[NHC] Bits and pieces

[magid]

In no particular order. (As always, let me know if I should translate/explain terms.)

• My morning class was an artist's beit midrash, which ended up meaning that each day we looked at sources on one word of this year's theme (v'samtem et devarai al lvavchem) in hevruta followed by open creative time, based on the sources, or other prompts of the day, or whatever inspired us. There were far more sources than time, so we chose a sprinkling of them more to get ideas flowing than to be exhaustive. Oh, and the day words were 'place' (or 'put'), 'words', 'My', and 'heart'. I found myself often more drawn to particular ingredients to play with (interesting paper, or paint, or pastels, etc) rather than particular prompts, though I did end up making things that were sort of on topic, as usual relying more on words than on images, since I feel in control of language, but lacking in the ability to get images out of my head onto paper intact. I knew some of the other people in class were artists, and it showed; I very much liked some of the pieces other people made.
  
  
• My afternoon class was totally head-focused, a look at the book of Leviticus, which is often seen as boring and/or irrelevant. The teacher had sent out a big packet of sources in advance, so people could print them or just bring them in their laptop, and we didn't get through all of them, by any means. It didn't matter because the conversation was so compelling. Sometimes there was hevruta time, sometimes it was the whole class, but either way, it ended up being much more interesting than most people generally consider tumah/taharah and korbanot to be. I'd happily have taken a class twice as long (or more) with this teacher; I felt like there was much more to learn than we had any chance of addressing. The teacher was of the opinion that we do have a system of tumah/taharah currently, but he didn't convince me that it's more than vestigial, other than for menstruants (and the reason that is still around is due to other parts of the text, not where it references tumah/taharah, which I'd not really paid attention to before). I'm not really sure how else to summarize this without getting into lots of details, which I suspect I won't actually manage to write up.
  
  
• Though there was still lots of starch at all meals, and high fructose corn syrup in some tomato products (and the pizza dough; ugh), I felt that the food was a bit more appealing this year. More spices were used (not tons, but it was noticeable compared to the previous extremes of bland), and I think the week's menus were tweaked some so there were more foods I liked. I know some people with food restrictions had some issues, and the staff was responsive if they could do something.
  
  
• I made it to only one workshop this year, which was the one on crocheting. The teacher had asked me to help out since her regular teaching partner wasn't there. I ended up teaching six or seven people the basics of crocheting in the round, telling people I was happy to be asked questions later in the week, which some took me up on. The rest of the time, either I was running late, or nothing appealed, or I was talking to someone, or reading something. It felt right, so I went with that.
  
  
• I actually told a story at the story swap later Shabbat evening, which is a first. Most of the other people told fairly elaborate fictional stories; I stuck to something short that I'd witnessed, and it was well received, thankfully.
  
  
• Yay for interesting people and the time to talk with them.
  
  
• I went to more of the evening programming, though I didn't always participate, especially when it was something with a lot of talking, since the acoustics make it difficult to have lots of people conversing at once. I was impressed with the results of the first night's activity, banners with many of the previous years' themes on them, which hung around the room for the rest of the week.
  
  
• There were a lot of little changes this year that mostly worked for me, though a few seemed off or didn't work.
  
  • The campus map finally included directions to the farthest dorms (it's a university-supplied map, so it's not like there's control over it, but it still made me happy, because that had been a sore point before). Of course, now it lacks the newest building on campus, the three-year-old one that most of the classes are in. At least that's easier to point out.
    
  • The day's schedule was shifted around a little so things started on the quarter hours, which I find much easier to internalize than on one of the other fives.
    
  • Also, the order was shifted, so both morning and afternoon had classes then workshops, rather than classes being in the slots closest to lunch. I liked this, since it works well for me (more intense classes first, usually less intense one-shot workshops after). It does have three potential disadvantages: people sleeping in missing classes rather than workshops; parents dropping kids off in camp being late to class rather than workshop; and those who hike Mt. Monadnock early Thursday morning likely missing class too. None of these were relevant to me...
    
  • Moving the shuk to the first day didn't really work, not only because people were still in transit and/or unpacking, but also because some people hadn't realized the change. Plus the T-shirts, which were supposed to be a draw to get people there, arrived days later. Some people were disappointed that the clothing swap and silent auction didn't happen either; I suspect it was a lot easier on logistics.
    
  • Instead of having families with small kids starting meals earlier, there was a request to let families with small kids to skip to the front of the line on one of the two serving lines, which seemed to work out.
    
  • A room was set aside for last-minute workshops, which was a great idea.