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).