4 In The House, 1 In The Dorm - Day 5

Day 5

Thursday morning.  The last day of the work week, and the first day of summer vacation for Avigail.  Therefore she was awarded the privilege of taking the kids to gan.  Since I had left my bike near work with a flat, I took the bus, intending to purchase a new inner tube (and possible tire) at a bike shop near where I switch buses.  After walking the two and a half blocks and picking out a tire, I discovered I had left my credit card at home and had no other means of payment.  I apologized to the bike store owner and dejectedly walked back to the bus, rode to the stop near where my bike was, and walked it to work (grateful that it hadn't been stolen over night).

When I got to work, I discovered a slack message from a coworker who is more of a bike enthusiast even than I am, offering me his spare inner tube that he keeps in his bag, free of charge.  The heavens were smiling down on me again.

At work the problems with the imagery preprocessing software bogging us done became intolerable, and we had a very intense yet brief meeting about it, which resulted in a resolution to run more comprehensive tests in order to better isolate the actual bug.  Research on the subpixel shift continued.  I started writing a test suite to ensure data integrity for the training data for our crop classification algorithm.

Every Thursday, the company buys us lunch (ordered from some local restaurant) and we all eat together, at one table (8-10 employees, depending on who's in town).  This Thursday, a random young woman ask to join us, before she realized we were an organic group.  She decided to stay on anyway, and as we told her about what we do, she realized she'd applied for a job at the company, over a year ago.  Small world.  She herself is a developer working remotely for Elasticsearch.

After work, I walked my bike back to the gas station, and waited for an inordinate amount of time for other patrons (mostly on two-wheeled vehicles) to finish using the air.  Then I was able to ride home, powering my wheels with my own two legs, just the way I like it.

Once I got home, getting the kids into bed went fairly routinely.  At night, I popped over to my parents' place, where I tried to help them figure out why the very recently purchased TV's speakers had stop producing sound.  I talked to Michal over Skype and tried to help her find a place to go for Shabbat, since in her parent's home there is no Shabbat observance, nor in their neighborhood.  She'd originally made up with her 6th grade teacher, with whom she never lost touch, but the discrepancy in the weekly Torah reading had caused a grave miscommunication.  Religious folk often find referring to weekends by their weekly reading more convenient and relatable than calendar dates.  Michal gave her the name of the Torah portion, meaning this weekend, but her host understood that she was referring to next weekend (see here for how this can happen). 

At first, she thought of going to Lakewood, NJ, where she has a few old friends who live a very large yeshiva-based community.  But there have been some recent cases of measles in Lakewood, and Moriah (age 2) has not been vaccinated for measles, so that option was out.  I messaged some friends via Facebook who live in the area, but in the end (this I found out on Friday afternoon) she found a host family through the brother of a friend from Ramat Gan (who grew up in New York).

As for our Shabbat plans, my mother and I planned out a scrumptious menu.