If it's not water, it's not worth saving.

Daylight saving whaaaa?

In the States, for about three weeks before the clocks get sprung forward or felled back, every media source feels it's their sole duty to warn the public about the catastrophe that will occur if they fail to change their clocks before they go to bed. It's printed in calendars, like a major holiday.

Here, I was told exactly once, yesterday, by my BF's mother, that clocks get changed tonight. I have listened intently to the news, confident that I can understand enough Hebrew to discern whether or not someone is talking about a clock, time, losing an hour of sleep (yes, that phrase is important enough to me to understand), etc. Zip, zero, zip, efes. And yet, there's this really annoying ad for saving water that comes on about every ten seconds. Save the Kineret, people, we don't care what time it is!

Maybe the problem is that they don't schedule the clock-changing for Friday night - that is, the night before Shabbat. I remember, growing up, that the reminders for daylight saving time were printed in huge bold letters on the church bulletins the week before, so that come Sunday, no one would be an hour early and stand lonesome in the sanctuary with their own thoughts and tired kids, or even worse, be an hour late and completely miss what God had to say that week. If the synagogues had a stake in this whole time-saving business, perhaps we'd hear more about it so as to avoid any ill-timed prayers.

A sampling.

Some photos from my recent past.

From Life in Israel

Floods in the mountains outside J'lem. This is normally bone-dry, and I run here a lot.

From Life in Israe

Carmel mountains.

From Life in Israel

Orchids

From Life in Israel

Unknown flower

From Life in Israel

View from the Carmel

From Life in Israel

Judean hills

From Life in Israel

Oasis

From Life in Israel

Kennedy Memorial

From Life in Israel

Who's who?
(Ok, not taken in Israel, but in NYC's Chinatown. Never mind :)

Yeah? Well your mother doesn't make coffee like I do.

It's been a while. I stayed at home from work for the second day in a row today, and I'm to the point where I'm not feeling 100% healtyh but I'm bored outta my mind and restless. So, to the blog!

I'm not feeling particularly insightful today, so I'll just share a funny story that happened not long after I moved here. This incident pretty much explains the Israeli personality and the apparent contradiction between their aggressiveness and their consideration.

There is a monstrous new house going up next door to us. We spend a lot of time staring at this thing, making comments as to what we'd do better, and trying to understand why it's taking so damn long. This last mystery wasn't hard to solve, as there is evidence of workman presence approximately once a week, if that.

Well, about 7 months ago they were working more than today (yes, a year later, the thing still isn't finished). In fact, they would work until the sun would go down, and being as it was summer after the clocks changed, this meant about 8pm. You can imagine how thrilled we were to try to enjoy an al fresco dinner with the sounds of welding and crazy Israeli workman screaming at each other in the background. This wouldn't happen every day, but just often enough to drive us nuts. After a few times of this routine, DBF got fed up and started screaming at them over the fence. Now, this was before I could understand much Hebrew, so to my virgin ears the resulting exchange sounded like they were whipping out the "your mother" insults and threatening a Mossad-type assassination on one another. After a few minutes' screaming, DBF came storming into the house, and started making coffee.

Wait, what? You were just screaming at them, now you're having coffee with them?

Yeah, I told them I'd make them coffee if they'd stop now rather than later.

That's what you were screaming about?

Screaming? Who was screaming?

They spent the next 10 minutes chatting like they'd all known each other for years.