I finally, finally re-brined the darned olives. I think I made two critical mistakes when I did it the first time: not every olive's skin was actually broken and the brine wasn't strong enough. So I dumped out the old brine, rinsed the zillions of olives, slit each one with a paring knife, and dumped in salt water made the old-fashioned way. That's right, ladies and gents, there was no weighing of the salt and measuring of the water; I just poured a container of water, dumped in a bunch of salt, mixed, and made sure a raw egg floats in the stuff.
Oy, pickling olives is really, really time-consuming. Granted, things went much faster this time, but it still took me like four hours. Eventually, I realized I could listen to lectures, but the only thing on my phone was Rabbi Tatz speaking about Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur. You know what? Sometimes it's nice to listen to things out of season. It's novel.
And I learned something very, very important. I've known for years and years that repentance has three steps: regret, confession, and saying you won't do it again. That third step always gives me trouble, though: I know I don't want to do whatever-it-is again, but I also know from past experience that deciding not to do something and actually not doing it are two different things. And I don't like making promises that I'm not sure I'll keep. This leaves me in a bit of bind. Rabbi Tatz didn't give me a whole lot of comfort when he said that saying something along the lines of, "I'll try not to do it again" absolutely doesn't count.
Luckily, his next sentence explained the way out. To truly repent, you do have to say you won't do it again, and you have to mean it, even if you've messed that one up before. The thing is, during repentance you work on yourself and focus and his a point where you know to the very core of your being that doing whatever-it-is is a terrible decision. That's when you say, "The way I feel now, knowing what I've managed to finally grasp, I would never, ever, do that thing." What happens a few days or weeks or, if you're really good, months later when you've gotten distracted and lost sight of who you are and who you want to be... Well, that's another story.
So I guess what I'm saying is that it's a really good thing that I finally re-brined the olives, but I am still considering loading more seasonally-appropriate lectures onto my phone for my next long, quiet, tedious task.
Speaking of long, tedious tasks, Husbinator's JawSaw finally arrived. Let's start with, "wow," then back up and tell you that a JawSaw is what you get when you cross a tushie-pincher/chapper/grabber-thingy with a chain saw. Place mouth of device over branch you want to cut, pull lever, and chain saw descends and cuts said branch. And it cuts it much more quickly than an axe does, let me tell you. I tried a branch and stopped after about two seconds because I didn't feel anything, so I was sure I was doing it wrong. Nope, that branch was cut almost all the way through. Wow. Wowowowowow. So Husbinator cut the logs that LandPeople left for us (but were too big to fit in the stove), and now we don't have to be stingy about lighting the stove. Before, every log thrown on the fire represented long, difficult labor. Now it's just zip zap zoop. Yay!
And no, the day still isn't done. I made kugel and went to Rami Levy: I want to have all of the food cooked before Friday this week.
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