Weekend

Friday. I must get out of the house today. I feel like I need an adventure. So I will take a walk around the block. That might be mostly boring, but you never know.
I'm going to go a long way today, but I will take my time. A woman asks me something as she goes by. I know enough Hebrew now to be able to say "I don't know," and I even know what it is that I don't know. This time I catch the words "Sabbath, to buy, and time" and I conclude that she said she wants to know what time Sabbath begins because she needs to go buy something.
Every time I come to a bench or a low stone wall, I sit down. But I don't sit long at the first bench because there are a few small annoying flies. So I move to another bench. I am at a park that I call the "grown-up" park, because I have never seen children here. There is a jungle gym and a little merry-go-round. Occasionally a small group of teenagers returning from an event will crowd onto it and take a few turns around.
Farther down the street I pass a pomegranate tree with pomegranates as large as softballs, with newspaper wrapped around each of the largest ones.
I sit on a bench under a tree that smells rather bad. A man on the other side of the street is smoking a cigarette that smells delicious by comparison.
I head downhill a couple streets. Between each street are several flights of steps and a gradual incline between the steps. Beside the steps is a smooth path. A really fit biker can just manage to slowly bike up the hill without coming to a stop. This time there are three boys pushing their bicycles up the path. The third boy is lagging behind, so a fourth boy decides to help. But does he push the bike up the path? No, he carries it up the steps!
I go on to the next bench, but it's in the sun, and there are flies here, too. So in a minute maybe I'll head for home. But here comes a little boy down the steps. He's wearing a bright orange shirt and has a pacifier in his mouth. I don't see any grown-ups around. I ask him where his mother is, but of course he doesn't answer. He doesn't appear the least bit worried, and climbs onto a little wall and starts walking along it.
An older man comes along with a bag of greens. He hands me a myrtle branch, used in the closing sabbath ceremony. It smells wonderful! He doesn't know who the little boy is, but he takes him over to a nearby building where he knows some people, and they don't know him either, and are going to call the police.
So I go back up the hill and notice some people at the end of the street, who turn out to be the boy's parents. When I told him where the boy was, his father took off at a run to get him. I ran after him because he didn't wait long enough for me to explain exactly where the boy was, but he found him anyway. The little boy looks happy when his father picks him up, but evades his mother when she tries to pick him up. She frowns at him and exclaims "What did you do!?" He walks away from her with a look like "I did something big and I'm pleased with myself." [If you've read "Bored, Nothing to Do" you'll remember "a spank, and kisses."]
On the way home I pass a building with a 4-inch thick vine planted in front and climbing to a trellis over a third-floor balcony.
That was Friday.
Today was Saturday. A little kitten died. Not much else happened. I drank some coffee-flavored soy milk. Too good! and too much sugar. We took a late walk after dark and came across a young man lying on the sidewalk doing crunches with one leg propped up on a light post and a young woman coaching him.
Sabbath is over now , and the Lord's Day begins tomorrow. It will be a good day.

Dead Computer, Dying Kitten

Actually, it's not quite that bad. The computer is fixed now. We found a guy nearby that could fix it right away. I got it back within 24 hours.
The kitten however, is without much hope. It is only a couple days old, and cries all the time. Its mother must have abandoned it. It is too young to raise by hand. I put some cottage cheese out in hopes of attracting the mother cat if she is in the area.
Cats do sometimes misplace their kittens. They can have one kitten in one place, and then if they are alarmed by a dog or something, they run off and have the next one somewhere else.
I lost track of a baby once. I was gathering up the loppers and a basket of clothes to hang out. I decided to leave Mercy in her seat by the washing machine, take the clothes and loppers outside, and then come back to get Mercy. When I set down the clothes, I got distracted for a moment and started lopping the bushes. After a few minutes I realized that Mercy wasn't there! I ran upstairs and down, and then remembered I had left her in the garage by the washing machine.
You don't have to be old to be forgetful. But it helps.

I Have a Piano!

Second-hand electric, that is. But it works! It is going to be tremendously useful.

I have had my home-maker hat on the last few days, rearranging furniture and things. My piano fits at the end of the kitchen. A pillow case provided material for a dustcover for my piano. The living room is turned around now, with the computer cords and extension cords all in a heap in one corner, partly hidden by the computer. Eventually I hope to replace my 7-foot extension cord with a 3-foot one, which is all I need for the current arrangement. My curtains are under-going some adjustments. Books are being re-organized. Books I don't need very often have to stay in the bedroom. That leaves me with four important books close at hand: a Hebrew-English Tanach, a lexicon, a Heb-Eng dictionary, and Barron's 501 Hebrew verbs (actually 1580, or 565 roots). Plus Bibles and psalters. I feel a little better about the kitchen after hanging a few utensils on the wall, making drawer-space available for all kinds of miscellaneous. The fridge needs de-frosted, but I guess it can wait till next week.

I went to an office supply store to get a three-ring binder and found that there's no such bird here. The usual binders are two-ringers, which for my purposes are about worthless. I saw one nice padded-cover D-ring 4-ringer, but it wasn't thick enough and it cost 75 shekels (21 dollars). So I ended up with a couple of plastic accordion folders from which I will probably cut off the cover flaps. Next time I am in Texas maybe I'll get a couple 3-ringers (and then manually punch holes into wholly un-holed sheets of paper).

Cool breezes are soothing us from time to time. (Nyah-nyah-nyah, Houston!) (Just kidding--if you want, you can say to me "We have no trash on our streets -- nyah-nyah-nyah!") We actually live on a nice street with only a little trash (paper and plastic) around our building, and lately I've been picking it up myself. Most of it is in the vacant lot next door. The lot is full of thistly plants, and any loose paper blowing in the wind gets caught there. Other apartment buildings not far from here are not so nice. They aren't poverty-level apartments, either; but no one seems to be assigned to picking up trash, and the tenants don't take it on themselves to do it, either. Must be a different frame of mind. (After all it's not my
trash.)??
We shopped at a good vegetable market today and got oranges, kohlrabi, tomatoes, peppers, avocados, red cabbage, cucumbers, beets, carrots, and one banana. The bananas are different here. They are not as white inside, and they are ripe before they look or feel ripe. Sometimes they'r short and fat. They taste about the same.

I bought two jars of instant coffee. I thought I was getting a two-for-one deal, because of the way they were packaged together. It turned out that the second jar was only a tiny one. That's what happens when you can't read Hebrew (not fast enough to examine all the labels in the grocery store).