Shabbat - - Day 908 (Yr 3, Day 175)

Houston, TX

On Friday, we had a list of a few places to go for shopping.  The traffic and horrible roads made us both very stressed, so we decided to only go to one store (Target) and get as much as we could from that one place.  Work load was relatively light, so we just sort of vegged besides preparing the challah and food.  Weather has been really yucky.  It's either sunny and chilly or extremely warm and cloudy, and the humidity is extremely high.

There are many synagogues of all denominations around.  Yesterday, we chose the one we were told had the best chances of parking the truck.  Unfortunately, it was 12 miles away and took us 45 minutes to get there!  This will probably be the case every week, unless we relocate somewhere closer (which we'll consider if the price of the campground goes up to the same price as the other places).

It was an enormous facility and is actually the Lubavitch headquarters of Houston.  What a small world it is -- we found that the parents of one of our favorite rabbis (Yisroel Cotlar of Cary, NC) go to that synagogue (I had forgotten that he had family in Houston.  We met them before when they visited in Cary).  The shul itself did not offer a kiddush lunch after services (they do it once a month -- probably because the congregation is too large), but the rabbi's wife invited us to join her and her husband for lunch at their home, literally across the street.  We were going to, but by then my cold medicine wore off and I was having choking fits again.  It was also about 1:00 and I figured we weren't going to leave until about 3.  We had plans after Shabbat, which ended at 6, so the timing wouldn't have lent itself well to napping, which we both desperately needed.  So we apologized, hoped we didn't cause offense, headed home and napped for 2 hours.

The best part of the day was after sundown - getting to meet my friends from HS: Ira and Miriam, whom I haven't seen for 40 years.  They have a beautiful home, where he had some wine & cheese, and then went out for a sushi dinner and frozen yogurt afterwards.  We plan to see lots more of them while we're here, although schedules are a bit rough.

As for today (Sunday), we slept really late (10:30 -- didn't go to bed until about 1:30am).  Mostly a day for puttering.  Mitch needs to fix a few things, if I can get him moving!