I haven’t been here much; I even skipped Facebook for a couple of weeks. The workload has been crushing with the end of the fiscal year and the website redesign–and then there’s been the Holidays, which have saved my sanity. (It’s amazing how much traffic to this blog is generated by that silly product that didn’t list its ingredients; hardly a day goes by without someone happening onto my site after googling for info on that.)

If it wasn’t for time off for Rosh haShanah, Yom Kippur, Shabbat and Sukkot festival services, I’d have been working all-day-everyday for the entire month. (Well, OK, there’s ACL Fest, too, but I lit candles and said kiddush there as well.) Taking time for these holidays is a privilege and a joy, although so many people don’t see it that way, obviously.

At festival services on Thursday, three darling siblings helped with opening the ark and dressing the Torah. Even our rabbi mentioned that it reminded him of The Child doing just the same thing, which touched me deeply, as I’d been remembering those times, too, and wondering if our commitment to always attend festival service without regard to practicalities wasn’t the first step on the road to his current path. After sleeping on it, I’d give Tot Shabbat primacy, but not by much. Lots of kids go to Tot Shabbat, few go festival services.

I’m very happy with this year’s sukkah, after missing having one last year for the extremely lame reason of going to Israel during Sukkot….

Anyway, this year’s is a fine illustration of many of my sukkah preferences: no tarp, something recycled from a previous year’s sukkah, minimal cut greenery, no decorations, plenty of shade from the still-intense sun, enclosure, incorporating the chimnea in hopes for cooler weather. I couldn’t quite get the geometry to work out right so that I can hang in the hammock in my sukkah, but some year that wish will come true.

The uprights are salvaged from previous years’ gazebo-skeleton sukkot. The cedar lattice on top was purchased on the last trip I made in the Limpopo River. The clay pot is covering a sprinkler head, as the annual thrice-daily watering to sprout the winter rye is happening this week. The umbrella barely visible in the upper left is a new addition to replace the dead-one-of-these umbrella broken in the winter snow and ice; it’s larger, rectangular, brown, shade-giving.

While I was out there, I also snapped a shot of one of my favorite examples of my taking things too literally: