A and B and C

A and B and C with normal spaces.

Method for putting in extra spaces: (secret)

A           and           B           and         C

So it is possible to put in extra spaces by typing -- well, I can't tell you what I typed, because it will just put a space.

Psalm Four

More exasperating attempts to cut and paste from Excel onto Blogger. It doesn't work, so I try plain typing. Replacing tabs with 9 spaces doesn't work. What's so hard about typing 9 spaces? Shouldn't 9 spaces take up more space than 1 space? I guess I just don't think like a computer.

ד.מ.מ. דֹמּוּ domu - be still!
פ.ל.ה. הִפְלָה hifla - he set apart - hifil
ז.ב.ח. זִבְחוּ zivkhu - offer! - piel
נ.ש.א. נְסָה nesa - lift thou up
י.ש.ב. תּוֹשִׁיבֵנִי toshiveni - thou makest me to dwell - hifil

Psalm Three

This one wasn't too hard, probably because I've read it many times.
One important word:

ש.י.ת. שתו shatu they set, placed

Now I have vocabulary lists on excel for Psalms 1, 2, and 3, with 43, 64, 48 words.

Psalm Two

This one is twice as long and quite a bit harder. There are seven words that I have seen infrequently. The hardest ones are:

י.ס.ר. הוסרו hivasru nifal imperative masc pl - be instructed or admonished

נ.פ.צ. תנפצם tenaptsem - thou shalt dash them in pieces

ר.ע.ע. תרעמ teroem - thou shalt break them

Whew. Typing Hebrew and English together causes serious directional problems. It's best not to look at the screen when you are typing because the cursor and sometimes periods jump all over. I'm not even going to attempt nikud at this point. (Ha-ha-ha, bilingual pun).

Pumpkins

Yesterday I saw at the store what look like sections of an odd kind of large pumpkin. Today I realized that it probably was pumpkin, and the reason is that it's Thansgiving. Someone told me that he does celebrate Thanksgiving, but on Friday. You can't get whole turkeys here, but you can get turkey.
I'm not crazy about the holiday--all that cooking and eating--but it's the best family time ever. Or could be. Or was.
The best part is the meal is the pumpkin pie. I like to make it my own way, and make enough pie to have at least half a pie for myself. And more for leftovers.
I could make pie just for old times' sake. And because it tastes good. But I'd have to buy pumpkin, flour, eggs, spices, sugar. I would probably cook the filling in my toaster oven and fry the crust in a frying pan, since I wouldn't trust my toaster oven to do a good job on a pie.
But that means I'd have to go out in the miserable rain and go to the store. Maybe I could do that tomorrow. We'll see.
Tonight it's beet-carrot-cabbage soup and leftover chicken. Not too bad, but it seems like something's missing.

Psalm One, Bibles

Psalm One wasn't too bad. I just need to remember עדת and עצת. Adat is congregation and atsat is counsel. And then there is על-כן, al-ken, therefore.

I use a Bible that has Hebrew on one side and English on the other. It has errors in it. For example it says "now sweet are thy words" instead of "how sweet are thy words." Also it capitalizes all the letters in "LORD" whether the original is יהוה or אדוני. There is also an error on one page in the verse numbering, and on another page The Hebrew and English aren't lined up right. This Bible is published by the Society for Distributing Hebrew Scripture. It is a nice size Bible for a diglot and easy to read, but pages are a bit thin and wrinkle easy.

Where's the House?

I can't find it! What do I do now? I used Blue Letter Bible to look up every use of the word "house" in the Psalms, and the verse I want isn't there!
It's a verse where there is a group of words where there is some dispute about where the space goes. There are about three places you could put the space, and they all make sense. I thought one of the words was בית , but now I'm not sure.
So that means I'll have to simply read through the entire book of Psalms again until I find it.
Oh well, it's time to read through them all again, anyway. This time I'll make a vocabulary list as I go, skipping over the ones that are infrequently used.
Psalm 1 I have read numerous times. It makes sense when I read it, but if I copy all the words and alphabetize them, will I still know the words out of context? That will be the test.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Rain

The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.


The Seaside

When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.
My holes were empty like a cup,
In every hole the sea came up,
Till it could come no more.


Escape at Bedtime

The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
There were thousands of millions of stars.
There ne'er were such thousands of leaves on a tree,
Nor of people in church or the Park,
As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,
And that glittered and winked in the dark.

The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,
And the star of the sailor, and Mars,
These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall,
Would be half full of water and stars.
They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,
And they soon had me packed into bed;
But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
And the stars going round in my head.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

I've never seen stars in a bucket of water. The moon, maybe, but not stars. I'll have to try that sometime.

Gray

Cold and rainy. And I feel totally gloomy. Yesterday I lit a candle. Just an ordinary pillar candle. No scent, not especially pretty. After a while there was enough melted wax in the bottom that I could stick a taper candle into it, since the wick was about gone in the pillar, and I didn't have a regular holder for the taper. It burned away rather quickly (a couple hours) so then I stuck another taper into it. So today I have a red taper stuck in a white pillar, which looks sort of funny, and I don't want to light it because when it's gone it'll be gone.
I wrote a good tune yesterday. But I don't know if it quite fits the words. So I wrote another tune today. It's maybe a little better. But I couldn't refrain from playing gloomy music on the piano. So maybe it's time to do something completely different. Go to the mall. What mall? Play a game of Set. Or Scrabble. With whom? Better yet, play train with Elijah and Noah. Hard to do at this distance. Or clean somebody's oven. What somebody?

HEY!!! I know, make some cream of broccoli soup!!!

Piglet

"Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?"

"Supposing it didn't," said Pooh after careful thought.

Piglet was comforted by this.

Keyboard

My keyboard (computer) has 120 keys or buttons on it. Ridiculous. Many of them I don't use and never will. It just makes it easier to hit a wrong key. One of them I accidentally hit and everything freezes.

Then there is the problem of typing in two languages. I can type in English, and I can type in Hebrew. However my English typing ability has taken a setback because I sometimes can't remember which is where, so I type E for Q because the E key is the Hebrew Quf, and K for L because the K key is the Hebrew Lamed. And several others. In Hebrew I constantly mix up Mem and Nun, which are one key over from the English M and N, and Dalet is one key over from D.

You could probably invent a code by exchanging every other letter for the similar key in another language.

doud mornhns = good morning. That one's fairly obvious. Or you could say
guos murbibg.

But then there'd be a problem of what to do with diphthongs and digraphs.

Fair Weather

I decide to hang half the clothes in the house, where there's a 50 percent chance they'll dry, and half outside, where there's a 50 percent chance it will rain.
It did rain in the evening, so I left the clothes out all night and they were dry by morning. (How did that happen?!)

Today is a lovely day. We went to a clinic where I had to get some blood tests. The building looked normal on top, but we parked underneath it. We entered at ground level, which was the sixth floor, and descended from there. Afterwards I had breakfast at a little coffee shop. A typical Israeli breakfast. (Typical blogger lack of complete sentences and correct punctuation.) A salad with perfect dressing (vinegar and oil with a touch of mustard) and a sweet potato-mozzarrella quiche. I'm not sure if that's correct spelling, but when you combine Italian and French you don't have to be too exact, do you? And a small cappuccino, which seems suitable, somehow. It won't keep me awake this time. I could easily go to sleep, but I am so relaxed I don't need to.

Afterwards we strolled unhurried around a few stores. I saw a good felt hat, but I don't need a hat. Or do I. Maybe I'll change my mind when it gets colder, and I'll wish I had bought that hat. I looked at some toys and some art kits and some cut-paste packages and wished I had grandchildren here to do things with. There were stickers of Hebrew letters, and coloring books with Bible stories in simple Hebrew. I saw several really neat scarves (mitpahats), but prices were a bit high. And how many scarfs does one woman need, anyway. (Probably 35 minimum, maybe 300.) The whole time I was there I had a sort of undergroud feeling -- the ceilings were a bit low and the lighting less than the best. It was a relief to come out to daylight again.
And it's a lovely day. I think I'll get outside while I can. It's apt to rain again and for the next few days. I feel free today from the pressure of "get something done." Rather, enjoy life.


Hmmm. That Was a Nice Hat.


Hmmm. Maybe it would be good to have coloring books on hand Just In Case some little ones, or middle-size ones, ever come to visit.

Hmmm. I like art kits and cut and paste myself. But, no, I'm grown up now and I haven't finished fixing the curtains yet.

Nothing to Say

What do you say when you have nothing to say? It's not that nothing ever happens, but it's hard to pick out the most important or most interesting or most relevant, and I don't feel like sorting things out or analyzing them.
So I stick with simple obvious and somewhat trivial things. Not that they're totally trivial. All put together they make up life.

Planes have been flying overhead. Makes me wonder what's up in Gaza or Iran.

It's cold out. "Cool," I was recently corrected. I call it cold. It's cloudy, too, and might rain. I washed some clothes but I don't know how I'm going to dry them. Cold and cloudy doesn't dry clothes. Rain is even worse. Ironing them works, and is sort of fun if you don't think about all the other things you could be doing.

The ice cream truck is playing Rock-a-bye Baby plus about 3/8 of another tune. I would prefer the other tune plus 3/8 of Rock-a-bye Baby. Or better yet, just shut the music off and go "ding-ding-ding."

Cold weather makes you appreciate a warm bed. Cold floors make you appreciate dry socks. Ice cream doesn't sound too appealing right now. Home-cooked food doesn't sound too appealing, either. What do you do when you're hungry but you don't feel like eating? Now, if someone else were to cook me a home-cooked meal, that would be a different matter. So I should simply get someone else's recipe and pretend I'm her while I cook it, and then be me while I eat it. Then I could be both of us while I/we wash the dishes.

Why does the refrigerator sound louder when you're in the living room than when you're in the kitchen? Maybe I should put the refrigerator in the living room. It would look fine with a lamp on it.

I have about a hundred tune ideas. However there are certain phrases in the Psalms that just don't sound very musical to my English ear. One such phrase or another manages to crop up in many of those tunes, so it is hard to finish them to my satisfaction. I should quit trying to be a perfectionist.

I had a moment one day of feeling useful. That's a good feeling. I used to feel useful when I was painting walls. And doors. And baseboards. Here I don't often feel useful. But one day I was sitting on a park bench and a tame cat jumped up beside me. After a few minutes she crawled into my lap and went to sleep. So a cat found me useful anyway.

We cook on a single burner. A hot-plate. When it is plugged in and the heat turned all the way down, it still goes on and off. Probably because the lowest thermostat setting is about room temperature. My kitchen is simple but sufficient. One thing I would like, though, is a tomato slicer. I have lived 40 years without one. I think now is the time to buy one, if I ever see one.

I got a blender, thinking it would give me more options. It helps some, but not as much as I had hoped. I make tomato juice with lots of carrots in it. Or fruit juice. I like mangoes with a little orange juice; but for some reason, mangoes don't taste very good with lemons or apples. Apples and peaches don't go together, either. I haven't yet tried mangoes with peaches.

That's all I have to say.