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Judaism: education is a catch-all bucket. Sometimes things start here and then spin off into their own tags.
Sh'liach K'hilah (LJ swallows the first apostrophe for some reason) is (was) the Reform movement's para-rabbinic program. I attended in 2004 and 2005.
Open Beit Midrash (obm) at Hebrew College. I attended in 2007. I also have a more-general Hebrew College tag that includes entries about a program called Ta Sh'ma that I attended in 2006. One of these days I might give those their own tag.
Melton = Florence Melton Program, an international two-year program of which I completed the first year in 2006-2007. (My class session got cancelled the following year. Someday I will probably return, if the scheduling works.)
Study with my rabbi is for entries related to my one-on-one study. Midrash overlaps that, covering my midrash study in particular.
NHC is a tag for the chavurah program I attended in August 2008.
Kallah is a tag for the ALEPH kallah that I'm attending in 2009.
Shalom Hartman is a tag for the Shalom Hartman Institute, a program I considered in 2008 and 2009. I'll get there some year, I expect...
Pico review: I'll definitely go back. :-) But you probably want to know more.
Thursday night about half of the students (and one of the faculty members) went out for dinner. I had hoped everyone would come, but most of the students are local and thus have other obligations (spouses, kids, etc). It was a nice dinner with those who did make it.
That's turning out to be a key difference between this program and my experience of Sh'liach K'hilah. In SK, no one was local: almost everyone stayed in the dorm on campus, the days started early in the morning and ended late at night, we were with each other most of that time, and there were basically no outside distractions. The group had a real chance to get cohesive. Here, two-thirds of the students disappear soon after classes end at 4 or 4:30, only a few of us are staying in the dorm, and while I'm enjoying my interactions with most of my classmates as individuals, the group isn't really gelling strongly. That's not better or worse, just different. On the plus side, it's giving me time to spend with local friends. :-)
After the dinner tonight I met up with 
siderea (yay!). We
walked around the area near the Hynes T stop, including 15 minutes
in the Boston Library (it was near closing time). It's a neat place
-- a library with a strong secondary identity as a gallery. Tonight
they had a nifty exhibit of miniature books (I mean really
tiny; they used coins as size indicators in some cases). Some of
the miniature books came with miniature magnifying glasses, which was
a nice touch. Some of the books were a little larger and I could
imagine one actually holding them and reading rather than just
showing off. After we got kicked out of the library we walked
around the area some and then spent a while sitting in a cafe
talking geekery. :-)
Part of the T is out of service, so for the last few stops heading back to the school we got kicked off the train and transferred to a bus. For all that the trains do a good job of communicating upcoming stops, the bus I was on sucked. There was a banner-style digital sign up front that was dutifully scrolling date and time past us twice a minute. Once I saw a request that people give up seats to the elderly. But it was not used to name upcoming stops -- and since it was stopping at the T stops, not on every corner, that would not have been burdensome. It irked me because I had not memorized the map (hadn't anticipated the problem) and I would not recognize my stop at night from inside the bus. The bus was packed, so walking to the front to ask the driver wasn't going to happen. I had to ask other passengers (characteristically, most did not know what stops we were passing), which was frustrating. I wonder if this was a failure of the system or a failure of that particular driver.
I discovered tonight (when trying to install a mouse driver
hakamadare clued me in about) that I don't know the
root password for my machine. Err, oops. I wonder how I can fix
that. (Maybe I'm lucky and the person I got the machine from
remembers.)
Wednesday night I joined Andrew and his family (sorry Andrew; I can
never get the user name right on the first try), mabfan,
and gnomi for dinner, conversation, and ice cream.
I had a good time. How can you not, when in a single evening you
can geek about halacha, science fiction, comics (that was mostly
mabfan, TV, and music? :-) Mabfan or Andrew, please
remind me of the name of that TV show you were so excited about
getting on DVD?
Much time was spent trying to find a way, within halacha, for someone (I won't out you here) to read the new Harry Potter book on Shabbat. (Some of my suggestions were rejected because they would involve waiting until morning; apparently solutions that don't involve starting by quarter past midnight aren't interesting.) I hope you find a solution, but if not, I suspect a 22-hour delay isn't fatal... :-)
Erik (one of my cats) is staying with a friend while I'm here, and
apparently he's very comfortable in her house. She can offer him
avian theatre (we don't get many birds visible from cat-accessible
windows), and he quickly established his place in the household.
Good, as he'll be going back for Pennsic in a couple weeks. :-)
I miss the cats, but knowing they're in good hands helps.
Never mind the academic stuff: I'm beginning to wonder if I would
have the physical stamina to attend this school if I lived in this
city. That's one steep hill! I'm staying in a dorm at the top of
the hill for this program (so no biggie), but the houses up here
are all in the multi-million-dollar range, so ordinary people don't
live here. (Actually, I wonder about the people who live in some
of the humongous houses up here. Are they insanely rich, or large
families or other groups? Some of these places look like they'd
easily be 10,000 square feet.)
There appear to be no vending machines on Hebrew College's campus. How odd.
I've had a few instances of an odd style of encounter here, and I
wonder if it's a Boston thing or if I'm just unlucky. I have
asked people on the street (or in the T) what should be simple
questions (e.g. "which of these intersecting streets is Center?"
when there's no sign), and people who seem to be from around here
don't know. In the example I just gave, it was a group of students
who'd just gotten off a city bus. On the T, I asked someone who
seemed to be a regular T rider (based on overheard conversation)
"does this train go to Government Center" (a big stop), she said
she didn't know, and then she got on my train (after I got the
answer elsewhere) and rode it past that stop. There have
been a couple other cases, too. Is this a "don't wanna talk to
strangers" thing, or what?