Beautiful photographs of Israel
You won't believe where I found this. It was the blogspot advertisement on the top of Allison's blog. I wonder if anyone else clicked through.
posted by Imshin 20:23

For Gunner and anyone else who was wondering
A stone laying is a memorial service which takes place at the grave following the erection of the grave stone, usually attended by family and close friends. I know that in Ashkenazi communities outside Israel this can take place many months after the burial. In Israel it is customary to have it thirty days after the funeral.

posted by Imshin 20:15

Six months, next week.
Hebrew date - Sunday (kaf gimel); Gregorian date - Wednesday (twenty eighth).

Remember that big exam Youngest did, Mum? You know - she and Bish didn't come to your stone-laying because she had to do the exam? No, you wouldn't remember that, would you? Well anyway, she passed it. You'd have been so proud.

Eldest is getting so grown up. She's been forcing me to do "mother" things, like take her to the hairdresser, the orthodontist, the eye doctor (she has started to ask about contacts). She even managed to get me to get a haircut myself, Mum. I finally did it. Can you ever forgive me for not doing it before you died?

Yesterday I went to Kitan and bought Eldest something that you told me you wanted to buy her, when you were already very ill and giving yourself future goals to keep you going (Yes, I knew that was what you were doing). At the checkout I was served by that cashier you used to know. You always loved Kitan.

Please say to me you are looking down and you can see, and then maybe it won't hurt so much, not being able to tell you.

Do you remember that time we went to Kitan and you bought me loads of clothes (a good day's shopping that was, I still wear them all), and then we crossed the road for a spaghetti lunch and you told me how much you missed Grandma and thought about her every day?

posted by Imshin 10:52

Here! Here!
Every word.

Especially the words that mention me ;-) (That Meryl is so nice).

posted by Imshin 10:25

Where am I?
Still can't be bothered with Reshet Bet radio station, which is a sort of radio CNN, giving news all the time. I used to have it on non-stop at work (My job does not require using a brain very often, so my brain is free to do other things). The news seems so repetitive lately. My friend at work fondly calls Reshet Bet "The Piguim (=terrorist attacks) Station" because that's the station you switch to, after a terrorist attack occurs, to get the particulars. They have tuned the interviewing of every idiot who was anywhere near the terrorist attack to a fine art. They are also forever talking to the most annoying commentators they can find on affairs of the day. Needless to say, they just love Yossi Sarid and Dr. Yossi Beilin.

I'm not even in the mood for classical music. Definitely in the pits. I'm listening to stations that play things like ABBA and other such upbeat and annoying oldies. Oldies?! Having ABBA on the oldies shows is bad enough but some of the other stuff they put on the oldies shows really make me feel ancient, stuff I was hearing for the first time, like, yesterday. Anyway, I'm listening to anything happy sounding that I can sing along too. Pretty pathetic but it seems to be working for me. Drives the girls in the next office up the wall though. My singing that is.

Besides that I'm busy preparing for my three day trip to Eilat next week. Eilat season is here in a big way. Everyone has just been, is there at the moment or is going next week. My trip is with work. Bish and the kids are not invited (Which is okay because I read somewhere once that you should take so many days holiday without partner and kids every year). It's one of those dirt-cheap deals that you get through work except that it means you have to spend three days there with your workmates. Now I don't know about you but I have a problem with my male coworkers seeing me in a swimsuit. I don't mind being sociable with them otherwise (even though the effort will probably kill me) or even going dancing with them all in the evening, but the swimsuit thing is probably where I draw the line. I have to work with these people, for goodness sake. I've been experimenting with all sorts of sarong type shmateh's from the back of the closet. Hopefully likeminded female coworkers and I will manage to sneak off to relatively uninhabited beaches. Not that I mean to actually bare my skin to the sun unprotected if at all possible, I'm not in the habit of frying myself, but I like swimming in the sea and the Red Sea is lovely to swim in.

Why am I going if I anticipate such hardship, you ask? Well, it's the same as listening to ABBA on the radio. Escapism, I guess. And it beats working.

posted by Imshin 00:16

A good sign?
Gazans have taken to the streets to protest the use of Beit Hanun to launch Kassam rockets against Israeli towns and villages. It looks like this is a direct result of Israel's military activities there.

A few days later: I'm now thinking this was no more than a manipulation for the foreign press and not a gauge of popular sentiment in any way. A popular cause can easily get tens of thousands of Gazans (inhabitants of what is probably one of the most densely populated place in the world) out onto the street. Here there were a measly few hundred. I am less than impressed.

posted by Imshin 19:57

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall"
John Williams wrote me "Some guy on Brit Telly was talking about the wall around Israel as representing 'man's inability to live together'. He should come here because I've got a wall and I'm flaming well glad of it, as I like my privacy. Come to think of it I'll bet he's got a bloody wall around his home too. Why is a big wall somehow anti-social, I mean the Chinese are revered for theirs and it wasn't erected to grow peaches against, was it?"

And I was reminded yet again of Robert Frost and his wise neighbor.

posted by Imshin 21:48

While I am writing
Another one. A shopping mall in Afula. A woman blew herself up among people.

It looks like 4 murdered, at this point; 18 injured, 5 of them in critical condition.
posted by Imshin 17:55

So who rides the bus from a Jerusalem suburb into town at 5:45am? 44 year old Marina Tsahvirashvili does, or used to, on her way to work in the kitchen of Shaarei Tzedek hospital; so did 63 year old Yitzhak Moyal, on his way to the sorting room in Jerusalem's Central Post Office; and 42 year old Ghaleb Tawil, also a hospital worker; 34 year old supermarket worker Ronny Yisraeli; 55 year old Nelly Frob, maintenance worker in the police station in the old city; 52 year old Olga Brenner, a cleaner in a new immigrants radio station; and even 67 year old Shimon Ostinsky, once an economics lecturer in Kiev, now a guard in a car park in Jerusalem. Just ordinary, hard working people, scrambling for a living, ride the bus from a Jerusalem suburb into town at 05:45am.

Who would blow up such people? 19 year old Bassam Jamal Darwish Takruri, son of a well-to-do Hebron family, would.

I look at the pictures, on this side and on this side. Here - a good looking young warrior, from an affluent background, taking his fate in his hands, sacrificing himself for an exalted cause, to be remembered and revered forever as a hero; here - people who got up early day after day and worked hard and long to feed themselves and their loved ones, to pay the rent, to survive. Not striving to be heroes, not striving to be anything. Just people. Like you and me.

Where is the poetic justice in this? Why are the cold-blooded murders of these people seen by so many as fitting revenge of the weak? Why is this young, good looking, physically strong and economically secure kid perceived as being more desperate than a 67 year old economics lecturer making his way in the soft early morning light to his dead end job as a guard in a car park?

posted by Imshin 17:49

Some other blogs have posted some pretty gruesome photos of the horrors of this morning's terrorist attack. The Frog posted one as a protest and actually called Reuters up to complain and suggested we all do the same. The photo Gil posted is worst. Not for the squeamish. Not for me.
posted by Imshin 22:35

It seems a gas balloon has exploded in a restaurant on Ibn Gabirol St. near Kikar Rabin. Quite close to us but we didn't hear the blast, just the ambulances. Ten people have been reported wounded. We thought it was a terrorist attack at first, but they're saying it looks like an accident.
posted by Imshin 21:48

And while Bish and I ponder if Sharon will throw out Arafat this time, especially considering his recent reiteration of his demand for full "Right of Return" for all Palestinians into pre-1967 Israel, look what has crept up on us:

Lag Ba'Omer (also known as an opportunity for every Jew to become a raving pyromaniac for one night)

It actually didn't creep up. Tel Aviv kids have been on a wood-gathering rampage for months now, our usually gentle offspring included. The Security Room, of Iraq War fame, immediately became a hiding place for choice planks of wood, once plastic sheeting had been dismantled.

Numerous young horrors have been sighted daily, rushing round in amok, pushing purloined supermarket carts full of the booty of raids on construction sites and other quality wood sources (Strangely reminiscent of the looters in Baghdad, only shorter). It is a well-known fact, after all, that the size of your bonfire reflects directly on your worth as a human being.

An important reminder to all Israelis, in view of tomorrow night's festivities:
Don't forget to close your windows if you don't want your home to stink from the smell of the bonfires!

Youngest's bonfire begins at 7 pm. We're to bring a potato covered in aluminum foil, 2 cans of sauerkraut (That's a new one. They don't really expect any kids to eat that, do they?) and wood for the fire.

[=================================]
(This depicts the last part bring cut by my inner censor. Sorry.)

posted by Imshin 21:35

Alisa has fallen down a new rabbit hole. A very stylish one too.
posted by Imshin 18:51

You turn on the radio at 6:15 am to hear what's new with the strike and you hear the words "...that was major general Mickey Levy, commander of Jerusalem District Police..." and you know, even before you hear another word, that there has been another terrorist attack.

7 murdered; 20 wounded. A bus near the French Hill in Jerusalem.

You continue making sandwiches for school; you prepare lunch on plates for the kids to warm up in the micro when they get home; you wake everyone up and you leave for work. Another day. Another week.

On the way out you glance at the newspaper. The headlines tell of yesterday's terrorist attacks, in Casablanca, in Hebron. Old news already.

posted by Imshin 17:24

We are told that our early childhood shapes us into the people we are to become.

But when we have become those people, the so-called formative years of early childhood, important as they may have been, seem to fade into vague memories of just a few scenes, played over and over in our minds, until we're not sure if they ever really happened; if they are no more than dreams or fantasies.

What happens if our early childhood has no resemblance in any way to the life we live today? What if everything is now completely different from what our early childhood prepared us for? The sights, the sounds, the smells, even the language we talk, the accepted behavior expected of us by society, by our loved ones? What happens to those hazy early childhood memories then?

Maybe they become so distant as to make them appear to have happened in a previous life, or not at all.

But every so often we hear a word, spoken in a long forgotten dialect; we notice a scent, so unmistakable, so familiar. And then it's gone. And we are filled with such a feeling of yearning, of longing, for another life, another world.

For some, the world in which I spent my early childhood is still home.

posted by Imshin 00:11

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