Goals

I am very please with how many of the goals I set for myself to accomplish while DH and Y have been reached. Not all of them, but a fair bit.

I went to the bead shop and 2 projects are either completed or nearing completion.

I went to visit my friend, Jayme, in Ashkelon last night. We went out for dinner. She had her daughter with her and I had E. On the way down there we dropped T off at the boarding school she went to last year. She has stayed in touch with her friends there and goes to visit them occasionally. We picked her up on our way home.

I got the ironing done. (Feeling VERY virtuous about that!)

I'm NOT doing so well on getting more sleep. I feel like I need to use/enjoy every minute I have to myself and hate to waste it on sleep. So there have been a quite a few late nights and I'm beginning to feel it. Not good. Maybe tonight I'll get into bed with a book as soon as E goes down and just call it a night.

At some point last night E came into our room. I hauled him into bed with me and we both went back to sleep. Love it! I toyed with the idea of letting him sleep with me every night while DH is away but know I'd regret it and DH would have a COW if he came home and found that E had gotten used to that and we had to retrain him to sleep in his bed.

The weather the last 2 days or so has been milder but starting on Thursday the temps are due to take a nose dive and the mother of all storms is supposed to move in and carry on through the weekend - rain, wind, hail, freezing temps and even snow up north and in Jerusalem - it does happen but it's VERY rare!

If you're having a hard time visualizing Jerusalem covered with snow, here ya go! (Pics I found online taken 2008.)

New Language

When you move to a new country of course you have to learn a new language. But imagine my surprise after moving to Israel to discover that dogs no longer said, "bow-wow" nor birds "cheep cheep". (Luckily, cats DO still say "meow", cows still say "moo" and pigs still say "oink" - whew!)

An American friend and I recently got to laughing about Israeli animal sounds. Here is a short list:

Israeli dogs say "hahv-hahv" or "how-how".
Israeli birds say "tzif-tzif".
Israeli ducks say "gah-gah".
Israeli pigeons say "gur-gur".
Israeli frogs say "kvah-kvah" (HUH?).
Israeli roosters say "koo-koo-ree-koo!". (When E attemps to say this it comes out "ree-koo-ree-koo" - lol.)
And an Israeli rider says to his horse "dee-oh, dee-oh" (rather than "giddy-up").

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I remember shortly after arriving in the country, I was living and studying Hebrew at the Immigrant Absorption Center in Kfar Saba. A few weeks after arriving I got a bladder infection and went to the medical clinic. I knew the word (barely) for "test" (Heb.: b'dikah) but didn't know the word for "bladder" so I told the nurse I needed a "peepee test". I'll never forget the peals of laughter from all the nurses and all the people in the waiting room - most of whom were new immigrants as well and whose Hebrew was probably not any better than mine. Needless to say someone told me the correct word for "bladder" (Heb.: sheten) and thanks to this experience it's a word I'll never forget.

It's times like this after moving to a new country where you've got to make a conscious decision just to lose your selfconsciousness, let whatever you're trying to say just fall out of your face and leave it up to your listener to work out what they think you mean. Otherwise you'll give yourself ulcers.

A Little Humor

I'll never forget the time when E was a baby. I had him in the front seat of the car in his carseat. I went to put gas in the car. There were two female Ethiopian gas station attendants there that day - both blacker than black. I rolled down the window to talk to the first one, tell her how much to put in the tank and at the end, pay her. While the gas was being pumped, she was cooing and talking to baby E. He was NOT responsive to her so she laughingly said something to her friend - the other attendant - about how deadpan his expression was so the 2nd attendant said to mine, "It's because you're black. He's not used to it." (As if she wasn't black??) My initial reaction was shock at how un-PC her statement was but then I saw the funny side and was cracking up the whole way home. Ay-yi-yi-yi! Only in Israel............

English

Y mentioned recently that she is bored in her English class. Not surprising. Her spoken English is fluent even though her reading and writing skills aren't - although those are quickly improving too. I hope to make a trip to Ra'anana (about 45 minutes north of us) to a store there that I was told sells English teaching supplies - workbooks and such. I want to get her a book or two that will supplement what she's getting in school but that will be more of a challenge for her.

Y started a gynmastics class this week and is LOVING it!

My weekend starts tonight. I wonder what the weekend holds?

We have been potty training E for several weeks now. He got "#1" down pat in about 2 days. "#2"......that's been a bug-a-boo. Sigh. I keep comforting myself by saying, "He won't come to his wedding in a diaper." Everyone catches on at some point. Just when?

Chanuka is around the corner and I want to take a day or two off to spend with the kids. But do I want to just stick close to home or pull out all the stops and do something BIG with them??? That is the question. A month before E was born - on Christmas day which was COLD and pouring rain (weren't no shepherds out tending flocks in THAT weather, let me tell you!) - I and the girls jumped on a bus and went to Jerusalem for the day. There is a small, quaint, cosy coffee shop there called Kad V'Chomer where they sell plaster molds of all kinds of things including Judaica items like menorahs, kiddush cups, Shabbat candlesticks, mezzuzah covers, etc. You pay for the one you want and then you sit and paint it. They provide all the brushes and paints and sponges for people who like sponge painting, etc. When you're done painting your piece, you have to leave it there for them to fire it in the kiln and then return to collect it which, coming all the way from Rehovot, was a bit problematic for us. But we have friends who live near Jerusalem who agreed to pick up the three items for us and hold them until we saw them again. So it worked out in the end. The girls each painted a jewelry box and I painted a mezzuah cover which we have up on the doorway of our kitchen at home. This activity is NOT cheap but it was the perfect thing for three artistic girls on a cold, rainy day in Jerusalem. I don't think doing this again would fly, especially now that we have a very active almost-3-year-old but maybe spending the day in Jerusalem would be fun as we hardly ever get there.

T and I did a big food shop last night. I love baklava but rarely buy it. But it just sounded good so last night I did buy a box of it. Which brought to mind the one and only time my Mom ever made it when I was a kid. Dad took one bite of it and started laughing so hard he was crying and couldn't talk for ages. We asked him why he was laughing and when he could finally talk he said, "It's like eating the morning newspaper!" That's what I think of whenever I eat it. LOL.

Have a good weekend!

My Newest Hobby

A co-worker and friend of mine is an avid beader - she makes jewelry. Really nice stuff! She recently was asked to give a beading workshop to all of us employees one evening just for fun. As there are only 3 men who work here, it was a suitable girly activity for the majority of the employees.

Since the workshop she conducted, I have started making jewelry of my own. Some people would say it's tedious but apparently I like tedium! I find it extremely theraputic and I totally lose track of time when I'm beading. Someone could shout "FIRE!" and it wouldn't faze me, so engrossed do I become.

I am particularly fond of bracelets and earrings as they don't take as long nor do they require as many beads as a necklace so therefore the cost isn't as high. (UNfortunately for me, beading is NOT an inexpensive hobby.) I can whip up a nice bracelet in approximately 2 hours while I watch TV in the evening with DH. It's also fun to experiment with different sorts of beads and the effects of different stitching techniques.

I finally found a GREAT web site and blog on the subject that also includes excellent, easy-to-read beading patterns - some are free! Website: http://www.aroundthebeadingtable.com/ and blog: http://www.aroundthebeadingtable.blogspot.com/. Highly recommended!

And this just in.....THIS just made my day! I just had an email arrive to my inbox with a link to a pdf file which informs us that starting in July, Israel will be seriously ramping up its recycling campaign to include plastic, paper and cardboard, glass and metal whereas up until now we've only been able to recycle newspaper and plastics. This info and other interesting environment-related stuff can be found in English here: http://www.adamteva.org.il/?CategoryID=388. I didn't know this organization existed. It will be "soul food" for me to delve into this site further. I did notice during the .0000937 seconds that I had to glance at the site, I noticed THIS gem: http://www.adamteva.org.il/?CategoryID=408&ArticleID=1252, which combines my two "soap box subjects" - education and green living.