A sweet New Year

It’s Rosh Hashanna, the Jewish New Year. Tradition is to eat something sweet, so that the coming year will be sweet. My family celebrates by giving candy; when we went to my parents’ place for dinner yesterday Chris and I got a small box of Godiva chocolates and a box of marzipan. I opened the marzipan earlier today, around lunchtime, and ate the whole thing. I just now opened and ate all the chocolate. At least now I don’t have to wrestle with temptation for the next week. And I’ll be hyperactive and incoherent for the rest of the year.

Zeher, zeher disappointed

I’ve gained three pounds, but that’s what holidays are for. Imagine how much I’d gain if I were observing Yom Kippur next week!

I really didn’t feel like spending three hours shifting weights at the gym today, so I just did 40 minutes on the treadmill (while re-reading Vernor Vinge’s “The Blabber”), and I’ll do weights tomorrow and shift over to a Mon-Wed-Fri schedule for weights instead of my usual Sun-Tues-Thurs. I’ll have to shift back next week, since the gym is closed next Monday.

I did some shopping, and on the way home the Lubavitchers were out in force, carrying little shofars and asking passers-by if they were Jewish. The Lubavitchers, for those of you who aren’t local, are a branch of Hasidic Jews who proselytize among less observant Jews. I got asked a few times if I was Jewish, and I gave them my prepared answer: Lo (“No” in Hebrew). I didn’t get any sort of double-take or other interesting reaction out of them; maybe they’d heard it before. Oh well.

Plot falls in my lap

For quite some time now I’ve wanted to write and draw my own comic book. (Drawing someone else’s just doesn’t hold anywhere near the same appeal.) I’ve had a few ideas floating around in my head, but they’ve been refusing to congeal into stories. Well, this morning, one of them gave up and congealed. It’s a science fiction story, set in a future where What’s your religion? and What Internet Service Provider do you use? are the same question, and I can’t really say any more than that, except that I think the working title is going to be The Black Persimmon. I was just idly musing on it, and a chunk of speculation bumped into a chain of consequence, and an arc of plot crystallized out of solution. I know who my protagonist is now (well, one of them), and I’ve got a pretty good idea of what the mcguffin is, and I know some of what needs to be done to get from A to B. I may actually have to write/draw the thing now.