Day 285 (blocks)

BSM and I played with wooden blocks today. Lots of fun, lots of tall, shaky towers, lots of happy shrieks, and then suddenly lots of insisting that I'm not allowed to play with the blocks. Slow down there, happy camper. We share the blocks. Especially when your mother is an engineer.

Day 284 (party)

Tonight was the monthly ladies'  get-together. I don't know what they're usually like (I was expecting dinner and a lecture), but I went, chatted, ate dinner, chatted, and... played with pottery! Seriously. The thing started around 8, and I realized at 11:30 that I really, really had to go home even though I had not yet decorated my lamp and over half of the women were still there. It was fun. I haven't played with proper clay since middle school. It still feels great. So glad I forced myself to hang out with and meet more people in this community. (Also, they're really nice, and I actually enjoy spending time with them.)

Day 283 (Shabbos)

We have a friend from the US who lives about 20 minutes from us, and she visited us for Shabbos with her husband and 2-year-old daughter (whom I shall call Girlio). It was nice seeing her, but it was amazing watching BSM and Girlio play together. Sure, there was some parallel play that went on, but mostly they played together. They sat on the bottom step and ate crackers and stomped their feet. They looked at each other and giggled. They gave each other things they had dropped or left behind. They pointed to each other and declared, "Baby!" It was a really fun Shabbos.

Day 282 (Erev Shabbos)

I lit Shabbos candles on time this week. Not right before sunset. I lit forty minutes before sunset, as written on the calendar. How cool is that? (And we even cleaned the house!)

Day 281 (cooking)

Know this: Kniyah Chochma brand noodles make a terrible Yerushalmi kugel. I mean, really terrible. The good news is that (a) I made everything else for Shabbos except the guacamole and (b) I have all the ingredients I need to make another Yerushalmi kugel tomorrow. So all is not lost.

In other news (not sure if it's good or not), I learned that if I give BSM slices of deli and let him wander around, he will use said deli as "magical meat magnets" (in Husbinator's words) before eating it all. The boy is clever, I'll give you that. I don't think I've ever seen pieces of salami and smoked turkey just hanging out on a door before...

Day 280 (is there anything to know?)

There is a letter circulating around Towna. It does not make me happy. It is a reaction to yesterday's shooting in Har Nof, in which one of the terrorists was an Arab who worked at the bodega next door. Therefore, says the letter, we need to be proactive and vigilant, and immediately fire all Arabs who work in Towna, replacing them with Jews (or Druzim, presumably). Barring that, the letter continues, if someone brings in Arab construction workers, for example, that person should also be obligated to hire an armed guard. I do not like this. It is the panicked reaction of a mob. It is flat-out racism. It is not economically sustainable. It is not right.

I had an hour-and-a-half conversation with my friend Mrs. Orna today, and we spent most of the time working this back and forth. She was very glad to hear I was also upset by the letter: she and her husband just signed a contract to have an Arab contractor build them a house here, and she calculates that it would cost her at least 10,000 ILS per week to hire an armed guard.  She thought her financial situation was clouding her judgement, so we talked. And talked and talked and talked. About war, and responsibility, and trust, and tragedy, and honesty, and where oh where is the solution? And why can't people just be good?

Day 279 (I just don't know)

When I read about this morning's terror attack in a Jerusalem shul, I felt a lot of things. Let's skip to the middle, where I really don't want to leave. I've been suppressing the dichotomy for a while now: I want to see my family in America, and I don't want to leave Israel. This morning I could no longer ignore it. I am sad, and hurt, and angry, and I don't want to leave. I will leave, though. Because I do want to see my family, and to miss out on that makes no sense at all. But I don't want to leave Israel. Not even for two weeks. Not now.

Day 278 (pupik!)

I finally called our local Ministry of the Interior representative. She confirmed that not only can she process our too-new-for-a-passport paperwork, but we can also give her the payment (in cash). She reiterated that it's cheaper to pay online, but I don't have an Israeli credit card, so that's not really an option. I'm just glad that there's a simple way for me to pay, though I do wish I could take advantage of the cheaper option.

I also made pupik soup! I haven't had that in years and years and years, and it was delicious and tasted just like I remember. Okay, to be fair, I'm not actually sure if it was objectively delicious or not. It could be that this is the least flavorful soup I've made, and I'd have no idea: like I said, it tastes exactly like I remember Ema's pupik soup (which I know is impossible, because I didn't put in any celery), and that makes me happy. For the record, if you soak the pupiks for about an hour, change the water, soak them overnight, then rinse them really well multiple times, your soup will actually end up needing a tiny bit of salt. Well, not needing, but I added a bit of salt to my bowl

BSM enjoyed the pupiks mightily, fondly saying "ot da" [hot dog] as he munched away.

Day 277 (babysitting)

I babysat a neighbor's infant for a few hours this afternoon. He was no trouble: he yenched a tiny bit, then fell asleep, then yenched a tiny bit more (because he was hungry, but his mother was coming in 20 minutes, so it wasn't worth thawing his bottle), but was reasonably content as long as I jiggled him. BSM was fascinated by the baby. I got nothing done in those three and a half hours that the baby was here.

Day 276 (Shabbos)

We ate at the Gordons Friday night. I was kind of nervous about this, since we haven't really taken BSM out past his bedtime since he stopped sleeping in his stroller. Thank G-d, he was great! We didn't get home until 9:30 (two and a half hours past his bedtime), but he didn't complain at all. He sat beautifully in his high chair almost the entire time, ate well, and even played peek-a-boo with one of the other guests. It was so cool!

Moreover, even with going to bed so late (for him, anyway), BSM still slept his full 12 hour night, which meant I had 2 1/2 hours to myself when I woke up on Shabbos morning. Wow. I honestly don't remember the last time I had that much time to myself immediately upon waking up.

My parsha reading of the week left me with a question. Granted, I did no research at all on it, but then again, I'm still dancing with my question from Parshas Bereishis (which is what? a month ago now?) so one thing at a time. Does anyone know why in this week's parsha, the word נערה (lass) is consistently misspelled? (It's written without its final heh, making it look like the word "lad.") Or why the third-person narrative in the Torah refers to Rivka as a lass (נערה), but in Eliezer's retelling, he calls Rivka a maiden (אלמה)?

Day 275 (Erev Shabbos?)

Yes, it was Erev Shabbos. But it's a darned good thing that we were only eating one meal at home, and that meal had minimal food preparation. I just wasn't in the mood to be productive, and my Shabbos wouldn't be terrible if I wasn't, so I just let stuff slide.

Day 274 (financial inanity)

Well, I have once again been confronted with the inanity of the Israeli financial system. I finally got through to my credit card company to figure out why the card doesn't work. It turns out that it's not actually a credit card, it's a prepaid card, and I haven't put any money on it yet. Not a problem, say I, I shall call the number with which you provide me and pop some of my money over there. Haha, silly me. The card can only be loaded with an Israeli credit card whose account-holder's ID number matches mine. I don't have an Israeli credit card, so this prepaid thing is not getting loaded any time soon. Growl. Though as Husbinator encouragingly pointed out, I got an answer to my question, and it was a full and complete answer. In truth, that was more than I thought I'd get, so I shouldn't be too frustrated: I succeeded! Ha.

In other stupid financial news, I finally figured out how to order checks from my bank. But they cannot be delivered to my house, only to a branch of the bank. Specifically, the checks can only be delivered to the branch of the bank in which I opened my account, which is in Beit Shean, which is an hour-and-a-half away in the best-case scenario. Ack!

In more soothing news, Mrs. Gordon gave me her "graham cracker" crust recipe, and I made it pretty successfully, so now I have that in my repertoire! Interestingly, even though Israeli stores don't carry graham crackers, they do carry graham cracker crusts. I guess it wouldn't hurt to check the price tag, but I made my assumptions and jumped straight to home-made.

***

Graham Cracker Crust

1 1/2 cups finely crushed tea biscuits
2 T+2 t sugar
2 T+2 t honey (I don't suggest pouring from a full jar: there's a good chance gobs of honey will spill out the other side of the rim as you gently tilt to avoid getting a huge honey glob on the first side of the rim. Not from personally experience or anything, of course. Naturally, I reasoned this out before doing anything silly, so I can't tell you from personal experience that if you pour in nearly twice as much honey as the recipe calls for, the crust will taste a little too honey-y, but will still come out okay.)
1/2 t ground cinnamon
6 T melted margarine

Mix everything together, press into one 8- or 9-inch pie plate, and bake at 375°F for 7 minutes.

Day 273 (Osher Ad)

The Gordons invited me to join them in their excursion to Osher Ad, a grocery store in Jerusalem that is the closest thing to Costo that Israel has. It's not Costco, but they do carry larger packages than are typically sold, so I see why people say that. Osher Ad also carries some Kirkland products, so again, easy to see why it's closer to Costco than your local mini-mart. Nice as the store is, I shall not be swayed from my Rami Levy loyalty. (A), I love our Rami Levy and no uppity Osher Ad can come between us and (b), it takes almost no gas (or time) to get to Rami Levy, and the same cannot be said of Osher Ad. It was nice to visit another grocery store, though!

We made homemade pizza with the dough I prepared last night (Serious Eats' New York Pizza Dough). The dough was ridiculously easy to work with, and it was delicious. It was also reasonably easy to make, though it does require forethought: the dough needs to rise in the fridge for at least 24 hours before using. The other cool thing about the pizza dough is that they also list the recipe as baker's percentages. This is the first I've heard of baker's percentages, and I am a fan.

Here's the ingredient list the easy way:

All-purpose or bread flour: 100%
Sugar: 2%
Salt: 1.5%
Instant yeast: 1.5 %
Olive oil: 5%
Water: 67%

I foolishly used 1.275kg of flour (allowing me to double the recipe as it was listed with the instructions), but next time I'll just use 1kg (1000g). Then it's an easy 20g sugar, 15g salt, 15g yeast, 50g oil, and 670g water. Boom! Scaling a recipe up and down has never been easier.
In preparation for Shabbos and to use up the bag of frozen bananas we have in the freezer (and to get good use out of the Bosch as long as it was sitting on the kitchen counter), I made banana custard. I'm quite proud of how it turned out since I made up the recipe as I went along. For the record, it's one small carton of whipped topping, three or four bananas, lots of junky vanilla pudding (I have a dream that one day, Israeli pudding manufacturers will suddenly decide that their customers actually want their pudding to gel), some amaretto that turned out to taste gross, a tiny bit of almond extract, and some dried coconut. Boom!

Day 272 (back again)

Tonight, the girl for whom I wrote a story knocked on my door with the finished product and a thank-you note. How cool is that? (The book is really cute: maybe two inches on a side, with holes punched in the side and bound by ribbon. Fully illustrated: and my copy was hand-colored!)

Day 271 (yes chores)

I put up the last two rolls of bamboo between our house and the shul. Now I can stretch out in our hammock without feeling like I'm laying down in the shul's driveway. Excellent. I also did about a zillion dishes.

My Israeli credit card company did not call it back. (Surprise! I called them yesterday to ask why the card wouldn't work, and no matter which sequence of buttons I pushed, I ended up being instructed to leave my telephone number, and they'd get back to me within one business day. Since my hopes were not high, they were not crushed. I am annoyed, though.)

This evening, Mrs. Gordon (did I give her a pen name yet? She's my age or a drop younger: calling her Mrs. Gordon is really ridiculous) drove with me to a used book sale in Maale Adumim, which is half an hour away. I'm really glad she came, both because we had a nice chat in the car, and because I hate driving to new places by myself.

It was lovely, was the book sale. I got a new (for me) book by Rosemary Wells, I replaced our first edition Shmiras Shabbos that got lost in the mail as we were making aliyah, I got a collection of Jame Herriot stories that I've never heard of, and much much more! OK, only 9 other books, for a total of an even dozen. Everything was 1 ILS. There were signs reminding people of this, and that the proceeds were going to charity, so we shouldn't think to hard: just buy it! Dangerous, dangerous attitude. And now that I don't have the prospect of dragging all of my books halfway around the world, there's not much deterring me from Buying All of the Books. Oh, dear.

Day 270 (no chores)

I mean, there was plenty of housework that had to be done, but other than doing two loads of laundry, I did none of it. Ha!

Day 269 (Shabbos)

The Gordon's joined us for dinner on Friday night, and we played a game afterwards. It's fun, this weekly playing of board games. I like it.

On Shabbos morning, BSM was tired out of his mind, but he refused to let me put him down for a nap, so we compromised by me letting him sleep on me while I dozed in the rocking chair. For almost two hours. If he weren't feeling unwell, you can bet your sweet patooties I wouldn't have stood for such silliness.

Day 268 (Erev Shabbos)

It was crazy. I'm writing this on Monday, so I don't remember details, but I do know that next time I really will bathe BSM on Thursday night. Really really. Not that the bath took up so much time, even, but it's the principle of the matter: I Must Not Leave Everything for Friday.

Day 267 (In Which I Write a Story, With Some Help)

In useful news, I did two loads of laundry, went shopping, and baked brownies for Husbinator's birthday kiddush, and looked up how to cook marlin. (Last time I cooked marlin, I just threw it in the oven for about 15 minutes. It came out roughly the consistency of chewing gum. It tasted fine, but I had to shred it to make it edible.)

In "things I like about Israel" news, I yelled at some other people's kids in the park today. I did not ask them sternly where their mothers/fathers/nannies were. I just told them in no uncertain terms that they had to stop walloping each other. (In deference to my stern adult lecture, they ran to where I couldn't see them before [presumably] resuming their walloping. I win!)

In actual interesting news, one of the girls from across the street knocked on my door today to ask for help. She had to memorize a five-minute story in Englihs for class, you see, and she wanted to know if I maybe had something for her. The challenge was a fun one, but I didn't win: the girl is just old enough not to want to stand in front of her class and recite a picture book, but the words in Little House on the Prairie were too hard.

In the end, I wrote a (very) short story for the girl, with her input. I was going to have a nice long ramble about how this experience was so different than it would have been with an American middle/high-schooler, but on second thought, I'm not willing to draw passionate conclusions from one anecdote. So there.

(Now that you're curious, I'll tell you that she wanted the story to be very, very realistic: let the wind blow away the jump rope rather than have the cat steal it; if the wind is as strong as I'm describing it, perhaps the girls just shouldn't find the jump rope at all; don't have the jump rope blow all the way to her grandmother's house. I made the requested changes for her first comment, refused to write a sad story when she made her second comment [this blew her mind: as a child who was certainly read An Incident of Five Balloons as a baby, she knows that no matter how much you love your toys, the way of the world is that they will eventually leave you], and told her that if chasing the jump rope all the way to the grandmother's sounds too implausible, well, keep in mind that I never specify how far away the grandmother lives.)

Very interesting. Very tempting to draw passionate conclusions from this one incident. Now I'm hoping that more girls stop by and ask me to write stories for them.

Day 266 (sick)

Poor me. I can tell you, though, with the benefit of writing this on Thursday instead of Wednesday, that after napping all morning and then going to bed for the night at 7:30, I feel much better.

It's a shame that I was sick all day Wednesday, though, because it was Husbinator's Hebrew birthday, and we had planned to eat out in its honor. Luckily, I baked and frosted his cake the day before, so at least there was birthday cake. With the appropriate number of candles. So, ha! Take that, illness!

Day 265 (procrastinating)

I'm not sure what I was procrastinating from, or what I did to procrastinate. What I do know is that other than baking and frosting a cake for Husbinator's Hebrew birthday, I didn't get anything done today.

Wait, that's not true! As part of my procrastination, I ordered a wall plaque of a great picture that I have been coveting since The Caped Avenger took it ages ago. Look at all of the great lines in that picture! (I sweetly compressed the photo before uploading it. If you want the full-sized image, be in touch with said Caped Avenger. And as his shameless sister, I suggest that you offer my little brother some money for a copy of his art. Being a shameless sister, I didn't pay him for it, but that's no reason someone shouldn't reward him financially for this awesome shot. Do you see how each crack in the rock is parallel to a line of the giraffe? Wow, I guilted myself into it. Now I need to give some money to The Caped Avenger, in addition to throwing the filthy lucre at Snapfish. Darn my convincing rhetoric.)

Day 264 (approaching heat)

Today, as with all responsible days, I washed many dishes. I miss my dishwasher.

Unlike other responsible days thus far, I learned how to deposit a check today. Surprisingly, it's pretty much exactly the same method as used to deposit checks in the US: find an ATM at your bank that says it accepts checks, sign the back, insert ATM card, PIN, then check. Enter amount if so prompted. Get receipt. Nothing new, here, folks, move along. I thought it would be more complicated, somehow.

Because Winter is Coming, I assembled the oil heater for BSM's room and dug out the wood-burning stove in our living room. I also spent a long time with BSM, both of us shaking our fingers and saying, "No, no, no," to both the wood stove and radiator. Please G-d, he really understands. Oy, this is scary. Even with these precautions, I only plan on running the radiator when he's in his crib and can't reach it, and Husbinator and I want to put up some sort of gate in front of the stove. Or we could only light it after BSM is in bed. Anyway, we need to split kindling before the wood-burning stove comes into play.

Speaking of heaters, I'm considering replacing/asking the Landpeople to replace the space heater above the bathroom door: the current one only has one working heating element out of three total elements. Even with the not-quite-warm room, BSM loooooved his bath. He didn't even cry for hair-rinsing.

Day 263 (freestyle crib)

After another dish-washing marathon, I built the crib that we got in America (for free). Not seeing any instructions in the slim folder of paperwork we got with the crib, I jumped in and just snapped the thing together. As I reached for the last piece (the board on which the mattress rests), I saw a nice large diagram showing how to assemble the crib. Ah. I looked it over and saw that I had installed two of the supports upside-down, so I popped them out, flipped them, and popped them back in. It was frighteningly easy, assembling this crib, but it seems perfectly sturdy, so I think we'll switch to it. (Not only is it a little prettier than our rehabilitated dumpster-rescue, the American crib is also made to convert to a toddler bed if you pop off one of the sides.)

Day 262 (Shabbos)

There was beautiful, beautiful rain all Shabbos. Yay! Since Shabbos came in at 4:15 (!!!), BSM joined us for kiddush, hamotzi, and soup before we trundled him off to bed. After dinner, the Gordons came to play with us again. Have I mentioned how much I like having friends?

Our sleepover guests joined us for lunch, along with their RA. We had told the Shabbaton organizers that we could have up to 14 people or so, but I would have liked a heads-up even for the one extra so as to have a place set for her when she showed up. It wasn't a big deal though, especially since after shul, we invited a woman and her kids for lunch, so there were extra places to set, anyway.

Our neighbor is trying to re-start a women's class on Shabbos afternoon, which makes me happy, because I like having a Torah class to go to. The other great thing is that one of the women at shul remembered that I asked her about this class weeks ago, so she came over and told me about it when she saw me. Again, yay friends (or potential friends, in this case).

Day 261 (Erev Shabbos)

Well, I fully excavated the guest room and Husbinator's office! We'd been stashing pillows in the guest room, and as I started to think about making the beds, I realized I don't actually know how many spare pillows we have. Thankfully, the answer is nine. Which is a lot. But that's good: it meant each of our guests got one decent pillow and one terrible pillow. Perfect!

I need a mindshift about our floors. If I'm going to wash them, it has to be while BSM is in daycare, which is in the morning. The problem is that then I spend the rest of the day obsessivly sweeping my once-clean floors. I don't see a choice in the washing-time, but I need to let it go after that, and just do one final sweep before Shabbos. I waste way too much time maintaining the morning's clean right now.