House-cleaning, Peru, and Torah trope. Not necessarily in that order.

My goodness, almost a week since our last post?! Where does the time go.

Well, it's been an eventful week. I got through my Biblical Grammar midterm (let's just not talk about it), caught up on almost all of my readings, wrote some mini-papers for Hebrew Literature class, am learning Torah cantillation/trope, got paired with a third-year student mentor to answer my school questions, and today I brushed the cats so thoroughly that I took a kitten's worth of fur off of each of them.

In my education class we did this cool exercise on learning styles. Founded by Kolb, the Learning-Style Inventory classifies people as more than just visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. It tells you how you learn. For example, I'm an Assimilator, which means I learn best from reflective observation and abstract conceptualization. (In my eyes, it also means that I'm a Borg, but that's neither here nor there.) I highly recommend taking the test, if just for fun.

In non-school news, Maura and I went out for dinner two days ago, and voila, I have a new friend! We've sat by each other in classes for a year and a quarter now, in Israel and here, and we've only ever talked about school things. It was great to break out of the HUC mold, and transcend that friendship boundary into the personal. She's now my Torah cantillation partner, and we're going to work with each other on learning the daily nusach, the daily service melodies, as well (as opposed to the Shabbat or High Holiday or Purim melodies... sigh).

Maura also told me of a wondrous, fabulous, amazing, stupendous thing called the Fall Sale at Old Navy. Jonathan and I went last night and got 14 articles of clothing for $100! That includes a jean skirt and a nice skirt to wear on the bima ($1.97 each), 2 shirts ($3.97 each), and a jacket for Jonathan ($6). What bumped up the price dramatically was the thermal underwear and winter gear. (And just because I'm already complaining about the weather, do you know that yesterday the sun only came out for an hour and a half, and that it's still pitch black at 7am?? I'm having serious sun issues.)

The school bookstore is offering major discounts on lots of Jewish books, through a deal with a publisher. I'm trying not to go too crazy, because I don't need the books... and I probably won't be reading them anytime soon anyway. Actually, whatever I do read for fun lately is about as far away from Judaism as I can get. E.g. I'm halfway through Isabel Allende's Ines of My Soul, about conquistadors in 16th-century Peru and Chile. Allende also wrote The House of the Spirits and Daughter of Fortune, but this one is historical fiction, not magical realism, so I like it better.

And now I should be off. We're having an HUC grad student and his wife and kids over for dinner tonight - they're the ones who lived in our house last year, and who we first met at Tel Dan in Israel. I really do love having company over, but it does necessitate this pesky thing called vacuuming...