💭 🐠🐟 It can be relaxing and peaceful to watch fish in an aquarium and tell them your secrets. Don’t worry: Fish won’t give away any of your secrets. Well, except for the sole. I suspect it may be a gossip or blabbermouth. You know the old expression: “Don’t tell a sole.”

🌡✉🍴 I have convinced myself I have the mettle and personal responsibility to go out now in the middle of the night (01:15) in the extreme coldness (18°F) to do an important task (mailing my maintenance payment) but I acknowledge that’s only if I get some food in the process. Let’s see if I can get some real food at a nearby 24‐hour restaurant rather than indulge in discount leftover Christmas sweets at the drug store (if they’re even still available).

Past Heads of Years

Just in time for sundown and thus the end of the holiday, here is a list of my past Roʼsh hash‐Shana–themed micro‐content which I compiled on my hard disc and thought worthy of sharing. Because Google eliminated their micro‐blogging service Jaiku, this list had to be cobbled from various sources. Some of the accompanying links lead to holiday videos.

5769 (2008), preserved nowhere but on Facebook as far as I know

• שנה טובה!‏ 🔗‏ ‎—29 Sept. (Facebook)
• …wishes all a כתיבה וחתימה טובה. May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year. —29 Sept. (Facebook)

5770 (2009), published on Jaiku, preserved on FriendFeed

• …awaits the Jewish New Year by listening to a Yiddish cover version of a popular Hebrew song about the coming year. 🔗 —17 Sept. (FriendFeed)
• …feels if you do not have access to a shofar (ram’s horn) you should improvise. Happy New Year. 🔗 —17 Sept. (FriendFeed)
• …now awaits the Jewish New Year by listening to a Turkish cover version of the same popular Hebrew song about the coming year. 🔗 —18 Sept. (FriendFeed)

5771 (2010), published on Jaiku, preserved on Google Buzz

• …wishes all a sweet new year, but tonight will not be eating the traditional foods depicted in the video. 🔗 —8 Sept. (Buzz)
• ☼ At my location, sunset will be 19:16. Sometimes, waiting for sunset for a holiday to begin can be a drag. 🔗 —8 Sept. (Buzz)
• ‏✡ לשנה טובה תכתבו ותחתמו.‏ 🔗‏ ‎—8 Sept. (Buzz)
• …is celebrating the Jewish new year by listening to a Sefaraddi‐Israeli Gipsy Kings knockoff band. 🔗 —9 Sept. (Buzz)

5772 (2011), published on Google+

• …thinks it perfectly appropriate to celebrate the Jewish new year with a cover version of “Gold Digger.” 🎶⚞✡ 🔗 —27 Sept. (Google+)
• 📺 ‏„שנה טובה.”‏ An appearance by the late Ofra Haza on the children’s television series Parpar Neḥmad. (🍎🍯) ♬ 🔗 —28 Sept. (Google+)
• 🎵 What could be more exotic than the Zulu song “Mbube” (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) adapted with a Hebrew lyric? 🔗 —28 Sept. (Google+)
• 🎉 A happy, healthy and sweet year 5772 to all! לשנה טובה תכתבו ותחתמו. שנה טובה ומתוקה.‏ Roş Haşana Bayramı kutlu olsun. 🍎🍯 🔗 —29 Sept. (Google+)

5773 (2012), published on Google+

• ♫ It’s too theistic for me at parts, but the Ein Prat Fountainheads did release a really cute music video for Roʼsh hash‐Shana (ראש השנה) last year. 🍎🍯 📹 🔗 —16 Sept. (Google+)
• 😞 I always think to have traditional foods after the holiday has begun, so I doubt I’ll find lekex (לעקעך)/​revani/​basbusa (بسبوسة) in my area. 🔗 —17 Sept. (Google+)

Shana Ṭoba שנה טובה

📷 Roʼsh hash‐Shana ראש השנה, the Jewish new year, will soon be here. 📅

My new cover photo on the social networking sites: Chany Crystal, Shana Tova, 29 Sept. 2006, Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.

Window in a Square

My new cover photo on the social networking sites: Maria Hobl, Window in a Square, photograph shot in Agadir, Morocco, 29 Mar. 2011. Flickr, 14 Apr. 2011, under a Creative Commons license.

Putting nearly all my photographs online

Summer sunflowers on 72^nd Street between 35^th and 37^th avenues, Jackson Heights, 18 August 2008. (Photograph by Elyaqim Mosheh Adam.)

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I have fallen so far behind in uploading my photographs and videos online that I have decided to work at least an hour every day “processing” them for upload, typically in batches of twenty‐five at a time. I write captions for them, remove a few failures, cursorily “enhance” them in iPhoto, set their approximate geographical locations, upload them to both Facebook and Google+ and then promote them (on those sites as well as on Twitter, Tumblr, FriendFeed and Pinterest.) If it sounds time-consuming, it is.

I am over a year behind in uploading photographs of events I attended with others and nearly two years behind in uploading photographs I shot while alone. (Originally, I had separated them into those categories and have wound up locked in that pattern.) Considering the number of pictures I shoot (sometimes hundreds in a day) combined with how much I procrastinate, it has taken me many months just to upload the hundreds of pictures I shot in June 2011 alone and I am still not quite finished yet.

My work schedule is as follows: I work on pictures of events I have attended with others. After completing work on all the pictures I shot in one day’s worth of events, I move on to a batch of older pictures I shot while alone. When finished with that, I move back to an event I attended with others. Wednesday, however, I work on videos, and Thursday, I work on the Great Digitization Project, my attempt to digitize and upload the tremendous backlog of photographs and video I shot before purchasing my first digital still camera in 2004.

This past Wednesday, I uploaded videos to Google+ that had been languishing on my hard disc since I recorded them in April 2010! Other than rotating some of them ninety degrees if necessary, they are the original separate video files as recorded. The next step is to combine videos shot the same day and then additionally upload them to YouTube where I can enhance them.