My daughter Hannah is three-and-three-quarters years old–don’t call her three! There’s something new at this age of three-going-on four where she’s finally competent with the basic skills of kid life: “Do you want to play?”, “I have to go to the bathroom really bad!“, “More macaroni, please!”, and so on.

As part of that she has started to use the computer. She can log herself in, use the trackpad, and do everything except type in the NickJr.com URL (I supposed I should set up a shortcut she can click) to find the Flash games she likes. I’ve even seen her intuit, without reading, where the “Print” or “Next” button is going to be in the bottom right corner of a window. (Isn’t there something inherently validating in seeing your work printed?) She gets frustrated and wants help, which I don’t mind in theory because playing together is better than just letting her watch TV (though not so useful when you need to get housework done) and because, eventually, I’m sure I’ll be concerned about what she’s doing on the Internet on her own.

When Hannah was born we knew she was being born into a different world than we were as far as computers go (we joked about her needing her own e-mail address as a baby), but, I don’t think Hannah’s experience is going to be so different than our own. I first used a computer in kindergarten when I was 5, and was instantly hooked. Maybe there is a certain (young) age at which kids are ready to use computers, and we didn’t miss that much. Of course, what she can do with a computer is going to be different (that kindergarten computer, a Commodore PET, was the single one on a cart that rotated among all the elementary schools in my town).

One thing I like about our old house is the picture rail incorporated into the crown molding. Picture rails are an anachronism; they’re a way to hang pictures without making a hole in the wall, but with today’s materials it’s easy to patch a small hole–even in old textured plaster walls–that only places like art galleries and office buildings that constantly rotate art need a hanging system.

I wanted to use the picture rails but it took a while to find hardware I liked. Molding hooks are easy to find at a local hardware store or in vintage designs through reproduction catalogs, but they require a wire to be looped around a hook, creating more visual noise on the wall than I wanted.

Eventually, I found a system that worked. At the top was a specially designed hook holding a cable with a finished end that hangs straight down. The cable is not picture hanging wire that you can twist and tie but wire rope or “aircraft cable” that is stronger and more flexible (and probably easier to hang straight without kinking). The effect is very clean and “architectural.”

The fun part is the cable grippers with an integrated hook, that attach to the art instead of a regular picture hanger and can be moved up and down without tools. You cannot get anything like this at a local store.

I bought the whole system from a company called Hang Ups. They have a website but are clearly more of a business-to-business operation; it’s not like ordering from Pottery Barn.

Every year when the Jewish New Year begins it always feels a little like a new beginning. I’m not sure if it’s a spiritual thing or if it’s just that the fall weather reminds me of new school years, but it seems like there’s always something new to reflect on.

This year there are a number of things. Within the past year, we have done a fairly significant construction project on our house, I’ve started a new job, and Cheryl has finished graduate school. And, we are expecting a new baby.

But, I feel like this year represents a change in a direction of sorts despite those accomplishments. I have a house I like, a car I like, and am a bona fide parent. Cheryl and I both have our master’s degrees, and I’ve reached a certain level of confidence of in my career. There is still a lot of work to do, but this is not going to be the year of the house. There is still a lot of parenting to do, and this will largely be the year of baby #2, but I’ve been a parent and will continue to be a parent so that’s not entirely new. Certainly I need to continue to work to pay the bills, but that’s not news.

Basically I’ve done everything I need to do to see myself as a real, grown-up adult, and now the question is how, as an adult, I’m going to leave my mark on the world (other than the obvious answer of through my children). As an IT executive, or as an engineer? As a local activist, or through accomplishments of Jewish learning? By starting a second a career as an architect or real estate mogul, or through new opportunities in the software field? I’m giving myself until I turn 40 to find myself on the right path which gives me a few years to figure things out. The one thing I know for certain is that the answer is probably none of the above, and the new year will be full of surprises.

Development (the real estate kind) and in particular development at the the former Omni Foods/proposed Chestnut Hill Square site in Newton is a topic that I tend to have interest in and opinions about. Last night I decided to put my “money where my mouth is,” or more accurately, put my mouth and the rest of the body where usually only my words go, and speak up at a public hearing on a zoning amendment being proposed in Newton.

It was terrifying. I got confused about when to speak and fumbled through what I was trying to say. A reporter from the Tab asked my name so maybe I’ll find out what I actually said there.

I do feel like I had my “day in court,” so to speak (sorry for the mixed idioms, I know this is a legislative not a judicial hearing, but that might have made it even more terrifying). Blogs are a great source of ideas and letters to the editor have their place as well, but if you have a strong and different opinion on a topic such as this, it’s important to register it in the official public forum. More people should do so. Moreover it was good experience for me - maybe things like the height of office buildings isn’t worth staying out late over, but certainly next time there is a matter worth speaking out over, I will be more composed.

I wrote the following for a project at Temple Emanuel where is was published as one of 70 essays in a booklet titled Blades of Grass and Angels distributed to each family at Rosh HaShanah morning services.

Growing up, we “weren’t” kosher, although we knew other families who were. At some point, being an annoying teenager, I started to correct the other members of my household: food “is kosher,” people “keep kosher.” It’s a fine point, but Jewish learning is about questioning the fine points, and I think there’s a real difference. While knowing who “is religious” makes menu planning easier, observing mitzvot isn’t an ascribed characteristic or something to be treated as a shellfish allergy. Life is a journey, and mitzvot are the way God has given us to get somewhere. “Halakhah,” which means “Jewish law,” literally translates to something more like “The Way.” It’s ironic that we tend to focus on its limitations. I prefer to think of it as a highway: you are constrained to follow the road, but there is no limit to how far you go.

My own religious path has had many stops along the way. My mother’s family attended Reform synagogues in Connecticut since the Victorian era. My father converted to Judaism. I began to explore my own Jewish identity in high school and college. I participated in the March of the Living, traveling with several thousand young Jews to Poland and Israel. This experience opened my eyes in two ways: first, by seeing the range of Jewish practices among my fellow travelers; and second, by learning how traditional Jewish life was present in pre-Holocaust, twentieth-century Europe. Tradition hadn’t been incompatible with modernity; it was simply wiped away with the people who practiced it. In college, I started going to the Conservative minyan at Hillel, and, after a variety of twists and turns, majored in Jewish and Near Eastern Studies. I traveled throughout Israel for a semester, where I absorbed enough Hebrew and culture to feel comfortable anywhere in the Jewish world.

As an adult, my life is a little more stable, but I still find ways to grow. This year, our family is planning to build our own sukkah for the first time. It can feel like the Goldenfelds always build a sukkah (or some other observance) and the Rosensmiths don’t and when we’re in synagogue, we don’t ask about it. Well, I need to ask things. How do I make it so it won’t fall over? What do I use for skakh? Will you come and eat with us, even if our level of kashrut isn’t rabinically correct? What if we invite a family member who doesn’t keep kosher and they bring a dish? We Jews have always had questions, Halakhah is literally a book of questions (the Mishnah), and wrestling with our real questions can only be a good thing.

In fact, I think that’s what this project is all about. We say that the Conservative movement is a “halakhic” movement, but what does that mean? It doesn’t mean that other movements recognize our authority, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we all keep all the mitzvot. There’s a common myth that our grandfathers went to shul every day in Brooklyn, our mothers were scrupulously observant at home, and we all had a second-to-none Jewish education; we just lack willpower. But this underestimates the difficulty of doing mitzvot in the real world. Perhaps there’s a fear that if we talked about Halakhah, people would say it’s not for them. But this is a simple interpretation of mitzvot as something you feel guilty about. What binds us together as Conservative Jews is that we care about Halakhah; it is special and holy. Whether you are observant, want to be observant, or even if you just want to know the Rabbi and Cantor are observant, Halakhah and mitzvot are central. Discussing our relationship to mitzvot—including how we find them challenging—can only strengthen our commitment.

Marc Stober, along with his wife Cheryl, has been a member of Temple Emanuel since 2003 and you will most often find him with his daughter in Tot Shabbat. He lives in Newton Highlands and is employed as a software developer.

I have to comment on this: I’ve been sitting in the house working on a document on my laptop for the past couple hours, when I went to check my e-mail, and learned that a package I’ve been expecting was delivered by FedEx an hour ago. If not for the e-mail  I still wouldn’t have opened the front door yet, but there is was, right outside.

I’ve started a list of useful computer tools I call Marc’s Indispensable Computer Tools List. It’s not much yet, but you can check it out; I hope to add more later.

I’ve set this up as a “page” in WordPress (as opposed to as a blog post, like this one) because, conceptually, it doesn’t belong at a certain point in time; but I’m hardly a WordPress master so we’ll see how that works out.

Over the past week or so I’ve been spending my evenings and weekends prepping and painting our home office, a task that involved a lot of prep work, a new high-tech paint, and being mistaken for a pro.

The office is a unique little room, separated from the living room by French doors with lots of windows. A lot of houses in the area built around the same time have a “sun room” that projects out of the house, with windows on three sides, and maybe not heated well, but this room is a little different because it’s a regular room, not projecting out. Whatever the original purpose was, we use it a lot like the first-floor home offices present in a lot of better homes built within the last ten years, for paying bills, holding papers and computers, and we are even hoping it can be a place for grandmothers to stay once the baby comes. It’s one of those “old is new” things we really like about this house.

Another thing we like about the house is that, except in the bathroom and kitchen, it has its original plaster walls and ceilings. On the first floor the walls are textured. But, like any active octogenarian, it has some wrinkles, or more precisely cracks, and this room also had some water stains on the ceiling from what must have been a leak in the roof. Actually, the walls are in very good shape for their age, while the house has settled such the nothing is level the old plaster coming loose from the lathe is really cosmetic and worth saving both for its character and because replacing it with drywall would just be unneccessary. So, this is not really just a painting project but a mini-renovation and redecorating project to get the room in better shape, including patching the walls. Patching plaster is something I’m not very good at, though I get a little better every time. The basic plan is to widen cracks and remove the crumbly bits (down the lath in a couple areas) and fill with setting-type joint compound (“setting” in that it doesn’t dry per se but hardens from within after mixed with water, like concrete or, well, plaster), then sand smooth or until I can’t stand the dust even with a dust mask. Actually, next time I may try web going over the partly-cured plaster with a wet sponge, a technique I gave up on once in my last house before I knew to use the setting-type compound. I will say that I’ve gotten the mixing of the compound down, about 4 parts powder to one part water, which is a prerequisite skill as well. Fortunately the texture on the walls is rather random so it hides the patch work, rather than highlight it as some textured finished would, and this room was a good one to get practice on.

The leak in the roof scares me but it seems to be old, we haven’t see any evidence of an active leak and from what we know the house got a new roof a few years ago. The best home improvement advice I read once was to first try the simplest and least expensive thing that will work, which in this case meant painting over the stains with an oil-based primer. Then paint the ceiling. I love the look of a fresh, white, velvety-soft-looking ceiling.

It’s a small room and we wanted a deep color that would “pop” the room off of the living room, making it feel like a separate, cozy area and work well with the reddish gumwood molding and French door. We chose a pumpkin-like orange called “buttered yam” (second choice was “pumpkin pie”) and the color really feels like comfort food; it reminds me of being in my grandparents’ den (orange naugahyde sofabed and manufactured wood paneling on the walls, circa 1970). Our last experience with dramatic color was not good: red paint that didn’t cover and dripped off the walls like ketchup (Cheryl said like blood), and people though we’d attempted some decorative painting technique. This time I was prepared to use a special primer and as many coats as it takes. At first I’d dismissed Benjamin Moore’s new Aura line of paint as overpriced, but then I did the math: I’d need a least two $36 gallons (paint plus tinted primer) of regular paint, maybe I could get by with one $54 gallon of Aura for less? It might actually save money. I’ve found Benjamin Moore paints better than Home Depot’s Behr paints that I used to buy, and the fact that in this house there’s a store five minutes away with better service makes it the obvious choice in terms of getting things done. They paint salesman gave me the advice that, contrary to usual good painting practice, I should let the paint dry after cutting in the edges when using this paint. This worked well, and really shows the best part of the Aura paint which is the synergy between fewer coats and a fast drying time, allowing recoat in as little as an hour. We did need two coats but no more, resulting in four “batches” of painting and drying (cut in, dry, roll, dry, cut in second coat, dry, roll second coat) within about six hours. With other paint it would have taken at least ten hours (three coats with four-hour drying times) which means I would have been in painting mode all weekend and less time for the rest of family life; this is the biggest difference, plus I didn’t need that second gallon so I saved money, too.

Because of the woodwork, I also did a lot of masking with this job, using that plastic film with masking tape along one edge. In rooms where I’ve painted moldings, too, I’ve sometimes tried to “freehand” the edges, because all the masking takes more time than the painting and isn’t always perfect anyways, but in this case I resigned myself to spending more time prepping than painting and the results turned out pretty well.

Finally, I put a couple coats of Holloway House floor polish, as-seen-on-TV, on the floor. It’s not a substitute for refinishing, but at least it doesn’t just look neglected.

The best part of the whole experience? Going in to National Lumber in jeans, a t-shirt, and boots, the cashier at National Lumber asked me if I had an account, like I was a contractor. At least it looks like I know what I’m doing.

My father always made a big deal about turning off certain appliances when we weren’t using them; now I’m the dad and it’s my job. Recently I’ve seen a lot of articles (even a new book on the topic) about how doing little things–like unplugging cell phone chargers (I’ve seen this in a few places recently) and turning off or unplugging other appliances that draw small amounts of current (I like the term “flea” power)–can save a lot of energy.

I just came across an article in the Wall Street Journal (an news outlet which, like PBS, I find worth paying for to get a perspective that differs from the rest of the media herd) that confirms what I’d thought all along: devices that don’t do much generally don’t use a lot of energy.

This is important because efforts to encourage people to do things that are easy, like unplugging a cell phone charger or reusing a plastic bag, are likely to consume our psychic energy and make us feel good without doing things that, from a scientific basis, could really make a difference. It’s the unbreakable laws of thermodynamics from basic physics: things that create a lot of light, heat, and/or movement consume a lot of energy. A light bulb that could burn your hand while illuminating the room is a lot bigger problem than some device with a little LED that gets just a little warmer than room temperature.

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to do the big stuff: either it’s expensive and hard to know if it’s worthwhile, or it would require unacceptable changes in life. Right now I’m trying to find someone to insulate my attic, which I’ve decided, even at a cost of more than a thousand dollars, is the biggest difference I can make; even getting someone to come give me an estimate is a hassle. But keeping my house uncomfortably cold, or not using the car, are not realistic options. Newer houses are better insulated than mine will ever be, but tend to be bigger—according the WSJ article above, they have more than 45% more space to light and heat than those built a generation ago.

I’m not going to lose sleep worrying if I’ve done enough little things to save the planet; I’m going to lose sleep over the big ones.

I didn’t renew my Costco membership this time. Not that $50 will break the bank but I have a hard time believing
that it’s really buying me convenience and savings. I think it’s time to take a look at my motivations.

We never went to these stores growing up; my mother preferred to shop in small quantities as she needed things and was more concerned with the week’s grocery budget. I liked to help her with the shopping but she was never wanted to pick the large sizes of things if they cost more, even if I was proud of my arithmetic skills in understanding it had a lower unit price. Today I guess they’d call her way “just-in-time inventory management” on a household scale. When we went to other people’s houses I was always envious of their well-stocked pantries. I can really wound up about little details sometimes, and not having the right plastic bag to pack my sandwich in or something would really bother me. I resolved to do things differently when I grew up. In shopping, like so many other things when you’re starting a family, you have to deal with tension between doing things you own way now that you’re the grown-up and being faithful to the way your parents raised you.

We had tried Costco once before we had a baby (we got a free promotional membership when a new store opened) and immediately rejected it. We didn’t have room in our small apartment for anything in bulk sizes. When we joined again we were in a larger condo, with a new baby. We’d been going to Target on almost a weekly basis to buy diapers and formula (at the back of the store, so you have to walk by everything else). It was around the time of the 2004 Presidential election and I remember hearing things about how despite Target’s cachet, Costco was more of a blue-state retailer, in terms of how it treated workers or something — I don’t remember exactly, it seems like there was a red state/blue state analysis of everything back then. Anyhow, having a family with children involves a certain amount of routine that makes it more practical to buy things in bulk.

This is the essence of the game: there are really very few things that it makes sense to buy in club sizes. I can easily count them on my fingers: toilet paper, trash bags, Ziploc bags, laundry soap, Diet Coke, juice boxes. The best part about Costco, by far, was never running out of these items (fulfilling that childhood dream I mentioned above). Wandering around that big store, though, it seems like a waste of time to go in and buy just those few things. Almost every food product we’d tried at Costco resulted in wasted leftovers; even nonperishable and frozen food loses its appeal eventually. I’ll admit there are a couple things - a coffee grinder; a large chromed-wired shelving unit - that I got a deal on at Costco and continue to enjoy. But far more often a trip to Costco ended with shopping time gone and a long shopping list remaining. If Costco helped save money it was as much by allowing us to buy cheap groceries at Trader Joe’s once the non-grocery items were crossed off the shopping list. (I give a lot of credit to the people who run main-line groceries stores like Shaw’s; they don’t get any respect but at least make an honest business of selling people things they actually needed.) The other side of the game is that you are supposed to pretend that you are buying at wholesale prices intended for business-to-business purchases; the membership fee is a bit of legal fiction that makes you “technically” qualify as a business. The whole thing seems offputtingly undemocratic to me - what do you mean my money is no good here if I’m not a “member of the club”? It’s true that the selection of products sometimes includes variations you won’t find at other retailers, including some things that resemble common food-service supplies; but the products at Costco are clearly intended to be sold to consumers, at least as much as they are at any other retailer. At my last job they bought break-room snacks and supplies at Costco, but we were a small software company; we didn’t buy computers there any more than restaurants confusing using Costco with Sysco.

What finally did Costco in for me was napkins and then plastic wrap, and then some funny business with a computer printer. (Oh, and diapers.) While it’s great to know that you can get a case of commercial-grade napkin-dispenser napkins when you need them, we stopped seeing the ordinary store-brand white household napkins. Then, while I’d had some great Costco plastic wrap, heavy duty, with a nice cutter, that I’d originally bought in a package of two 750 square foot rolls, the same product was now packaged in a single 3000 s.f. roll, that wouldn’t fit in my drawer. (The drawer that was a carefully considered part of the kitchen I’d just renovated for tens of thousands of dollars!) Then I was looking for a new computer printer, and in doing some research realized that Costco (a) had a different model number for the same HP printer you could buy elsewhere - it was actually a better price at Costco.com but felt sleazy and (b) it was $5 more in the store than online. Regarding diapers, while we aren’t buying them at the moment, Costco stopped carrying Pampers in favor of the store brand (or Huggies). All are adequate but we liked Pampers, and the bottom line in all of this is that if Costco isn’t going to be the go-to place for certain categories of household supplies, then they aren’t going to be a place we go to at all.

At least not for now. Actually I’m thinking of joining BJ’s instead. They advertise smaller sizes and, at least in our particular location, are closer to other stores in case they don’t have everything we need. The warehouse clubs like to advertise themselves as a resource for frugal households, but really they’re just a new way someone’s invented to part consumers with their money. But really it all boils down to making the never-ending need for toilet paper and juice boxes somehow interesting, and at 1000 words I can at least say it’s been interesting.