Neil Fein's Blog

The sukkah looks like it's starting to fall apart. The wall of plastic sheeting came off last night and one of the horizontal support pipes came off; Martha went out this morning to take care of it as much as possible.

I sent an email to Martin last night for this week's Haboger activity. As requested, we're hosting again, and we're planning on having a coffee tasting after dinner in the sukkah this week. Here's the email that went out:

Hello all, Martha and Neil here; we've been threatened -- I mean convinced to host again this week, Friday 17 October. We'll meet at our place as close to 7 pm as we can manage, Jewish Standard Time, for services indoors and then dinner in the sukkah. The meal is dairy, and we'll be having a coffee tasting this week.

The meal will be dairy; please email me at with what and who you'll be bringing for the second shabbes under the sukkah!

The weather forecast looks good, no rain but on the cold side; I think we'll have lots of customers.

Speaking of coffee, we brought my Mom a coffee maker last night, a Braun FlavorSelect. I'm plugging this model because it was one of my recent coffeemakers and the Turner's current one, and is an excellent piece of coffeemaking machinery for about $55. While the glass carafe is on the fragile side, it is a very, very good model, partially due to the built-in filter, but also because of what Braun calls a "flavor selector" dial that lets you fiddle with the brew. Makes a very good cup of coffee, the next best thing to a French press. Other manufacturers should learn from this.

Also continued reading Quicksilver on the way to and from work on the train yesterday. It's a very heavy book at 944 pages -- particularly when you're holding it in front of you while walking home. I took the long way home to have more time to read; after reading Dan Piraro's book the other day and, I'm very conscious of how much time I don't take to just relax.