Highmoon's Ponderings

Two things this weekend have put the whole self-owned business idea back into the front burner of our minds.

While at St. Augustine, we visited a shop there with a very unique concept that totally captured us as customers and our imaginations as a possible option for a business. The store is called Bath Junkie, and they sell bath products that you can personalize with custom-blended fragances from a menu of about 200 options. I thought this was a fantastic store concept, with a neat gimmick to set it apart from your Bath and Body Works-type of stores, and after mentioning it to my wife, she’s come around to think likewise. Miami is a ripe market for this kind of idea, especially because the next closest Bath Junkie is about 250 miles north of us! We’re gonna run the idea by the family’s Fountain of Wisdom (aka. my mother-in-law) and see what she says, then proceed from that.

The second thing is that I just received in the mail the summer catalog from The Container Store, which is always dedicated to travel products. Every single time I see this catalog, I get a pain in my chest because I KNOW that a dedicated Travel Store in Miami would be a feasible business option and one I could certainly organize and run. The problem with this idea, compared to the one above, for example, is that this would be a brand-new concept, not a franchise, which brings with it support and an amount of recognition, which makes it harder to secure funding. Then again, who says it couldn’t eventually become a franchise operation? I really wish I could put this together; though I know it would be hard, especially because travel equipment is very much a luxury item and one that would need to be marketed aggresively in order to gain a following (though let me tell you, after years of hanging out at The Container Store during the summer months and seeing literally thousands of dollars worth of travel gear being bought, much of it by me and my family, I know it is possible), I believe in the idea, especially when presented as what I truly have in mind, a one-stop travel resource center, with luggage, packing solutions, books, maps, DVDs and audio, all conveniently present for the would-be traveler.

Being self-employed is scary, but I know in my heart that it is the way to go for me, and I believe for my family as well.

Anyone got $500,000 they’d like to invest in two new upstarts?

Just got back a couple hours ago from our trip to St. Augustine, FL this past Memorial Day weekend. The trip was great and we both loved St. Augustine! We took quite a few pics around town, and I got to meet one of my gaming forum buddies/podcast listeners who lives in the city and works in the tourist industry there as a (get this, it’s cool) a ghost tour guide. I’ll have a full trip report and link to the photos in the coming days.

Getting back and having dinner (pizza, just horrible but oh so good) we saw in the news about the “altercations,” (as one newscast lightly put it) in Venezuela, where Dictator… err, President Hugo Chavez and his government has now taken control of all but one of the country’s TV and Radio stations, all but establishing a dictatorship of information over the airwaves, already vowing to take down Globo, the remaining private network left in Venezuela.

I hate to say this, but Cubans in Miami have been telling every Venezuelan they come across to either fight back or take off NOW; whichever choice they choose, do it now, because Chavez is nothing if a perfect student of Fidel Castro, and what is happening in Venezuela is a step-by-step copy of what Castro did in Cuba almost 50 years ago. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans (both in and out of the country) either don’t care, or reply with a very arrogant, “That was in Cuba, that won’t happen in our country.” Of course, now they are eating their words as Chavez continues on his warpath to establishing the second dictatorship in Latin America.

I kinda wish I’d stayed in St. Augustin, on vacation, away from the real world and all this crap.

After a loooong time in the works, after a lot of interruptions and other projects getting in the way, after I got off my lazy butt and put the finishing touches on what I was missing, my wife and I are finally ready to start our Victorian Age Vampire chronicle in about a week or so. We’d start this weekend, but we’ll be out of town on a mini-break, though I plan to use the driving time to talk about the game and her character, as I try to get as much info possible to weave the story around that of her PC.

This will be a New World of Darkness game as far as system, using the Victorian Age Vampire book as thematic source material, but for the most part I am looking forward to creating a semi-new mythology for our game; as I told my wife, you might meet a vampire that calls itself a member of the “Ventrue,” but you simply cannot assume you know what “Ventrue” is or means based on your player knowledge. I’ll go into the reasons more in depth later on. I’ve actually set up a tag for “Victorian Age Vampire” so it’s easy to follow the development and the game play.

Fortune of fortunes, I am now also playing in a D&D play-by-email campaign built around Goodman Games‘ Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) adventures. The campaign, West to the Empire, one of the suggested Adventure Paths in DCC #35 assembled from various of the DCC modules, is being run by the excellent and tidy Mark Gedak (who has done a lot of HMP work both for and with me), and aside from myself, there are two other players, a fella named Kurt and David Jarvis (of Reality Deviant Publications, my collaborator on the DaVinci Labs line for HMP). I am playing a 0-level aristocrat named Squire Fisner, a pregen that came with the first adventure, DCC #35A Halls of the Minotaur (part of DCC #35 Gazetteer of the Known Realms). I’ve already customized this pregen a little by giving him the name Argus and a bit of a backstory which I hope to expand as we play. Though I’ll admit play-by-email is not necessarily the optimal way to play for me, I’m just happy to be in a game, and Mark is organized and detailed enough that I feel good about the whole enterprise and about the opportunity to actually do a bit of roleplay via text. I’ve also created a tag for “D&D PBeM” to track thoughts and play reports from this game.

So we’ve rejoined the regular world tonight after two days of celebrating Shavuot. It was a good time, actually, even if I was in a little bit of a funk going into it for reasons unknown.

Tuesday night I had dinner at home instead of at the synagogue, then made my way back at around 11:00 PM ready to study Torah all night. We got started at around Midnight, looking at two letters from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, on the meaning of Shavuot, as expounded by our rabbi. The conversation drifted for a while to the topic of Israel and the 6-day War in 1967, when Jerusalem was finally reunited and we gained access to the Western Wall one more time. The Zohar seems to indicate (in the way that the Zohar can indicate anything with any kind of accuracy) that 40 years after the reunification of the city (i.e. now in 2007/5767) we enter into an auspicious time for the arrival of Mashiach. I have no idea if this is true or not (as I said, the Zohar is anything but clear, written in symbolic language that hides its esoteric revelations), but I think we still need to do our part to bring the Redemption, auspicious time or not.

After a short break (the conversation actually drifted a couple more times, ending in a discussion about failed marriages and divorces, something I have nothing to say about) we went back to study, this time exploring a maamar from the Rebbe on some mystical underpinings of Shavuot. We talked about the book of Ruth, its connections to the holiday, the role of converts in Judaism and in the line of Mashiach (Mashiach will descend from a convert, as we can see in the book of Ruth, who was a convert and the great-grandmother of King David, an incarnation of Mashiach), and about the various midrashic tales of what transpired at Mount Sinai when the Torah was given. In between breaks I was also studying the Talmud, tractate Chagigah, reading about the Seven Heavens, and the Merkavah, the Holy Chariot of the Throne of G-d, as seen in the vision of Ezekiel (Chapter 1), which is enough to send anyone home with a headache, so dense it is with esoteric symbolism.

Much coffee was had, but eventually we all got sleepy and at 3:40 AM we called it a night and all nine of us (actually, there were 10 counting a 12-year old boy who is soon to have his bar mitzvah) made our way home. For my part, I got home, had something to drink and a snack, and kept on studying the Talmud, reading about the merkavah and the heavens, until I woke up and realized I’d fallen asleep while reading. I made my prayers and at 5:00 AM I went to sleep. By 10:30 AM I was back at shul for morning prayers and to hear the Ten Commandments be read aloud. Since to G-d there is no Time–past, present and future are all one concurrent point to Him–when we read the commandments at the synagogue, we are all really and truly standing at the foot of Mt. Sinai once again, hearing the voice of G-d Himself read the commandments to us and transmit them to Moses and the rest of the nation.

During the last two days we have eaten horribly. I mean, I’ve tried to be good, so as to not gain the 5 pounds I’ve lost in the last 2 weeks, but since it is customary to eat dairy in Shavuot, there has been an overabundance of cheesecake, both the ones my wife made (which she did alter to a more diet-friendly recipe) and the ones at shul (the bad-for-you-yet-yummy kind), plus a lot of food, much of it with cheese on top (at least at home). I mean, I did do a lot of walking, but I think that only got me a net result. Oh well.

Tomorrow my wife and I go away for a weekend getaway. Our destination is still a secret to her, which is great! I’ll post pics here once we get back.

Tonight begins the holy day of Shavuot, when we commemorate the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai 3,319 years ago. The name of the holiday, meaning ‘weeks,’ is a reference to the seven weeks between Passover and Shavuot, a period during which we count the Omer, and every night we anxiously await the arrival of the day of Revelation.

This is my favorite holiday in the Jewish year: while most people know about Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover, Shavuot has diminished in visbility, though not in importance; it is one of the three holidays where the men of Israel were required to go to Jerusalem and the Temple, along with Passover and Sukkot.

The status in which it is held today belies the importance of Shavuot: Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Torah, the single event in Jewish history that truly and utterly changed the world. Without the giving of the Torah, there would have been no reason for the exodus out of Egypt, no reason for Jacob and his sons to have descended there in the first place, no reason for Abraham to have had Isaac, because in the end, all these events were driving at the creation of a people, of a nation, that would be G-d’s chosen people on Earth, a nation that would be the carriers of Divine Will in the physical realm, a nation that would help make the limited an abode for the unlimited.

On Shavuot we accepted the Torah, and by that act we became a nation, separate yet part of the world, Holy unto G-d, “a kingdom of kohanim (priests or ministers).” The reason we have all the other holy days in the Jewish calendar is because we are the Jewish people, and we are the Jewish people because of our acceptance of the Torah; without Torah, we are nothing.

As a convert, Shavuot gives me context; my soul was present at Mt. Sinai, either in physical form as a prior gilgul (incarnation), or as a pure soul destined to eventually join the Jewish people, so in many respects, aside from the actual day on which my conversion was completed, this is my anniversary of being Jewish, of my soul finally coming home. It is the celebration of a day when I was not a convert, but an equal part of the whole (not that there is any deficiency in being a convert, though some people may erroneously think so).

Tonight I will do my best to stay up all night studying Torah, as is the custom–which is one of my favorite parts of the holiday–and tomorrow I will once again stand at Mt. Sinai, hearing G-d Himself read His commandments to us, and saying, “We will do and we will listen.”

Chag sameach!

… secured!