sacrilegious somehow and so I stopped. On the tour, i started preaching to them, telling them about this and that from the Bible. They were curious as to why a layman would know anything about the Bible. As I began to explain, I got the nudge.

When you know, you know.

Waking, I brushed and flossed and stepped outside to enjoy the predawn sounds and sights. Sitting on the porch, I spent the time in prayer and realizing that yesterday's musing about the wildlife making the most of the preheated day was right. Even the mosquitoes made their presence known. What is it that makes me so irresistible to those little monsters?

I especially hate when they bite me on the palm of my hand. That one feels personal. What did I ever do to you, mosquito? Besides happily murder untold numbers of your ancestors. And you too, given the chance.

At least the pain and itch will pass soon enough. Mosquito bites fade. Some nudges don't.

Sunday Sunday Sunday!

7:11 – I am sore this morning from yesterday's softball picnic. It was 100º at 5pm, but we still managed to convince about 40 ppl to come out to the park. I took my gas grill and cooked hot dogs, hamburgers and corn for a hot, hungry group.

I tried boiling the corn, but for some reason, my grill could not heat the giant pot of water. Internet says: I should have brought a lid.

But I got the 30 hot dogs and burgers grilled and served along with grilled corn, 6 caramelized onions and some very choice garlic. Mmmmmmmm.

Per usual, we had enough food for twice as many people, and everyone ate to satisfaction.

When we first arrived, several people got bit by wasps. They had decided to start building a nest under the corner of a table. Hard to fault the parks dept for not catching it, it seemed brand new. I decided to add a can of wasp spray to the next summer event. An enterprising fellow named Allen took some paper towels and a match and managed to dispatch the angry creatures in short order. Not short enough to save three people from a half dozen stings.

I was burned and exhausted when post meal, everyone was lazing about. Since I was ostensibly the host, I grabbed a ball and glove and invited another friend to go play catch. That was all it took. 10m later we had two teams: The cowboy hats and the ball caps, named for the headwear of the two captains.

I am not and never was a jock, a sports enthusiast, the fastest, most dexterous or strongest... not for lack of physical ability, I just never had any interest in sports during those years most people develop those skills. I was and am far more interested in the arts and intellectual concepts.

I say this to explain my choice of team. I was often among the first chosen because of my size and there was a lot of expectation. Meanwhile, the less-obvious were ignored and passed over until the very end. I always despised this. I mean I GOT/GET it: team choices have to be made so you can win the game. So you look for the most athletic, the youngest, the most skilled.

UNLESS you're a 50+ year old closet intellectual who has a low opinion of choosing just to win and not so that everyone feels good, included and having a good time.

So the choices went: Ball Caps looked like an all-star team: former league players, younger athletes, competitive personalities. Cowboy Hats looked like the island of misfit toys.

Surprise players were the 66 yo who clearly used to LOVE this sport and the 13 yo introvert who wanted to pitch. Bravo for braving that spotlight, Juan! And shockingly, the 25 yo personal trainer had never played the sport! And our 29yo girl played with more heart than nearly anyone else on the team.

So, teams were a bit imbalanced physically. The Ball Caps were all home run hitters, or at least good line drivers, and we were the bad news bears, the benchwarmers.

WHich was FINE. We had SO MUCH FUN! And I learned that I am way way past my prime. It's easy to forget when you spend 8-10 hours a day behind a keyboard. My 30-40m daily routine helps, but there's no way I'm running back and forth, hitting and pitching and still be able to walk the next day.

in fact, by the night's end, I KNEW i'd be giving up ambulation the next day! It's not all that bad. Def a little sore, but nothing crippling.

Fun comes at a cost, and this was a bill I am HAPPY to pay.

Saving our Family

We did notice something about the pattern of who attended. My wife and I have been discussing for some time that our congregation seems to have lost it's spirit of camaraderie and friendship. Like the spark or the spirit is gone. Honestly, for a while, I thought it was me. It's part of why I went to Europe for 4 months late last and early this year: give them a chance to recover from whatever pall I was bringing on our group.

But, surprise, when I came back, it was worse than ever!

:–/

So, I still don't know what he problem is. Lack of love in the leadership is my best guess right now. I'm on hiatus from a leadership role and things are not improving. BUT, of the 40 that showed... they are largely those eager for close friendship and enthusiastic for the bond that comes from worshiping together. And that number is well less than half of those with whom we worship.

So, to summarize, I suspect it is a general frustration and lack of willingness to socialize, to be close to one another and be that brother that Proverbs 17:17 describes as 'born for times of distress'.

I keep telling everyone, 'We're friendLY, but we're not FRIENDS!' There IS a difference.

IDK what to do except love the people and try to lead by attitude. I cannot and will not change the minds and practices of those who have been here much longer and who will be here long after I am gone. And I don't think that's my job. My job, as I define it: to be as good a friend as I can afford, to give more than I take and do as little as harm as I can along the way.

To those that I have harmed: i'm sorry. That was never my intent.

At least the picnic was a roaring success.

NEXT

One of my decisions is that as a group of the like-minded: we're going to start having AT LEAST quarterly meetups to socialize and recreate together. Every six weeks will be better.

August: Batting cages, expensive, but indoors September: Puppet show planning and plotting party October: Backyard Movie night! My house or at the park. November: Fall Baseball! December: Game night! January: PUPPET SHOW

Okay, SURELY if I can pull of SIX social events in the next six months, we'll be stronger and happier as a family of friends.

All of this is to say, I'm glad I got up early this morning. That i am feeling especially content today, a feeling that's been absent from my life for some time. I absolutely felt a moment last night of deep satisfaction. And I could tell on the faces of those who were there that they felt it too.

THIS is the chase.

| | | |

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Game roster for posterity:

Team Ball Cap: RV – Captain – 56 former amateur softball team player AS – 44 – HVAC technician and VERY good ball player MA – 56 – Small stature, but great hustle and ferociously competitive CB – 25 – personal trainer, VERY athletic, hungry for competition DB – 30 – very athletic, s-ball isn't his sport, but he LOVEs a game of any kind JP – 27 – LOVES sports, chews up whatever game he is give the chance

Team Cowboy Hat: WLFW: Captain – 54 smeller of flowers, drawer of women and would rather be reading a book AA – 66 – slow, old, but LOVES sball and great as first base SP – 27 – young and energetic, she was having a BALL ZR – 26 – Z isn't an athletic guy at all, strong, smart but prefers video games AP – 50 – former fire fighter and 70% disabled, drives for a living and is shows JA – 13 – introvert 100%, so when he asked to pitch, I was delighted, great way to cme out of. your shell, J!

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Details on the six month plan.

One of my decisions is that as a group of the like-minded: we're going to start having AT LEAST quarterly meetups to socialize and recreate together. Every six weeks will be better.

Mid-August is brutal here in Dust Merdian, so my next pitch is going to be to invite 30 or 40 people to go out to the local softball complex, an indoor 11k square foot facility with more than a dozen batting cages. OUCH! $50 an hour is kind of steep, but maybe we can swing it. ;–)

September will be a puppet-show preplanning event. I'm hosting a puppet show in January, and September will be a meal and a pitch to get people to sign on to write a script, make puppets, rehears and be ready to give a 4-6 minute puppet show to a warm and well-fed audience. My hope is that we can get 6-8 teams and put on an hour-long puppet show in January.

October: Backyard Movie night! Cooler weather means we can enjoy the out of doors again.

November: Fall Baseball! Finally!! We can be outside and not break a sweat.

December: Game night! We'll rent a small facility and set up 8 game stations. Each station will get an assignee to bring the game, decorate their table and provide light refreshments. The idea will be to make your table more enticing than the next. Neanderthaler Poetry Telestrations Videogame station Card game Scrabble Lego free-build Jenga Ticket to ride Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza Dominoes

We'll need awards for this one: 🏆 Best Decorated Table 😂 Most Fun Game 🍪 Best Snacks 🎭 Best Host ⭐ People's Choice 👑 Overall Champion

Clearly, I am smitten with the game night party!

January: PUPPET SHOW – Rent a swanky facility. There's a REALLY nice place in town that has a modest ballroom with a stage.

These days sort of blurred together a little because I let loose and had a few drinks on Day 43 after dinner with friends. I suppose I have not had many drinks in a while and my tolerance is way low. This was all mostly Days 43 and 44. Towards the end of Day 44 I was able to meet my family at the playground and have a nice dinner with them.

Day 45 was very productive. I took both my dogs to the lake and let my younger dog off leash for the first time. Then I dropped them off and headed to a workout class. It felt weirdly routine and great. I took a shower at the gym and then finally headed to the pottery studio for a few hours. It was super busy! My parents stopped in the glaze some of their things and I got some glazing done as well. From there, we did a little bit of shopping and headed home to take care of the dogs. Finally, we went to go see Toy Story 5. See? It was a very productive day!

I spent some time in the evening planning out my older (and sick) dogs last seven meals since we have set a date for next Saturday to put her to sleep. I planned out home cooked meals to give her and activities to make sure her last week feels fulfilled. I think it is mostly for me, but I would like to think that she appreciates it too.

It is only the next day now, but I don’t really remember what I did day 46. I certainly slept in after staying up late last night finishing a book. My brother, SIL and nephews came over for a little bit in the evening.

I have not had any updates on my situation. I have no idea when I will be able to get back to work. I wish I knew a timeline so I could start looking or applying to jobs soon. The world feels heavy, but what can I do besides focusing on the little mundane tasks of everyday life?

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

Image: A Citizen Eco-Drive Zenshin (AW0130-85L), and Citizen Classic Eco-Drive (AW0082-01A), Photo by Unattributed, License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Up until now I've only owned one Citizen watch. It is an Eco-Drive Pilot style watch, and I didn't like it. Why? Several of reasons:

• It was way over-sized for even my beefy wrist.
• The size makes it wear weird on the after-market strap I bought (I had to, the original didn't fit).
• The date window was confusing: it shows the day before and after the current date.
• Finally, the seconds hand was so thin it was basically invisible ninety-five percent of the time.

But still, I like the watch. The case is solid, and it's quite reliable. I just don't wear it as often as I could.

Recently, I was browsing Amazon, seeing if there was anything new in the watches that I was interested in when the Citizen Classic (AW0082-01A) caught my attention. I know I'd seen it a hundred times before, and thought it was nice looking, but just went past it. So, why did I stop this time? The combination of the cream dial and rose gold case was always attractive to me, and I don't have anything like it in my collection. Then the thought entered my mind: why don't you give Citizen a second try?

I mean, I didn't really have anything against Citizen after the first watch. I just hadn't bought anything else from them. And, to be honest, there has always been in the back of my mind a couple of other Citizen watches that I wanted. So, I made the decision to buy it.

And I'm really pleased with it. The strap fits, the watch lays down naturally on my wrist, and it's an overall nice watch. Granted, too many it's probably nothing special to write home about. However, for me, it fits my retro-vibe / modern mix style.

Then I started thinking about the other watch I'd thought was really cool looking when it came out, but I didn't want to pay the original price on it: the Zenshin. After looking around a bit, I found that they have come down a fair amount in price, and Citizen had introduced a few new models (mainly a brand collaboration).

This one took a bit more thought. Aside from the collaboration Zenshin, there are four colors: white, green, blue, and salmon. I ruled out the white pretty quickly. There isn't enough contrast between the hands and the dial for easy viewing. Of the remaining three I really wanted to go for the salmon. But, I had second thoughts: what if I didn't like the watch for some non-color related reason?

That meant I should go green or blue. I have both colors in my collection already. So, I went with the safer blue color. And I can't explain how happy this watch has made me. It's light with the titanium case and bracelet. The finishing is awesome, especially the polish in the middle of the links.

Honestly, I've barely had the Zenshin off my wrist since the day it came in. It's easily become one of my favorite watches, destined to join my Casio Lineage as my most frequently worn watches.

Now maybe someday I'll get that other Citizen watch I've been considering…

I have another pair of watches I'll be writing about soon. Basically, I saw someone I never expected to reference a watch I'd had my eye on for a couple of years. So, I decided to finally buy one. But more on that another day.

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Categories: #Features Tags: #watches, #wristwatches, #citizen, #ecodrive, #solar, #classic, #zenshin, #titanium License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

...being a footnote to an omission.

It took less than three seconds to un-write the tattle. I watched it happen at the third desk from the center aisle, under the great blue dome where the air always smells of damp wool and old cataloguing glue. The mark itself was nothing more than a stray tittle, a tiny, soft dot of 2B graphite that had wandered away from its sentence and settled in the wide, white wilderness of the margin.

It was a beautiful, irregular little thing, sitting on the manila page with the light, terrifying poise of a creature that knows it does not belong to the authorized text. It lived in a state of pure emsistential angst. To be a pencil mark in the National Library is to exist in a permanent state of waiting for the eraser. It is a life measured not in hours, but in the distance between yourself and the nearest Sorter.

Then the Block Shirt arrived. He didn't look at the text; the Block Shirts never care what the print actually says. They are entirely unconcerned with meaning. They are concerned only with boundaries. He saw the unauthorized dot in the margin, reached to his belt for that severe, sulphur-grey eraser, and with three brisk, friction-heavy strokes, restored the border to a state of absolute, sterile standard. The tittle did not leave a scar. It was reduced instantly to a tiny drift of grey crumbs, a microscopic ash heap of a suppressed thought, which a stray draft from the dome immediately scattered into the gaps hiding type between the floorboards.

I have spent many hours since then wondering why they do it. Why do the Block Shirts pursue a stray pencil dot with the same metaphysical fury they might bring to a rebellion on the Dublin quays? It is because they understand that a margin is a dangerous space. If you allow a single tittle to exist unclassified outside the block, do you admit that the world is larger than their system? Do you admit the possibility of an interval?

They do not hate the mark because it is false; they hate it because it is unassigned. And yet, as I watched that particular Sorter move down the aisle, I noticed a slight hesitation in his stride. He did not immediately re-holster his eraser. He looked down at his own fingers, greyed by the dust of a thousand erased thoughts, with a sudden, fleeting expression of disgust. Or perhaps it was doubt. It was the look of one who has suddenly realized that when you spend your entire life narrowing the world down to a standard, you eventually run out of space to stand.

My notebook was open on the oak desk before me. The paper was clean. The ink in my fountain pen, clandestinely brought past the gatekeepers, was full. I felt the immense, heavy pressure of the moment. I knew I should record the philosophy of the crumbs. I should write down the lines that were forming in my head: that the eraser only removes the graphite, but the indentation of the hand remains; that freedom is not found in the weight of the print, but in the depth of the space we leave behind. But my notebook remained empty. I did not write those lines. I shifted my chair. I recapped my pen. I watched a pigeon strike the high glass of the dome outside, its wings making a brief, frantic punctuation against the Dublin sky. I told myself that the light was failing, that the ink might smudge on the damp paper, that the O'Ranelagh boxes required a more systematic mind than I could offer before closing time. I am, as I have always been, a student of postponement. The tattle had faced its existential end with a fragile, beautiful dignity. I, on the other hand, faced the blank page with my usual, comfortable cowardice, leaving the most important sentences of the afternoon to inhabit the only space the Block Shirts could never police: the one I intended to write tomorrow. ✒️ Sigi