Winter is Over

I don't know that winter is over because the weather has warmed up, nor do I know that winter is over because we've passed the vernal equinox. I don't even know that winter is over because tonight, Israel starts Daylight Savings Time tonight (which is called the "summer clock" in this neck of the woods).

I know that winter is over because when I looked down at my arms and hands, I see that they have started to tan.

Israeli Humor

Conversation upon seeing two boys clearly interested in a hoodie dangling from a branch:

אני: של מי זה?ש 

אחד מהבנים: לא יודע. (הפסק) אולי זה הסוודר של המן.ש 

Me: Whose is that?
One of the Boys: I don't know. (pause) Maybe it's Haman's sweatshirt.

Get it? Because it's hanging on a tree! Har, har, har.

Weight Gain!

Since his last visit to the nurse, I've been very good about making sure BSM sits down in his chair or at the table for his dinner. I've also started offering more deli and/or challah and/or givna levana or chummus sandwiches instead of pretzels/Bamba.

Thank G-d, we went back to check on his growth this week, and this new data point is sharply above his previous gentle slope. Baruch Hashem.

Reassurance

FYI, when I picked up BSM today, we discussed putting on his shoes. "Youse!" he proclaimed as he sat down to be shod. I confirmed that we were indeed putting on his shoes, and Dikla said with a bit of a sigh, "All day, he's always talking in English." Which is funny, because I feel the same way, only with "Hebrew" in place of "English."

Voting

A week before elections, I finally figured out who to vote for. Thank you, israel.electioncompass.org. I thought I should vote for that party, but being able to compare parties' stances on the issues I care about (with sources given!) is very important to me.

Voting itself was a lot of fun. Election day is a national holiday, and there really is a tangible happy excitement in the air. This bubbliness is only helped along by the fact that the voting booths/ballot boxes themselves look like science fair projects that didn't get too much parental help.

Here's the voting booth, as photographed by friends of ours in Northern Israel.

And here's the selection of ballots, printed on normal paper, each about the size of a playing card. Notice that in this voting booth, the chart reminding you of which abbreviation is for which party has fallen down.

After standing in the privacy of the voting booth and carefully placing one and only one ballot in the very official envelope given to you by the voting attendents (the envelope actually is nice: dark blue, lined with black, with two actual signatures on the front to show it's 100% official), you seal your envelope and enjoy the immemsely emotionally satisfying experience of placing your envelope into the Government Suggestion Box. (I'm totally not being sarcastic, by the way. This simple form of physical voting is very emotionally satisfying, even though it totally feels like suggesting the local library get a few more copies of your favorite book. Still, I am left wondering why on earth this process is not electronic.)

Photo Credit: ynet's Herzel Yosef

And since today is a national holiday, we took the opportunity to go see Elmo at the Bloomfield Science Museum. The museum itself is a lot like The Franklin Institue, but forgive me for saying so, is even nicer. Not only are there more exhibits (and cheaper admission prices), there are step-stools everywhere. Naturally, this was all way above BSM's level, though he did enjoy grabbing a plastic ball from one of the exhibits and playing fetch with it.

However, we brought him to see the giant Elmo puppet, who only shows up on rare occasions. The giant Elmo turned out to be a person in a mascot costume (naturally), and BSM reacted as could have been expected: he didn't freak out, and he did seem to think it was cool, but rather intimidating. He loved the promotional sticker he got, though. He could hold it in his hand, and it had a tiny little pixely picture of Elmo hidden on it.

Really, taking him was a bit of a waste, but I would have felt bad if I knew Elmo was half an hour away from us, and we didn't take BSM to go see him. On a side note, the photo-op was in a little corner dressed up to look like Rechov Sumsum. It is soooo much prettier than Sesame Street. Just saying.

Wedding!

Well, approximately two years after buying it, I finally sewed a kickpleat into my pastel pink suit. (Because if I am going to buy a suit for an unspecified occasion, you can bet your sweet patooties it's going to be a fun color.) I was going to go all-out and match my suit with my wig, but I just don't have the confidence to pull it off. I can fake a suit, or I can fake a wig, but it turns out I can't fake a suit and a wig. But a small bedazzled satin scarf still paired well, I think (and a nice lady at the wedding showed me where to gather the material to avoid little "horns" which are always awkard).

But oh! The music! The dancing! The seeing of friends! (The now having a babysitter on tap!) Mazel tov to all :)

Post Office Woes

The post office on our Yishuv (where everyone must go to collect their packages/registered mail, since mail is delivered to PO boxes rather than individual houses) is changing their hours from three evenings a week to an hour every morning. Naturally, residents are up in arms, because this means missing half a day of work to get a piece of mail. Facebook comments ranged from shock to indignation, outrage, and despair. My favorite comment, however, was "! ! ! ה פ ק ר ו ת" ["UTTER CHAOS!!!"].

Support Network

Landman was in town to pick up his mail (from our shared PO box up the street), and he stopped by to ask how our electricity was working out. I told him everything was fine since we unplugged our dryer, and he suggested we call the company to have them fix it. When I told him it was at least second hand, Landman looked at it himself and suggested we swap out the plug (as a previous owner has already done, he explained). Sometimes I get the impression that the Landpeople think we are sweet but helpless young things. We're not really that helpless, but they do generally have good advice that we haven't thought of. Also, I like that our Landpeople have made themselves part of our support network.

On Coffee Liqueur and Israelis

As we do every year, we put a small bottle of homemade coffee liqueur in our mishloach manot (recipe courtesy of EmaII). And as we've come to expect, people really enjoyed it, and told us so. The new spin on things was this reaction: "Your liqueur was delicious! It really made our kids' Purim." Said children are two and four-and-a-half years old.

Mishloach Manot (a photo essay)

Our Mishloach Manot got fancied-up this year. Lacking non-brown paper bags, I bought some cellophane bags for our shalach manos. Not having bought enough cellophane bags from Jerusalem, I caved two days before Purim and bought cellophane. My friends, using cellophane is a bit more work than using bags, but the result is considerably fancier than the old "white paper bag" standby.

I assume you noticed the (censored) label taped onto this little package. Husbinator prevailed upon me to print labels in English, even though the majority of our mishloach manot recipients are Hebrew-speakers. "How else will they know it's from us?" he asked. In the end, I agreed, but only on the condition that (a) we use pictograms to help out the non-English-literate and (b) kashrut information be listed in Hebrew. Picking symbols for "Happy" and "Purim" was fairly easy, and picking a symbol for our family name wasn't too hard, either. This, you see, is the sign we have on our front gate:

We own this sign due to the combined whimsy of myself and Husbinator, and we hung it on our gate for giggles and kicks. We did not expect the outpouring of confusion from the Israelis around us. The slowing down with rotating head. The full stop. The moving of lips. The discussions. The seeing us around and asking what on earth our sign meant. The endless parade of 7-10 year old girls asking us over and over again to translate, if they could see our walrus, why we hung up the sign if we don't actually own a walrus, to explain again what the sign meant. Basically, we had a solid three or four months of walrus-themed conversation, so the pictograph for our family name was fairly obvious. I am thrilled with how this turned out.

Speaking of how things turned out, I remembered after my Absolutely Last Grocery Run Before Purim that in Israel, one is expected to give nice gifts to daycare/preschool teachers at Purim and at the end of the year. Non-disposable plate sort of nice. I am very, very impressed with what I managed to scrape up for Dikla, using things I already had in the house:

Truman Capote

A while ago, I went to a used booksale in Ma'ale Adumim and bought a whole pile of books for 1₪
each. In that pile was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which I bought because it's very famous for being very good. It's taken me this long to start reading it, because it's famous enough that I know In Cold Blood is a true-crime account of a disturbing multiple murder. Have to be in the right mood to read that one.

Well, I finally found a mood where I wanted to read In Cold Blood and wouldn't be overwhelmed by it, and I see why it's so famous for being so good. Because it is. So good.

After having finally opened the book, I also now know why it was donated to a used-book sale: this particular copy of In Cold Blood was withdrawn from the Beit Shemesh Children's Library. I should think so! I only hope that the story of its withdrawal is amusing rather than horrifying.

Parshat Zachor

Ever since I slept through Parshas Zachor (the handful of verses discussing Amalek's attack on the Jews in the desert which we read on the Shabbos before Purim) almost a decade ago, I've had a teensy bit of extra kick-in-the-pants to make sure I get to shul on future Shabbtot Zachor. (The year I missed it, I spent the next three months obsessively remembering that I must go to shul and hear those verses read when Parshas Ki Teitzei finally rolled around. Thankfully, I did get to shul and hear it when summer finally rolled around, but it was rather stressful: if I had missed that one, I would have been really up a creek.)

Yeah, so anyway, I made it to shul for Torah-reading this week (yay!) and BSM reminded me why I only take him to shul for Kabbalas Shabbos if I take him at all: if it ain't a sing-a-long, he can't sit quietly. Not shocking, I know, but I had kind of hoped he could sit quietly and listen to leining for 10 minutes until they hit the grand finale.

My point, however, from which I continually digress, is that this was the first leining of Zachor I've heard where they didn't read the "Erase the remembrance of Amalek" verse twice, once vowelizing "remembrance" as "zācher" and once as "zĕcher." However, they did read the whole paragraph four times: once with the Ashkenazi trop, the second time with Yemenite trop, thirdly in the general Eidut HaMizrach style, and I still don't know what flavor the fourth reading was. (Husbinator thinks there was just a fourth guy who also wanted a turn to read.)

So that's what I just spent 277 words saying: my shul read Parshas Zachor using 3-4 different traditional cantillation styles. I found that interesting.

Circuit Breaker Excitement

On Wednesday night, our circuit breaker tripped. Repeatedly. Which is odd, because we weren't running anything we haven't run many times before, in this very combination. After a lot of fiddling with individual circuits, I finally got the light over the front door, the fridge, and the heater in BSM's room to all run. Then the whole thing tripped again. Husbinator worked some sort of magic, and he got the fridge (and the baby's heater) to run all night long.

On Thursday morning, I called LandLady, who said she'd call an electrician they knew. Perfect. A few hours later, LandMan called and I talked him through what was going on. I learned more electrical words from that conversation... Anyway, I mentioned that among other things, every time I flipped on the dryer's circuit, everything blew. LandMan made the obvious (once he made it) suggestion that I unplug the dryer. Oh. Yes.

So I unplugged the dryer, plugged a small fan into that outlet, flipped on all of the circuits, and turned on a bunch of appliances. That got us through Shabbos and most of Sunday, when I decided to make sure the dryer was off and plug it back in again. Just to see. Sure enough, as soon as the plug was halfway in the socket, the main circuit tripped. So the problem seems to have been isolated, and now my white load is hanging up to dry.