Listen to the Rain

Back in Japan I used to go view the cherryblossoms every year, multiple times a year. I remember sitting by the banks of the Motoyasugawa with friends, tons of people all around us on blankets at 10 a.m. on a Saturday, and drinking sake and eating kushiyaki while we chatted for hours at a time. One time we all went up to Shōbara and had a picnic in Ueno Sakura Park, where a bunch of us rented rowboats and went out on the pond. Halcyon days.

Well, we can't get that experience in Chicago but we do have cherryblossoms here, planted down in Jackson Park. The last couple of years the weather has been cold enough that they didn't bloom, and this year the weather was also pretty changeable but the blossoms were out, so on Saturday morning after sashagee and I woke up late and ate breakfast, her parents brought Laila back from her grandparents stay, and then we all drove down to the Garden of the Phoenix to look at the blossoms. What blossoms there were--Chicago weather being what it was, a couple days prior it had been 26°, it was now 10° with chill winds. What's more, the day before there had been a strong rainstorm that had washed a bunch of blossoms off the trees, and they were on the ground and in the lake when we got there. Some trees were almost devoid of blossoms entirely! Despite that, there were still some trees to be seen:


The most interesting trees were right near the parking lot as we entered. We walked around the lake, where there were some trees but only a couple with enough blossoms to bother looking at, and then when sashagee asked me about the festival that was supposed to take place that day I said it wasn't until 1:30 p.m. (it was 10:15 a.m.), so sashagee's parents drove us all back home and after hanging out with Laila for a bit, they left.

We put Laila down for a nap but she did not take one, and she had enough energy later in the day that she kept demanding we go for a walk, so we went. The temperature had gotten a bit warmer, helped mostly by the sun finally coming out, but that meant when we went to the park there were a bunch of people there and Laila asked to leave after only ten minutes. She still wanted to go for a walk, though, so I kept walking down to Broadway and we went down to the other park further south, and Laila ran around for a while. She told me she wanted to leave once and then changed her mind, and it turned out to be fortuitous because after we had been there for twenty minutes, some of Laila's classmates from gymnastics showed up! I actually got to see Laila play together with some other kids. The cutest part was when two of them were on either end of the seesaw, and the second-cutest part was when Laila was beneath the playground equipment and two of her classmates were up top, and they were all looking for each other. When a bubble-shooting gun came out, they all got distracted and Laila eventually got tired and we went home.

The next day was a lazy day most of the day, but in the evening I had an invite to worldbshiny. I was also invited to go to see The Sinners in the afternoon, but I already wrote about why I didn't go. Since I handled most of that, I took the evening off and walked down to the bar where the party was being held, arriving a bit later, but it turned out that it wasn't too late because poor worldbshiny had her car towed while she was in the movie and had to move the time back. But once I did get there, it was lovely--I spent a while talking to lisekatevans's housemate about sightseeing in London, we all (except me) discussed The Sinners, I had a couple drinks and listened in, and after two hours I called it a night and went home. It's how I used to spend multiple nights a week that way.

I listened to Gorgeous on the way home, just like I used to on summer nights, all those years ago.

The Hebrew word משכן mishkan is usually translated as "tabernacle" and refers to the traveling tent complex that the Children of Israel brought with them in their wanderings. That's why Mishkan is named that way, since it doesn't have a synagogue building and contracts spaces throughout the city for various purposes. But, as time has gone on, we've settled on a few places that we return to again and again. So it is with the Purimspiel, which has been at the Chop Shop in Wicker Park since Purim 5780 just before the Plague Years. I even wrote in past years that the commentary on the sides was very similar. That part was still true, though I could tell that some parts were updated. The food was the same as last year, and this time Purim wasn't on Shabbat so Ta'anit Esther meant I couldn't eat until the spiel had started, as was traditional. It's all familiar.

That which hath been is that which shall be,
And that which hath been done is that which shall be done;
And there is nothing new under the sun.
-Ecclesiastes 1:9

Before I went, yoni-labow-5693413a asked me if I were coming, and I spent most of it hanging out with him and his wife whoolia45. yoni-labow-5693413a had specifically asked if I were coming, and we spent most of the time I was fasting talking about his coming funemployment--he was quitting his job working for his parents' company and striking out on his own, which was obviously pretty stressful. He was the designated heir but the longer he worked there, he said, the more he got a sense that it just wasn't right for him and he needed make a change, so he was going to strike out and go back into sales. I'm sure he'll be great at it.

Despite what I said earlier, the spiel was different:

The big joke this year was apparently based on the rabbi eating a granola bar for an inordinate amount of time during Rosh Hashanah services, which I missed because we only went to the family service and skipped the other ones. In lieu of a Hot Ones sketch like in previous years, they had a sequence where the rabbis answered question about Purim, Judaism, and...rabbits from Google autocomplete, because it turns out the most answers when you put in "rabbi" into Google are about rabbits. I learned that rabbits are prone to spontaneously dying, at least based on the number of times people google things like "rabbits just die" and so on. There was also a question about Purim Meshulash, which occurs whenever Purim falls near Shabbat--Purim is celebrated a day later in walled cities (in practice, just Jerusalem and Shushan), and while Purim itself will never be on Shabbat, Shushan Purim sometimes can. Due to Shabbat some of the celebrations are delayed until the following day, creating a three-day celebration. They had to take a moment to remember it because we're in America and it's not super relevant to our Purim celebrations here.

Brief cautionary tale--I checked what google had to say about Purim Meshulash and I got this AI overview:

"Meshulash" (Hebrew: משולח) in English refers to "emissary" or "delegate."

It's hallucinating again. The Hebrew there reads "meshulaḥ", with a chet at the end, whereas meshulash is משולש with a shin. AI just straight lying to me. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

I stayed through the spiel, ate two full plates of food, got an extra drink--every year I find at least one drink ticket somewhere on the floor and get another drink--and when I left, the goodie bag was being handed out by the husband from the couple I sat with at break fast after Yom Kippur. I mentioned I had seen their daughter was acting in a show based on a theatre poster, and we chatted a bit before I walked off into the night and took the bus home. Another Purim in the books.

I'll be curious to see if the location changes next year, but some traditions are good to stick to.

Last year most of the Jewish holidays were on weekends, so I already had them off. That's not true this year, but the bonus is that many of the High Holy Days are on Thursdays and Fridays, so in October I only have one full work week and three four-day weekends. Not bad.

Wednesday night was Erev Rosh Hashanah and Mishkan did a livestream, but since Laila was awake I missed most of it and by the time she was asleep there were only thirty minutes left, so I skipped it. The next day, though, we woke up bright and early thanks to Laila, ate breakfast and got dressed, and took the bus out to the Copernicus Center for Rosh Hashanah services. While the last time we all went, we were able to go into actual services because Laila was small enough we could hold on to her and she could enjoy the singing, that was never going to work this time. We went for the Rise and Shine service (for kids 0-4), and then went over to the "Museum of Awe" where Laila immediately ran over to Toddler Town and started trying to grab all of the stamps. She was full of energy, so we didn't stay very long, but we did say yoni-labow-5693413a and whoolia45 with their new baby! They were heading in to services with a very asleep baby, just like we had been a couple years ago, but we chattered with them a bit and then headed out to lunch at a drive-in diner that also had Korean food (I got a teriyaki chicken pita. It was delicious) before heading home.

The next day sashagee wasn't feeling well, so while we originally all planned to go to the second day picnic, it was just Laila and I who went. I packed up a lunch for her and we got on the bus to go to Welles Park. We arrived just in time for the Shema, and while she initially squirmed a bit she calmed down once the singing started. Once it ended and the rabbi started talking, though, she immediately lost all interest, so we left the main area and went over to the part of the park where the kids activities were. She really went in on the activity sand, and while she still doesn't quite know how to interact with other kids, she waited her turn until she could get close and played very nicely with them. She even took a turn at blowing the shofar! When we got back home, sashagee was asleep, and while Laila woke her up when we ate lunch, she went right back to sleep when Laila laid down for a nap. She was really wiped out, so I took Laila to the park for a bit and let her rest of the day, and when Laila went to bed so did she.

There is one other thing we did, though. We didn't get to stay long enough at Welles park for the ritual of Tashliḥ, the symbolic casting away of our sins, as it is written:

Who is a G-d like you,
who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
of the remnant of his inheritance?
You do not stay angry forever
but delight to show mercy.
You will again have compassion on us;
you will tread our sins underfoot
and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.
-Micah 7:18-19

So we went to the lake to do it. Laila loved the actual throwing of the bread on the water, but she wasn't interested in anything else. She didn't want to run around on the grass, she didn't want to look out over the water, she didn't do anything. She did smile briefly for a picture, but that was it:



And then we went home.

Saturday we had two things scheduled but neither of them was until later in the day, so we had a nice slow morning where we all got to eat breakfast and sit around watching Kiki's Delivery Service until closer to 11, where we walked to the bus and went to Lincoln Square for Applefest. I went to it back in 2019, and then in 2020 and 2021 there was no Applefest, and in 2022 and 2023 we were out in the suburbs on both weekends, but this time we could go and a bunch of our friends were there too! The festival was twice as big as the last I was there, from Lawrence all the way down to Sunnyside on Lincoln, and the weather was beautiful but that meant it was a sunny day and I was carrying Laila for blocks up and down while we looked at the shops and got a bit of apple pie, some breakfast sandwiches--sashagee wanted a smashburger, but we were warned that it was a thirty-minute wait time so she got a breakfast sandwich too--and ate them while Laila ate her apple waffles. We got apple cookies and looked at the artisans, and chatted with our friends--Laila was obsessed with spacedragon's dyed hair and kept asking her to hold her--until 2 p.m. came and we needed to get home to rest for a bit. It was already too late for Laila's nap, but we could still go home and rest.

Around 4:30 p.m. we left again for our second event, thosesocks's housewarming, with apple pie and Laila in tow. We went out to the bus and the tracker said "no scheduled arrival times," so we had to walk all the way there--it was only a mile or so but it was a long way after all our earlier walking and while carrying Laila. When we got there, sashagee talked to thosesocks while I chased after Laila, which proved to be the theme of the evening--at one point Laila went out on the balcony and ran up and down, since it was laid out lengthwise along the entire building. She did that a couple dozen times, full of way more energy than I expected, except for some brief interludes to dip a cookie in ranch dressing and eat it and trying to steal chocolate-covered pretzels. After an hour or so, right when thosesocks was concerned about Laila being so energetic, it was time for us to go (Laila needed an early bedtime since she skipped her name), so we said our goodbyes and went home. We didn't get a slice of that apple pie but the chocolate-covered pretzels were delicious.

Sunday morning was a fast day, Tzom Gedaliah, so I woke up before anyone else to eat breakfast before the sun came up. When I was done, I opened the door so Laila could escape her room, we all got ready, and I took Laila out to Hebrew school. This time went better than the first time, where she was overwhelmed by all the people. She still wasn't very interested in the songs, but she was much more focused on the crafts. There was a craft to make a "Bug Sukkah" and that was what Laila focused all her energy on:


Sadly, it did not survive the trip home on the bus. While Laila wasn't interested in the songs, she did stay at the craft tables for much longer than many of the other kids did, who got bored and wandered off to sit with their parents and read books or something. She really loved those bugs, and we stayed through the closing songs and then left to go home...except the bus wasn't coming for 35 minutes so I walked most of the way home, carrying Laila the entire way, and then spent much of the rest of the day sitting down because she's heavy. She's a big girl now!

This coming weekend is Yom Kippur, so even more holidays ahead.

It's been five years since I made one of these posts, since ACEN 2019, and boy has a lot happened since then. COVID cancelled ACEN 2020 and ACEN 2021, and by the time ACEN 2022 happened I had a family and couldn't just run off for a weekend and leave a nearly-invalid sashagee at home with Laila, so I went just for Saturday night to see people and then came back home. I did the same in 2023, but now sashagee is feeling well enough that she could attend the entire con, so back last year I bought her a badge too, and we got a hotel room sorted out, and she got excited about doing a family cosplay. Well, I'm not going to bury the lede--we did:



And now, here's the rest of what happened at the con:

( Thursday )

( Friday )

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

It's been five years since I last went to a full con but the experience was still the same! Always being on your feet, seeing old friends, traveling from place to place to place and collapsing into bed at the end of the day. It was different this year since we had Laila with us, and we kept telling people how she would run through the skybridge shouting "DRAMA-MA-MA-MA! DRAMA-MA-MA-MA!" but she was only there for half a day of the real con, and a good thing too. We took her through the dealer's hall on Friday morning and she was getting overstimulated already--if she had been there on Saturday she would have had real problems, but instead she was having tons of fun with Papa and Nana while we were wandering around the con.

sashagee had a great time is already planning how to have an even better con next year, starting with bringing sneakers. sashagee and dorchadas con-goer arc has begun!

Last week Wednesday, I suddenly received a Facebook event invite for that night, at 4:15 p.m. for an event at 5, that fang.the.tall would be at Portillo's for one night before he went back to his homeland (Malaysia). Before I texted sashagee that I wouldn't be home for dinner, someone else said "Is this tonight?" and fang.the.tall posted that Facebook had messed it up and it was next week (aka yesterday). So I told sashagee about it, and we made plans.

Yesterday I finished work and wandered around the nearby Nordstrom and attached stores--the mall on Michigan Ave is obviously not doing well, being kept alive by that Nordstrom and maybe a couple other stores there--until sashagee and Laila arrived on the L. We needed to keep Laila occupied, so we went to Eataly to pick up these particular candied fruit sauce in porcelain jars that sashagee likes, had some dessert before dinner (fruit tart and tiramisu), and then went back to Nordstrom so Laila would have an open space to walk around in. We spent most of our time in the perfume floor, where Laila charmed the saleswomen by taking all the testing strips that sashagee used and stuffing them in her shirt. When it was all done, we headed over to Portillo's.

I haven't seen fang.the.tall in eight years, but we follow each other's lives on Facebook--I've seen him arguing about asshole Malaysian politicians, he's freaked out that I got to see Sun-mi in concert, we've argued about hanzi vs kanji--and so he knew about sashagee and Laila. justpearlstuff and bradford.bensontaylor were there too! I haven't seen them in four years either, since before the Plague Years. I introduced my family, we all caught up, and we ate Chicago's finest Italian beef for an hour before Laila got too restless and we had to go home to get her to bed. Apparently the party went on for hours after we left, but that's the life of a parent--you show up when you can.

Chinese food.

Yesterday we went to Ming Hin, where arsduo in years past had held his Erev Christmas gatherings. He's moved to Toronto to be with his partner, but I decided after three years to take up the mantle and continue the tradition. I invited a bunch of people, some of them could come, and at 6 p.m. we met up for Chinese food:


Delicious.

I was hoping to have a Russian-speaking contingent there (shoutout to aguart), since tom.hen.12's wife is Russian, dinaraua is Khazak and speaks Russian, and maptekar is Ukrainian and speaks Russian. But both of the latter couldn't come, so my plans were foiled. Someday!

After dinner, the others stood around outside while I gave sashagee some time to have a grown-up conversation and chased Laila around--she saw a maybe seven or eight year old jumping from small stone bench to stone bench and demanded that I help her make the same jumps. Then we went to Uni Uni for boba, I got a coconut milk taro tea with coconut milk jelly that was AMAZING, and we all went home. Laila didn't get to bed until 10 p.m. but by 8 a.m. she was awake and demanding to be let out...and then took a four hour nap. So it goes.

Today, as our first full day back at home, we did absolutely nothing. I was going to go shopping, but I was foiled by Whole Foods being closed, so we...ordered Chinese food. The Halaḥah is clear--while it is permissible to eat it on the 24th, the 25th is praiseworthy, though there is a maḥloket on some issues:

While the rest of the questions above are good she’elot, poskim generally hold that the food must be either purchased from a Chinese restaurant or recognizably Chinese, but ideally both. If your food is in one category but not the other, the accepted practice is to eat a fortune cookie (the symbol of American Chinese restaurants) in order to rule out a safek of any kind.

So if you’re on a diet, sushi would be fine (b’dieved) as long as it was purchased from a Chinese restaurant and not a specifically sushi establishment, as long as you also ate a fortune cookie.

Judaism is like that.

Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends!

To very_strong_and_cool (possibly the best Instagram name of all time).


sashagee and I left with plenty of time to spare and then traffic was the worst I've ever seen, so we arrived fifteen minutes late and missed the opening drinks. We got there and saw a few people standing outside the ceremony area holding angry toddlers--separated from the rest of the hall by a curtain--and slipped in to find tom.hen.12 reciting the sheva braḥot, the traditional Jewish wedding blessings. There was only another ten minutes or so left after that, with the traditional vows and the kiss and the party proceeding out, and when we were standing out with tom.hen.12 and his wife eating the hors d'oeuvres, he said that the ceremony was the shortest he'd ever seen and we had honestly barely missed anything.

britshlez had originally told me she was going to seat sashagee and I at a table with her friend pinktokki1004's parents (who only speak Korean) with the idea that we could still communicate with them, but when we actually checked the seating arrangements, it was the two of us, tom.hen.12 and his wife, and kjtrujillo and his boyfriend and the other two seats were taken up by a couple who never showed. That meant I got two pear and goat cheese salads and two dinner rolls, which was pretty nice because the main course (I had requested kosher) was a veggie burger seemingly straight out of the 90s--it was a thick lump, slightly rubbery, and nothing like modern veggie burger technology. I ate it, of course, because what else was I going to do? But tom.hen.12's wife and I spent some time commiserating over how bad it was.

We didn't get much of a chance to talk to britshlez during the night, because that's how weddings work. Even beyond the ceremonial parts, she had to go through to all guests, thank them for coming, chat with them for a few minutes, all of that. Most of the rest of the night was sashagee and I dancing together and chatting people as the guests gradually thinned out, and just after midnight our table were the only ones left. britshlez said that she and very_strong_and_cool were going to the Billy Goat Tavern downtown and invited us, but after some internal discussion we decided to give them some time alone, so we got a cab with tom.hen.12 and went back home and straight to bed.

IIRC britshlez and very_strong_and_cool aren't going on a honeymoon right away, they're waiting until a bit later. But hopefully they have a lovely start to their married life!

On Friday, which I took off because it was the first day of Shavuot, we went to the Field Museum with my parents for a couple hours so I could check out the First Kings of Europe exhibit and my mother and sashagee could wander around the animal exhibits with Laila, and then then took Laila with them back out to the suburbs so that they could have some time with their cute granddaughter and sashagee and I could have a weekend to ourselves!

Unfortunately, sashagee was sick for part of the weekend, so we didn't actually do that much and she spent a large chunk of it resting. But we still managed to do some things. On Friday we went out to dinner at Uvae:


We originally had seats outside but it was weirdly cold for even the end of Chicago May--wind gusting at like 13°C, far too cold to just sit outside. We saw another couple move indoors after just a few minutes outside and then we asked if we could do the same, which the waitress was happy to arrange.

I was a little worried that we would suffer the Parent Problem where on a night out without the kids we'd struggle to think of what to talk about, but we didn't. Other than sashagee worrying about Laila being away from us, we had a lovely conversation, ate our salad and meals and drank our drinks, and wrapped up around 6:30 p.m.


We paid and left and I said goodbye to head to my next event--I went to Friday night Shabbat services because it was Rabbi Deena's last day. Since she had a special blessing for Laila's mikvah visit I wanted to see her off and leave a note for her, and after services ended I walked up to some of the people I knew. yoni-labow-5693413a, once he had completed the traditional telling me his name again because for some reason he always assumes I don't remember him--maybe I give off "Who is this guy?" vibes?--invited me out to a bar with his wife whoolia45 (the OneTable sponsor of the dinner I went to at Milt's pre-Plague Years) and some friends. I said I had to talk to sashagee about and by yoni-labow-5693413a's reaction I knew it was fine if she came, so I told her where we were going and she hopped in a Lyft and met us there. It was more of a bar and grill so it had live music, children playing pool, and closed at 10 p.m. so we had our one drink--I had an Old Fashioned as is my custom, sashagee got a Lunacy beer--everyone met sashagee finally, we got an invite to aaronhparker's outdoor Shabbat in two weeks, and everyone got to see photos of Laila. yoni-labow-5693413a invited us to a Shabbat dinner too, though I don't remember when it is.

Man, my posts are always filled with tons of referential links to my friends' online presence. I'd say this is a Sign of the Times but mostly it's because I don't want to use people's names unless they already put their names out there on the internet. Regardless, it's not going to get any better in the rest of this post.

Saturday we did mostly nothing while sashagee rested and napped and I caught up a bit in Genshin Impact, but in the evening we had an invite to lisekatevans's house for afschifler's birthday! sashagee was all dressed in a cute sundress and was planning to wear heels since heels are half her shoe collection but she hasn't gotten to wear them in years, but since the weather was 20°C and sunny I suggested walking. We had Some Brief Discourse™ on my suggestion but in the end we left with sashagee in flats and walked through side streets filled with flowering trees for thirty minutes until we arrived at the party, lisekatevans handed us some drinks, and we spent a while chatting with people and eating tavern-style pizza and tres leches cake.

Me: "Tres leches. That's Spanish for 'three leches.' "
sashagee: 🤣🤣🤣

The benefit of having a fiancée who is not Too Online is that this is the first time she's heard these jokes.

Sunday we once again mostly rested and played games, and then Laila came back in the evening and was happy enough to see us but it was clear that she had an extremely fun time at Papa and Nana's--after they left, she grabbed her toy bag and walked over to the front door while waving bye-bye at us! I can see many more grandparents' weekends in the future--Laila and my parents both are getting older and need as much time together as they can get. And I think it was really helpful for sashagee and me too.

As the saying goes, the only real parenting hack is having grandparents who live nearby.

I said previously that it would get down to 8°C but I didn't go far enough--it was actually 1°C when I woke up today! I brought a smaller coat because the sunlight means it's going to warm up enough later that I should be able to go for a walk on the riverwalk again, but after it being 27°C on Saturday it was quite the change. I'm glad that I don't have to plan anything for this upcoming week. דער מענטש טראַכט און גאָט לאַכט, as the saying goes (der mensch trakht un Gott lakht, "Man plans and G-d laughs"). Or maybe 来年の事を言えば鬼が笑う (rainen no koto wo ieba, oni ga warau, "When you speak of next year, demons laugh"). It's a pretty universal concept.

On Sunday went to a birthday party! Laila got an invitation from the local rebbetzin on behalf of her daughter Bayla, for her second birthday, so we loaded up Laila into the stroller and walked down to the Anna & Fred Doppelt Base Andersonville house at 10:15 a.m. and arrived basically first of anyone. Bayla was very nervous at the beginning but Laila wasn't--she immediately started walking around and smiling at Bayla's grandparents and looking around the house. As more and more people arrived, sashagee and I got pulled into separate conversations. I met someone who actually lives on our street just north of us, though sadly they'll be moving a couple miles west in two weeks. I don't remember the husband's name, but he told me about a pizza-by-the-slice restaurant called Pizza Mania very nearby that has delicious pizza. We talked about languages--the wife works as a bilingual Spanish/English kindergarten teacher--and then a German guy sat down and we talked about soccer, all the while Laila and sashagee were drawing at the back table. Bayla eventually lost her shyness and started roaming around, and Laila made a mom very grateful to her because she sat in her lap, and then the mom's son Shimon, who was about eight months older than Laila, got jealous and wanted to sit in his mom's lap in a way he hadn't wanted to do in months. That's Laila, always bringing people together.

When we left, Bayla waved and said "Bye Laila~." Both sets of parents are hoping they'll become friends with each other!

Alright, big project in so now it's back to work.

Blah blah hard to find time to write blah blah.

We've been taking advantage of Laila's youth and easy distractibility as long as there's food around to try to go to friends' for meals, since she's not old enough to get bored when adults are talking about grown-up things. On Saturday, bunnydelfuego invited us over to a combination Havdalah/birthday celebration, so we took Laila and grabbed a bottle of wine on the way. When we got there, Laila was fascinated by the layout of their apartment--unlike most Chicago apartments (and our own condo) which are a long corridor with rooms along their length, bunnydelfuego and benjieweiss's apartment is laid out in a square. Laila was fascinated by this, and she spent quite a while just crawling or walking through doors in a circle trying to find out where the "end" was. sashagee and I traded off watching Laila while the other sat at the table and engaged in grown-up conversation. Laila spent a lot of time in the bathroom touching the tile or the fuzzy bathmat, briefly met Nugget--the rabbit in residence--and gave everyone hugs. We ate gyōza and bruschetta and drank gin punch and got Laila home in time for bed!

Sunday we went out to brunch with aaron.hosek at Pauline's, a diner that's one of his favorite local restaurants. He expected it wouldn't be crowded but the lovely weather (20° and sunny) meant that it didn't matter we were late because the table wasn't ready until we got there. It was another lovely meal, though Laila got a little grumpy towards the end. The stand-out part was when she turned to the table of people next to us and shrieked, just a deafening scream (at baby scale), and when they turned to look at her she was just like Oh! Hello! How are you? Very cute but we're certainly going to have to civilize her a bit.

Perhaps uniquely, I didn't spend last night doomscrolling on the election. I have achieved zen detachment--無心 mushin, one might say--and thought that I had done what I could do and would have to let the world do what it could do. And B"H it turned out that the news is very good. In Illinois we put the right to collective bargaining into the constitution, the governor candidate who made repeated abortion/Shoah comparisons lost, and even the collar counties went Democratic which almost never happens. It turns out that the average voter is able to connect creeping fascism with the problems the country faces.

Does this mean I'm going to stop urging sashagee to renew her passport, and stop plans to get Laila a passport? No. There's a saying that "Jews don't have roots, we have legs" and it's always good to have a plan. I remember reading a tweet from a Ukrainian back in February saying that a couple days prior she had been laughing and chatting out at a sushi restaurant with friends and now she was eating cold sandwiches and happy she had that much. Things can change very quickly.

We took Laila to the dentist yesterday and she did great! She obviously didn't like having her mouth messed with, but she didn't cry and she still gave the dentist a hug afterward! What a good baby.

A few years ago, lisekatevans, worldbshiny, meowtima, and I were out at a restaurant--Margie's Candies, I think--and over conversation I mentioned that I was always confused by the name praline for food since it sounded to me like it was referring to some kind of fish. lisekatevans thought it was hilarious and talked about "saltwater pralines" and "freshwater pralines," and when we said we should do this dinner thing again, we named our group chat "Saltwater Pralines" and met up at least once every month-to-month-and-a-half for dinner until the Plague Years began and ruined all meetups.

I looked through my archives to try to find if I'd written about it, but surprisingly I can't find anything.

Anyway, sometime in late 2019 we went to a tiki bar called Three Dots and a Dash and had a lovely time, and it was suggested that we get back together there on Talk Like a Pirate Day, in September 2020, to buy the $350 Port Royale, a giant pirate ship filled with rum, and drink it all. Well, you know what happened in 2020, and in 2021 (plus Laila), but now that meowtima has accepted a new job and is moving away from our fair city, we didn't have any more time to wait until September 2019, so yesterday we assembled once again.

After walking down the pedestrianized Clark Street, filled with pop-out tables set up on the street, and turned two corners to enter the alleyway leading down to to the bar. When I got to the table, it was dominated by a giant bowl in the middle with five straws poked into it, so I took a few sips and ordered an Old Fashioned, the signature drink of Chicago. But at a tiki bar, well:


Those are peanut-dusted banana chips in the background. I had a papaya salad and spring rolls to go with them.

The giant drink ran out shortly after I arrived, so we decided to order another one. We briefly discussed getting the pirate ship, but it was instead decided to unleash the kraken--the "Shotstapus," with five shots of 151 demerara rum mixed with fijian rum and fruit juice. Shot is a misnomer since each glass was maybe 2.5 shot's worth of drink and we all sipped them because we didn't want to die, but honestly they were better for sipping anyway. The point of a shot is to get drunk faster and at this point it was only 8:30 p.m., so we sipped our drinks, sipped our shots, talked about Pittsburgh, I talked about Laila, worldbshiny talked about her job, and we had a lovely time. At the end of the night, the discussion turned to dessert, and meowtima cast the (weighted) deciding vote for Portillo's so that was our next destination. Most people got milkshakes but I just got fries, since I didn't really want to overload my stomach. At this point it was only 9 p.m., and lisekatevans suggested we go to a place she knew called the Drifter. We walked a few blocks, leaving the heavily-populated Clark Street area and walking through a couple empty streets, before we found a place called the Green Door Tavern. lisekatevans led us through the bar, down the back stairs to the restrooms, and opened a hidden panel in the wall to lead us into the Drifter, a genuine speakeasy still in operation today.

The menu is printed on Tarot cards:


That was the drink I got, and I sat and drank it in the dim light while the bar slowly filled up, the waitress snuck behind me to open the curtains, and a burlesque performer came out and began her act. I have no comment on it, since my back was to her, other than that the music drowned out her singing, which was a shame since it was "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" which sticks in my memory thanks to playing Fallout: New Vegas.

When she was done, the waitress closed the curtain--manually--and at that point it was about 10:30 p.m., so we closed our tab, walked up to the L, and went home. I don't know if this will happen again, since even though I know meowtima will come back to visit we'll all have to have free schedules during that time, but I'm glad we can end the Saltwater Pralines on a bang.

Yesterday and today is Purim (פורים, "lots" in the fortune-telling sense) and it's the first one since Purim 2020 that I've attended in person. It was even back at the Davis Theatre again, with the food out in the bar area, just like the first Mishkan Purimspiel I went to. The reader who did voices for the different characters was back!

sashagee couldn't make it. Even if we had found a babysitter, she was too sick to go, which was a bit awkward when the rabbi emailed me on Tuesday and told me how happy she was to see our names on the guest list after everything that has happened in the last few months. She found me at the party pretty early (I'm very easy to spot) and expressed her regrets for everything we had gone through this year so far. Then she gave me a hug.

The spiel was mostly pre-recorded video this year, and the real innovation is that it was a bunch of small skits put together with the aid of the Neo-Futurists, performers of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and Chicago's best theatre group according to TimeOut magazine! And also very Jewish, apparently--the reason this happened is that there were at least six or seven Neo-Futurists in the audience at the Purimspiel. My favorite short was the first one they played, a parody of Seasons of Love called "Married to Mishkan" about being the partner of a rabbinical assistant and the "525,600 emails" they have to deal with, but also shoutouts to "My Dad Blows It Again," about the father of the presenter who literally wrote the book on shofarim, "Shofar Sho'Scary" chronicling how the team tasked with recording Mishkan's 2021 Rosh Hashanah services did not bring a tripod (and thus a parody of The Blair Witch Project), and "Mishkan: Reloaded," which was a Matrix parody by the technical director and ended with:

"I am one with the livestream.

"I am the one.

"I am...אחד." (echad, "one")

There was also a lot less innuendo than in most years:


The one problem I had with the event was that they put out the dinner food before the Purimspiel, and the dessert food after...which meant that anyone like me, who's keeping Ta'anit Esther, couldn't eat any dinner food since the fast ended in the middle of the spiel. I grabbed a plate of a few things and brought it into the theatre, so my dinner was asparagus, mushrooms, a bit of salad, and cheese from the cheese plate eaten about halfway through the spiel, and then the hamantaschen from the goodie bags on the empty seats on either side. And then I walked three miles home because I missed the bus. Honestly, the walk was nice--I used to walk miles home alone at night all the time, back before the Plague Years when I had a full schedule and was out doing things all the time--but a full meal would have helped.

I did get flagged down by bunnydelfuego, who recognized me from running into me at last week's Shabbat services, and it turns out she and her partner live nearby! Maybe sashagee and her will get to meet soon like thedukelord suggested.

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For future reference, and if anyone is curious, here's some points from the traditional Jewish understanding of Esther's story that aren't necessarily obvious from a straight reading of the text (Heb: פשט‎ pshat).

( Knowledge Within )