magid

Pound Hall is not a lovely space. But having davened there for so many high holidays gives it some feeling of being the right place.
The drapes at the front of the women's section were three-quarters closed the whole time. No battles about reflections, at least the first night (I was too exhausted to make it to mincha-maariv after the first night. I feel old.).
Though I thought with a midweek chag it would be fairly full, it wasn't, by a long shot. Better for me, though. I even found a bit of my missing kavanah. I hope it's not just visiting...
I kept thinking about Elka: singing the special high holiday tune for Yigdal that we both love(d? (grammar can hurt after all); hearing her husband saying kaddish; seeing her daughter with Elka's hair, and hairstyle, and eyes, and skin tone (she's just 5, gosh darn it).
For some reason, the first morning the people leading had problems. Both the shacharit and musaf baalei tefilah had hoarseness and voice challenges (both are talented people who've lead these services for years; ability is not in question), and the baal tokeah didn't pace himself as well as he might. No one thing was surprising, but as a whole, it was unusual.
There was an orange and black butterfly that went by the window both mornings. This pleased me.
I am a lucky person, to have had three invitations out. Each was so wholly different from the next, too. Plus I was asked to make kiddush the first night and lead bentching the first day (both honors surprised me).
I attempted my first noodle kugel in a long time. Not bad, but it definitely needs work: the fruit wasn't noticeable at all, and I didn't use enough pepper for the flavor to come through, either.
The first day laining includes Hagar and her son being thrown out of Avraham's house. It took me years to realize that the "na'ar" (boy, young man, not-yet-adult-in-some-way) has to be at least in his teens, given that they were thrown out for his teasing of his new half-brother, who came along 10 years after his birth. But the text has his mother putting him under a bush so as to not see him die of thirst, which always made me think of a much younger person. Yitzchak is also described as a "na'ar" in the Akedah. Oh, and this year there seemed to be a lot more parallels between the two incidents than I'd noticed before.
There's a new ortho minyan rabbi at Harvard, and from what I saw over yom tov, he's not quite my style (though I suspect he's really good for the undergrads).
I don't like that the mi-sheberach for cholim has changed from a list of actual people to everyone standing and saying names to themselves. Yeah, it's quicker, but feels less communal.
The tunes really make it work, every year. Some piyyutim leave me cold, especially the ones with inscrutable vocabulary (more a Y"K issue, actually), but hearing the special tune for kaddish, or Aveinu Malkenu, or Yigdal (etc.), that's important. New tunes are nice, but don't evoke in the same ways, even if it's a familiar tune from other davening.
There are lots of different round challah shapes.
The amount of mayhem made by small children is an exponential relationship to the number of children.