Drat those pipes.

    After having my entire basement remortared at great expense, this week we discovered a leak. Now, I know when life gives you a leak, you should try to make leak and potato soup. But the plumber's diagnosis had me stewing: He could fix the leak, and it would undoubtedly soon leak again, or he could replace most of my plumbing and fix the problem more permanently. I decided to have him replace things with a system more tied together, remembering the old adage "Loop before you leak." Naturally, when he had almost finished replacing my entire plumbing system, the one section of pipe that we were not going to replace decided to spring a leak, so he'll be back on Friday to fix that.

    On the bright side, my sister's Bat-Mitzvah went well. And, in typical fashion, everything surprised me. The speech I'd spent days preparing, crafting, going in depth into the Torah portion that my sister was reading, was received with blank stares and unspoken disapproval. Later in the evening I was called upon to give an impromptu speech as I presented my sister with a bible, and although I babbled a bit and spoke randomly off the cuff, numerous people approached me afterwards to tell me how impressed they were with that speech. Not a single positive comment about the one I'd prepared, mind you.

    And then I was supposed to serve as co-entertainment for the event, along with a clarinet player that was a friend of my parents. I was nervous the week before the event, as I hadn't played piano in a while, and was sure I'd be embarrassed to be compared to a professional musician. And I may well have been, if a professional musician showed up, but the clarinetist sounded no better than I did (which is no attempt to impugn his skill, as I did receive a few compliments on my playing). Anyway, my sister is now officially an adult -- albeit officially in the same sort of way that Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam did the news report that begain, "Officially, nothing happened today. Unofficially,..."