Taking Your Camera on the Road

Dear Dona:

Mom told me that she really enjoyed your T-Day dinner. How fun. We kept things quiet here, just a dinner for two other couples, and only done out of obligation. We needed to pay back some dinners from ages ago, so we invited them over. It wasn’t much fun, but we tried.

How wonderful to have Joseph and Carrie up for Thanksgiving. I can’t believe he hadn’t been up before. Did you get much of a chance to take him around Seattle?

As for the quilting shop in the market, I found that when I was there last time and was actually good and spent less than a hundred dollars…okay, kinda good. What is the final story on your mother’s quilt? Did you get it fixed? Can’t remember if you told me. My head has been so filled with my writing, I keep forgetting what someone told me yesterday. It’s a strange way to live, but part of my hermiting that I’ve been doing since I got back here. Focused on the creative and staying out of the social circle as much as possible.

It is so weird to be here in the land of no Christmas. On a phone call to my mother before Christmas, Lindsey asked me about all the things I was going to do for Christmas, after insisting on knowing when I was going to “come down for Christmas.” I kept telling her I wasn’t coming down and explained to her that I was still in Israel and there isn’t any Christmas in Israel.

“Why?”

“Because Israel is a Jewish country and they don’t celebrate Christmas.”

“Well, that’s stupid.”

I did explain to her that they celebrate Hanukkah, and she thought that was great because she had heard it involved a lot of candles and stuff. I explained to her about the miracle from God to keep the oil lamp burning in the temple for 8 days on only an ounce of oil while the Jews worked overtime to crush new oil to keep the eternal flame going and replace the contaminated oil, and she said, “Wow, you are so smart!” It’s the simple things that impress the youngsters.

I’m starting to slowly get the news about the presidential race in the states. I guess it is starting to heat up. Here in Israel, it is illegal to publicly campaign until three weeks before the election. No posters, signs, handbills, nothing. Within those three weeks, you had better let people know who you are and what you are for or you won’t get the vote. It’s a mad house of campaigning, and then, three weeks later, it is over. Done, finished. Lovely!! I think the US should have the same rule.

Hey, if your reputation hasn’t preceded your campaign, then what are you doing running for office anyway. I guess it is easier being in such a small country. Did you realize that at the widest point, Israel is the width of Edmonds to Lake Sammamish…or Tacoma to Lake Stevens…maybe that might be stretching it but it is about two hours drive to cross the country. It takes an hour to drive from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem 0 minutes if there were no hills) and then maybe a half hour to an hour to go through Jerusalem and down the hill to the Dead Sea/Southern Jordan Valley and Jericho to the Jordan border. Barely two hours across. Amazing. All this fuss over such a little place. A couple weeks ago a campaign of evil was started when the EU published some uncredited report that stated that “survey results say” the European public believes that the number one threat to world peace is Israel. We’re in a pimple on the butt of the planet and it is the MOST SCARY country in the world. Really. I’d think after the US got through doing their evil pounding on Afghanistan and Iraq (whose next? Syria, Saudi? Libya has taken a dive to come up smiling through the poop so they’re safe for the minute.) for reasons we are still trying to figure out, I’d say that the world had more to fear from the US than Israel. Leave Israel alone and they won’t bother anyone. Trust me. Spend a little time here and you will see a country that honestly just wants to be left alone by the rest of the world.

Oh, the news from Israel is so weird it is hardly to be believed. Let’s see, Sharon has basically said that Israel is pulling out of the West Bank areas (not all but most) and that Israel will “reward quiet with quiet”. After a huge speech a couple weeks ago, he has drawn a huge line in the spinning sands that says there will be no messing around any more. He wasn’t clear on what the consequences were going to be, but if the PA doesn’t get its act together within 6 months, he says he is going to do it for him or totally cut off all negotiations, dealings, everything. Close the door. Kinda the “don’t play nice, we’re kicking you out of the sandbox” routine. The terrorist groups are pretty much devastated by the past year’s campaign of targeted assassinations and arrests, and they are having a hard time recovering, but they are still, with Arafat’s help, holding the PA’s new government (such as it is) hostage and unable to DO anything. Now, here comes the really bizarre stuff.

On a visit to pray at the Al Aksa Mosque (Temple Mount), the foreign minister of Egypt was attacked with shoes by Palestinians also at the mosque. Two PA security teams had been assigned as escorts to him, and four Israeli security guards (part of the government’s official security folks) went along to make sure everything was okay. When the attack happened, and the shoes started flying, the PA security teams (something like 14 or more men) stood by and watched (we joke that they probably passed shoes to the attackers) while the minister was pummeled, his forehead being cut open and other wounds from the shoe bashing. The four Israeli security guards moved in when they saw nothing was being done to protect the minister and rescued him, pushing through the crowds and getting attacked with more shoes and fists, and rushing him to the nearby hospital where he was stitched up and mended. Egypt was pissed, to say the least. Attacks with shoes, especially shoes taken off because of the filth on them before going into the mosque, is one of the most humiliating things that can be done in the Arab world. They were yelling that Egypt was a traitor and other things, but Egypt is now seriously ticked. They were the last real friends of the Palestinians. Egypt has now totally closed their borders to anyone with Palestinian papers, and ejected out the terrorist group heads who have been free to live and roam through Egypt gathering support, money and weapons. For the first time every, they are working IN COOPERATION with Israel to close down the tunnels dug under villages along the border for the delivery of weapons and explosives. Before, they would stand there and insist that there were no tunnels and that Israel was making it all up, siding with the Palestinians about the horrible deeds of the Israelis for destroying homes along the border. Now they have bulldozed down homes on their side of the border and blown up the imaginary tunnels.

With Saddam gone (he was paying $25,000 a head to the family of every suicide bomber who succeeded) and on the hate side of Egypt, the PA is really hurting for Arab support. I didn’t know this for sure, but I’ve finally verified it that people who call themselves Palestinians (or their parents called themselves that) are not permitted legal papers, passports, or land ownership in any Arab land. Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, etc. With the permission of Israel, for the first time ever, Jordan has given permission to about 100,000 “Palestinians” to get legal papers that give them a “round trip” one time only visit to the West Bank and back to Jordan. Sharon has agreed to this and insisted that Jordan do this as part of some agreement that we all don’t know about – a “people for land” exchange, they are saying. It is scheduled to happen soon, we’re all just waiting to see the results. Israel is the only country that gives Palestinians legal papers and rights to land ownership, business ownership, and citizenship status, either as an “Arab/Israeli” or PA resident. Interesting.

Anyway, the bizarre isn’t over. Just after Christmas, Arafat cleaned out the PA treasury. Totally. The PA has only had an independent government bank account for a couple of years. Before that, everything was in Arafat’s name, and a lot went into his Swiss accounts. The government account is now totally for the government, but Arafat obviously has signing rights on it, because he cleaned it out. January 6 was to be pay day for 80,000 PA government employees and there is no money to pay them. The past couple weeks the new prime minister has been begging for money from the international community who has said, “Throw shoes at Egypt’s foreign minister and expect money from us? Who are you kidding?” and saying no. The last new prime minister lasted four months. This one, Quieria or whatever his name is (we’re learning not to remember them as they don’t seem to last), has been around for two months and he is threatening to resign so he won’t get the flack for the empty bank account. We are waiting to hear the word any day.

Israel’s government has been on strike for over three months. This had made it impossible for us to get Brent’s work permit renewed, so we can’t leave for a vacation. Now head of the treasury, Netanyahu is trying to crush the government monopoly on shipping, customs, port facilities, post office, telephone, and other government agencies. Now, in theory, this is great. The “padding” of the government officials and the leeching of the government funds to pay for luxury homes and “essentials” needs to be tackled with a vengeance. The cuckolding of the port authorities overcharging for import fees and running a mafia operation also needs to be put down. BUT the government still has to function, and they still have to work within a budget, so he is trying to strangle them down while still keeping a viable government. It’s a tough job and while I don’t agree with all of his tactics, I understand the need to be brutal. So the country is living on postal service from 8am to 2pm. If you need to call the phone company to pay a bill or get information on a phone number, only call between 8am and 2pm. After that, you get a recording. Waiting for stuff coming in from outside the country? Well, some of the private, household stuff is coming in, but Office Depot, Ace Hardware, and other major importers of stuff have been waiting for months while ships sit off shore battling mice and other watery ills. Shelves are partially empty and not being restocked. Garbage pickup comes and goes when it pleases, so it is typical to find the streets cluttered with overflowing trash bins for weeks at a time, and then cleaned up and nice for a couple of weeks and then overflowing again. Meter maids/men or Parking Enforcers have been introduced for the first time to Tel Aviv, and now people are accumulating parking tickets by the drawer full. No one is paying them, but they are kept well occupied with the task. Strange stuff.

I just got an email from a friend of mine who works for the city in Everett and she just got her 2004 pay contract. She is pissed off and trying to figure out how she will live in 2004 on 1990 wages. Rental prices in Israel and property have dropped to their lowest in decades. Apartments that used to rent for $1200 are now going desperately empty for $800 and less. If you have the bucks, its probably a good time to buy property here, but few are selling because they can’t afford to take the loss. It’s a strange time and place to be here in.

Strange doesn’t seem limited to Israel. I just finished listening to the NPR radio debate (what – the first one since Truman?) of the Democratic folks and it left me wondering. Dean “sounds” brilliant and I know he is the “talk” of the Internet, but I am so used to masters of spin, I have to admit that he sounds extraordinarily rehearsed, prepared, and coached. Like he is saying all the right things all the time to attract attention and “sound right” but I don’t feel like it goes below the skin or is just rehearsed. I’ve not been exposed to any of the stumping by anyone, so I’m just gauging it on the debate. I have to admit that Carol Mosely Braun (is that how it is spelled?) also attracted my attention. What the US really needs is someone who KNOWS international stuff and the rest of them haven’t a clue, really. Understanding domestic stuff is fine, but really understanding the whole world and how the international community works is better for today than isolationism. The fact that she comes from “the people”, a real representative of the United States (black, woman, been poor, been rich) combined with her travel and ambassador experience, that really appeals to me better than a bunch of stupid white men.

Yes, I’m reading Michael Moore’s book, Stupid White Men. I downloaded it off the net. Whew! I thought I was surrounded by conspiracy here! Goodness. Have I learned a lot about the unelected president of the United States. So what do you think about the politics in America?

Brent and I are still recovering from the loss of our little fuzzy boy, Dahni, and being really sick. I was down for almost three months with some viral/throat infection thing. I’d think I was fine but tired all the time and then I’d find my throat all coated white with little yellow spots again. I went through two bouts of antibiotics. Finished those up finally two weeks ago and the doctor gave me a clean bill of health. Then a friend’s cat was hit by a car and I went to help her wait for the vet (they make house calls here) and the normally cuddly kitty (only 3 years old but a swear 400 pounds of lazy cat) bit me solidly and viciously twice on the left thumb. Went through to the bone both times. He was in such horrible pain and we were doing the best we could to keep him calm and quite. Broken back. Had to put him down. It was really bad, but we’re all hanging in there. After the vet we spent the next three hours in clinics getting Maureen repaired (she had her arm opened up with a four inch gash from teeth and numerous cat bites and scratches from carrying him up the stairs to her apartment from the street) and then trying to find someone who would give me a tetanus shot. After the whole evening trying to find someone who would 1) accept my insurance, 2) accept cash, and 3) give me a tetanus shot – I went home and tried again in the morning, my thumb the size of a baseball mit. After visiting two pharmacies and more doctors, I finally ended up in the hospital emergency room. Ridiculous. With more fuss (ball-ah-gone – Russian for “big mess”), I learned that NO ONE in Israel can give me a tetanus shot any more. In the past couple of months the only place that has the shots is the big hospital emergency room. Can’t get it anywhere else for some hoarding reasons that no one knows. So I stood in the emergency room for 2 and a half hours (chairs filled with slimy bleeding and broken people who smelled like cigs, grease, garlic and arm pits – emergency rooms in big cities around the world are all the same) with my back aching from standing still on the hard floor for so long, until I could finally get enough attention to get a shot and get out of there. Totally ridiculous.

And now I’m back on antibiotics…something called Augmentum for bites and baterial infections associated with stuff like that. Side effects: diarrhea and constipation. What? Can’t make up its mind, I guess.

Three different kinds of antibiotics in three months. Think I’ll build up some immunity or resistance?

On the brighter side, (is there one? I’m looking and not finding one lately) my mother, as you probably know, has a herniated disk in her back, maybe two, and is taking 13 different kinds of medication including methadone (we’re allergic to pain medication and so far the methadone has done nothing bad to her and she likes the “sleepies”) for pain. I’m calling her in a couple of hours when she wakes up to find out what the newest report is. If she requires surgery and it will put her down for a couple weeks, I’m flying home. Have you talked to her lately? If you’ve seen her, let me know how she is “really” doing because I’m not getting a good “picture” of the shape she is really in. I’d appreciate the insider knowledge.

My dad picked up the phone a couple of days ago and thought it was broken. Couldn’t get a dial tone. He banged away at it and kept trying and nothing. Pissed off, he slammed it down, walked away, and then decided to give it one more try. It worked. Later, when he tried again, it wasn’t working. Trying to get it to work again, he switched ears. Dial tone. Switched back to the other ear. Silence. Yep. Through infection, clogging, or the final straw, he is off to the doctor to get his ears checked for hearing loss. He’s had terrible problems with his hearing (blames it on his shipyard days) for years, cranking the television up to 4000 decibels) for years, so we knew it was just a matter of time before it got worse. We’ll find out how “worse” it will get soon.

I’m working hard on redoing the underlying structure of the web page and having a great deal of fun doing it. It is really creative work when you get down to it, though it just looks like a lot of code. The new pages will be streamlined and much easier, I hope. Faster loading at the least. Then it is back to that damn book. Got to get to it. I’ve been hacking away at it for too long and not getting it done.

I’ll let you know when I know if I’m coming home.

We had a really quite – well, actually it was a really busy Christmas with Hanukkah stuff and Christmas stuff. I actually went to two Christmas parties. I usually go to one or none, and it just all felt like too much. We’re really into being quiet this year. It’s safer that way for us. We just like being together alone, and yet it really feels like we’ve been with too many other people lately and we’re tired of it. Scrooges, aren’t we.

Well, we’re trying to get out of the country for SNOW but the government is on strike again (for three or more months now) and we can’t get our work permit renewed, so we can’t leave until that is fixed up. What a pain. Been through this so many times, it’s old, but it is still a pain.

I sound like a whiner, but there is one good thing. While it was over 75 degrees yesterday and I was walking around in a tank top sweating, it has been storming all night and all day and Lake Dubnov is outside my window again. I went upstairs to check on our roof top swimming pool (forms during rain storms only) and the new resurfacing of the entire building for months and months last year paid off and all the water ran out and down the drains so I may get through this winter with only one leak in the sliding window by my desk (comes in through the rails and will require complete ripping out of the whole sliding glass window sliding glasses long) to repair – so I just put towels out and change them all the time). That beats the buckets I’ve had for the previous four winters.

Four winters in Israel. Bizarre. Anyway, the storm is fabulous and the trees are blowing sideways and the thunder shakes the cement buildings, echoing on and on and on and on, rebounding off the cement everything. The rain comes in sheets not drips, and we actually had pea-sized hail last night. I opened the windows and let it beat on me. I loved it. Miniature snow balls. I threw one at Brent but it melted before it hit him and he just got lightly splashed.

It will only last for a day or so, but I want it to be like this for MONTHS.

Heard there was tons of snow in Seattle. Lusting!

Love you and hope the holidays were and are wonderful!

Tel Aviv, Israel

My parents and a few friends are asking me what I want for Christmas. Shoot, I have such a hard time finding presents for THEM, how in the world am I supposed to come up with ideas for myself? So it got me thinking. Now, if I had a body like Britney Spears or Jennifer Lopez, then I’d tell the whole world that I want nothing but gift certificates from Victoria’s Secret. Having spent the majority of my life as a bra size 38 KKK (yes, that is a bra size and not the nasty group of American terrorists) until I got my breasts cut off and down to a decent single letter size, I lust for gorgeous lacy bras. I still can’t wear the things, but I can now wear more colorful and interesting bras as a D cup. I long to be a C cup, the perfect little tit size. Oh, I’m not confessing anything secret here. My whole family and all of my friends know this about me. It is only recently that the underwear companies of the world are paying attention to big boobs. So top of my list would be, if they made them in my size, gift certificates from Victoria’s Secret. But since I’m day dreaming here, this is a fantasy. Besides, there are no Victoria’s Secret stores in Israel. Not much help, am I?

Honestly, for the past few years, I have everything I could ever possibly want or need. And if I want it, I go get it. Not that we are rolling in the money, oh, no. After years of surrounding myself with STUFF, coming out my ears with the STUFF, getting rid of it all and hitting the road was more than just a great relief on the back and shoulders. It has freed up my head and my thinking about STUFF. It didn’t happen overnight, and it is an ongoing process, but the “getting” has seriously been replaced with the contentment that comes with having and not needing. I’m now into the giving, but not even the giving of stuff (though that can’t be completely ignored, though I would like to). It is now more about the giving of self, altruism, if you will. It is what I give of myself to others in the short time I spend with them that makes a difference in the quality of my own life. Hopefully, it does a little good in the life of others. They tell me it does, but that’s their problem. Mine can only be in what it does for me in the process of the doing. Make sense?

So what do I want for Christmas? World peace? What a crock. I have now reached a mellow age where I have seen enough of the world and enough of the world of man to know that where man stands, peace will not reign. Or to put it more bluntly, as George Carlin says, “My God’s dick is bigger than your God’s dick.” The guy with the biggest dick wins and every guy has to be comparing dicks with each other, and if they don’t match up, kill them. Looking for some humor, I turned to an old favorite, George Carlin, downloading a few great classics from Kazaa since I had to leave my CDs and tapes behind in the states. I adore his cynical perspective on the state of the world. His claim that the greatest cause of death in the world throughout history is God is so true. Living here in the unholy land of Israel, I see the evidence everywhere.

Even now, Osama Bin Laden and his crew are fighting over the perceived melt down of the Islamic faith, blaming the Satan United States for its demise. I don’t know what one has to do with the other, but then I was never an expert into reading the minds of twisted brains. The Bosnia War, now almost forgotten by the world, was fought by neighbors over a threat of “my god over your god”. Over and over we hear the propaganda so cleverly put out that the number one threat to world peace is Israel. Huh? I’m sorry, but I’ve been living here for four years and the only ones Israel has ever threatened, and actually did something about it occasionally, were its neighbors who were getting ready to bring the “wrath of God” down on their heads and “drive them into the sea”. Israel ain’t threatening the US. They ain’t threatening Korea or Turkey or Pakistan or China. They ain’t even thinking about doing anything about Taiwan. Their citizens certainly didn’t fly any planes into the Trade Center, and they aren’t out playing suicide bombers with civilians anywhere in the world. All Israel wants to do is live in peace among the millions and millions of people who hate them, and they have a long record of doing just about anything it takes to keep that peace, including giving up tons of land won in war and a lot of other concessions, just to have what peace they have today. So how can Israel be a threat? Ain’t it the millions of Arabs who want to drive them out of a land they haven’t had control over for over 5000 years?

Jews have always lived in Israel, for over 5000 years, making their way under the variety of dictators under various foreign governments that ruled over the Arab lands. So much fighting over such a little tiny piece of land. Look around and you will find very few Arab relics and archeological evidence of Arabs living here. Mostly you will find tons of Crusader, Greece, Roman, Turk, and Jewish archeological sites. The few Muslim sites are only a couple hundred years old or so. Either way, it isn’t a matter of who is right or wrong. The UN established the area with the permission of the British, and Israel exists. You don’t see the Arabs fighting over Jordan’s right to exist, or Iraq or any of the other countries “manufactured” and established by foreign governments in the past. Jordan never existed as a nation, not even as a tribe until the British established Trans-Jordan, the area of land that included both sides of the Jordan River. I don’t see suicide bombers attacking Jordan for being made a state just about the same time as Israel.

I get confused on this issue. Anyway, haven’t Christians done more to kill millions of people on behalf of their god than just about anyone else. I’d see them as a bigger threat to world peace than Israel. So is it god that makes men fight, or is as good an excuse as anything to justify man’s need to bust a few heads? I don’t know. But I do know that asking for world peace is a joke. Until there is peace in the hearts of man, there can be no peace in the world – anywhere.

So peace is out. What else could I possibly want? Since buying my Palm Tungsten T hand computer, I now have access to thousands of books just waiting for me to read, which thrills me to no end and saves tons of space in our little apartment, not to mention all the trees saved from being made into paper. I want snow, but that is hard to mail, even with the fast mail service available today. Keep working on that, guys. I got plenty of clothes, and I only have one style of shoe I wear, of which I now have a great collection. Oh, I still have my hiking boots, though I’ve worn them two times in the last four years. I don’t even wear tennis shoes now. Just my Source sandals. Love those things. Let’s see, what else? I bought tons of fabric over the past couple years for my sewing projects, though I haven’t had time this fall for sewing like I normally do. So that’s out.

Cook books. I have a new enthusiasm for cook books now that I’ve learned how to cook and how to read a recipe. That is something I could do more with, but I like buying my own so I get things I’m interested in cooking and not just a jumble of books. I love the picture cook books that not only show you in great visual detail how to make the food (I have trouble cooking something from a straight printed recipe without a picture to tell me how it “should” look when I’m done), as well as the travel-oriented cook books that show you the history of the area and the reason behind the foods and spices. Again, those are personal things. I’m just lousy to shop for, aren’t I?

Okay, I’ll do more thinking on this subject, but I do have to tell you that on my list of things I HAVE TO HAVE when ever we go to the states are things like AA and AAA batteries, REAL zip lock bags, real Q-Tips, and Root Beer. Oh, I miss Root Beer. And cheese. Good hard, aged sharp cheddar cheese. Oh, yeah. Root Beer, sharp cheddar cheese, and Victoria’s Secret (Okay, I’ll settle for Lane Bryant on my fat body)….now that is something to day dream about….

Lorelle
Tel Aviv, Israel

We are trying to make arrangements for some kind of Christmas experience this year. Last year we spent a week in Jerusalem desperately looking for Christmas and hardly found any. In fact, on Christmas Eve, we went to the Swedish Christian Information Center and I asked the lady behind the desk to help me find Christmas. “I haven’t had Christmas in four years and I want to find some Christmas.”

“Where in the world could you possibly be,” she hissed, shocked. “And have no Christmas?”

“Israel.”

That stopped her. Then she smiled and nodded. Of course I could be in Israel and not experience Christmas. Unfortunately, our choices were few and we only had a little Christmas. This year, I’m determined to have some kind of Christmas. I miss the lights, I miss the cold, I miss snow – shoot, I miss weather period – I miss the smell of cinnamon and spiced apple cider brewing, I miss sparkles and songs, the constant ringing of bells by artificial Santas…so I need a little recipe for Christmas right now. Gee, just thinking about all these things makes me feel all gooshy inside, kinda sexy with the warm cuddle thoughts of lights on the tree and the romance of it all. Sorry, I just want the stereotypical Christmas fuss. I don’t care about the religious stuff, I want the lights and bells, damn it! Ha! It sounds like I’m really hunting for Las Vegas or something. But I want a little Christmas.

We looked through the last minute travel web sites and came up pretty empty. Not a lot going on right now, unless we want to go to Paris, London, Prague, or New York. Been there, done that. We’ve now been to Prague twice and the first time we had a heck of a time with an Israeli charter which, after getting confirmations for a no smoking room over and over again, turned out to be a false confirmation and we ended up at the expensive Hilton Hotel in downtown Prague, which was nice. We don’t stay in Hiltons because we like the small cheaper places (okay, we really can’t afford them), but they were the only ones who could guarantee a no smoking room. This last time, we ended up in a rarely-used suite in an old Prague hotel, but at least we didn’t have to suffer the smoke. I called the travel agent and asked him to search, but so far, nothing is working out. We’ll see. I got out some maps of Europe and checked where the mountains and potential snows are. On my list where there is Christmas and snow are Vienna and Zurich in Switzerland and Salzburg, Germany. We spent a wonderful Christmas time in Budapest two years ago and it was absolute magic. I’m hoping to find a little Christmas magic this year. Brent and I need it.

I hate air travel out of Israel. It isn’t the security checks or the long lines, but the noise, arrogance, pushing and shoving, and just condescending attitudes that confront us from the moment we approach the airport. It isn’t a language problem, though I feel like I need a dictionary to translate the procedure sometimes. It is the games they play, it seems, to just make your life miserable. After a while we just treat the experience like one big joke, an endless series of confronting little dictators with our tickets and passports, explaining and re-explaining why we are here, why we want to leave (even for three days) and why we want to come back. Sometimes I just want to tell them that the reason I’m leaving is because of the ridiculous bureaucracy and dictator clerks treating us like a combination of criminals and terrorists – the unwashed. But I play good and nice and they keep letting me come and go.

I miss cold weather. I want some real weather. The rains of the past week have been great, but today the sun shone again and the city heated up. I actually wore a sweatshirt this morning for our early morning walk. I was sweating by the time I reached Maureen waiting for me on Dizengoff, about an eight minute walk away. Ridiculous. Another unfortunate event was the song on the radio that woke us up this morning. An old bee-bop classic, “Earth Angel”, and now I can’t get the lyrics out of my head. I raced down the street, a tad late, singing “Earth Angel, Earth Angel, will you be mine…” It still hovers at the back edge of my brain.

Maureen and I hauled ourselves along the waterfront and headed for the market. Actually, we kept up our normal pace quite well, so obviously both of us are feeling much better. My throat infection seems to be finally gone and I’m starting to get some energy back, and some enthusiasm. She is doing much better. The Carmel Market was just opening and we raced up the hill to our favorite spice seller. He had a line of customers and the “garage door” was barely open. His wares weren’t out on display or anything, but the customers were there. We waited, laughing at the joy he approaches each customer with, and made him race around the shop collecting up the little goodies we wanted. Maureen needed cardamon, currants, nuts, coriander, and a few other spices, and I needed green tea, whole nutmeg, currants, raisins (more pumpkin bars!), and two kilos of black sunflower seeds for the birds out my window. Then we hauled our loot through the streets to Ruth’s office where Maureen rested and then headed back out, and I turned to Ruth to start working on her filing system, which now, for the first time in 30 years, exists. Yep. She has managed to maintain her business for all these years without a decent filing system. I cleaned that up for her and we started putting all the papers away.

My Hebrew isn’t that good, but I can recognize a lot of words and when you tell me what the word is, and I see it in writing, I can usually recognize it as I go. So she was delighted at my ability to “read” Hebrew enough to help her file a lot of her papers. When she came out into her clinic area and saw me spread out on the floor organizing three years worth of bank statements, she laughed. “How can you do that when you can’t read Hebrew?”

I just smiled and gave her the look that says, “I’m smarter than the average bear.” Of course, she would not understand the analogy, but she understood the look. I didn’t tell her the secret. The dates are written in Arabic/Latin numbers, and I can spot a date easily. The only problem is that I grew up in America where the date is listed month-day-year while the rest of the world does day-month-year. I’ve been living in foreign lands long enough to tell the difference, but sometimes I still goof when faced with dates like 4/8/03 and have to decide if it is April 8 or August 4. I don’t have problems with 28/8/03 because those are obvious.

So we cleaned up most of her files, though at the end she told me she has two more huge boxes in the other room to file – I told her she was on her own for those, but that I would be checking next week to make sure they were done. Always checking! We ordered a simple lunch from next door and ate in her office, something we both enjoy doing, being silly and just talking. She’s an amazing friend.

I got home at three, exhausted, but ready to get some work done. Whew. What a day. Hopefully by tomorrow we will have our travel plans all put together and I’ll have some exciting news about our Christmas plans…we’ll see.

Lorelle
Tel Aviv, Israel

By Friday afternoon, the web site was reloaded and I finished off a bunch of other long-delayed work. I fixed a great lunch of marinated honey-lemon baked chicken and our favorite home fries with Parmesan cheese baked on them for lunch. Brent arrived home from work five minutes before dinner was ready, so my timing, for a change, was perfect. I’m getting better at this cooking business. We watched “Wayne’s World” as our lunch movie, something we do at when we stay home for the weekend. A few days ago I had done a “schwing” move on Brent and he had no idea what I was doing or saying. “Haven’t you seen ‘Wayne’s World’?”

“Is that a movie or TV show or something?”

I swear, as intelligent as my husband is, he led an incredibly sheltered life. He can’t stand television and watches it maybe for an hour a month, and only when I have it on and there is some bit of news he has an interest in, and he dreads movies. Calls them “boring” and “time-wasters”. Me, I live for movies, though my movie going has dropped off considerably since meeting him, and even more so since coming to Israel. I can’t stand the damn intermissions they have in movies not designed to be broken in two pieces. As for “Wayne’s World”, it was such a cult classic, I couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it. I had to educate him.

That movie is an education. Not only is it mindlessly dumb, it is intelligently stupid. Brent was laughing, which is RARE, at it, groaning and rolling his eyes, and doing all the things he was supposed to in the right parts. He admitted it was so bad, you had to love it. So now he is going around the apartment saying “Excellent” and “Party on!” I love it. I took him to see “Toy Story” years ago and for six months he wouldn’t stop leaping up and shouting “To infinity and beyond” whenever we needed a break in our serious life. Movies have that effect on him, few as he ever sees. Maybe it’s a good thing he doesn’t see many of them.

I wanted to drive up early this morning to the Alexander River, but a huge storm was predicted, with flooding and high wind advisories. They haven’t occurred yet and it is already nine at night, but we decided to sleep in. Unfortunately I awoke about 3:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep until almost six, so it was better I got a little rest anyway. My brain wouldn’t stop spinning on Dahni ‘s death, a frequent reason for me not sleeping lately. I know I did everything I could to save him, but I can’t help but beat myself up for not doing more…like there was anything I could do except take him to the vet, a twenty minute drive, only to have him tell me my fuzzy baby was dead. But I’m not going there…..it’s bad enough it makes me crazy in the middle of the night.

I guess what brought on the nightmare thoughts was Thursday night’s scanning of Dahni’s pictures. I have to rescan hundreds of pictures that got wiped out by a computer glitch after I had scanned them, so I pulled out the first pile of slides from the box of new stuff and started scanning all the images that had already been marked as scanned. I didn’t need the light table, just slap them in the scanner and let it roll. After twenty or so images, I start saving them, and I realized that they were all pictures of Dahni in the motor home on our trip across Spain. He loved traveling so much, and the motor home was heaven. Not only did he have our full attention almost 24 hours a day, he got to hang out the window and “watch” the world go by and listen to the birds and noises that surrounded us everywhere we went. He loved sitting in any open window, just listening to the world. I swear I could see him smiling, his one pink exposed eye wall squinting, the other closed up by surgery, his ears pivoting towards the sounds like giant satellite dishes. He was my satellite dish ear kitty. He loved hanging out the window, one paw holding himself up and the other hooked out the window just hanging there. He never showed any interest in jumping down, just hanging out the window watching the world go by, pushed up onto his very tippy back toes on the sill of the car door.

I stopped looking at the slides, and just kept scanning. I waited until Brent came home and we had a little dinner together, him at the kitchen table (his desk) and me sitting on the floor of the kitchen, a frequent pose for the two of us. I told him I’d been scanning images, and he looked at me with full knowledge of what I was scanning, a caring sadness in his eyes. “You okay?” “I will be.” What more can I say.

I pulled myself together and saved the scanned images, doing what I could before my heart broke. Last night something came over me, and I was able to add some of the new scans to Dahni’s web page. I made it through, feeling sadness, but not dwelling on it. I fought it back. I just don’t know how people who lose their children or spouses can survive this intense pain. Yeah, yeah, he’s just a cat, but he was a part of my life and spirit, and we shared so much together, overcoming my prejudice about his abilities, the rest of the world’s prejudice about him, and his own abilities to become a “normal cat”. He changed my life and I was looking forward to many years of life changing stuff from him. Three years wasn’t enough.

No wonder I had waking nightmares last night. Now they make sense.

I let Brent sleep in and I started reading through a lot of saved files I’d been saving off the web to read later. We all have those things and I had a computer desktop littered with dozens of icons of things I had saved and delayed over. So I read them and trashed them, and cleaned up the computer’s desktop a bit, like cleaning your real desktop, I guess. It was a lazy feeling and it felt great to not feel the pressure to get things done for a change, just to do the little things needing but not desperate for my attention. Here are a few things I learned today.

Did you know that if you eat an orange a day, it will seriously decrease your chance of cancer, especially stomach and mouth cancer? This is good news for the gross tobacco chewers out there who run an almost guaranteed risk of these cancers, but it also got me thinking about something Brent said when I told him about the oranges. “If you ate everything they told you to eat to keep disease away EVERY DAY, you would weigh tons!” He’s right. My goodness. Something like five or six servings of vegetables and fruits daily, an orange a day, green tea, two liters of water, an apple a day, a grapefruit a day, blueberries for cancer, whole grains for colons, meats and tofu for proteins, soya everything for females, milk and calcium stuff for bones, blah, blah, blah. It is overwhelming sometimes. I stick to low carbs, good proteins, and have a good dose of fruits at lunch (my main meal) and about three servings of veggies, especially green ones, a day, but more than that I can’t shove in my face. Already I’m eating more than I used to with this anti-diabetic program I’m on, but to add all the stuff they tell us to eat to keep the diseases away…it’s overwhelming. I’m glad they are telling us that the REAL FOOD is the stuff that is good for us, but they are having a hard time going against the fast food and junk food lobbyists to get them shut down, though I’ve heard that bread product companies are having a tough time in the states now that the demand for low carb is on.

Did you know that over 75% of all movies coming out of Hollywood now feature cigarettes, a number higher than ever before? NPR had a great story on the battle to get Hollywood to get the cigs out of their movies. They are saying that smoking in movies is replacing Joe Camel. One expert said, “People buy movie tickets to watch the sex and violence, but nobody pays money to watch people smoke.” One group wants to rate movies with smoking as “R-rated” in order to limit the smoking, but another guy says it is just censorship and too wide a swath to paint, since movies that use smoking for creative license shouldn’t be forced to have such a rating. I was trying to come up with how smoking and creative license comes into play and I realized that “bad behavior” often features smokers. When smoking on screen was less, how did movies portray the bad folks. In the fifties and sixties, the bad guys in the cowboy movies all wore black and the good guys were in white. And the bad guys smoked. Later, bad guys still smoked and looked greasier and blacker. But then, in the eighties, the lines between good and bad thinned. Even the good guys smoked. With period pieces like “Cotton Club”, “Chicago”, and such, everyone smoked, all the time. There was no artistic license, just smoke. Research has proven that even if children have parents who smoke, children exposed to movies with a lot of smoking are three times more likely to smoke than children who haven’t seen “smoking” movies. Interesting. I loved the comment by one guy who said that if a movie includes the “f-word” it gets an automatic R-rating, but if it includes a cigarette, which kills over a half million people annually – well, you get the drift.

I also learned that virtual jobs is becoming even more popular in the US than ever before. People are hiring “virtual assistants” to do their secretarial work, allowing the assistants to work anywhere in the world with their clients somewhere else in the world. This kind of creative self-employment is spreading across the US with more and more people who have been sitting on unemployment with all the layoffs getting off unemployment and starting innovative service jobs through the Internet. Self-employed folks are now making about three times what they used to as salaried employees. WOW! I like it. I need a virtual assistant of my own to clean up some of my dirt and clutter. Got to look into this more.

I also learned that the area just north of Tel Aviv, not far from where Maureen and I sludged through the mud, has been closed twice in the past three days for security reasons. On Tuesday they caught two terrorists in the area with weapons and bomb equipment. They claimed they were with Jihad Islamia. Then it turned out that they were actually two security policemen for the Palestinian Authority on their way to supply weapons and bomb stuff to someone else to do a suicide attack. A bomb was found later in a shopping bag awaiting pick up and “delivery”, a huge one, that was safely detonated. The police reported that they were planning to bomb a school near Haifa. What shits. Part of the ball-ah-gone (Russian for “big, confusing mess”) over the shell-game of Palestinian prime ministers concerns Arafat’s insistence in maintaining control over the security forces. He will give up power elsewhere, but he wants to control his “army”. Now two of his army have been captured as terrorists. Interesting. There were also four others caught with massive weapons intent on machine gunning down more civilians. The vehicle they were in also had explosives. These are the things you will never hear about on the big media shows. About two years ago, when the bombings were frequent, what you didn’t hear about were the average of 25 attempts daily that were thwarted. Yes, TWENTY-FIVE every day were stopped by Israeli forces. Isn’t that amazing?

Also, rumors are flying about that Bush has given some kind of ultimatum that there has to be a truce declared by the Palestinian terrorist groups by December 9, and that Egypt’s Mubarak is supposed to be meeting with the terrorist groups in Cairo to settle a truce, but they aren’t cooperating, saying they want Israel to make concessions first. I don’t see Israel conceding anything since the terrorists are the one who have to settle things between themselves…which is a confusing thing to even think about. The idea of all these terrorist groups cooperating – now that is freakin’ scary! Unfortunately, every time there is a terrorist “cease-fire” it only gives them time to rebuild their forces and weapons because Israel is “supposed” to restrain itself and not keep wearing them down. It happens every time, so I don’t see that this time is any different. And if Israel does take some kind of action to prevent terrorism, everyone blames Israel for breaking the truce. If the truce is between the terrorist groups and the Palestinian Authority, and not with Israel, how can anything Israel does break a truce since they aren’t part of it? I get so confused on these thin points. Wouldn’t you?

Turkey is now open for travelers from the UK, but the US and other countries still have warnings up. And now Saudi Arabia is under a “watch for terror” again and foreign citizens are being warned to stay safe, get out, and not go there. So far, most of these warnings have turned out to be justified, so I am nervous that something is on the horizon. So much for catching up on the news.

One other little news tidbit that I just can’t help but share with you, because it stuns me. In November, a terrorist was caught crossing into Israel who had a Canadian passport. I don’t know how Israel interrogates and investigates the terrorists they catch (I’m sure its not completely Geneva Convention and pretty, but it could be), but in the process they have found out that he is a member of a Hamas terrorist cell in North America. Did you know that there were Hamas terrorist cells in the states and in Canada? They are everywhere. Hamas is a well-cultivated organization as it has a huge humanitarian face, coming in when the Red Cross backs away, but it also has a dark, evil terrorist network that few Arabs like to look at. I’m not totally surprised at this piece of info, but I am surprised that the rest of the big medias haven’t picked up on it.
I also read a bunch about search engines and getting listed in one. It is such a game and I’m still learning how. When I figure it out, I’ll let you all know.

I also looked into getting a news feed on my web site, specifically aimed towards news about nature, travel, and photography, but the process overwhelms me right now and I need to start focusing my energy back on the book and away from dinking daily with the web site. After all, I’ve written more than 400 articles on here, WHAT ELSE DO YOU WANT??? Giggle.

I have four articles I want to write this week for the web site, and I assigned one to Brent, so there will be new stuff coming. I have at least six articles to edit and upload, but I don’t have the images scanned yet…as they say in Hebrew “le-aht, le-aht”. Slowly, slowly.

I’m just looking out the window to see if Lake Dubnov is visible. I can see just a little of the park’s street lights glimmering in the water, but as the rain has stopped and the clouds are clearing, I’m sure it will be gone by tomorrow morning. So sad. I liked the lake. My friend Ruth asked me if she needed to order a boat for me to get out of the house. I told her I’d call her when it got high enough. The things we say.

Lorelle
Tel Aviv, Israel

ARGH!!! I am so tired of software that does more damage than good. I know it is old blather, but aren’t computers supposed to make our jobs easier? I swear….

The web site is finally how I want it, simple and clean and totally without tables, except where appropriate. It took more time than I planned, but that was because I had to relearn how to do a lot and I had to spend a lot of time reading web pages on technique and structure. But it’s finally done. I have been uploading the different versions but was now ready for a total upload. I have been using HotDogPro for the design work, and their built in FTP program for short uploads, but I wanted to go beyond WinXP’s built-in FTP program (which sucks by the way!) and so I searched the Internet for recommendations on FTP programs. WS_FTP came out among the highest, so I downloaded their free version and it was okay. So I decided to try their evaluation on the WS_FTP PRO. It took a bit to figure out how to get it to upload all the folders and details, and I like the layout and ease of the program, especially the synchronize capability which allows me to synch my folders and files with the web site, simple and easy. I set it up and left it running overnight. There were a couple of failures, but I just restarted them and it finished after I got back from my walk the next morning. Yeah.

end of the day, I wanted to find a link for something I knew was on my web site, so I did a little search and that page took FOREVER to load. What the hell? When it finally came up, I scrolled down, looking for the link, and whoa! Midway in the document it “started over” again with the header and everything. Yikes. I uploaded the page again and it cleared up, but then I kept finding more and more pages like that. Bunches of double loaded and appended pages all distorted. They are perfect on my computer but corrupted on the web site. I uninstalled the FTP program and did a clean reinstall, just to make sure I hadn’t messed things up, and then reloaded a good number of my pages again through the night. When I got up Friday morning, I found even more farkled pages. Damn!

I finally downloaded CuteFTP and tried uploaded again and by afternoon I had my entire site re-uploaded and seeming to work. Unfortunately, CuteFTP has a new stupid policy of a day or two for evaluation and not 15 or 30 days which is normal. So it has expired and I’m not even sure I want it. I don’t know what caused this, as WS_FTP gets the highest ratings, so I’ll have to do a little research. Sorry to all who stumbled on the damaged pages for the 24 hours or less that they were messed up. What a pain.

As for life here in Israel, the storm that was supposed to be a monster, has turned out to be a mouse here in Tel Aviv. I told Maureen I wanted to walk the beach Thursday morning so we could see all the storm waves crashing the beach. There were people out there swimming in the barely visible surf. The sun wasn’t out, but the waves weren’t out either. Darn. But it was great to walk through the mist early in the morning.

We got as far as the Tiyalet in front of the King David Hotel to visit our favorite little beach kitties. There is a gorgeous black short hair mother that was once loved by humans, who loves to be petted and cuddled a bit, though holding is only for a moment. Her kittens aren’t people friendly, but they do come up for food. There is a runt black one that breaks my heart, reminding me of all the wonderful black kitties I’ve had in my life – I seem to have some weird attraction to black cats – and I want to rescue it. I probably could have a month ago when I first spotted it, but already it is too old and unaccustomed to human hands. If you don’t get them touched by humans in the first six weeks of their life, they will never be good at being touched. It took me almost a year to get Dahni to let me cuddle him. I kept at it, but it was a terrible time. And these hands worked so hard to save his life at the end….

Anyway, I got a little kitty cuddle which I’ve missed so very much. Then walked home to battle the computer foes. ARGH!

Lorelle
Tel Aviv, Israel

Maureen has been talking on and on about walking somewhere away from the beach. We did a walk on Sunday along the Ha Yarkon River in Ha Yarkon Park, cruising up one side from Ben Yehuda Blvd to Namir, then across and back down the north side of the river, but she wants to see something outside of Tel Aviv, so she suggested we walk along the Alexander River north of Tel Aviv and see some soft-shelled turtles. I’m always game for an outdoor adventure, so I agreed.

As I climbed into the car a few minutes after six in the morning, the skies opened up and the long awaited rain storm that has been haunting us for two days, blasted down from the skies. I could barely see out the back window as I backed out our narrow driveway/parking lot. As I got to the huge bushes at the sidewalk, I just prayed that people were staying out of the rain and not on the sidewalk since I couldn’t see if anyone jogging or pushing baby carriages were barreling to or from the park, and edged out onto the street. It was a joy to have the windshield wipers whipping back and forth across the windshield, squealing with their sunburn rubber squeegees. Israelis and other Middle East countries go through a lot of windshield wipers annually. Not because of overuse but because of sun damage. One rental we had early on had its windshield wipers almost disintegrate when we first turned them on at the first dribble sign of rain. We bought a replacement set but turned the car back in before we thought about replacing them. It didn’t rain for the three months we had the car, so it wasn’t worth worrying about. We kind of forgot about them.

There was hardly a car or person on the street as I plowed through instantaneously formed lakes in the roads towards Maureen’s house. I honked and she came running through the torrent, smiling gloriously. “Isn’t this wonderful!” Just looking at her, I felt thrilled and alive, a feeling I haven’t had in a while. It didn’t last long, but it felt great to see someone so joyous over a few drops of wet. I love it.

The rain faded as we drove towards the highway. And she didn’t mean “a little north of Tel Aviv” – we drove way north of Tel Aviv, past the Mikhmoret interchange, and then yanked a hard right immediately off the highway onto a dirt road. It wasn’t until I was off the highway, the car churning in the muddy sand, that I realized we were actually in a nature park, the big blue and green bizarre bird and sign designating this a Keren Kayemet nature park. As we twisted through the dirt roads through the park, Maureen was amazed at how many improvements had been made. Picnic tables and parking areas had been set up in what once had been just a mishmash of picnic tables and garbage among the trees. We just wandered the many dirt roads, turning where we thought was “towards the river”, letting luck guide us more than any landmarks, since there weren’t any.

Giant puddles covered the dirt road, ponds of brown water, and I have to admit that I took advantage of them and released my teen-ager crashing through the temporary ponds and spraying water in all directions. I loved it. Maureen squealed and whistled, feeling youth coming back to her as well. What a pair, we are. Me, older than my 40 years in soul and spirit, and her, younger than I can even imagine in her 70s. Believe or not, we finally got a little tired of the puddles – oh, that’s crap – we didn’t get tired, we ran out of time, and finally had to make our way to the river so we could get some walking in, beefing up our hearts and all that. Ha!

We parked near the train bridge and walked under it towards where the turtles hang out, or so she told me. A commuter train roared overhead, shaking water drops on us as we dashed under, avoiding the thick mud and puddles. While we were in the area, I swear more than a dozen trains passed by going in both directions, towards Haifa to the north and Tel Aviv and points south. From under the bridge, the path opened up into a grapefruit orchard and an unusual dance hall/nightclub/rental hall (we couldn’t tell which but all apply). It had been recently refurbished and featured tons of glass and a tent-like covering over the huge enclosure. Strobe lights and a mirror ball decorated the high ceiling that looked like it could be open to the night air. Along the river, a grassy garden for picnicking or partying was poorly landscaped, but interesting all the same. A deck was built on the edge of the river, giving a decent view of the river and the great birds sitting in the tree branches and bushes along the river’s edge. I will have to bring Brent here to enjoy the birds!

We wandered up among the orchard rows to the road with the bridge across the river and home to the soft-shelled turtles. Of course, there were none. We looked everywhere and not a turtle to be seen in the muddy waters or steep river banks. The water level was clearly a bit high after the morning of rain, but not a turtle to be seen. Maureen explained that they were HUGE, but obviously they were somewhere else that morning. We crossed the bridge and started down the dirt road – excuse me, muddy road along the other side of the river, just to see what was there and look for more turtles.

We sludged through the muck and mud along the dirt road, and came to the end of the road when the water and muck under the train trestle was way too much for my open sandaled feet and her rubber muck muck boots. She wandered into the orchard and picked up a grapefruit off the ground and munched it as we slogged back through the muck.

Back at the bridge, a tour bus of seniors had shown up and they were crowded on the bridge, umbrellas mushrooming brilliant colors and designs as protection from the misty rain now falling, leaning over the railing looking for turtles. Of course, they saw what we saw earlier – nothing. As Maureen and I, splendid in our sweat clothes, rain coats, and muck splatters, stepped onto the bridge, the group turned as one, a great revolving mass of colorful rain slickers and bumpershoots, towards us. Intimidated only slightly, I leaned towards Maureen. “Think they noticed us?”

We took another synchronized step onto the bridge and the crowd pivoted again, this time turning their backs on us and moving off the bridge. I kept walking, moving forward of Maureen, and the slow moving crowd parted before me, like Moses and the Red Sea (hey, I don’t get to use that reference much and I should – after all I live in the country that owns that vision!). It was then I spotted what the bottleneck was. A huge puddle had formed on the end of the bridge with only a step wide dry area to the right along the edge. The little old ladies and men were crowded against each other to pass one at a time along the dry edge, taking care not to wet their tennis shoes or square heeled shoes (so common still in older women – why bother?). I just plowed through the puddle, stepping carefully as not to splash them (I’m only slightly rude, you know) and turned around to wait for Maureen, my toes bared for all to see.

Yes, as usual, I heard the gasps and saw the head shakings. I don’t know what is wrong with people, but I don’t like shoes and I wear sandals or thongs when possible, which for my lifestyle is constantly. Even in winter, which is what they call this 20 C plus degree weather here in Israel. No, for the thousandth time, my toes are not cold. It’s hardly cold enough to wear a sweater so why should my toes be cold? No one – trust me – no one ever got a cold from exposing their toes to the cold. A whole lot of other things get you sick, but exposed toes harm no one or nothing, unless you connect them with an immoveable object, then the laws of physics takes over and harm occurs. Same theory applies to cars and brick walls and telephone poles. An elderly man (who actually looked like he should be out playing golf somewhere sunny – but there is only one lousy golf course in all of Israel, and I think that went out of business a year ago…not sure – moved towards me applauding.

“Col-la-co-vode, col-la-co-vode!” he called to me. His “good for you/great job/right on” made me smile as I watched Maureen sniff at the others her age and younger as she plowed through with a vengeance, making waves with her long strides through the same puddle. One thing I can always trust about Maureen, she wastes not time nor money when she has the end in sight. We turned off the road and traipsed through the orchard along the river, leaving the stunned umbrella crowd behind as the mist fell on our bear heads.

Walking in muck, especially muck made out of a mix of clay, thick enriched soil (brought in for the trees and plantings to give the soil substance), and water, changes ones’ pace and style of walking. Within seconds, massive soles of mud had cemented itself to the bottoms of our shoes. I told Maureen that I was growing taller by the minute. It does little good to wipe it off, as it takes a ton of energy and searching for grass or gravel to scrape against, because a minute of walking later, it is gunked up again. So we did a weird sort of moon walk, high stepping through the muck with thickened shoes.

I spotted a hawk of some kind, probably a red-shouldered, but I couldn’t tell because it was darkened from the rain. There were tons of sparrows and swallow-like birds flitting about the bushes as we moved through them. We came to an opening in the orchard and some tall trees with the popular green parrots that escaped from the Tel Aviv aviary and have been making their home around the area for years. Against the monochromatic colors of Israel, these bright green screechers are a delight to see. We spotted six of them high atop the trees, honking and whistling at each other. Along the river, I spotted a lovely blue, white and dark bird, but I couldn’t tell if it was a jay or king fisher. I did see a king fisher hover and spike the water at high speed, coming up empty before flying off down the river. And a beautiful great blue heron posing in an empty field across the river. As we walked by, it flew up into the tree tops, its wing-span at least a meter across, maybe more. Magnificent. I have to bring Brent here.

We turned around and headed back to the car, just enjoying the stormy weather and the feel of rain on our faces. The drenching rain was still holding off and we loved the mist in the air. At the car, we scrapped and scooped off the muck as best we could, got in and headed back to Tel Aviv. What a lovely morning. Must do it again. And again!

Lorelle
Tel Aviv, Israel

I was so startled when my dad asked me what our plans were for Thanksgiving a couple weeks ago. Thanksgiving? There is no Thanksgiving in Israel. In fact, there is no Thanksgiving outside of the United States, and even that holiday hasn’t been going on there for all that long, though the myth around it tells the story of it being a four or five hundred year tradition. Sorry folks, maybe a hundred years, and it was supposed to be a “family” dinner and not a “hurry-up and eat so we can watch football all day and sleep” holiday. But it does bring people together. Brent’s parents asked USA, too, what our plans were. Just another day of working and sleeping, nothing different here. For them, it’s a jammed packed weekend with tons of family get-togethers, traveling to and/or from Tulsa to Dallas and back, all to see family and eat a ton of food. They only watch a little football. My mom, when I reached her in Lisbon, also asked what we were going to do. She told me that she was going down to our “adopted family” friend, Dona, in Seattle for their traditional Thanksgiving dinner. But us? Nada.

I had heard Brent mention an American engineer just arrived here temporarily to work on the current airplane project, and how he arrived without family, leaving them behind. So I thought this might be a chance to actually do something good for someone, make him feel a little more welcome, and find an excuse to DO SOMETHING for Thanksgiving. So he accepted the invitation and then I thought – who else?

Luckily, Maureen practically invited herself, god love her for that, and I thought of a wonderful couple we have enjoyed spending time with, Motie and Marlene, and luckily they also accepted. I hadn’t seen or talked to them in ages, since before we left for the war, but we’ve been in semi-contact by email. They were delighted. Now, I just hoped I could hold up my end of the bargain.

I made a simple plan for the food, calling on recent successes. I do have to admit that I’m getting better at this cooking business. Certainly I’m getting more relaxed about it and the anxiety is fairly low on the scale compared to the panic attacks of the past. Having cooked Ruth’s Osso Bucco recipe a couple times with great success, I thought that would be a good replacement for the turkey. The pumpkin raisin bars with cream cheese frosting were a must, of course, since I’ve mastered those. And I just needed some kind of salad and vegetable. Hmmm.

I sat on the couch and debated over the recipe books. I have collected quite a few delightful cook books, but nothing was popping out at me. Enthusiasm is still a reach for me. I’m moving about, still acting and doing fine, but inside my heart is still breaking. Walking back from the beach on Sunday, after a glorious hour spent sitting in plastic chairs (instead of our hard walk towards Jaffa and back) at the edge of the sea, our bare feet splishing in the glass polished surf, feeling completely wealthy and spoiled with the world, Maureen and I decided to head home, her to rest her tired and sick body and me to work.

Only a couple blocks from the beach, a cat sleeping atop a cement wall at my eye level caught my eye. It’s fur was tiger stripes, but the most impressive shade of golden orange, making him or her glow in the morning light. As I walked towards it, it’s eyes opened to reveal blank holes, the oh-so familiar light pink wall of the inner eye. I gasped and the cat sat up. Maureen also gasped slightly, understanding what was happening. I moved slowly and put out my hand. In Israel, the majority of cats are feral and a hand means food or pain, so I knew this cat was feral when he got a whiff of my hand and backed off. He moved away with complete confidence through the fence and bushes to the yard even with the top of the fence. He paused, “looking” at USA, an expression so familiar and dear to my heart, and then moved off to the front entrance of the house, hidden behind the buses, his front paw lifting routine to check the way with ease also familiar. I just stood there, pain and joy flooding my soul. I miss Dahni so very much. We were so closely entwined every day of his life. My greatest fear was for him getting out among the wild cats and being attacked and unable to survive, yet here was a feral cat that seems to have survived the loss of both of his eyes without any form of healing surgery, and he was at least a year or two older than Dahni would be and he was surviving just fine. Happy and healthy. While I can’t imagine having released Dahni to the wild, it does give me confidence to know that he could have survived. He was such a fighter, every minute of his life. But it made me miss him again and again.

Maureen stood by me, silent in the moment, understanding the pain. She has suffered greater losses than I can even imagine in her life, so she has a special empathy that I really admire and she has helped me so much to deal with all of this, in her own way. I closed my eyes for a second and grabbed a hold of all the feelings that wanted to burst forth, tucked them deep down and turned to continue down the street, returning to our conversation as if nothing had happened. I couldn’t lose it on the street. I has been six weeks since I lost my little fuzzy friend and it was time to return to life and not tears. Maureen kept up her side of the conversation, understanding completely. But when I got to the quiet of my home, those eyes haunted me for two days, at odd moments during the day and constantly in the night. I couldn’t sleep for more than an hour without seeing those eyes and waking up, sliding my legs around looking for the familiar pressure of warm cat against me.

Lost in more tears, I put away the cook books, deciding on simple grilled vegetables and the mango tomato salad with oil and vinegar and curry and crushed basil dressing to complete the meal, and got on with the plans of the day. The night before the meal, I talked to Maureen on the phone to go over my preparations and admitted my fears.

“What is really bothering you about the dinner? What are you really afraid of?”
I took a deep breath. “That they will ask about Dahni.”

She gave an understanding sigh. One of the things that I adore about Maureen is that she doesn’t tell me it will be alright and all those useless platitudes. It will be alright but people are sick of hearing that. For the moment, it just won’t be alright. It just is. Then you buck up and take care of things. It’s how it works. Life goes on. She let the moment pass and then moved onto another topic with grace. I was so thankful.

And sure enough, within the first three minutes of arriving, Marlene asked about Dahni. I just didn’t expect it so soon, but Dahni was his own person, a unique character, and of endless fascination to everyone who heard about him, especially those privileged to meet him. I stammered that we’d lost him – and that sounded so lame, like we let him outside and couldn’t find him, so I corrected it to “he died.” She asked me when and wanted more information, but I kept moving, putting the food on the table, and told her that it was sudden and only a few weeks ago, and that it was still painful. She let it go, as did Motie, thankfully. We kept the conversation going and the topic didn’t come up. I was grateful, but still nervous, just waiting for more questions.

Back to preparing for the meal, the night before the dinner, Brent set the table and cleaned the living room, bathrooms and all, while I chopped, whipped, and boiled. The Osso Bucco meat has to boil and simmer for hours, so I cooked it for two hours then put it in the fridge to finish the last hour or so before we ate the next day. I chopped up all the vegetables ready to put in the oven an hour before the meal, and whipped up the pumpkin bars. Earlier in the day, I had schlepped up the stairs a heavy load of veggies and groceries for the dinner, and I was sure I had everything. Two minutes before Brent came home from work, I reached for the sugar and found there was barely a quarter cup left. I searched the cupboards to no avail. Ugh. Didn’t I just buy a bunch a couple weeks ago? I couldn’t remember. I struggle daily to hand onto the simplest of thoughts lately.
When Brent came in the door, I gave him our usual hug, but held on longer this time. “Is it okay to need you?”

He melted into my arms. “Always.”

“But I need you. I need you. I really need you now.” I could feel him enjoying this thoroughly, holding me even closer. “I do need you. I really need you to go to the store and get some sugar.”

I knew he would be unhappy, but I didn’t expect him to push me away and start stamping his feet and swearing “shit” over and over again. This is just not normal Brent behavior. When he is really angry, he gets super quiet and crawls into the woodwork, a steaming combustion engine. This was strange. Finally, he stopped his stomping to explain that he had known over a week ago that we were running low and had picked up some bags of sugar at the shop near his office, a fifty percent reduction from the price we pay at the local shop. They were still under his desk because he kept forgetting to bring them home. “Well, they don’t help us there, do they? So go get some.”

A few minutes later he was out the door, still cursing himself, and I returned to my vegetable chopping. When he returned I poured in the two cups of sugar and reached for the jar of raisins. It was empty. “Where are the raisins?”

I could tell by his sheepish expression that he knew another trip to the store was coming, and this time, it was indeed his fault. “I ate them.” Off to the store he went for raisins. I did check over the list to see if there was anything else not in the house that is always in the house, and he was cleared for only raisins. We finally got the food all done and I worked for another couple hours on the web page before falling into a restless sleep.

I worked through the day to finish up the last of the food and the cleaning. We ran out of kitchen towels midway through, so I started a load, turning to paper towels. I hate paper towels because I think of them piling up in garbage dumpsters everywhere, blowing around the landscape, but I’m also torn between the chemicals I put in the water to wash the cloth towels. There is just no winning when I start thinking environmental protection, but I used the thoughts to distract me from my other worries.

The dinner was a hit and the food was incredible, thank goodness. The salad was a big success and the osso bucco fell completely apart when you touched it, as it should, having been cooked an additional hour and a half longer than I should have because of late arrivers, but it wasn’t hurt. The veggies could have been crisper, but they were also good enough. The pumpkin bars were a huge hit, so as far as I’m concerned, it was perfect enough for me.

The conversation went from discussing the groups’ recent travels, though Brent and I stayed quiet about ours. Dahni was such a vital part of our travels, hanging out the window of the motor home, racing up and down his parent’s stairs, and with me in and out of airplanes all the time. It was easier to enjoy talking about their travel adventures. Eventually the dinner conversation turned to traveling Israelis, and for a bit I thought we were all bashing Israelis, but I know it wasn’t meant that way, but it felt like it. Marlene finally called a halt to it just as I was about to, so that was nice. Traveling used to be such a joy, so filled with adventure and fun, but now it is such a time-consuming drag no matter where you are traveling to and from. So sad. Then things turned towards politics and it was clear we had some major differences of opinion regarding Israeli politics, but we were all united in our opinion of Bush. Not a good one. Even for the one semi-republican at the table, my husband.

Brent was raised by a rabid republican father and a very quiet but determined democrat mother. It was a long-standing policy that politics were not to be discussed in the house, but his father’s views were felt by all very strongly. Luckily, Brent’s mother kept him open minded enough that he was ready for me, the rapid independent semi-democrat, and anti-republican, to come blasting into his life, making him think about things he had never thought about before, nor wanted to, but now had to.

I think we opened a few eyes for our American guest. He didn’t realize that the so-called “Palestinian Refugees” living in other Arab countries (but in many cases actually former citizens of the country before they went to Trans-Jordan to look for jobs from the British) had no rights as a citizen. They can’t vote, buy property, and in some cases they can’t hold jobs without special permits. He had no idea. Until the Intifada, Israel was the number one employer of Palestinians, with more than 90% of the tourism and agricultural workforce made up of Palestinians. They have more rights under the so called “Israeli occupation” than they do in their home countries, including the Palestinian Authority. This is a fact, not an Israeli-biased opinion. It is also the kind of fact never heard by the media and the public. But it is true. Now, it seems that the King of Jordan, king of the majority of Palestinian refugees (who were once all citizens of the Jordanian government since before 1948, but they lost all their rights as citizens after 1967 – but that is a long story), has announced that 150,000 passports will be issued to Palestinians for entrance to the West Bank, the first time since 1967. According to the news story, Sharon has given permission for this “people for land” deal. I don’t know what the whole story is, and I thought Marlene and Motie would know, but they hadn’t heard anything. I need to look more into this. It makes me so suspicious that typical under-the-table deals are happening. Like I’m some kind of expert and I can influence their idiocy, but I always want to know. That’s me, the inquiring mind.

So dinner ended late, but everyone seemed to have a good time. I wish it had been brighter and happier, but it was what it was. Usually, after people leave one of our parties or dinners, Brent and I have a ritual to put on great dancing music and dance in the kitchen as we clean things up, laughing and re-telling stories about the evening, but it was cleaned up in a snap and we both slunk to our computers, hiding from each other, and just existing. I finally went into the kitchen where he was poking at his computer and asked him what was wrong. What went wrong? Why didn’t we feel like we normally do?

He had no answers. Maybe we are still healing and just coping with the moments as they come. Dahni brought such light and spirit to our home, and it will take some time for it to return with the freedom it once enjoyed. Everything now is still forced. An act for everyone around us. Brent and I are even acting for ourselves, adjusting to the routine of missing Dahni. Even while cooking, standing at the kitchen counter, I so missed the feeling of his paws patting my butt and his kneading massage against my leg that was a frequent daily routine while I was in the kitchen washing dishes, talking to Brent, or fixing lunch. A big hole, Dahni. You left a big hole in our lives.

Lorelle
Tel Aviv, Israel

Maureen and I headed up north to get meat yesterday. We’ve been planning and postponing this for weeks, so it was with a great deal of relief when I found my car keys and headed to her place early Tuesday morning. This was really going to happen. Whew!

When I had gotten into the car, the skies opened up and Tel Aviv was completely drenched. Maureen waited in the lobby for me to arrive, then raced between the huge drops to jump in the car, scattering water everywhere. But I loved it. I hoped the rain would last through the day, but by afternoon it was warm and muggy again. We’re only a couple days away from December and people are still wearing sunglasses, sun lotion, and swimming in the sea. We headed north through the beginning of the morning rush hour, but quickly left it behind as we passed Netanya.

We chattered away about things, as we do, ignoring much of the lack of scenery along the way. Highway 2 is a straight run from Tel Aviv to Haifa, and there is little to see along the flat path until you almost reach Haifa and the Carmel Mountains drift slowly up into view along the east. We turned on Highway 70 and cut through a pass in the mountains towards Tiberias. The road was so clear of traffic, we arrived way ahead of schedule, so we doubled back and decided to drive up into the mountains to visit a favorite shopping village, Daliyet al Carmel, a Druze town.

Escaping persecution in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, the Druze fled to what is now Israel hundreds of years ago, and they continue to exist in relative peace, working with whoever is in charge of the country so they can continue to live in peace. The Druze, like many Beduion, serve in the Israeli army and do their part to participate, while continuing to stay separate. There is much mysterious and mystical about their life and culture, especially about their religion, being part Christian, part who knows, but they are a warm and friendly people, at least the ones I’ve met in the shops, and as usual, Maureen and I were greeted with great excitement. The lack of tourists, the major source of income, is killing this area, so we were the star attraction. Within a few minutes in the second store we explored I had become the salesman’s sister and Maureen had become a cousin. Now why I was the sister and she the cousin, it’s a mystery that will never be solved, but when it got to the end of the bargaining, she had been upgraded to sister. I guess they saw money to burn in my hands but not hers, until it was time to deal. Playing the “relatives”, she and I played around negotiating over a large brass plate/coffee table with legs, and a few other odds and ends. I wanted to buy backgammon sets for the kids back home, but I didn’t want to spend much, settling for the cheaper handmade models than the glorious custom built things. So we wheeled and dealed and played the family members until we got the prices we wanted. We could have gone further, as with any deal, but I already felt confident about what I was spending, and I’d shopped there before, so I settled not long into the bidding. The morning was still cool and damp, so I didn’t want to hang around as Maureen and I were both feeling punky from our various recent illnesses.

While paying for the table and odds and ends, a familiar looking man came in and begged us to follow him to his shop to see the weaving of his daughter. Since we had lots of time, and I knew that I had met him before, we followed and ended up in the shop where Brent and I had bought all our Druze glass dishes. I love them. They are hand painted in a translucent pastel drip and then fired again at high temperatures, making the glassware very sturdy while being thin and delicate looking. I just love their rustic imperfections, and I reminded him of my previous visits. “Ah, I remember you brought your father from America here!” I had indeed, along with my mother and my in-laws on separate trips. It is nice to be remembered. I fell in love with some of the fabric weaving, a thin table cloth material in the most lovely gold and browns with square designs, one inside the other and again, repeated across the surface with a wide band of thick gold embroidery along the edge. I also fell in love with a gorgeous blue and pink one with roses for my mother…ah, but I just told. Anyway, a perfect present for her for Christmas. I felt saved. I had the backgammon sets and another treasure for my mother. My shopping is almost done for the year. Time to go home and pack it all up for mailing to the states.

Maureen was good and only walked out of Daliyet with legs for one of her copper plates back home and a little knickknack, but I had filled the car with too many things. We do make a good bargaining team, though. I like that part. We crawled into the car – let me correct that – we pried ourselves into the car and headed back down to the butcher.

We were still early, so we drove up to a small park I know and walked around it, admiring the new blooming crocus and other “spring” like flowers peaking out after the first rains of the season. Strange to see spring flowers at the beginning of winter. Finally it was time to head to the butcher and to lunch.

We had a great lunch of lamb steaks and spent way too long getting all our meats figured out. I am still learning about what part is what and what to do which what part I get, but Danny, our butcher guide, was of great help. When he asked me how thick I wanted a fillet cut, I squirmed and shuffled, hoping Maureen would help me, but she was distracted with something else. So I just grinned and told him to cut them the way he would if he was fixing it for himself. He was thrilled, sighed a grin of pleasure and started hacking. I eat so little red meat nowadays, I am worried about how to fix it all, but the list is from Brent and he will be thrilled with it all. Especially because I was able to get some American-style T-bone steaks, something he has never had since we arrived in Israel. Just can’t find them in the stores. I’ve asked and they don’t know what it is. But Danny did and he cut them perfectly, according to Brent.
Stocked up, we headed back towards Tel Aviv, listening to Bill Cosby on tape and having a good laugh, full of good food and tired out. Maureen made me stop at Ikea, even though we were both exhausted, and lucky for us we did and discovered a perfect filing cabinet for Ruth marked down almost 50% in the clearance section. I arranged to have it delivered to Ruth the next day and called and told her it was on her way. She didn’t know what it was that was coming, but if I had done it, she was happy. That’s just the kind of friendship we have.

I picked up a couple of odds and ends and then we headed back home through the afternoon rush hour. I dropped Maureen off and then picked up Ruth and we went to Office Depot to get her some filing folders, then I took her home and Brent and I dragged all that meat up the four flights of stairs to home. Whew. I’m still exhausted. It was a full day but great fun.

Lorelle
Tel Aviv, Israel

I wish I could say it has just been another day in the life of two regular folks, and in a way it was, but honestly, it has just been another shocking day in the normal life of human beings on the planet earth. As for me, I’m sick of this type of normalness.

Beep, beep, beep. The following is a news bulletin from the planet Earth: This week in Iraq, more soldiers have been killed by the new form of terrorists, a combination of attention-getting radicals from foreign nations who think this is “fun” and Iraqis unhappy with the current state of affairs in their country – who think this is “fun”. Their “fun” has grown from shooting soldiers and setting land mines to firing rockets into hotels, office buildings and helicopters from donkey carts and yanking soldiers out of cars stuck in traffic jams and bashing them to death with cement blocks, clearly a spontaneous mob action and not a re-enactment of the same event that happened to Israeli soldiers by Palestinians during the start of the Intifada. The newly appointed Iraqi officials, police, and security officers are being assassinated frequently by their own people or foreign “sympathizers”. In response, the United States military has stepped up their search for Saddam Hussein by attacking areas around his home town with raids, bombs, and heavy military crushing, tearing down the homes of known “terrorists”, terrorizing local civilians who may or may not be guilty by association, including more than 1500 house-to-house searches routing out about 120,000 people in the military operation “Rightful Blitz”. Elsewhere, in a non-bloody coup, Georgian President Shevardnadze has announced his resignation after being ousted by his people as a result of a proven fraudulent election. A prime example of the people having some kind of a voice against their corrupt government, and making a change without violence and death. Speaking from a park bench outside of his government offices, Shevardnadze told the world press that he would stay in power, and hours later, he realized that he had no power in which to stay. Take heart people living under corrupt governments – there is another method to change the rules. Also, attention to travelers heading towards Turkey, you are now advised by the USA, UK, and Australian governments to not travel to Turkey, and if you are there, get out now. This comes as a reaction to a series of terrorist bombings in Istanbul killing more than 50 people and injuring over 500. The Turkey Government, with the help of the USA, UK, and Israel, are jumping to crush this “insurgence” and to quickly restore Turkey as a tourist destination and keep the money flowing to fix their economy spiraling down the drain, created by another past corrupt government. As a side note, the subway stop under the former World Trade Center reopened today, a sign of hope and renewal after the September 11th attacks. All of this has happened on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of US President Kennedy. Thank you, and have a nice day.

This is what greets you every morning when you wake up outside the United States borders. Only the names and faces are replaced as they are killed off. Corrupt and dictatorship governments continuing to exist with the support and blessing of the great powers in the world, while others, now found “guilty” by world leader opinion (fact or fiction – who cares), are bashed down, often destroying the life of its citizens more than the leaders deposed. Robert Taylor, former war criminal leader of Liberia, sits in splendor and catered life in Nigeria. Milosovitch continues to battle the world courts, dragging out his trial for years while not accepting responsibility for his crimes. And the beat goes on.

It reminds me again of how the world condemns Israel for their response to terrorism on their own soil. When the Israeli military moves against the Palestinians, Brent and I keep remembering what we thought when the first major incursion and “cleaning out” of Jenin happened: If the Israel government and military wanted, the streets of Jenin would flow with blood. While the media and Palestinians screamed and yelled that hundreds and possibly thousands were being murdered, there has never been any evidence of those claims, yet everyone remembers the claims and not the truth. I don’t hear the world press up in arms about the destruction of homes and property in Iraq by the US forces. I don’t hear anything but support for the harassing of civilians in Iraq. And because the overthrow of the Georgia government was done with no blood and gore, it will not even register as a footnote in history, other than to the people involved, but even there, it will take a back seat to the bloody battles fought in the past and in the future. “If it bleeds, it leads” is more than just a media slogan, it is representative of our historical memory. We rarely remember the moments when the world shifted and tilted for positive reasons that came with peaceful indent and action. When people remember Martin Luther King, do they remember his peaceful intent and actions? Barely. Mostly they remember his violent death, and before that, the violence that met their peaceful demonstrations. We seem to have a collective memory for violence rather than peace. Sad.

So, while this was a normal day like most days in our lives, in fact, it was a typical day in human history, but for one thing. The people spoke with peace as their weapon, and their government listened. Wow. That is an amazing thing. Are the rest of you listening?

Lorelle
Tel Aviv, Israel

Where was I? Oh, I was going to tell you about our anticipated trip up north to the Tiberias area in the Gah-lil (Sea of Galilee area) to buy meat. That’s right. I’ve been a whirl all day long. So, Wednesday, my whole day was a bit screwed driving to and from Beersheva in the morning to pick up Ruth’s daughter and bring her back to Tel Aviv, but I did get a bunch of work done once I got back home. I had to cancel my massage with Ida, but she understood that “a friend in need…” since I’d dropped everything for her in the past. Ain’t it nice to have friends like that, where you can just say “I’m needed elsewhere” and they completely understand. I’ve the best friends like that. So Wednesday night I get everything all set for a whole day driving north in search of meat.

I packed up the Creative Labs Zen MP3 player, once it was fully charged, and then threw in a bunch of CDs for playing on our portable CD player…just in case the Zen ran out of juice. It’s not been charging very well, and we’re not sure what is going on. Might be a bad cord. I put the plastic ice packs in the freezer, all ready to put into the cooler for the journey, filled up water bottles, checked for money and driver’s license and everything I needed. I was READY.

I was up at 5:30 the next morning, racing around to finish a few work details while Brent showered and left for work. I was in the shower when he showed up and informed me that for the first time in four years, he had missed the bus. It was a couple minutes early and he ran to catch it but they didn’t see him. He had found out a couple weeks ago that there was a seven o’clock bus that stopped on Dizengoff, so he dilly dallied around and then left a few minutes before to catch that one. I got all the ice into the chest, and put on my backpack loaded with tunes, and reached for the car keys. No keys.

I tore the whole house apart, pulling out furniture, tearing up my backpack three times, going through everything and anything. Turned the whole place upside down. I went down to the car thinking I might have left them in the trunk lock, but nothing. I crawled down all around the ground and nothing. I walked around the whole apartment building looking at the mailbox racks to see if someone had found them and set them there. Nothing. I went back upstairs and called Maureen with the bad news. She was feeling terrible with her swollen hand from the cat bite, so delaying our leaving was fine for her. I kept on looking.

I called Brent’s work, knowing he hadn’t arrived yet, and left a message for him to call me immediately. I figured he picked them up when he was late out of habit to take the car. But it didn’t make sense. Maureen was cute and had told me that after three weeks of looking all over the house for her makeup kit that she brought back from London with her, she found it the other day in the freezer. Now WHY she put it in the freezer, we may never know, but it was worth a good giggle. I tore through the freezer, since I had been in and out of it to get the ice packs, but no keys. ARRRGGH!

At eight I called the car rental company. No answer. I tried three of their numbers around the area and no answer. I kept trying and by 8:30 someone finally answered. I explained my predicament and asked if someone could deliver the keys to me. The ass told me that “we don’t deliver keys. When the customer loses the keys, he must go out to the airport to pick up a spare set, IF we have such a set available.”

“Do you have a spare set of keys for this car?”

I will have to call the airport office to find out if they have one.”

“And if they do, you will have them delivered to me, right?”

“Ma’am, we do not deliver keys to customers. No car rental company in the whole world does that.”

“That’s not true,” I corrected him. “I don’t lose keys often, but I travel a lot all over the world and when I’ve needed keys, an extra set, or anything else, the car rental companies have delivered them to me. No questions. No debate.”

“Well, in Israel, no rental company does that. You can call Hertz, Avis, no one will deliver keys.” I realized I was hearing the same crap I hear over and over again in this country. When they can’t be troubled, it’s just too much to think about, or too much effort, or they don’t want you to go any further, you get the same old story: “No where in Israel can you -” get, find, have, or do that. I’ve heard this line enough to recognize manure when I hear it.

“That is not true and you know it. We’ve been with you guys for four years and you have delivered keys, cell phones, cell phone replacements, and other things to us before. You just don’t want to do it this time. This is seriously unprofessional behavior. Why do you have to call the airport to find out if they have the keys? I got the car from your office.”

“We keep all the spare keys for all our cars at the airport,” he answered, totally oblivious to my attack and correction. I thought this was bizarre, to have all the keys for all the cars at the airport, when their main office is in Herzliyya and they have offices all over Israel, even down in Eilat. But then, probably most of their rentals are initiated from the airport, so I guess it makes sense, but what a pain. It’s the middle of rush hour so it would take me about an hour or more to get to the train/bus station to get a taxi out to the airport, pick up the keys, and then another hour or more to get back via taxi and bus, costing a small fortune…I asked him to call the airport and let me know if they had a set and hung up the phone.

He called up a few minutes later and told me that they had a set of keys, so I would have to go out to the airport to pick them up. I again argued with him about having someone deliver them, and he kept to his selfish, lazy position. So I told him again that this was bad business, and that SOMEDAY I really hoped I would meet a company in Israel that actually believed in the phrase “customer service”, and I hung up, pissed.

There was no way I was going to get there and back and still have enough time in the day to get up north with Maureen, pick up the meat, having lunch, hit the dairy, and get her back in time to teach her English student that night. It was almost nine and the day was already shot. I was furious. So I tore apart the apartment one last time.

I finally got ahold of Brent and he reported that he had no keys with him, but he did agree to get a friend at work to run out to the airport (he works literally AT the airport but really “next door”) office and pick up the spare keys and bring them home. God, I love him. But the day was still shot for the trip, so I decided to take one more look downstairs and then come back up and get some work done. Downstairs, I ran into my neighbor, whose window my kitchen and utility room stares into (her kitchen and utility room) across the courtyard. She asked me what I was looking for and I told her about the keys. “You’re kidding. I lost MY keys! Must be something in the air.” I wanted to scream something obscene to the air, but it was a strange coincidence. I returned upstairs and finally settled down and got some work done. Maureen actually made it out of her house (she had to call a neighbor to help her tie her shoes because she could only use one hand) and visited me after having a little lunch with a friend who lives nearby. Her hand was swollen up like a baseball bit, the old rounded and overstuffed kind, so I made her sit with a bag of frozen beans on it for a while and the swelling went down a lot by the time Brent got home at five, with the keys! Bless him. I took Maureen home in the car, just to keep my “commitment” about a road trip that day, even if it was to her house and back. Oh, weary me.

Brent told me about his ordeal in getting the keys. His friend took him to the airport office of our rental car company and he walked in to find the guy, who recognized Brent from our many trips in there to turn in cars and rent them, standing at the counter with a set of keys in his hand. “I’m here to pick up the spare set of keys for our car. The Tel Aviv office called you, right?”

“Spare keys.” He held up the keys in his hand and nodded.

“Are those my keys?”

The man seemed to nod, but then asked Brent if he had called the Tel Aviv office. Brent repeated that his wife had and they had called here and told her that there was a spare set of keys for the car here and to come and get them.

So you talked to Tel Aviv.”

“Yes. They told us to pick up the spare keys here. Are those the keys?”

“Well, you know you have to get permission from Tel Aviv before you can get the keys.”

“Did the Tel Aviv office call you to ask you if there was a spare set and to tell you that I’d be coming to pick up the keys?”

“Yeah, but you know you have to talk to Tel Aviv before I can give you the keys.”

Brent finally insisted that the man call the Tel Aviv office to confirm that he was indeed here to pick up the spare keys and he did. Brent also told him that the lack of a delivery service for getting the keys to his wife was completely unacceptable and unprofessional. He made him pass on Brent’s condemnation to the Tel Aviv office while Brent stood over him. The guy passed on the message and then handed the phone to Brent, who reiterated his bad feelings. “Over the past four years, we have paid your company over USD $40,000, which would pay for at least two of your vehicles brand new! Only once before have we lost the keys and your company had them delivered to us. Now you say you don’t deliver. This is seriously unprofessional, and for the amount of money we pay you, this is a small thing. You will get a letter from me about this. I am not a happy customer.” He handed the phone back to the slow man and reached for the keys, which finally, the guy released from his grip.

We are so tired of the lack of customer service here. We get it from small, surprising places, but when it comes to companies which should specialize in doing everything possible to make the customer happy so they will come back, like in mall shops, electronics stores, car rental facilities, grocery stores, and even a few restaurants, it seems to be the policy of the store to make the customer feel like they are below dirt. I wish I could say that it is the rare event for us, but we seem to battle with this on a weekly basis…well, I have to correct that. We battled weekly for the first two years, and then I got smart and quit shopping so much. I figured out where the discount huge grocery stores were and I would stock up for three to five weeks on everything we needed, filling up the fridge and freezer. Then I’d go out for only the barest of things I needed. The thrill of shopping was totally gone and the calluses are built up. My neighbor, Naomi, used to call me the saving grace of the Israeli economy, the true capitalist that was single-handedly pulling the country out of their economic depression, but now, I stay home and save our money. It’s so sad.

The next morning, rushing around to get last minute food stuffs, I ran into my neighbor again walking towards the ice cream/newspaper stand outside our apartment. She told me she still hadn’t found her keys, and we commiserated. She asked the ice cream man if he had found some keys and he smiled and said yes, and handed her HER KEYS! We were stunned. She must have dropped them out of her bag or pocket. I asked if he had a second set, but he shook his head. Damn. But I was thrilled for her. I got my fresh groceries and hauled them back upstairs and raced around to get lunch ready so we could eat and leave to head up to Tiberias to visit the doctor up there. At the last minute I decided to gather up some papers to work on during the long drive and – you guessed it – the keys fell out of the papers. Unbelievable. I’d been through those papers thoroughly during the mad search, and at least four times during the day, but there they were.

What a pain. So we made it up to Tiberias in time to meet with the doctor, only to have him tell me that I just had the normal (for me) throat infection, get antibiotics, and drive the two hours home….so tired! Today should have been a breeze, getting done the three things I had on the list: fix our computer network, clean the bedroom (way WAY past due and becoming a dump), and bake havosheen (quince) that I got at the veggie stand yesterday. I haven’t had quince since last winter and I miss that incredible taste. I got the quince done, but the bedroom was completely ignored. I spent the whole day screwing with the network and finally got all three computers to “see” each other, but the desktop will connect to my laptop but not Brent’s. My laptop will connect to Brent’s and his can connect to mine, but both of us can’t connect to the desktop. I am too tired to keep going. I’ll hit it again tomorrow after my seven in the morning walk with Maureen, who has reported that the hand is almost back to normal…close to kitchen glove size.

Lorelle
Tel Aviv, Israel

Whew, what happened to the week?

I finally got ahold of my mother in Lisbon to wish her a belated happy birthday and to check in to see how their three week cruise around the Mediterranean had gone. She reports that they have had a great time, though she sounded incredibly exhausted. She got the flowers I sent to her, and the bouquet was so large, she split it into two so she would have one by her bed and the other on the desk in their hotel room. Isn’t that nice.

I also took time to check in with my dad, living his normal life in Marysville, Washington, going to the local pancake house every morning for grease on a plate, playing with his fishing boat, and avoiding all doctors. I have been nagging him again to get to the doctor for a full checkup and at least get his hips looked at. He sits all the time and his body has locked into a sitting position. Walking is incredibly painful and miserable, so he just doesn’t do it. But he whines about it and tries, once in a while. He probably needs hip replacements or some kind of therapy or surgery to fix whatever is locked up and broken, but then he has to work to keep it in shape. I get all my procrastination genes from my father, that’s for sure. Ugh. Anyway, hopefully I have nagged him enough and I told him I would call in a few days to give him grief.

Having spent a majority of my life taking “care” of my father in one way or another, after seven years out of the care-taking role, I’m finding it a great relief and pleasure to not have to be there to witness the self-imposed deteriation. I can savour all the energy I save by not hounding him to walk and move and get about. He is actually doing much better than I thought without my constant presence, but I have started hounding from afar because he is slowly getting “worse”. We’ll see.

What else happened? I’ve been so busy, I’ve hardly had time to do any writing. Ruth called me at six in the morning on Wednesday to tell me her daughter had left home after being very ill for over a week and returned to Beersheva, almost two hours away, to get back to her work there. Only two days before she was being hauled to doctors for bleeding and coughing up blood and such, combined with the horrible flu, chest infection, and a massive dose of antibiotics, only to be told that the antibiotics caused the bleeding and that it was “normal”. She was confined to bed for the rest of the week. But oh, no. She’s barely 18 and thinks she knows everything, so she took off with her mother telling her this was stupid and the wrong thing to do. A few hours later, in the middle of the night, of course, she gets sick, has cramps, and wants mommy to come rescue her. Mommy has to wait until morning because she doesn’t have a car. Ruth decided to take a taxi and called me to cancel our appointment. I cancelled my day’s appointments and drove her down to Beersheva instead. Ugh. In the meantime, I told her, tell her daughter to get her cute butt to the hospital because it would be four to six hours before we could get her to the hospital or doctor here in Tel Aviv and this is nothing to waste time on. So she did. Turned out the infection had spread to her urinary tract, so I warned her that in addition to all the antibiotics (which aggravated the urinary tract infection, as it does to me every time), there would be no sex for at least three weeks, or this could boil up again. I don’t think she listened, but then again, neither did I when I was her age.

I drove them back and Ruth got her into bed where she is to stay until the end of the weekend, at least.

As for me, I have been fighting a sore throat through now for over six weeks. I kept thinking that it was just the left overs from the sinus infection I had the week before Dahni died, and then with all the crying and sadness for the past month dealing with the loss, just left overs. But I finally took a flashlight to my throat and freaked. It was coated white with yellow spots. I told Brent and he checked our insurance card and, of course, it hadn’t been renewed since September. It was still current, but the card had a September date on it. So he had to call his agent and get a new card, which, of course, takes a couple of days. Ruth heard me whining about it and promptly called her oldest friend in Tiberias who is a head honcho at a clinic up there and made arrangements for a few favors to be called in. Brent and I drove up on Friday after he got home from work, a long two hour drive, and within seconds he diagnosed me with the normal throat infection, the kind I’ve dealt with all my life, put me on antibiotics and told me to gargle with baking soda and warm water. Well, that was a lot of fright for something I am so used to. I just deal with it faster, but I haven’t been paying attention to much for a while. So I missed the early clues. I’ve also run out of Amoxicilyn, so now I have just enough to last me for the five day regimen, but I do have to get some more on one of our trips to a country that is free with their sale of drugs. Since I have chronic once or twice a year attacks, this is something I can easily treat myself, having spent over 40 years dealing with it. Such are the steps you take when you live on the road and your health insurance sucks.

My friend, Maureen, got her hand thoroughly bitten by one of her cats and it swelled up to three times its normal size. She went to the clinic and they gave her a tetanus shot, and then she felt miserable from that. Ugh. She understands it was an accident, that she caused by not paying attention to his need NOT to be picked up right then, so she isn’t so mad at him as she is at herself. We both understand cats better than we do people, I think.

She and I were supposed to head up to Tiberias on Thursday to go meat shopping at a wonderful butcher up there, Limousine, which also houses a fabu restaurant, and then hit a dairy farm on the way back, but things didn’t turn out that way. I was all packed and ready to go and I couldn’t find the car keys. What a nightmare. I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow, but suffice it to say, it was a good thing that it was called off as Maureen was seriously miserable with her bad hand. More ugh.

I did get more work done on the web site, and I’ll be uploading all the new stuff next week, but ain’t it a bitch when life gets in the way of your life.

Lorelle
Tel Aviv, Israel

Happy Birthday to my mother, who is just finishing up a cruise throughout the northern Mediterranean with her husband, Robert. I spent the past week trying to figure out how to get to Lisbon to spend a couple days with her, and the airlines have won in their plot against me. What a pain!

I’m exhausted, so I will rag about the airlines later, but I just wanted to take a minute to fill you all in on my past two days. I have been finishing up all the details on the web site, getting all the validations in except for Bobby, the validation service dedicated to verifying that a site passes EVERYTHING to be totally perfect for physically impaired or disabled users. There are a couple of little things that are stopping me from passing their test, and I am having trouble finding justification and alternatives…but I will keep trying. There are tiny things, like non-sequential nesting headers (it only likes h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, etc., and I have a lot of sequences that go h1, h2, h3, h4, h4, h4, h6 – unacceptable, it says, though it passes the jump from h4 to h6) and giving me errors that says that the use of any graphic to represent color must have alternative text to state what it is trying to do. Well, I do have all those, on and on, and every graphic, but it isn’t seeing them, or something. So I keep plugging at it until I figure out what the trick is.

Ruth called me Sunday morning, so pleased with all the improvements in her office, and ready to rock and roll with the final details this week. But life raised its ugly head. Her daughter has been fighting off a viral infection and it has triggered her asthma, sending her through rounds of doctors and on a heavy course of antibiotics. Ruth has cancelled all her appointments for the past two days and possibly tomorrow to be with her 18 year old daughter through doctor visits and horrible coughing spells. She is an amazingly dedicated mother, but I can hear in her voice that she is totally worn out. She has help, so I would just be another body in the way, but I worry.

Maureen and I had lunch with another friend of ours, Helen Benjamin, at a pasta place that actually has a serious no smoking area. The food was great and the service was delightful. Helen had been to “Pasta Mias” many times before and said that it had gotten high reviews over the years in the newspaper. We had a great time catching up. Helen has just returned from a couple months in the states and Mexico, having a great time visiting tourist sites and fantastic museums and gardens, and spending time with family there. So we had a lot of catching up to do.

I headed right back home, and then realized that I had forgotten to pick up salad and veggies…oh, well, I’ll do it tomorrow on my way home from my 6:30 walk with Maureen.

My depression over losing Dahni comes and goes and for the past few days, I’ve been able to keep a grip on myself and have been in a fairly good mood, but a few little things happened today that have sent me spiraling down a bit. I just can’t seem to get past the tireds. Next week I will kick up the exercise and that should help me bust through the blues. It usually does. Wednesday I have a massage with my friend, Ida, and then I’m going bra shopping with Ruth, always a humiliating experience, but this time the humilation is on her and not me. I’ll fully outfitted with gorgeous bras from my time in the states. What a joy it is to actually have pretty bras to wear instead of those cement encased nightmares I had to wear when my boobs were 38 KKK. It is so wonderful to be a “D” cup now, though with all the weight I’ve been losing, I can feel the bras feeling a bit too roomy. What a nice change. Having the surgery to remove my oversized watermelon boobs was the absolute best thing I ever did in my life. I highly recommend it to everyone who is over a DD cup. Honestly! They took off over SIX POUNDS of boob!

On Thursday, Maureen and I are planning to head north to buy meat and dairy products, so that will be a nice escape. Then it is back to work, buckling down. It sounds like I have such a fairy tale life, and in many ways I do, but I work glued o this computer often from 5:30 in the morning until midnight, with hardly a break for exercise and eating. I often work while eating. Shame on me. So when I do take a break, it is much deserved.

Well, forward ho!

Lorelle
Tel Aviv, Israel

Whew! I am totally exhausted. Did a lot of final work cleaning up the web site, working through validation issues, and cleaning up some code Friday morning. Time got away from me, so I shoved lunch in my face, jumped in the shower, and raced through the neighborhood dry cleaners to drop a dress off, the veggie stall to get some fruit and vegs for the weekend, into the kiosk market to get the Friday Jerusalem Post (the source of all entertainment news for the country…well, almost), then boogied down to Ruth’s office to be there by two, carrying my weekend detritus in my backpack.

The next five hours were spent ripping and tearing apart Ruth’s office. Ruth has had the same office for something like thirty years. Once in an upscale neighborhood just off Dizengoff, still a popular street but fading as everyone moves to the malls, her building has gotten a bit seedy, and her office is terribly overrun with clutter, carefully disguised, but still clutter. I and her friends have been incredibly patient with our suffering while in her clinic, but it was finally time to take action.

The criminals in clean-up-crime were myself, Maureen, and Ruth. Now, I’ve been through the clean-up process with Ruth before, helping her attack her “kitchen” in the clinic, an office/storage/lab/kitchen/junk room, and her bedroom at home, so I know how she gets. How she “gets” is teary and nostalgia over things that most people would pass over without a second glance. I’ve found her sobbing over cancelled checks, calling herself dumb and stupid over other pieces of paper, and making tons of excuses to justify the keeping of junk. Now, she is not a junk-collector, like I tent to be (and I battle it daily, mind you). She just saves everything on paper. She also has this need to justify to the world her value, and it shows up in strange ways, like saving check stubs and cancelled checks dating back to 1971. “But if the government comes to check on me – I have to prove to them what I did with the money.” I don’t know what the specifics are here in Israel about saving paperwork. I know it is three to seven years in the USA, but I don’t think that junk from 1971 is of any interest to the Israeli government. Toss it!

Actually, Ruth is really good at all of this. Once she gets the flow of things, she plows through with a vengeance. But we have to get through the first hour of “but this is important” and “I worked so hard to get that” and my personal favorite: “people will think I am important if they see this”. EERRRGGGGHHH. One of the first of the latter excuses came up right away as we tackled a gigantic oxygen tank painted a yellowing color with a couple of pink flowers on it. I told her it had to be moved somewhere else. It was right in the middle of the walkway between her main room and her small “clinic” room. For three years I have stared at this, wondered about it, and hated looking at it. I keep thinking that I will get a balloon if I’m good.

“But I can’t get rid of it! I need it for my work.”

“I didn’t say anything about getting rid of it. We just need to move it.”

She hammered and stammered and then popped out with, “I have a confession to make.” I have a love/hate relationship with that statement when it comes out of her mouth. “I want people to see this.” Now, Maureen and I were truly flummoxed. Ruth hunted around and came up with a red leather cloth and wrapped it around the nozzle and released the gas. “You see, it makes ice. I use it for treating acne. It’s a very good treatment and I am the only one in Israel who does this.”

“So what does it matter if people see the tank or not,” Maureen always speaks my mind for me, and does it so well. We think on the same track so often, it’s frightening.

“People will see this and know that I do the treatment and think ‘wow, she is so good and important.’ This is very special treatment.”

I asked Maureen if she had looked at the tank and known about the treatment. She shook her head. I had never heard of this. How many people out there in the world have heard about this treatment and would see a big tank and think “wow, this person is some kind of freaking genius to have such a treatment available – sign me up immediately and I will pay thousands of dollars for this treatment!” I told her that and we made a compromise. We’d move the tank over to the corner of her smaller clinical room, right where everyone would see it when they come in to lie down on the table (and probably hang their jackets on it – not knowing how “important” this thing is). She agreed and I was left with the back wrenching task of rocking and rolling this heavy air tank into the corner.

We had made a “blue print” of her office and played around with the furniture, work tables, and beds, finally getting a layout that we thought would work. Maureen started pulling the pictures off the walls and I started in on moving furniture and giving Ruth something to do to stay out of our way. It takes very little to distract her and get her running off on a tangent. We would give her something to do, and then find her wandering over to move this, clean that, and get in our way. If someone was recording the conversation, they would think we were the meanest bitches in town, if not the country.

“Ruth, what are you doing over here? Go back to what you were working on.”

“Ruth, what were you working on? Well, go do that.”

“Ruth, get out of here.”

“Ruth, shut up.”

“Ruth, don’t touch that. Didn’t I tell you not to touch that.”

“I’m not throwing it away. I’m moving it over here.”

“Ruth, get out of the garbage.”

“Ruth, that is trash, put it down and leave it there.”

“Didn’t Lorelle tell you to work on that? Then work on it.”

“Ruth, leave me alone. Go do your own thing.”

And so on and so on. We laughed, we held her when the tears came over strange things, and we pitched and tossed and carried tons of shit out to the street.

Now, there is an amazing thing that I adore about Israel. Nothing goes to waste. Just about everything finds a purpose and a home. If you don’t want to try to sell it, if it’s broken or beyond repair, or you are just tired of it, carry it out to a street corner and walk away. Odds are that within five minutes (actually I’ve seen things disappear in seconds between loads) it is gone. We carried out a ton of clothing including two ugly, moth-eaten fur coats (beyond hope, trust me, and who wears fur in Israel…dumb!) and it was gone twenty minutes later. We also carried out old makeup displays, strange rolling carts designed only to hold specific makeup and skin care product lines as part of their promotion, and those were gone in minutes. We came out to find the street corner clean as a whistle (except for the typical dog-shit pile). Amazing.

We came back at eight the next morning and started in on more details, arranging her work products and chemicals, all the paper crap under her desk, her kitchen/work area, and the bathroom, which is actually a huge bathroom, bigger than it should be for such a small place, but a bit of a mess. A little bit of tidying turned it into an elegant room.

One of the funny, and hardest, things to clean up where all her samples. Ruth has collected up hundreds and hundreds of samples for the different skin care products she carries. Two years ago I helped her get rid of the samples for products that she would never recommend or sell, but now it was time to clean up the ones that have value to her. She is supposed to give these to the clients, to help sell the products, but she forgets so we needed to make this more accessible.

Ruth has been studying English very hard, as I’ve mentioned before, and doing very well, but the names of her products are very difficult English. “Gentle Exfoliation and Dermabrasion” just doesn’t roll off your tongue, no matter what language you speak. When she pulls out a sample, the writing is so small, she has to put on her glasses to see it, and then she has to figure out which is which in English. There are some snags. There isn’t a lot of difference between “facial cleanser” and “facial cream” or “multivitamin cream for neck and hands” and multivitamin cream for eyes and lips”. You read the first bit and miss the second detail and the product is different. She also has things like “anti-aging lotion” and “intensive anti-aging lotion”, again, easy to miss with the problems she has reading English.

So I got three shallow boxes and we started putting all the samples together in groups, and I had her write in Hebrew the words that would help her identify the product at a glance, no glasses needed. It seemed like a simple task but it took over an hour to get it all figured out. The companies changed their color scheme for packaging from last year to this year, so many things were the same but the package colors were different, so each one had to be looked at. With the tags in Hebrew, I had to look at the sample to see the English, since that kind of Hebrew isn’t in my reading vocabulary, as limited as it is. And just when we thought they were all done, we found another bag of the stinkers. We added those to the pile and then Maureen pulled open one of Ruth’s desk drawers and found a couple hundred more samples. UGH! They are like rabbits, popping up everywhere!

I had warned Maureen to stay out of Ruth’s “kitchen” as it was a black hole that would suck the life and soul right out of her body, but as usual, she didn’t listen. She actually did amazing things in there, tossing out two or three garbage bags of absolute shit. She kept bringing things out for Ruth to dissect, and that kept Ruth distracted and out of the kitchen while Maureen trashed and restored the place. I was absolutely stunned by the brilliant cleanliness of the room when I peeked in before heading home for lunch. Incredible, and what an amazing amount of work.

But we finally got the place pulled together and looking, if I do say myself, really awesome. Maureen and I are going to talk paint and figure out how to fix up all the nail holes from the millions of certificates she had covered her walls with, and then paint the whole thing. We’ll do that in the next couple of weeks, but it really does look roomier and awesome. There is a nice flow to the traffic line and customers can now look at her products and be more comfortable. We’ll see how it goes over the week as she starts working with clients to handle the changes.

Tomorrow, Ruth needs to vacuum and clean things up, as we did leave a few bits of stuff around, and then she has a whole list of projects to work on to make the space more functional. She is so gloriously happy. She keeps telling me over and over that this is such a blessing and such a rare experience. Who gets two brilliant people to come in and turn everything upside down and shake things up to make things every better. She loves the throwing out, once she gets the idea about it, and she will put a lot of what we told her into practice. We’ve warned her that we will come and do inspections at least once a week and there would be dire consequences if she slacked.

About one in the afternoon, Ruth and I walked to Kikkar Rabin, a good place for her to catch a taxi the rest of the way home, and only a block from my house. She went on and on about how happy she was about all of this. It’s kinda strange. In a lot of ways, we were beastly to her, but she got the spirit of the whole process right away, and her external optimism in the face of Maureen and my cynical nature – well, Ruth just shines like a diamond no matter what we do to her. An amazing lady. It was great fun, and it will probably inspire me to get busy with my own place. Actually, the living room, kitchen and my office are in good shape. The bedroom is a total disaster as I’ve piled up tons of boxes and crap for mailing off to Christmas, which has to be done by October in order tog et there on time, but I am not going to make it, obviously. It’s half way through November. More ugh.

Brent almost had lunch finished when I got home. He’s been down for two days with a vicious sore throat and runny nose. This is his second in just over a month, and he rarely gets sick more than twice in one year, so I’m worried about him. I’m not sure if he is up to going to work tomorrow, but we’ll see how he feels. In spite of feeling miserable, he still cooked an incredible baked chicken from a new recipe I found a couple weeks ago, and worked on his guitar in between naps. He wanted his warm-ups sweat suit because he was feeling chilled, and I had to tear apart the closet to find them. Yep, it’s time to start finding the winter clothes. We feel a chill in the air – but only after the sun sets.

I wanted to rest away from the computer for an hour this afternoon and watch “Enterprise”, the new Star Trek series, but it was not on because Channel 10 was running redundant stories about the simultaneous bombing of two synagogues in Istanbul. Last I heard there are 20 to 30 dead with possibly as many as 300 injured, many critically. Terrible. Israel and Turkey have very strong ties, especially because Israel gets most of their water from them and Turkey buys tons of military gear and planes and such from Israel. A nice match. Tourism from Israeli’s make up a huge portion of tourism income, too. So it is a nice relationship. Israel has sent over representatives and aid to help with the recovery. Combined with this, another synagogue in France was burned to the ground in the last day or so, another wonderful statement for peace and tolerance between religious groups.

On CNN there was a new woman reporter I’d never seen before giving the Israeli perspective on the events. The reporter in Berlin asked her if Israel was surprised and shocked by this event. The new reporter admitted that there was surprise, but Brent and I gagged at the question and the response. I’m sorry, but Israelis are shocked, angered, dismayed, frustrated, pissed off, sickened, and a lot of other things, but “surprised” just isn’t in the vocabulary. Israelis, specifically Jews, have thousands of years of persecution in their history, then and today. Every day somewhere in the world a Jew is persecuted for being a Jew, often resulting in death. Brent and I have learned that there is a fatalistic view inherent in the Jewish culture. They really believe in a twisted way that “if you can’t pick on a Jew, who can you pick on?” So as horrible as these bombings are, there is a lot of acceptance that this is just the state of affairs. “Of course we’re a target”, we’ve heard over and over again. I’m sorry, but there is not surprise any more. Just disgust.

Brent commented on the term “Islamist” to describe the terrorists behind the bombings. What the hell is that? I explained that this is the new media-speak for Muslim Extremist or Muslim Terrorist. They want to make a difference between Muslim and Islam, making Islam the “bad word”. The United States has played around with right and “wrong” or “bad” words to describe people with black-colored skin, with some of the terms moving in and out of fashion as good or bad words. Now everyone is trying to do the same thing with Muslims, wanting to “code” the good ones from the bad ones, I guess. “But Muslim and Islamic are the same things,” Brent said. He’s right. It is just the game of words. Not all Muslims are terrorists, and not all who practice the faith of Islam are terrorists, but the media has to create terms to keep the enemies separated from the good people. Yah Dah Yah Dah Yah Dah!

Tel Aviv, Israel