The downside to pretty trees. Job survival~ma, sarameg.

I think I can say with some certainty that the job economy sucks.

And yet, I have gotten one really good candidate for a position I'm trying to fill, and she took a different job elsewhere! I do not understand.

Dear Coworker-

If the instructions "edit this file. Put in appropriate message in the section starting at XXX" is clear as mud , I'm really not sure I can help you much further.

By edit, do you mean to put the appropriate message in the section starting at XXX? Or is there other editing that needs to be done?

I am celebrating/taking-advantage-of-having-the-day-off by trying a duck recipe that involves dry brining, air drying, steaming, cooling to room temperature, and finally glazing and roasting. I am excite. We are at the air drying stage right now, the duck is brined and stuffed with cilantro and ginger and already smells pretty amazing. The recipe called for a 4-lb duck and I have a skinny little two-pounder, so it's going to be heavily seasoned. Which I think will suit me? We'll see.

I gave the leftover cilantro to the rabbits, of course, and now I am observing to see if they like it or not. One dove in for a few nibbles right when I gave it to them, the other declined to come from the platform she was resting on, but I went back to dealing with the duck and didn't see what happened nxt. The pile has not diminished much. Neither is doing anything to lead me to believe they experience a soapy taste, but how would I know? Results are inconclusive thus far.

I don't mean to gloat, but staying in my pajamas and drinking coffee on my couch while it rained this morning was SO NICE.

Went to Rosh Hashanah services at my parents' synagogue. That was the first time I've ever walked out of a synagogue during a sermon. I just couldn't sit there and listen to that. (Israel, of course. He started with quoting Ben Franklin, "There never was a good war or a bad peace." The said that Franklin didn't actually mean that, he meant this whole equivocating thing. But, in any case, Franklin was wrong, because this latest was in Gaza was a good war. I can usually get through this stuff by making snarky comments to my dad under my breath, but this was just too much.)

Oh, Hil, I'm sorry. The High Holidays sermons at my MiL's shul were always along those lines and they were both personally aggravating and so at odds with the actual services - good for you for leaving.

I was talking with a friend of mine who's a rabbi a few weeks ago, and she was saying that she knew some rabbis who were planning sermons like that, and she didn't understand it at all -- the rabbis have to know that there are much more nuanced discussions going on within the congregation, and doing a sermon like that is really insulting the intelligence of the congregants.

Teppy, are you still following Nimona? Today's comic was great (but you really need to be caught up on on the comic to appreciate it).

Oh, and one of the rabbi's examples of people holding Israel to a different standard, and protesting things that Israel does when they don't protest when other countries do the same thing: "Nobody protested the bombing of Vietnam." And this rabbi is at least 60 or so.