O...Just....CRAP

I'm in a bad mood. Therefore read the following whiny post at your own peril. This is one of those crappy days someone needs to do a "RESTART" to.

It's the WRONG time of the month. Let's just start with that.

Winter is baaaaaack. And it's DARK and COLD and WET outside. I wondered if I was in Seattle when I woke up this morning and DH wondered if he was in Manchester (the UK version of Seattle).

It's Sunday (start of the work week). Ugh.

I'm tired.

My sprained ankle still hurts.

I got to work today and the computers were down for the first 2 hours of the day. It's like being without air.

Some "outside people" are here at work today to review the filing for one of the studies I'm responsible for. I have a feeling it's not going well and I dread to hear what the findings are.

On the bright side....

A funny from DD8:

One night last week DH had gone out to pick up DD16 from a friend's house. I was getting the little ones in bed in the meantime. 

DD8: "I hear Abba and T coming."

Me: "You do?"

DD8: "Yes. I have ears like an elephant. I can hear a fly fart in Africa." <giggle>

WHERE does she get her material from??

This week is "New Apartment Key Week"!!!!!!!!!!! Our sellers are moving out on Weds. so we should get the key to our new apartment on Thurs. or Fri. Hurrah! Then we are going to have to get in there and make some renovation decisions FAST. We have one month to go before we move in.

"Warts" - Live with 'Em? Or Change 'Em?

Our city has an Internet message board which my husband started and of which he is the moderator. At times some heated exchanges take place on this board between residents of the city over various matters.

The newest gripe to be aired on this message board was started by someone complaining about the minuscule size of the new street signs - when street signs exist - and needing a telescope to even read them or the street signs being obscured by foliage that hasn't been cut back enough and the like. This was the start of the thread.

To which another woman (who I actually know and who lives on our street) responded today:
"Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch! In 65 short years has accomplished what no other nation has!!! We went from being nothing, to being a prosperous, strong, independent country. So what if street signs are not to everybody's
satisfaction? We excell in so many other fields. Let's be thankful for this piece of land that is ours! We're here by choice!!!!!!!!!!" 

This post went unsigned by its author which irked me as did the tone of her post. She is right to some extent. I guess it's just how it was stated.

I am nothing if not a writer. I know this is a strong point of mine. Always has been. But this was only driven home to me yet again after receiving floods of thank yous from others on the message board for the following response which I dashed off to the anonymous poster above and posted publicly. Here's what I said:

"Yes we're here by choice but just because we are here by choice and glad of it does not mean we have to or should close our eyes to the place's "warts". It does not mean that we have to suffer the status quo in silence or refrain from trying to improving the place, refrain from requiring some streamlining of existing methods or refrain from introducing some good old fashioned niceties and conveniences! We Anglos have a lot to offer on all fronts since we know something different which is - dare I say it? - occasionally better."

I am glad I was able to respond respectfully and yet still say what I meant in a concise manner and it seems to have hit home with many who feel as I do.

Dogs...Hmmmmm

The girls have begun pestering DH about wanting a dog. They had a good go at him on Shabbat. To the point where he said, "We have a lot of work coming up what with the move and getting settled and all. Let's get through that and talk again." Does that sound like a "maybe" to you?

Then this morning he came to me and whispered that the upstairs neighbor lady's daughter had found a German Shepherd and they were looking for a home for it. He said he was thinking of going to look at it just so he could say "Nah!" LOL

We had a quick whispered talk about it in the kitchen. I said I would tend not to go for a purebred. Plenty of mutts waiting for homes without breeding more. German Shepherds have genetic problems with their back legs and also since E is afraid of dogs probably best not to get a large one like that. If we ever got a dog and if the girls intend walking it, it needs to be a size that they can control on a leash. Also smaller dogs eat less and can get enough exercise in an apartment.

I have very mixed feelings about getting a dog. IF we ever did, I'm saying. Nice in theory but....they are a lot of work as well. I definitely would NOT get a puppy. I do not have time or energy to deal with housebreaking and getting my possessions chewed up. I do NOT have time to walk anything in the mornings. And thinking of having to walk it in the cold and rain and get up early on Shabbatot to walk it and up and down 4 flights of stairs on Shabbat.....Am I nuts?

The plus side could be that it would afford the kids hours of endless fun with no effort from me. Yeah. But it could also just add to the existing chaos in our house.

Can you tell I'm of two minds? I guess like DH says best to get through the move and then think again.

Pesach Vacation Summary

Here I am back at work after being off work quite a lot due to Pesach (Passover). I've had a raging migraine since yesterday that still hasn't gone away even after taking something for it on two occasions since last night.

The kids were all off school for 2 1/2 weeks or so and I must be the only mom in the country who delights in school holidays. Just means the mornings are all my own for getting myself ready for work. They've been staying up WAAAAY later than I normally let them and therefore sleeping in later. So I have a full, delicious hour in the mornings during school holidays to shower, get dressed, do my makeup, etc. No kids to argue with over what they'll be wearing, no one's hair to fix, no homework to hound them about, no food fights in the morning over what, exactly, they will let me put in their pita and will actually agree to eat. Bliss!

The kids go back to school tomorrow. Which leaves me counting the minutes until the end of June and the start of summer vacation.

Pesach seemed to be all chag and no chol hamoed of which there were only 2 days. I worked one full day of chol hamoed and was off the other and that day was really nice. We all attended Y's acrobatics competition in the morning and then myself and my three offspring betook ourselves to the beach for about 3 hours followed up with a stop at IKEA for a cheap, kosher for Passover dinner out. The beach and the weather were heavenly. Cool breeze, warm sun. I think the water was too cold still to go in and I wasn't really interested in that anyway. Thankfully, the 2 little ones are getting old enough now where they are prepared to play in the surf themselves and I'm not too worried about them as long as they are in my line of vision. Far more relaxing for me this way than when they were younger and expected me to carry them into the surf, sit beside them, dig sand pits and tunnels with them. I hope to go back to the beach often but then again I say that every summer and it doesn't happen as often as I'd like somehow.

Shabbat of Pesach was....Shabbat. Nothing out of the ordinary. But then DH had the bright idea of inviting his mother BACK to us for chag sheini (last day of Passover) because his 2 married kids and 3 grandkids were coming for dinner and he thought his mom would like to see them all. Great in theory. Bad in reality. I was peopled out by this time. MIL is a nice lady and all but irks me no end. She lurks, hulks, hovers, whatever you want to call it. She's very critical in her dry British way which gets old and she's hard of hearing so it's impossible to have a conversation with her when you have to say everything 3 times before she gets it. In the end, I just left DH to deal with her and spent a lot of the day in bed in my room or out in the park with DS4. Just couldn't deal. I'm sure MIL thinks I'm the rudest person on the planet for ignoring her and goodness knows what she's told the rest of the family about me but.....too bad. I gotta do what I gotta do to cope, right?

So here we are back at work, catching up on 5 days worth of emails and slowly getting back into the swing.

The Morning After

After a long hiatus where life got the better of me, I am making a new resolution to return to blogging - at least semi-regularly.

Happy Pesach (Passover) to everyone who observes it!

Seder was held at our house as usual with my Mom and DH's Mom in attendance and DD16 was with us this year for a change. DD16 was such a big help with the cooking! She loves to cook and she's very good at it and adventurous too.

We begged off of doing the big extended family bash this year by using our impending move to get out of it. It sorta worked. DH's married daughter tried to invite herself and her family (that's 4 people) AND her husband's family (another 4 people) to us for the seder. And when do you suppose we got this phone call?? TWO evenings before the seder!! I heard DH on the phone with her and figured out what she was trying to pull. I rushed into the kitchen where he was on the phone with her and started dramatically drawing my index finger across my throat. As in "if you agree to them coming at this late stage I will kill you, her or myself.....or maybe all three". So it seems her story was that they COULD go to her mil's for seder but she would prefer to come to us so that her kids will have ours to play with! I said to DH, "O I see. So she's gone from telling us that a gay couple having a kids was more normal that us having kids together to actually realizing that her Dad having young kids is a plus for her." In the end DH told her that if going to her mil's was an option then she should take it because we wanted a quiet seder this year but that next year we would be inviting everyone. We will be in the new apartment and it's big enough that if any one wants to get away from anyone else, they can. ;-)

So. Speaking of apartments, thank G-d we finally bought a larger place. Our street is two blocks long so it's just down the block from us. Kinda funny to be moving one block down but it's good. We won't need to change the shul we attend or the kids' schools. We are SO EXCITED about moving. We had been looking like CRAZY for about 10 months and had seen this place last summer. They were asking WAY too much for it at the time and their taste in furnishings/decorating had kinda put us off. We carried on looking at other things and then on Election Day which I had off work, I saw on the internet that they were still trying to sell and I suggested to DH that we go back and take a 2nd look. By this time they were desperate since they'd already bought something else and still had no buyer. This time the place struck us totally differently and we were able to look past the decorating style and see the place's potential. We came home and straight away made a silly offer which was significantly lower than they were expecting to get for it. Man, were we on pins and needles all day long! It was so hard to concentrate on anything, wondering if they'd accept our offer. But they did!

About 2 months before we found the place to move to, a serious buyer for our current apartment had come along and he liked it so much that he was willing to wait until we found something else we wanted to buy. We ended up signing both the sale and purchase contracts on the same day.

The "new" apartment is in a building that is actually about 40 years old but very well looked after. The building is set way back off the street and behind another building so we're hopeful that it will be quieter than where we are now.

The apartment is on the fourth floor of the building and faces east, south and west so it's very bright. Whatever sun is going, we're going to get. I swore I would never again live in an apartment that didn't face south. And I think this is the only apartment we saw that DID face south. Our current apartment is ~100 sq. meters (~1000 sq. ft.). The new apartment is ~160 sq. meters (~1700 sq. ft.). Heaven! It is four bedrooms so the extra bedroom will serve as DH's office and guest room. His work space will FINALLY be out of the way and out of sight. The kitchen is large and an older style and we will be redoing it, at least partially. The apartment only has 1 1/2 baths. DH thinks we need to figure out how and where to stick another shower but I hate to start dividing the place up into little bits just for a shower and ruin the effect of all that gorgeous SPACE! We looked at what other people in the building have done about adding another shower. Everyone did something different and I wasn't crazy about any of the ideas. We may just not do anything straight away and live with it as is until we see what our needs really are.

Our sellers were supposed to be in their new place by Pesach but they don't have the key to their new place yet. So until they get it we can't schedule a moving date. However according to the contract they HAVE to be out by May 1 at the latest and we have to be out of our current place by May 23 at the latest. That gives us a 3 week window to do whatever we're going to do to the new place.

On other matters.....
Mr. Ex has been giving me fits over 5 years of child support that he hasn't paid. I finally took a VERY difficult step and turned off his checks and credit cards. This was about 2 months ago. And since then, with my lawyer's help, we have been trying to negotiate a payment plan for him to pay off the debt of back support that has accrued as well as how he's going to pay going forward.

After I had his money "turned off", the idiot phoned up DD16 and told her I'd done that. WHY?? We weren't home at the time when he spoke to her and when we got home she was sizzling mad - at me. Her take on it is, "Poor Abba. How could you be so cruel?" DD16 has known that he and I had a money issue but I never gave her particulars. But since he'd already put her squarely in the middle, I decided she might as well have all the facts so I laid it out for her and said a few choice things to her about the situation. She said she didn't care and she was going to live with him. The next morning I left the house to do errands and when I got home she was gone. I was a WRECK for about 3 days. The feelings of being betrayed by her were overwhelming. You know, you give and give and give and give and do and do and do and do for your kid and she slaps you in the face by running off to the parent who has done - I won't say nothing - but, as I see it, SO little for her. I'm the one who sat up nights with her when she was sick and dealt with her tantrums when she was little and handled school issues which have been many and ongoing and I'm the one who worried about her mental health through the years (there were two long periods at different times where I felt she needed someone other than me to talk to about stuff she was dealing with, fallout from the divorce and other things, and I sent her to weekly sessions with a child psychologist), etc. And for some of her growing up years, I did all this on my own until I remarried. Her Dad hasn't been involved in any of this.

Long story short, she missed 2 weeks of school to live with him as a means of punishing me for my "cruelty" to her Dad. And while she was there, he was threatening to enroll her in a school near him. It was two weeks of stress that I wouldn't like to relive but in the end she came back. I had gotten myself together enough so that when she did walk back through the door, I said hi and gave her a hug and said NOTHING. I think she was expecting me to make a scene because when I hugged her she gave a huge sigh. Relief?

Two days later I felt there was a lot hanging in the air unsaid so I suggested she and I go out for a coffee and talk and she agreed. We talked for an hour. Both talked, both listened. We obviously don't agree about her Dad but that's ok. She apologized for hurting me by running away to him and she admitted that she probably took too much of the situation on herself by trying to be the mediator between me and him. So all in all, I think/hope she learned some things from the experience and I am proud of myself for handling it the way I did.

Now it's left for her Dad and I to either agree about the money or not. My lawyer has turned out to be pretty useless, much to my disappointment. If he and I can't agree, then I have no idea what will happen or more importantly what he can or will do about it. I hate to think.

My secret weapon is just to keep thinking happy apartment thoughts.

One of my FB friends posted the following yesterday which I found helpful: "Please keep in mind that whatever you're going through, this challenging time in your life is merely IN your life. It is NOT your WHOLE life. So be sure to keep this SLICE of your life in perspective and don't let it overwhelm you. Remember nothing is everything. The part is not greater than the whole."

See What I Mean by "Adventure"?

I did entitle this blog "The Israel Adventure". Yep. That's a good name for it, alright!

Israel is in it's 6th day of Operation Pillar of Cloud - fighting Hamas after how many? - SEVEN years did someone say? - of daily rocket attacks on our southern cities. Enough is enough. Gilad Shalit is no longer being held captive there and there is no longer any reason NOT to do something to stop the attacks. I still wonder what took us so long to spring into action.....

I just got back from the U.S. a month ago (more about that in another post) and while I was there I was trying not to think about the possibility that "something" would happen while I was there with a husband and 3 kids here and of me not being able to get home. Thankfully, it didn't happen while I was so far away but it sure is happening now!

We and all our friends knew that we would all be in range "next time around" and sure enough we are which is a first. Thankfully, we've still been getting uninterrupted nights' sleep and haven't had ONE air raid siren alert yet. However, we have been hearing plenty of "booms" throughout the last 6 days which I can only assume is our Iron Dome anti-missile defense system intercepting the rockets that were headed our way.

Last Thursday night I left work at 4:45 with a co-worker and just as we left the building we heard 3 booms. We looked up in the sky and saw three black puffs of smoke hanging in the air basically right over our heads. O-KAAAAAAAAAY! This isn't something happening in "the south" anymore. This isn't fun and games. This is REAL. Now when I'm driving, my eyes are scanning the sky and my heart leaps at every bird flapping by until I realize it's JUST a bird.

On Friday, Y said to me, "Ima, the principal came into our class and told us the bomb shelter was open and if we have time we should run there if there's a siren but if not we should find a wall and lie down next to it with our hands over our heads. If a bomb goes "pop" on me, what good is having my hands over my head going to do?" I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Why does an 8-year-old have to think these things??? Nuts. Just nuts. But she's taking it very much in stride.

My prayer is that we do NOT give up before the job is finished, that we do NOT cave in to pressure. Otherwise we'll be in the same or worse situation a few years down the road. I also hope they don't jump the gun and send in the ground troups prematurely. IMO, they can do a hell of a lot more damage from the air without endangering anyone. They should send in the ground troups at the end to sweep up the pieces when it's all over.

Diary of an Aliyah-nik blog

I stumbled across this blog today by chance called Diary of an Aliyah-nik which looks wonderful and I look forward to perusing it more in depth. Many of her posts look good but in particular her post from August 28th jumped up and bit me on the tush. I couldn't agree with her more and I wanted to stand up on the table and CHEER after reading it. Good for her! Take a look.....