My Home in Israel

I think I’m going to be sick…
Video game where Jews and Atheists must be killed or converted due for Christmas

A video game about a Christian militia slaughtering Jewish and atheist New Yorkers who won’t be converted in the name of a particular brand of Christianity will be on the shelves of more than 10,000 American retailers in time for the Christmas season, including Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, GameStop, EB Games, CompUSA, Amazon.com, Costco and numerous others. The video game is a spinoff of the wildly successful collaborative novels about “the rapture” by conservative fundamentalist minister Tim Lahaye and the guy who used to write the dialogue for the Gil Thorpe comic strip, Jerry Jenkins.

I’ve actually wanted to read the “Left Behind” series, because it sounded interesting. (Somehow I don’t think it would cause me to convert…) but this is just going too far.

I’ve been tagged for my first meme by Ayelet, so here goes nothing:

Four jobs I’ve had:
*Camp counselor & Cook’s assistant at Girl Scout Camp (also camp for Speech & Hearing Impaired (I should really write about these experiences)
*Audio-Visual Projectionist (16mm, slide shows etc…)–this allowed me in college to “audit” an Art History class without having to do any work. I think I fell asleep only once or twice. “Next Slide”
*Reference/Automation Librarian at a women’s college in the US
*Internet Spy on Wealthy People (still doing it ..can’t say what organization) This is my current, “on the side job” which brings in a little bit of pocket money. You would not believe the kind of information that you can find out about people on the net

Four movies I can watch over and over:

*Willy Wonka (the original)
*The Wizard of Oz (hubby & I saw it in a real movie theater for our first date.
*What’s Up Doc Barbara Streisand and Ryan O’Neal–worth renting
*ClerksI LURVE this movie. I just forgot about it until I saw Psychotoddler’s list of jobs in his Meme

Four places I have lived:

*Cobleskill, NY (six years–I just missed my 20 year High School Reunion
*Ithaca, NY (four years of college)
*Milwaukee, WI (ten years–still the longest I’ve ever lived in one city)
*Jerusalem, Israel (just celebrated four years)

Four television shows I love to watch: ( I haven’t owned a TV in over 4 year, so my shows are based on what was on in 2001)

1. Simpsons
2. Gilmour Girls
3. The Muppet Show (we have the DVD of the first season–it is great!)
4. 7th Heaven

Four places I have been on vacation:
*The Wisconsin Dells
*Door County (yep, Wisconsin again)
*A month-long backpacking trip of Europe (post college) including: Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland, England & Holland (not in that order). I did the trip mostly alone. I started out by visiting a good friend serving in the US Army in Germany. When he put me on the train to Munich I nearly freaked out–but not as much as when I got to the Munich train station. There are so many wonderful stories (that wasn’t one of them) from my trip…maybe I should start a series on the blog about them.
*Kibbutz Maale HaChamisha (a nice shabbat away with the girls…umm if they are with us—what are we away from?)

Four of my favorite dishes:
*Fettucine Verde
*Chinese Chicken with Cashews
*Pad Thai
*Almost anything my mom cooks

Four websites I visit daily:

*Netvibes
*Jerusalem Post(not that I enjoy the news here)
*Facebook (this site is d*mn addictive)
*Anything that’s updated on my blogroll (via Bloglines).

Four places I would rather be right now:
*sleeping—uninterrupted beyond 6AM
*Touring Israel (it is amazing how few times I’ve left Jerusalem in the last four years
*Spending time with my niece and sister
*Camping (unfortunately, the spouse isn’t into camping…I’ll need to convince someone else someday…maybe me and the girls.)

Four bloggers I am tagging:
This is hard because my readership is so miniscule, that I don’t know who will even see this….lets try: Psycho Toddler, Mozeman, Daphna, and anyone else who reads my blog!

This Rav Shmuel video is pretty good. I want to see if I can successfully put it in my blog.

I’m writing this post because generally we don’t give enough thanks when something good happens…and this is a place where I wouldn’t have expected anything good to happen.

On Wednesday night there were two boys on bicycles standing at the side of the road trying to prevent cars from running over an already killed cat. (The streets here are over run with cats, so this isn’t a surprise.) I asked them what they were doing, and they said they had been standing there for an hour. I asked if they had contacted anyone to remove the cat and they said no.

I got on the phone and called 106 — the City Hotline. They deal with anything from broken playground equipment, to garbage removal. I didn’t expect any results, but thought that I should give it a try.

The hotline took my name, number, and the location of the cat, and within an hour there was a cleaning truck outside our building!!!

As if this weren’t enough, this morning,Friday at 9:50 AM, I received a call from the hotline, asking me if they had come and taken care of the problem, and thanking me for making the call!!!

Thank you City of Jerusalem for truly making a difference!!!

view

Originally uploaded by safranit.

I’ve been asked to show pictures of our new apartment (pre-rennovations which are starting (bezrat hashem) next week. The easiest way is to direct you to the flickr site.

The picture here shows the view from our apartment. The hole in the ground is the future home of the American Consulate. As you can see, there are no trucks or equipment there, so I don’t know when they are going to continue working.

The building on the right is the Diplomat hotel which is more of a hostel for the elderly that also holds many weddings and other events. On a clear day you can see the Dead Sea and Jordan.

Please leave me comments

Little devil

Originally uploaded by safranit.

Yep, my little one is quite maniacal. Yes, she is wearing a diaper despite the fact that she is potty trained…we had some, ummm intestinal distress with most of her clothes.

Shortly after this picture was take, big sis had a run in with a slide and got a bloody nose.

Quite a day for bodily fluids!

PA090007

Originally uploaded by safranit.

All she wanted to do was go to the beach. And that is what we did. I didn’t let her get much deeper than this…I wasn’t in a bathing suit, and she doesn’t know how to swim. Little one was also loving the water, but I didn’t get any pictures of her in it.

After reading David Brinn’s post on Israelity about the Tnuva Strike, I bumped into a newspaper article about something of which I wanted to make note.

About half-way through the most recent Lebanon War, I noticed that one of my favorite prepared food products was off the shelves. Mama Off, which is a refridgerated cooked chicken breast (they also have wings) were gone! I remembered that they were certified by the rabbinate of Kiryat Shmoneh, so I assumed (correctly) that the war was making it impossible to make these products. When things calmed down, I was heard to exclaim “the chickens are dying again in Kiryat Shmoneh!”

Just a note: Take a look at this article about the public relations involved with the creation of this product!

After having my cell phone stolen, (well, I think I lost it and then someone took it, so that sort of counts as stolen) I had to (not in Hubby’s opinion) find the perfect ringtone for my new phone.
Previously, I had the theme from The Muppet Show, but that was getting a bit old.

My first choice would have been. “Can You (point you finger & do the twist)“, performed by the Wiggles. But when I asked the Australian site if there was a way for me to get it, they didn’t respond (damn anti-Semites…(just kidding–I hope).

So I decided to surf the Orange (my cellphone provider) website. Since this is the Israeli site, you get lots of Israeli music, but the other categories include, TV shows and Israel’s version of Pop Idol (Cochav Nolad). The one category that, to me, truly separates Israel from the rest of the world: “Shirim Optimim”–Optimistic Songs. I’m not sure if this category was there before the most recent war, but it contains 18 (chai….even more appropriate) songs, both Israeli and Foreign (Beatles, Monty Python etc). I was thinking about taking “Lo Nafsik LaShir” (we will not stop singing), but in the end the winner was “L’olam Bekvot HaShemesh”, which I can’t quite translate. (Always for the Sun…any help out there?)

My big girl is madly in love with this song. I hope this will make her more accepting of my phone ringing–except maybe she won’t let me stop it from ringing.

• enclosure: http://www.mercurymobility.com.au/abcmobile/content/samples/sample_16x11_mp3/Wiggles_The-Do_The_Twist.mp3 62589 audio/mpeg

When I went to pick up my older daughter today at her kindergarten, I thought something wasn’t right. The assistant to the morning teacher was at the door.** She asked me to come over, and to have my daughter stay with the group. She had some sad news to share….

The assistant for the afternoon program went into cardiac arrest this morning and died. She was in her 60s. The supervisor for the afternoon program decided to hold off telling the children until after Yom Kippur. (There aren’t any more afternoon sessions until then anyway) On the Tuesday after Yom Kippur they will have a psychologist there to talk with the children.

Part of me wants to tell my daughter, because I feel that death is something that parents need to explain (can it be explained?) but on the other hand, I think they are right dealing with this as a group. Even though we’ve only known this woman for less than a month, it is hard to imagine that she is gone.

UPDATE: This afternoon (Tuesday) when I asked the teachers if the psychologist came, the answer was that they decided not to tell the children, and just say she isn’t coming back anymore. I think that is so wrong. People die, that is life…my daughter has lived through the death of three of my grandparents..one of whom she definitely has memories of. She has been to the cemetaries to see their gravestones, and she has seen me cry. In a country where hundereds of people died during the last war, and most of these children did see the news on television (unlike my daughter, I might add) I can’t believe they are missing this opportunity to teach. Shouldn’t these children at least be afforded the opportunity to send a condolence card to her family? From talking to some people, I think this is a cultural issue. My “anglo” friends agree with me, and the mom I spoke to from the school greatly disagrees. You may think that I could tell my own daughter, but I know her, and she will tell her friends, and then I will have angry parents…sigh.

**Kindergarten only goes until 1PM, after that there is an afternoon program (which you pay for) with it’s own teacher and assistant.