Taking Your Camera on the Road

Walked the beach with Maureen again this morning. That’s three times out this week, three times more than in the past two months. It’s good to get out and about. The exercise and fresh air is certainly helping me clear my head and heart. Coming home is still painful, but the pain is an old friend now and it will soon find a comfortable spot to rest in the back of my heart, right along all the rest of the sad memories. It’s a bit crowded in there, but it will be among good familiar friends and family.

We came back up through the souk (in Israel pronounced shook), the Carmel Market, a wonderful open-air market in the heart of old Tel Aviv. As it was still early morning, we had to crawl past the delivery trucks and battle the old prune-like men pushing carts of all shapes and sizes loaded down with goodies and food, or racing back to the warehouse or delivery truck to restock. Even at 7:30 in the morning, the place is a buzz with activity. Maureen and I have our favorite places and sellers, and we had a good time teasing one of them, a young man who works for his family business selling lettuce and herbs. He has grown a terribly ugly “goatee” that looks more like a Mr. T mohawk on his chin than a real goatee. He is such a handsome young thing, and Maureen just loves teasing him, but this thing on his face is ridiculous. I don’t have a problem with facial hair – in fact I force my hubby to wear his sweet beard that I adore – but this line on his chin looked silly. Maureen told him it was crooked. I made him look at me and I studied it carefully. I apologized and told him that indeed, it was crooked. “You’ll have to start over.” He wasn’t too thrilled with that, but he smiled and laughed at us all the same.

When he turned away to enter the stall, Maureen grabbed me and hissed, “It’s awful, but then, again, it depends on what its purpose is.” I had to stop and figure out what purpose…and then it hit me. What a delightfully nasty biddy that woman is! And one more reason why I adore her. Criminally nasty! I giggled and then our young friend wanted to know what Maureen had said. I couldn’t tell him, as I’m not sure how much English he could understand, but he got it without me saying a word. “It was nasty, wasn’t it?” “Of course it was!” I laughed, and he laughed, and he gathered up my baby lettuce and fresh tarragon with a grin.

A lot of the sellers speak mumbled Hebrew, coming from Russia, Arab lands, and elsewhere, or have been here in Israel for so many centuries, their version of Hebrew is their own, I often have trouble understanding their numbers when they give me the totals. There are male and female references for the numbers, so you don’t just learn one through ten and so on, you have to learn one through ten in the male version, and then one through ten in the female version. There is something similar in Spanish speaking countries, but the difference is consistent and small. In Hebrew, the words sound completely different in some cases. “Hamesh” and “Hamesh-ah” will get you a female and male number five. But when it comes to twos, oh, boy. When you want to count or find out how many of something there are, two will get you “sti-eem” or the rarely heard masculine version “schn-iem”. When you use two as an adjective, like there are two cups on the counter, you get “scht-ey” or “schn-ey” (female/male). Combine this with double numbers, like “ezreem ve sti-eem” and you got yourself a mouthful already without any help from accents and lazy lips. So I hand over what I believe to be about the right money in bills, and I get change back.

I’m down to the last bits of bills and into my coins when I decide at the last minute, backpack and hands full, to buy a pomegranate. They are so tasty here. I pick out a bright red one, bursting at the seams, and hand it to the seller. He tells me that it comes to “schmo-nah schk-leem” (masculine version of eight shekels) and I understand him. And I’m surprised because I have problems with telling the different between twos, sevens, threes and eights (they all start with schz-blah).

Delighted with myself, I struggle with the handfuls of bags and my wallet, and watch coins flip into the air and down into the old wooden stand. I shove the money into my pocket and start moving pomegranates around to barely get my fingers on a five shekel piece, only to watch it slip and slide out of my fingers and down into the crevice of the wood slats, buried under kilos of pomegranates.

The young man comes around and smiles at me, speaking chop-chop English as he snaps up the fruit and rearranges them to get clear access to my change. But it is really stuck down deep and will require pulling everything out. He just finished stacking all these within the last 30 minutes, so taking it apart isn’t in his agenda. We can tell, though, by the colors on the edge of the coins what is there, and he tells me it is 15 shekels and he gives me change from that. He smiles and tells me he’ll pull it out in the evening. “This is not first time.” Maureen and I were delighted with his courtesy, seeing so little of it when we shop. We thanked him profusely and made our way up the narrow market street.

At the top of the market, Maureen headed off for a morning meeting and it took me five seconds to decide to take the bus home. This was just more than I wanted to carry up the hill to our home. For that hour of the morning, the bus should have been packed, and I was nervous about getting on with all my shopping bags in my hands and the full backpack, but the bus was barely half full. No one, except me, was standing up. Usually it would be packed so tightly, faces would be pressed against the windows. Either there are fewer people taking the buses, or fewer workers heading to work. I don’t know, but it was a little scary. Not scary like terrorist, but scary because of the change. For the past couple of months, even though there have been no recent bus attacks, fewer and fewer people are riding the buses.

I read in the paper that Yad Vashem (Holocaust Memorial and Educational Center in Jerusalem) is only six months away from their official launch of a web site listing the names of Holocaust victims. It is in testing mode now, and it sounds wonderful. Family members will be able to search for lost relatives, and some may find out the truth when it was so difficult before. Currently, Yad Vashem has more than 3 million names in their own internal computerized database, but they have been working for over ten years to digitize all of its archives. They hope to get as many as five million names online by the end of next year. Wow!

Officials say that the web site will be interactive, with the ability to search and research as well as provide information and feedback, even to give testimony about the lost family members. They want “a page of testimony for every victim of the Holocaust as a symbolic tombstone,” according to Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem’s Directorate, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post. Since I am redoing my entire web site, this ambitious project really impresses me. One of the features they will have is the ability to search various phonetic spellings of names, with the page actually offering suggestions. Other Holocaust museums around the world will be able to add their data and reference this unique database as the project gets going. Isn’t that incredible. What a project!

I am thrilled to be living here at a time when Yad Vashem is undergoing such an amazing transformation from a memorial place to a full-blown educational/museum/research facility. Over the past four years, I have watched the place recarve an entire mountain. The architecture is incredible, looking like an airplane crashed into the middle of a mountain, buried inside of the mountain with projections on either side. I’ve seen the final models and I couldn’t believe they could do it, but never tell an Israeli he or she can’t do something. They will jump in with both arms and legs and damn the rest of you, they will do it. It’s incredible what they have done in such a short time in this place. While I’m not happy with everything they do, there is a lot that overwhelms me with their passion and determination against incredible odds. I can’t wait to see the finished project when it is done next summer. Maybe we will actually attend a few of the opening ceremonies…among the millions of others. Yad Vashem is such an incredible place, and I’m thrilled to have spent so many hours there over the past few years.

Another day spent plodding away at validating this darn web site, but it gets closer all the time. I think I’m down to the nitpicking, but I might as well get it right this time to make the “next time” easier. I’m actually having some fun with this, too.

Brent tried to view the new pages from his computer at work and found it a complete mess. Since the computer is Hebrew-enabled, it skewed everything to the right side of the page, flipping and flopping sentences and periods all over the place. Graphics were scattered with text overlapping – it was a mess. I have to do something to force the page to stay left-to-right since the language code I’ve put in isn’t working. I’ve asked about in a couple of HTML forums and maybe someone will come up with a better answer than the vague ones I’m finding on the web standards pages. With millions of Internet users browsing the web with right-to-left software, this is actually a more common problem than you would imagine, so I want to solve it.

Tel Aviv, Israel

I don’t know where the day went, and I think I got a lot accomplished, but it sure feels like I spent more time spinning my wheels than actually doing anything. I spent three hours trying to get our network of three computers to cooperate. Our backup “server”, a large three hard drive desktop, is networked to two laptops via a wireless and hard-wired hub. While I was camping over the weekend, something Brent did, or didn’t do, caused the two laptops to “see” the desktop but not connect to it. The desktop can see and connect to the two laptops, but I can’t get the reverse. I’ll work on it more tomorrow, but I don’t know where to turn. Ugh!

I did research a few new links and resources for our site, and found some goodies, and I tackled the backlogged email. Since coming back from our “refugee” excursion, I just can’t seem to catch up on all the email. It keeps piling up faster than I can get to it. I have to get more disciplined. I respond to the business stuff right away, but friends get ignored for a bit longer…sad, but I’m trying to keep up with a lot of work load!

I did get a few minutes to read at least the first section of the Jerusalem Post newspaper while eating dinner. I usually eat and work at the same time, but my fingers needed a rest. I found another story about a poll on the feelings and views of the Palestinians regarding suicide attacks on Israelis. These are the polls that never seem to make the international news. The suicide attacks make the news, but the attitude about them doesn’t. In a survey done in the summer of 2000, before the current Intifada broke out, over 70% of Palestinians did not want to be under Palestinian rule. They didn’t trust their “government” to take care of them, and of those living within the Israeli borders, the majority wanted Israeli citizenship and rights. Comparing Israeli freedom and business opportunities with the Palestinian Authority’s corruption and controls, I would have to agree, but I’m not the one experienced at living under the different rules. They are and the poll reported their feelings, much to the anger and dismissal of Arafat.

The most recent poll, according to the Post, found that 61.8 percent of Palestinians supported suicide attacks, and 34% were opposed to this form of terrorism, with a 3 percent margin for error. A majority of 42.8 percent said they supported the resumption of attacks inside Israel as well as the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as oppopsed to 14.1 percent who said the attacks should be restricted only to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The poll was done by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center (JMCC) supported by a fund from the Fredrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation in Germany and interviewed 1198 people over the age of 18 living within the Palestinian Authority.

Another interesting result in the survey is that 58.9 percent are pessimistic about the future and 71.9 percent are not optimistic about a peaceful settlement, with 76.8 percent supporting the continuation of the violence. Combine this with the poll revealing that 45.7% saying they supported the two-state forumla and 25.3% agreed that the best solution would be a “bi-national” state on all of historic Palestine. I’m confused, aren’t you?

First of all, polls are misleading and need to be questioned. I haven’t been able to find out what the interviewers asked and how they phrased the questions to determine these results, so I can only think about the numbers. It’s clear that the majority of those interviewed believe that violence is an answer – a solution to a problem. I find that offensive, no matter who it comes from. But then again, look at what these people have been taught.

While Clinton and other US Presidents have spouted their determination to never negociate with terrorists, time and time again terrorists have been negociated with, proving to the world repeatedly that violence can win power and influence people. In a wonderful editorial parady in the Jerusalem Post during the “war” on Afganistan against the Taliban and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Arafat is “overheard” having a phone conversation with bin Laden and lecturing him on what it takes to become a “world leader” from a lowly terrorist. Arafat instructs bin Laden to do it his way, the right way, and “you, too, will be elected president and given a Nobel Peace Prize.” It seems laughable to imagine anyone even considering giving bin Laden such a humanitarian award, but then it is incomprehensible to so many, especially the families of those who were killed in the 1972 Olympics PLO attack and the multiple airline hijackings, terrorist attacks and suicide bombings that have gone on for almost forty years in the name of Palestinians, with a huge number of these orchestrated and supported by Arafat, that Arafat would be honored by the Nobel Peace Prize Commmittee. When you think about it, bin Laden has just as much of a chance as Arafat did. Now stop and think about what Arafat has done for his people since receiving such a high honor and world-wide acclaim. Not much. Violence continues.

I’m not saying that Israel has nothing to do with the continuation of violence. That isn’t part of my issue here. My issue is with a people and a person who believes that violence is the answer. I have a problem with people who support violence as an answer. I’m shocked, dismayed, and appaulled at the American people who stood behind Bush when he went after Saddam. Sure, I think the Taliban were awful people, but to destroy an entire country for the sake of finding one criminal, bin Laden, even if that government is corrupt and horrible…I have problems with that. I have a problem with the US believing it can be the policeman for the world. I hate that people are suffering under repressive and destructive governments. It makes me ill to think that these people live in such fear and terror that they cannot reach deep within themselves and understand what it takes to reform from within themselves and their country. I think of all the tortured citizens of the world ignored by the great American policeman who could be saved, but instead, the great white men in the white house go after the dictators who control the oil…and other profits to be had. The US continues to ignore the genecide in Africa, and they live in great hope that continued business dealings with the Chinese will “open their eyes” to the moral value of democracy while their government continues to repress and control their people, the last gasping breath of Communist control in the world. I’m confused with the dicotomy. The US will do business with China, on the hope that they will see the light and change, ignoring their horrendeous human rights policies, but they will destroy Afganistan and Iraq (among many others) in order to get what they want faster. Who decides which groups of peoples and countries get treated which way? I don’t like all this at all.

On another rant of inconsistent political dealings, once again Israel is about to undertake a major international (and internal security) blunder. In the fall of 2000, three IDF soliders were kidnapped along the Lebanese border by the terrorist group, Hizbullah. About the same time, an Israeli business man, under suspicion by the Israeli government for illegal business dealings, was kidnapped in Lebanon, too. This past week, after long negociations, much debate, and a lot of frustration, the Israeli government has approved a “swap”. They will release over 400 Palestinian terrorists (some call them political prisoners, but there are a lot who are considered guilty for terrorism, murder, and kidnapping) in exchange for the three bodies of the kidnapped soliders and the business man. Upon the businessman’s return, Tannenbaum will promptly be prosecuted for his illegal business crimes. I know the families will be happy to have some sort of an end by being able to bury the bodies of their loved ones, but I’m missing something here.

What happened to the “not” in dealing with terrorists? The soliders are dead. There is no bringing them back. But their bodies have value, something I have a problem with. Their spirits are gone, and the memory of their lives have value and should be honored, but the corpses are just…well, I don’t want to sound cruel. But the damage is done. They are gone and it is horrible. No burying of the bodies or anything else will change the situation. But this culture dictates that the bodies have value and they are worth the risk of releasing known terrorists and criminals. As for Tannenbaum, is he really worth 400 terrorists and crimnals? Will his return be such a contrition to the world? Must be.

And what is going to be the price for the four Israelis and their three non-Israeli friends being held hostage in Columbia?

My point is that over and over again we give permission to terrorists and kidnappers that these actions are acceptable because they bring reward. And because the reward is good, they keep on doing it. Over and over again. Talk about your cycle of violence!

And the plotting continues. It looks more and more like Syria is next on the hit list from President Bush. I just read that the US Senate has voted 89-4 for bill to impose sanctions on Syria unless it stops sponsoring terrorists and halts its banned weapons programs. In the vote, the Senate changed the “Syrian Accountability Act” to give President more power “to waive economic and diplomatic penalties in national interest.” Whose national interest? Again, this seems to be a start on a new policy of “warn and attack if we don’t get our way.” Didn’t England do much of the same thing, which led to its becoming a world super power, until its downfall and reduction to a small island north of Europe and a bigger island south of the planet. Shouldn’t the US learn from other “world” power mongers? Couldn’t they just get by setting an example and leaving the rest of the world to get a clue? I know the policy of “non-interference” came out of Holywood’s Star Trek, but I’d like to believe it came out of a spiritual need of the American people to remind its government guardians that interference in another country’s politics and lifestyle is unacceptable.

President Bush is visiting London, and the whole nation is up in arms about it, and even the mayor is behind them, permitting, against Blair’s orders, a massive peace demonstration. Blair wants to shield Bush from his people’s views, as do other world leaders when other world leaders come to visit, but I don’t think Bush can ignore the English opinion. It will be all over the news and they aren’t quiet when they have something to say. I say “good for you” to the English people. I think it is time that Bush got the message that the rest of the world is sick of his political action outside of the US borders. He is not, and never will be, a world leader, just a president of a country who has, history will probably prove, made some dumb decisions based on insufficient information and a lot of personal agenda. People of England, speak out loud. Shout it out. Prove to the world that your voice can be heard.

And someday, maybe the world will embrace the “prime directive” and we will learn that violence is not an answer, no matter what the problem is. But then again, don’t back me into a corner…ah, the eternal dilema…resistance is futile has been proven that it is possible to resist…which way to turn. Which way to turn.

Tel Aviv, Israel

Well, the storm is still on, but much of the thunder and lightning has died down. I met Maureen at 6:30 for our morning walk and I actually got rained on for all of the ten minutes it took me to get to Gordon and Dizengoff from our apartment near Kikkar Rabin (Rabin Square). I took our big golf umbrella with me so it would cover both of us while walking the beach, but I didn’t need it as the rain stopped 30 seconds before Maureen arrived. Damn. I love walking in the rain.

Without tourists or money to replenish the sand on the Tel Aviv public beaches over the past few years, the storms have pulled much of the beach out and the water is lapping at the guard towers as the beach shrinks. The waves crashing on the breakers and the beach in the early morning sunrise storm light was absolutely breathtaking, bringing the water almost up to the Tiyalet (boardwalk) in places. We could feel the salty spray on our faces as we walked. Marvelous. I waved out across the pounding surf towards Greece, Spain, Italy and the like in the extreme invisible distance to my mother floating out and about on a cruise ship. I hate it that she is so close and I can’t see her.

We walked down as far as the Dolphinarium, famous for being the sight of more than 20 young teenagers, mostly Russian, who died in a horrible terrorist bombing three years ago. Within a month of the massive destruction, the disco was open for business. It was okay for a short time, but fear from other terrorist attacks swept through the wild youth community, and now they tend to drift into smaller clubs, avoiding the big body mashing scenes that attract terrorists into their crowded midsts. The club closed not long after. It was the hot spot on the beat at night for many years. We turned back before we reached the memorial to the lost children, a memorial that began as an impromptu placing of flowers, stuffed animals, toys, and other memorabilia. Over the past three years, I’ve watched it grow from fresh flowers, pictures and toys to sun bleached pictures and toys adorned with plastic flowers, to the cement monument and plaque that hosts only a few dried out flowers from the people who still stop by to remember. There are memorials just like this all over Tel Aviv and Israel. To remember the innocent who died in a war that isn’t a war, according to the rest of the world.

The joggers and walkers were not out in force, but the regulars were there. You see the same faces and T-shirt and short shrouded bodies over and over again three or four times a week, they feel like family even though you’ve never met. Along the Tiyalet is the only place I walk in Tel Aviv and people will willingly smile at me. I get no smiles anywhere else. You would think that they don’t smile because there is nothing to smile about. Not true. They are just not smiling-at-strangers people here. They save their laughter and smiles, of which there is a lot, when among friends and family. I think one of the reasons Israelis are so loud when talking to each other is that they store up all that energy for when they are together and it literally bursts out of them.

On the way back up Gordon, we spotted a beautiful white and tiger-spotted kitty sitting in the middle of wind-blown trash, in between the rungs of a smashed up chair. She was cleaning herself in that sitting-proud position, completely focused on the cleansing process. She was sparkling in the middle of the refuse, so I know she is a loved and fed kitty, probably attended to by nearby residents, and she had the look of a cat who sleeps inside at night, but she wasn’t interested in USA, just her cleaning routine. Adorable.

I made it home, exhausted, but fell right into finishing the web site and uploading it. While the computer whirled and clicked, I realized I hadn’t had breakfast, so I fixed some tuna salad and turned on the VCR to see what Oprah had done while I was out walking. What luck! I had recorded the show where she did a rare interview with Barbara Striesand talking about her new album, The Movie Album, and she actually sang in person. According to Oprah’s production staff, this is the first time Barbara has sung during a day-time program since her appearance on the Mike Douglas show in something like 1963 or 1965. She only performs at night in concert, when she rarely performs in public. So it was a treat to see and hear her. What a voice. The song she sang from the new album, Smile, is one that she dedicated to her dog, Sam, who she had to put to sleep while recording the album. At nine years old, he was dying from cancer and it broke her heart. She thought about him the whole time she was recording the song, so she dedicated the song to him. While singing on Oprah, they showed pictures of her and Sam in the background. It broke my heart, this being the one month anniversary of our loss of our fuzzy lover, Dahni. Tears don’t come as often now, but it still doesn’t take much to set them off. What a very touching thing for her to do and a great public example of the love and care and respect we need to have for our furry loved ones.

I did some more work and then headed out to pick up Maureen and we headed out for our ritual trip to Half Price, a fantastic, huge American-style grocery store out by Rishon Le Zion. I bought a month’s worth of food supplies, stocking up. Like some numb idiot, I wandered into the pet food section, and then cursed my self as emotions brimmed over. I stopped, took a deep breath, dealt with the feelings, and then moved on. What else can I do. Then we went for a quick run over to the stores for the employees of Israel Aircraft Industries. The prices for a lot of household appliances and items are fairly inexpensive. I bought a portable heater unit for Ruth (she asked me to), and some new house slipper for Brent, and a few other odds and ends. Maureen loves exploring all these places, but we were both exhausted, so after an hour we were back in the car and heading home.

Tomorrow I hit the book again, locking the doors and bolting the windows. The next trip out of the house is Thursday morning for an early morning walk and then Friday to meet with Maureen and Ruth in the afternoon at Ruth’s office to help her with her office remodel job. The rest of the time I’m hand-cuffed to the computer and WordPerfect, working on the book.

Tel Aviv, Israel

I can’t believe it, but Lake Dubnov is back. Yep. That’s what we call the “lake” that forms in the park below our apartment. Built over a parking garage for the Arts Center (hosting the Performing Arts Center, Library, Tel Aviv Art Museum, and other social avenues), drainage wasn’t taken much into consideration in this lovely tree garden turned dog park. It really is a lovely park and the flowering trees turn the most incredible colors through the year. Unfortunately, dog owners think it is the prime place for their mutts to dig and shit and the skate boarders consider the sloped and twisting walkways to be prime boarding terrain, and the caretakers and parents don’t seem to have much of a problem allowing their baby children to crawl through the grass and dirt littered with dog shit. The planners didn’t take the 10 minute torrents that fall from the sky repeatedly every winter into consideration and forgot about drainage. So the two giant sand boxes for the children and neighborhood feral cats fills up with soupy sand and all dog worn low spots flood, creating Lake Dubnov in Dubnov Garden.

It’s nice having waterfront property, even if it is short-lived.

At least winter has arrived. Arrived with a vengeance. The storm came in last night with lightning and thunder crashing around us and shaking the windows. We turned off our computer equipment for the night as the storm raged around USA, blasting great flashes of light into our windows. The wind was really fierce so we had to close the windows, limiting the sound of rain, a sound we long to hear. The storms kept up on and off throughout today, and I’m loving the view of the trees twisting and twitching out my window. Ah, winter is here!

It arrived so suddenly, as is typical here. It just doesn’t cool down slowly and then sneak up on you. Three days ago I was sweating in the sun and getting sunburned. Today, the sunburn is peeling a little and I’m actually wearing socks! We’re going to pull the fluffy duvet down, a giant quilt found commonly in Europe and the Middle East, and try snuggling under it tonight. It will probably be too warm, but I want to try – fake it until it really does get cold.

I ran these pages through massive validations and cleaned up a lot of the loose stuff. I’m sure there will be more details to find here and there, but the bulk is done and it’s ready for massive testing out in the real world. I uploaded the whole thing over the weekend, only to find out that I had misspelled the same word in a title on just about every page. Ah, the devil is in the details. So I decided to leave the misspelling up while I validated and now I have to start reloading. I’ve changed FTP programs, hoping to make the process easier. The first try of the program dumped everything into my root directory instead of into the specific directories, so that was four hours of waste while I went through and deleted everything and started over. Hope it works this time.

Tel Aviv, Israel

We survived. Actually, we had a tremendously fantastic time. It even rained on us. YEAH, GESHAM! (Hebrew for rain).

I picked up my friend, Ruth, from her office and we raced out of Tel Aviv and headed north to escape the wilds of civilization. We headed up to the Carmel mountains, a row of “hills” that rise out of the Mediterranean at Haifa and form a small spine that eventually drops down to just above sea level south of Zikron Ya’acov, the town and community built by the famous Rothchild wine maker. Made of limestone, these mountains are filled with caves and fascinating twists and turns of water cut canyons (wadi) left behind when the waters left these lands hundreds and hundreds of years ago. One of my favorite caves are the Nahal Me’arot Caves about 3 km south of Ein Hod along Highway 4. These caves also host archeological digs began by a woman-led team in the late 1920s. Dorothy Garrod of England, with the support of a British feminist group, led an all female team of diggers and scientists, and their work revealed one of the most incredible finds of its time. It seems that these caves have hosted almost 200,000 years of civilization. It was here that the first ever discovery of both Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal skeletons from about the same time period, proving that the two species lived about the same time rather than evolving and leaving them behind. Inside the largest cave the visitor can watch a film depicting what researchers believe was the lifestyle of the ancient people. Unfortunately for Ruth, who had never heard of these caves, the park was closed, so we headed further north and east into the mountains seeking a campsite.

We ended up above Haifa overlooking the northern basin and industrial area of the city towards Akko to the north. The lights sparkled in the night, and the almost full moon that rose through the trees gave us plenty of light during the night. The campground/picnic area was on a hill “mountain”covered by hundreds of planted trees. I’m still uncomfortable being in an Israeli forest. All the trees covering every centimeter of the entire country have been planted within the past sixty – ninety years, lined up in rows. I have a hard time with trees growing in a straight line. Growing up in the mountain forests of the Pacific Northwest of the United States, a forest is alive with anarchy, things going in every direction and every level of the forest crammed with life. Here, the underbrush is completely removed, leaves and needles swept up, barren dirt beneath the pine and fir trees, match sticks in the dry summer. Too clean. Too neat. And yet filthy with the trash Israelis leave behind them everywhere they go. The next morning I spent twenty minutes picking up the toilet paper remains, cans, bottles, cigarette stubs, plastic plates, forks, spoons, and general crap left behind by past visitors. I believe in leaving a site cleaner than I found it.

We choose a spot down the hill and behind some trees away from the Russian family and their over-built campfire. The children ran wild with their dogs through the campground, and voices were loud and obnoxious in the debated discussions of the adults reclining on their plastic lawn chairs around the fire. When dark fell, they started singing songs off key in Hebrew and Russian, laughing and giggling at great volume, until about nine and then they packed up their picnic remains, leaving a shopping cart and other detritus behind them, including the smoking fire, to return to their home after a day in the park. The campground grew silent with only us to make noise, and we finally heard a few birds and insect sounds over the distant traffic and car alarms in the nearby city of Haifa, population over one million.

We set up the tent quickly. My mother brought it over from the US in her suitcase two years earlier. I ordered it specially to handle the new desert and jungle HOT conditions we were now encountering. With the Thermarest mattresses, self-inflating sleeping pads, sleeping in our tent is actually more comfortable than our own bed at home. Brent and I love it. So I didn’t worry about comfort for Ruth’s first camping trip.

I had made both our dinner for Friday night and lunch for Saturday in advance, ready for reheating. This was more due to the fact that Brent is our camping chef and I’m the helpful cutter and chopper. I’m new to cooking and not ready for the bold techniques that Brent has so wonderfully mastered over a small camp stove. Leaving him behind meant I had to do things a little easier and gentler – at least for me. So I had made chicken tagine, a wonderfully fragrant Middle Eastern chicken recipe, for our first meal and taco meat for a Mexican lunch on Saturday. “A trip around the world,” Ruth told her daughter via cell phone the next day.

While dinner was warning, I taught her to play backgammon. It is strange to think that someone like her, having lived her entire 62 years in Israel, a land of millions of backgammon players, especially the men who fill the crowded sheshpesh parlors in the Arab areas (and other old areas of towns in Israel and the rest of the Middle East) tossing dice in the blue-brown smoky rooms, the sounds of clicking of dice and pieces and the low murmurs of conversation seeping out the open windows onto the street outside – Ruth had never learned how to play backgammon. So I taught her and she caught on immediately, beating me on the first three games. Yes, I sort of let her win for a few games, but then she turned cut throat competitive, yelling “I love this game” when things were going her way, and “I hate this game” when things looked dim, but winning anyway. It was actually fun to play with someone who took the game seriously and competitively for a change. Brent gets bored quickly, so I spend more time challenging the computer for hours on end. My father taught me to play when I was a little child, so I have a few years of experience and she tested it well. We had a great time with it.

I showed her how to wash her face with only a little water and no sink, and how to brush her teeth, all requiring some changes from life in your personal bathroom. She spit into the bushes before I could tell her not to, but I did catch her before the second spit to inform her that the chemicals in toothpaste are toxic to wildlife and that it can kill plants, so we spit into the garbage, taking it with us when we go. Peeing in the outdoors is something I’ve never had a problem with, but I worried about her. She had given this long consideration over the two years of discussion about camping, and she embraced it with the class and style I adore her for. I’ve never had such an incredible friend, one so willing to take a chance in life, in the smallest of ways (not the biggest, though sometimes the smallest steps are the biggest), and she told herself that “If Lorelle can do it, I can do it.” And she did.

I did worry about her sleeping in the tent. It is hard enough for anyone to sleep in a foreign bed, but outside under the trees, moon and stars, among the animals of the night (including humans), it can be a very scary thing. She didn’t know how to do the sleeping bag, but I slowed her and she slid in and snuggled down, and promptly slid down the sleeping pad. We’d chosen a spot as flat as we could find, but on my side I was sliding down to my feet and she was sliding off sideways. During the night she took the spare blanket and rolled it up under the sleeping pad, evening the surface, something I would never have thought of. She’s going to be a great camper.

At four in the morning, water drops hitting my face awoke me, and worried about her getting wet (Brent and I probably would have slept through the five minutes of drizzle without a worry, knowing it would be short), I jumped out in a T-shirt and nothing else and covered the tent with the rain fly. I told her it would probably stop by the time I got back in, and sure enough, as soon as my head hit the pillow and I turned to listen to the lovely patter of rain on the tent roof, there was silence. Oh, well. It took me a while to get back to sleep, but she fell off immediately.

The next morning we did a small breakfast and then headed out to the Jordan Valley. I took her along a rough dirt road rarely traveled by most Israelis, that rises over and fallows the Jordan River, the wild parts of the river where the rafters get a ten minute thrill of riding the “rapids” of the famous river. Brent and I had heard songs sung in church most of our lives about the mighty Jordan and crossing it. Turns out that I grew up next to creeks not much bigger than the Jordan. According to experts, even in Jesus’s time it wasn’t much bigger than it is today, except during the occasional flash floods during the winter. Not very mighty, but when you live in a place where green is rare and water even rarer, the sight of the white water below, snaking through the limestone cliffs is quite dramatic. I choose a spot out on a cliff overlooking the river for our lunch and we debated over how hard it would be to get a table and other silliness as we set down the foam sleeping pads on the gravel surface, covered it with a towel, and ate Mexican tacos for lunch. It was great fun and she will tell stories about it for years to come.

She called me today to tell me what a wonderful time she had. She said that she is happier than she can ever remember. It is such a freedom, she told me, to be able to do that. She wants to go again “any time you say.” That’s nice. We did have a great time, laughing, telling stories of our lives, and such. I loved watching her go way out of her comfort zone while trying to be cool and contain her nerves and giggles. I so enjoy camping, be it in a tent, trailer, or hotel, that I will do it every chance I get. I feel more alive when I’m camping than at any other time, so I understand her excitement, even though it is old hat for me.

Brent stayed home, played his guitar and messed on the computer all weekend, and loved every minute away from me. Honestly, we are so rarely apart, and we truly love being together all the time, and hate it when we’re apart – but once in a while, it’s a nice change. I called on the cell phone to tell him I was a block away and he came running down to help me carry things up, then put me in the shower and scrubbed me down, all dusty and smelly, glad to have me home.

Tel Aviv, Israel

The news today from the United States (heard on NPR streaming across my broadband Internet) is all about the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, entering his guilty plea to the courts in Seattle. What a scare from the past. Growing up in Seattle, in the early 1980’s we were absolutely terrified by the threat of the Green River Killer. Eventually, I began teaching self defense programs for women and we have to admit that the fear of the Green River Killer helped motivate a lot of women towards these programs. This "monster", as we all called him, targeted runaways and prostitutes. "Easy victims", the throwaways of life, everyone said. How incredibly sad. As always guessed, Ridgeway was an ordinary guy with an ordinary life who killed more than 48 women. He had been brought in for questioning several times and had passed two lie detector tests. The only way he was caught was that he had given them a saliva sample for testing in the early days of DNA testing. It took 20 years for the DNA testing to get to the sophisticated level to prove he was the criminal. Listening to his plea to the court, cold and unfeeling, I am filled with such a sense of loss and relief. Strange combination. According to the reports, he has shown no remorse and provided fairly detailed information on the killings, admitting that he killed the "disposable" women he found.

Washington State still has the death penalty, and while I have recently changed my mind about the death penalty, this tests my beliefs. While he admits to killing 48 over his two decade killing spree, he probably killed even more. Tracking runaways and missing prostitutes is a difficult job. I am starting to think that because he has confessed to 48 murders and the police and prosecutors believe he did it, the death penalty should be seriously considered. But they have done a plea bargain that in exchange for detailed information on the killings, he would get life. But 48 women…that’s disgusting.

Haunted by this for over twenty years, it is amazing to think that it is finally over and the families of these girls have some form of closure.

My friend, Maureen, came over for lunch and ended up visiting with me while I cooked up dinner for the camping trip over the weekend. She is such a joy to spend time with, relaxing and interesting at the same time. She always has fascinating stories to tell and we love going on and on debating a subject. We don’t pick shy subjects, mind you. We tear into Jew bashers, prejudice, politics, international idiocy of government policies, religion, you name it, we will seize a top and tear it to pieces with our opinions and issues over it. One of our current "hurrays" is over the failure of a US southern judge to get away with putting up a monument to the ten commandments in front of the court house. We are both fans of anything that keeps religion on a personal level and out of our faces and the faces of government. We also had a great debate over where to draw the line when it comes to the issue of the Holocaust. A great memorial going up in Germany (I think) has come to a bit of a standstill as they debate over the use of a special chemical spray on the monument that will prevent graffiti from sticking to it. They are paying for its application and have just found out that the company that makes it is the same company that made the gas used in the death camps. Ouch! Some say that this is going too far. Me, well, if they are donating their services and product, I would say it’s okay because it is like they are apologizing. Maureen says it is all a bunch of bullshit. Brent agrees. You can only go so far in penalizing those who did the deeds over 60 years ago. They can’t be punished forever, right? It’s a great thing to debate. Want to spice up your dinner conversation, discuss that!

Other than that, I’m plugging away at the web site and doing my best to get ready for the camping trip tomorrow.

Tel Aviv, Israel

On a personal note, I couldn’t sleep last night, going over and over how hard it was to tell my friend, Maureen, about Dahni’s death. A lot of emotion I’d kept under control was bubbling out around the edges. I miss his presence so much – he was everywhere in our lives all the time. Brent understood and when he came to bed, he held me tight and giggled. I asked him why he was laughing and he told me that he was laughing about how much he loved me. Confused, I wanted more, so he explained how incredible our love was. How it was still such a surprise how big it was, and how deep. He started talking about how we met and some of our earliest intimate moments together and how overwhelming those "feelings" were for him. He’d never really been touched by someone, a back massage or holding hands and such, and how he relished every second experiencing all these new sensations of just having someone near. And how incredible it still felt, over ten years later, to still feel that jumble of emotion every time we touched. It is comforting and exciting at the same time.

Brent and I have been through so much, it amazes me how intimately he knows me, understanding what I need and what I don’t, even before I do. He has been a brick through all of this, suffering along with me, giving me space when I need it and crowding me with love when I need that. We’ve made his "coming home" time even more special. I sit on the floor and he sits in his desk chair at the kitchen table and we talk for at least 30 minutes, covering all the minutia of his day and then mine. I love his favorite phrase about his work: "I spent the day grinding water." With all the game playing and negotiating involved in his engineering work, getting the different groups to cooperate to get the simplest of things done which become complicated within the game, there are a lot of days when he really feels like he is spinning his wheels in the sand, going nowhere. But I love the phrase "grinding water". No matter how hard you work at it, it is still water when you are done.

I am the luckiest lady in the world to have such a passionate and understanding husband. Honestly!

Wow, avoiding confrontation with loss can make a person really productive. I’ve just finished two weeks of hard work to completely revise our entire web site. While the surface cosmetic changes have been few, a little moving around of the logo and cleaning up of the left menu, under the hood I’ve made dramatic changes.

In an attempt to make this site even more accessible, while moving forward with current web standards – and making future improvements and changes to the site even easier – I’ve done away with the restrictive presentation format using tables. There is a lot of information on the Internet about how to do this process, fully embracing the power of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to handle the presentation and layout of a web page, so I’ll avoid a lot of babble about it here. But I will say that it was a lot easier than I thought, once I got a handle on the process. The time consuming part came as I checked EVERY page of the almost 400 web pages on my site to make sure that all those global search and replaces of code did what they were supposed to do, and to remove a lot of the tables within tables and clean up the formatting.

The results? These pages should load tremendously faster and be able to be viewed easily on must about any kind of machine and browser. I’ve also made great improvements to our web page design when it is printed, AND when viewed with a handheld computer. Go on, print a page and see the difference.

I still have a bit of work to do to clean up the few data tables I have left that honestly, don’t need to be in tables, and cleaning up the Gallery display of our images. I will probably let all my creative juices flow on those pages for a change, instead of using the simple, clean look of the rest of these pages. Stay tuned for color and creativity there!

Tel Aviv, Israel

Still warm here. I’m so tired of it. The coolness we experienced for all of 6 hours last week is totally gone and the heat is back. Ugh. I talked to my mother in Seattle for a bit this morning (her evening) and she told me that the first snows have arrived in the mountains and that they might even have skiing by Thanksgiving. ENVY!

Been working hard on the web page conversion to CSS. I ran into a format that should be really simple to create, and it just wouldn’t work. I worked for several hours last night and for hours today, and I just can’t get any layout positioning to work. I posted the layout on the Sizzler Forum, the discussion board for users of HotDogPro, the software I use for designing and maintaining these pages, and asked for help. I got it, but it wasn’t working for me. Some others mentioned other options, but nothing was working. Finally, I posted a new batch of code for someone to really go over and check it and found that a simple two letter code had been left off. Sometimes it is the smallest thing that bites your butt the hardest.

I should be ready to start the clean up of the style sheet code in another day or so. I have to start checking links tomorrow, a task I hate to do. Sure wish it was easier and not so time consuming.

My mother is heading out tomorrow with her husband for a three week cruise in the Northern Mediterranean, visiting Italy, Spain, and down to Gibraltar and ending up in Lisbon. Unfortunately, while she is so close, she really doesn’t have any free time for us to come visit her. I just saw her in July, so it hasn’t been that long, but I miss her. I hope we can work something out to meet somewhere soon. We’ll see. We are planning on going to the states in April for a business convention for Brent’s work, so we will see family then, but it seems so long from now.

While I am working on the web page conversion, don’t worry, I’m still working on my book – mentally. I’m going through the next chapters, editing in my head. I will be back at it the first of next week. These web pages should be ready for uploading by Thursday, if all goes well.

Tel Aviv, Israel

It is so incredibly hard to imagine that it is November and it is so freaking hot outside. I’m so tired of the air conditioning…anyway, I’m plugging away at this web page conversion. It is going fairly smoothly, with only a few glitches.

On Friday, Brent and I went to Jerusalem for the laying of the headstone on the grave of Naomi’s mother, Cilia. We ended up being late arriving at the graveyard, and were completely overwhelmed by the massive size of it. Covered the entire hillside spreading out in all directions. We walked through part of it, but the sheer size was totally daunting, so we came back to the car and waited for them to return to the main parking lot. When she returned, we all went into Jerusalem to the park in front of the Kind David Hotel. Naomi’s mother and father walked this park almost every day of the more than 50 years they lived almost next door to the YMCA and across from the hotel. After her father died three years ago, Naomi and her mother petitioned the city and got permission to have a bench placed on a slight hill in front of the hotel, overlooking the Old City. It is the absolutely best view of the Old City from anywhere in Jerusalem, overlooking the Jaffa Gate. Superb spot. Two trees intertwine over the bench "like lovers", Naomi explains. "Soul mates, just like my parents were." Beautiful. We sat around and visited and just were "there" in the moment, watching Naomi, so young and vibrant, as she played with her new granddaughter and niece, surrounded by family and friends.

Afterwards we walked through the park to the Old City and visited with one of our friends with a shop in the city. Badoin owns an antique and souvenir shop right in the middle of Kind David Street, a perfect spot for catching tourists. He has been absolutely welcoming to us over the years, inviting us into his upstairs area where the good stuff (among some junk) is stored, letting us take all the pictures we want of his marvelous inventory. We needed to buy a trinket for a friend of Brent’s, a fellow guitarist, as a thank you, and I knew that Badoin would be able to help us find the right thing, and he did. I also found some cute trinkets for my mother for Christmas…no details yet as she reads these pages. I also found a wonderful silver spoon, quite unusual in its floral pattern, for using in the spice box that Sabiha gave me. I’ve been looking for an interesting spoon for over a year to go in the box and this one is just perfect.

Brent had to run to the cash machine, escorted by Badoin’s teenage son through the Old City’s twists and turns, and I stayed and had a sit and a visit. Normally, we would be served tea and snacks but Ramadan started last week and there is no food or drinks permitted during daylight hours. He apologized, but we already knew that. We discussed the poor economy, an old topic, and moved quickly to politics. He tried to be polite, but loved it when I admitted that I thought Bush was an idiot. He laughed delightedly. "I can’t tell you how many Americans I talk to who once felt that Bush was doing the right thing but who are now embarrassed by their own president." I told him I was long past embarrassed and now into humiliated. But not so much by the president but also by my fellow citizens. Are they that blind to his idiocy? The war in Iraq wasn’t about saving the Iraqi people! Come on! "It was about the money and the oil," he agreed.

He brought up Arafat and the local politics, quickly delighted that I was up-to-date and so knowledgeable about the situation. In fact, he giggled in joy at my forthrightness. After the usual "safe" discussion about "the situation", Badoin rolled his eyes and informed me with anger that Arafat was determined to "stay put in his throne forever. He will die in that chair!" Interested in his unusual opinion, having met a few Palestinians who were cautious in what they said, but modestly defensive of their "elected" leader, I asked him what would happen when Arafat was finally gone. "He has to die someday. We all do."

"Good people are waiting to step in."

"Who? Who is there capable of leading the Palestinian people and fixing the mess?"

He sat back and gave this some serious thought. "You are right! There is no one."

"You know that Arafat has either killed, evicted, or forced out every good leader there is. He doesn’t want anyone around him to threaten his position," I told him.

He looked at me in shock. "How do you know these things?" Thinking he was questioning my truthfulness, I hesitated, but he clarified it before I could speak. "How do you, living here – what, four years? – How do you know these things? How do you know that Arafat has killed over 80% of the good people to control his power and seat? How do you know this?"

I wish I had misheard his numbers. I never said anything about those kinds of numbers. He went on, "Arafat is head of a Mafia, controlling everyone. You know when you watch on the television all those people in the streets cheering for Arafat? This is bullshit! He sends his henchmen out into the streets in the middle of the night and pulls the young men from their homes, away from their families, and forces them to carry signs and shoot the guns." This I had never heard about Arafat. I know it is true of many other Arab countries and other places where the rulers want everyone’s "good opinion" whether they deserve it or not, but I had heard a lot of bad things about Arafat, but this was news to me. "You know me. I am Palestinian, but I am Israeli, living here, proud, I do my work, I make my money, times are tough, but we are okay. We are good. Only little worries. But I am embarrassed by Arafat and how he hurts my people."

Wow, I thought, this is amazing. Is he telling me this because he thinks I want to hear this, which is actually more common than you could ever believe when dealing with Arabs I’ve learned, or is this the truth. I didn’t know where to go, he was so insistent. So I went back to my original question. "So what will happen when Arafat goes?"

"I don’t know, but there is no one good left. He had killed or ruined them all. It will be anarchy. Mafia." I asked him about Hamas. "No, no, no. Hamas is not political. It doesn’t want the position." This was news to me, too. I asked him about the two faces of Hamas and it’s impact on the situation. "Two faces? Yes, you are so right. You are such a wise woman to know these things. Yes, Hamas does such good. Do you know how many families they feed in Jerusalem alone, every day? Twelve thousand meals they deliver every day to Jerusalem. If they feel this many in Jerusalem every day, imagine what they are doing in the West Bank and Gaza? Thousands upon thousands of people are feed and recieve care from the good works of Hamas. They do such good, taking money from the rich Arabs and everywhere to take care of the people. We like Hamas. They do good work. But they don’t want the power. Yes, there are two sides to Hamas. They want revenge for the killings of Palestinians, they kill USA, Hamas kill them, but they do much good."

"So if not Hamas, then who?"

He couldn’t answer me, other than to rail against Arafat for being such a "Mafioso". Brent arrived a few minutes later and Badoin jumped up and announced, "Do you know what a brilliant wife you have? She knows as much about the politics and situation here as I do. She is incredible!"

Brent grinned. "Yes, sir, I do know." I love him even more, if that is possible.

Badion went on and on. "You don’t understand! She understands this more than anyone I’ve met, even those who lives here. How does she know all this. She is wonderful!" I finally hushed him. It was too much, even for me.

We visited some more and then went off looking for more goodies to buy for Christmas. We had dinner in a cafe with a view overlooking the Holy Sepulchre and Christian Quarter, then rushed off before all the shops closed to get Brent’s favorite Turkish sweets. We tried to do a little more shopping, but everything was closing up as dark approached, rushing home for the Ramadam evening feasting that would go on all night. We wandered the empty streets back out of the city and to our car, grateful just to be with each other, walking hand in hand, through this ancient city so filled with history. Imagine it. We spent the day inside of Jerusalem. It still overwhelms us when we stop to realize where we are.

Tel Aviv, Israel