6/26/07 10 pm

Today--201 (no, I don't think I actually lost another pound since yesterday, since that would mean burning 3500 calories over what I ate, or whatever the exact number is; I'm just reporting what the scale said because it made me happy. I never thought weighing 201 pounds would make me happy.)

builders bar, milk
iced tea
Gazpacho, tortilla chips, and some fresh mozzarella for lunch (leftovers)
2 squares of Green and Black Maya Gold (first chocolate in more than a month and it didn't make me binge on the rest of the bar.)
seltzer
Snack--can't remember what. Cheese puffs and something else.
water and then some more water--it was hot!
A plate of Mt. A!ry potluck for dinner. This is the thing of a private blog (and, Phantom, yes, it's working at least insofar as anyone lurking is doing so very discreetly): I know you'll know the kind of thing I mean. I went for seconds on the artichoke dip in the brown-bread bowl but didn't finish the fruit-yogurt soup. The sprouted-grain salad was particularly fine. The whole wheat pasta salad was a little on the near side of al dente.
A brownie. A. made peach brown betty but it went so fast I didn't get a shot at it.
A Coke--which maybe was a mistake, except I'm the only one in my household who's not crankola at this moment, so you know, maybe it wasn't.

We were at a sheva berachot dinner for the bride and groom. It was more fun than the wedding or the aufruf--a better scale for hanging out, no one whose face I didn't know, A. was there so I wasn't toddler-wrangling the whole time, and there was good singing.

The coincidence of the two weddings was that they had the same song for the processional--a Shef@ Gold song that A. chose for the wedding in the Berkshires, since she led that processional. And coincidentally, the Philadelphia couple also chose it, and they arrived at the potluck when we did, and someone started singing it, so we entered to the song.

Our host for the potluck said a few words--now, we're indirectly responsible for this couple because they met while the bride was visiting California to work on A. and my chuppah--and in his remarks the host revealed that he and the bride became friends because of a stray comment he made at Z.'s baby-naming. So this was a weekend where the Rhyming Family played this kind of role of being toasted for connections we made not just accidentally but more or less completely without knowing it. It was a useful and happy thing to be reminded of as I'm making my way out of my cave.

So, okay, the sheva berachot are the seven blessings said at a wedding and in the grace after meals in the week after the wedding. Because Z. needed to go home, we only heard them under the chuppah but b/c of the way the couple structured their ceremony, with friends coming up to comment on each blessing (did I mention that from signing the ketubbah to the end of the ceremony was TWO HOURS!?) there was no momentum to them under the chuppah, and I missed them at the wedding meal itself, so I really wanted to stay for them tonight. A. was pretty pooped, but she indulged me, and it was good. The sixth of the seven blessings contains two songs where, in a group of guests that's Jewishly-literate enough (according to A. the guests in the Berkshires did not reach critical mass on this point), the entire gathering will join in and when they're singing it for you it can actually make you dizzy. Not like my own anniversary is next week or anything.

When I first was going to Hillel, when I was converting, grace after meals intimidated me--there's this whole Hillel thing of doing it as fast as possible, and there's a whole intricate thing of which blessings are substituted for which occasions, and I would always get lost. We hardly ever do it at home--we substitute one of several much shorter blessings on shabbat, which is the only time we evver *do* bentsch (=say the blessing after meals), but over the years I've done it often enough that I don't get tripped up much and it is sung with great gusto so it's fun to do it once in awhile. It was fun to do it tonight. It was fun to do it with people I know. It was a social evening, and it was fun, and I went home singing, and when was the last time that was true?

Also, and this is a thing that ties into Helen, and to Z., the bride's stepfather, who is Arthur W@skow if that means anything to you, did the fifth blessing to the tune of "Morning Has Broken" and Cat Stevens was what I listened to on A.'s discman for a long long time in my initial weeks of pumping for Z. (when she was in the hospital and then later in the next few weeks when the blanching and the nipple confusion were so severe that I couldn't have her at my breast). I had that cd with me when I drove up to New York on the Sunday after Helen died and on my way back down I kept hitting replay over and over and over again on a couple of them, that one in particular. There are a handful of other songs I've used that way, to draw something out of me like a poultice. Big Yellow Taxi is one, during some of the particularly bad and drama-prone patches in Adams House my junior year. Naive Melody/This Must Be The Place is another, when my mother had surgery and when Smartest Dog died. So Arthur hit something home there.

(Thunder coming, blogging could get iffy. The grid in these parts is a little shaky and prone to brownouts and blackouts.)

But anyhow, I think that this wedding could well be the impetus I need to get back into the social swing of things. I know that I'm about to be out of town for two weekends in a row, possibly three, and then Harry Potter, so it's not exactly like I'm about to commit to getting to shul on time for another month or more, but, you know, not a bad evening.