dianaschnuth

What is Hanukah? (from Hanefesh.com):

The Jews observe the Festival of Lights for eight days, in honor of the historic victory of the Maccabbees and the miracle of the oil.

The Hebrew word Chanukah means “dedication.” In the 2nd century BCE, the Syrian-Greek regime of Antiochus sought to pull Jews away from Judaism, with the hopes of assimilating them into Hellenism — Greek culture. Antiochus outlawed aspects of Jewish observance — including the study of Torah — which began to decay the foundation of Jewish life and practice. During this period, many of the Jews began to assimilate into Greek culture, taking on Greek names and marrying non-Jews.

In response, a band of Jewish settlers took to the hills of Judea in open revolt against this threat to Jewish life. Led by Matitiyahu, and later his son Judah the Maccabee (“The Hammer”), this small band of pious Jews led guerrilla warfare against the Syrian army.

Antiochus sent thousands of well-armed troops to crush the rebellion — but the Maccabees succeeded in driving the foreigners from their land.

Jewish fighters entered Jerusalem in December, 164 BCE. The Holy Temple was in shambles, defiled and desecrated by foreign soldiers. They cleansed the Temple and re-dedicated it on the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev. When it came time to re-light the Menorah, they searched the entire Temple, but only one small jar of oil bearing the pure seal of the High Priest could be found. Miraculously, the small jar of oil burned for eight days, until a new supply of oil could be brought.

From then on, Jews have observed a holiday for eight days in honor of this historic victory and the miracle of the oil.

Today, the observance of Chanukah features the lighting of a special Chanukah menorah with eight branches (plus a helper candle), adding one new candle each night. Other customs include spinning the dreidel (a top with Hebrew letters on the sides), eating “oily” foods like potato latkes (pancakes) and sufganiyot (jelly donuts), and giving Chanukah gifts & coins) to children.

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Just for shits and giggles, I signed up on all those blogariffic sites out there: blo.gs, weblogs.com, BlogStreet, Blogrolling, syndic8.com, and updated my Technorati profile. I also set MT to accept trackback pings and to ping a few of the sites I signed up on, to let them know I updated. So, to anyone who finds my humble site or feed through one of those sites, welcome. I’m not always terribly interesting… but neither are the other friends and strangers whose blogs I frequent myself, so I’m in good company.

I’m not particularly motivated to do anything this evening. Work really drained me today. The stress I felt today was reminiscent of my days back in Lockbox:

24 September 2002: Just Another Day…

Hey, for once I worked an 8-hour day! Yeah, we were doing so well that we actually took a one-hour lunch and everything. Just for reference, yesterday I worked a 14-hour day. Seriously. My co-worker and almost-supervisor, Loni, worked an hour and a half more than me, since she came in at 6am. Damn, that sucked. Makes the normal 8-hour day seem like a luxury instead of a burden.

Being one of three people manning the Loan Corrections Team Line (aka ‘working the phones’) wasn’t horrible, although I had twice as many calls as usual. And doing loan changes wasn’t all that bad, either, although I had several requests that I had to call people about and wait around for answers. But all those things together made for one damn hectic day. I felt like I was going in six different directions all day—I’d hang up the phone from one call, go to start a loan change, get another call, have to do research for that call, finally get back to that loan change I’d started, then get another call, then finally finish that first loan change, then have to call someone about a detail of the next loan change… Yeesh. My desk has at this moment about seven different stacks of paper of varying heights and degrees of importance.

That really sucked away any sort of energy, creative or otherwise, that I might have had in reserve for my Me Time this evening.

So… that’s today.

Remind me: why did I syndicate this again?

Well, everything seems to have gone smoothly with the MT upgrade. I tried putzing with the “dynamic page generation,” but all it seemed to do was b0rk my one category page (although it did reduce the rebuild time). So, I’m not using the dynamic page generation yet… not until I do a little more research and find out what the big hype is all about.

I do know that there’s a lot about this whole thing that I haven’t been utilizing to its fullest extent, even with the old version of MT. For instance, I’d wanted to include a different sidebar (see right) with each category index page—say, photography links for my Photography category, and low-carb links for my Atkins category, and links to concert tours and reviews and such for my Reviews category. It seems that, while MT still doesn’t support what I’d wanted to do, there is a plug-in that can do this for me. So, I’ll probably mess with that sometime tomorrow.

There’s plenty of other blog things for me to research in the future, too, like pinging for trackbacks and such. I just can’t think of any mainstream blog tracker thingy that would give a shit if little ol’ me had an update. :-/ Do people really just surf off of places like blo.gs or weblogs.com?

Since I switched to PHP, and deleted all my HTML-based individual archives, I’ve also been having some visitors get 404 Not Found messages. D’oh! So, I need to go into my HostRocket Control Panel and make a custom 404 Error page saying to try changing the .htm to a .php to view the page. Awfully ghetto of me, but… *shrug*

Anyway, fun times ahead. Prepare to see more happy categorized entries from Yours Truly. @whee!