Monday 17 August 2015

The telephone saga

The telephone saga has two parts, neither of which had reached a conclusion when I wrote this scheduled post on Satuday afternoon. First, the landline and internet; second, cellphones.

When we left Israel last year, we froze the landline. On Sunday, the day after our return, ADC called Bezek, the main landline provider in Israel (formerly a state monopoly), to unfreeze the line. He was assured that there was no problem. At the same time, he arranged for internet access on the line, as the Hebrew University has a special deal with Bezek for its employees. On the way up to Jerusalem on Monday, he received a call on his cell phone saying that everything was ready for him to start using the internet, he just needed to acquire a router. When we arrived in the flat, we discovered that there was no line. Assuming that there might be a problem with the phone, ADC waited until Tuesday morning, when he acquired a new phone along with the router, before calling to complain about the line (or lack thereof). He was told that a technician would arrive by 6 p.m. on Thursday. At 5:45 on Thursday, ADC called Bezek to ask why we still had neither landline nor internet, and eventually browbeated the call centre into admitting that their technician had fixed our line, but then crossed it with someone else's!! Another technician will come on Monday afternoon, and hopefully after that we will rejoin the 21st century.

Cellphones: I had been exceedingly concerned about a cellphone before we arrived in Israel, as my phone had gone AWOL in May. Very luckily, the phone in fact had been in Kfar Saba all along, and I have neither been entirely cut off from the outside world, nor will I have to change my phone number. However, for historic reasons, ADC and my phones belong to my father's pharmacy's business plan, and now that A and S also have phones, we want to be independent. I thought I would be able to deal with this in Kfar Saba, but the shop I planned to go to had closed down. Things did not seem that urgent (the boys mainly use Whatsapp to communicate, which functioned even without an Israeli SIM), until it became apparent that they would arrive in Jerusalem before we had internet - and thus WiFi - in the flat. My brother-in-law, who is now working at the pharmacy, is in charge of dealing with the phone, and spent quite some time trying to transfer us to the status of private customers of the same provider, while retaining the same numbers, to no avail. At one point I thought he had said it was possible, so I bought new SIM cards for the boys, but I will be returning them and going to another provider on Sunday. This is hugely frustrating and took up a lot of my time and energy, but tomorrow this ordeal will be over.

ETA: All's well that ends well. A large part of Sunday was dealing with phones. We eventually went with one of the major providers, and A immediately had both phone and internet access. It took a bit longer for me; I had phone access but had to call the helpline to reset a certain parameter in order to access the internet. I subsequently realised that I could use the phone's hotspot to go online on my laptop, and I used the help chat to work out what was going on with ADC's elderly clamshell (which considers the world to have ended on 31 December 2014), which refused to function at all. In the end, I put his new SIM in my old phone (also a clamshell), and that is what he is using now. Fortunately, I had already moved most of my contacts list into my smartphone by that time - I did that manually after connecting the old phone to my computer prompted the latter to ask what I wanted to print. I decided that manually copying contact details might take longer but would be less stressful than trying to find software to do so automatically. This morning I was able to solve S's internet access problems quickly, once againusing the help chat - I really love that function! In the afternoon, Bezek finally reconnected the landline and it took only a bit of a struggle to get the router to function (the instructions assume that you have a PC, and there are no instructions for a Mac). 

Sunday 16 August 2015

Plans for better living at home

This is a scheduled post ... I will probably not yet have internet when it goes up :-(

Moving back home after a year away is a good time to rethink the way one's house is arranged. I will begin by saying that I live in an apartment block that was built in the early 1950s, a time when Israel was at its poorest and desperately in need of housing for the mass immigration of the early years of the State. By the present day, some sixty years later, the entire building is in need of an upgrade, and there are in fact plans to do just that, in the form of National Plan 38, intended to retrofit old buildings for earthquake protection, while at the same time adding new storeys. The idea is that the contractor would cover all the costs of retrofitting and enlarging the existing apartments and recoup his expenses by selling the new flats. Our building had begun that excruciating process, which has been dragging on for about three years now, and we haven't even signed a contract yet. We seem to be very close, though, so it is not worth our while to invest too much money in the apartment as it now is - but we still want to make some changes so that it feels airier and less full of stuff (we are incurable optimists). The main idea is to free up floor space by utilising walls better. 

Our current apartment is a three-bedroom, with a bathroom, a separate toilet, and another en suite toilet (but no extra shower) off the master bedroom. Due to a miscalculation, our bed, while extremely comfortable, is a little too large for the room, and there is barely space to open the closet doors, and no way for me to have a bedside table. I will, however, be getting a corner shelf, thus enabling us to remove a small triangular etagere from next to the chest of drawers. We use one of the bedrooms as a study, the place where we watch TV together, and a guest room. It will now also have to be my sewing room (although I'll be cutting out patterns and fabric on the dining room table, which is better than the floor I used in Takoma Park). In short, there is no way we are going to give up this room at the moment to allow each boy to have his own one. The boys currently sleep in a bunk bed, which is a bit narrow, but still long enough for A to fit there. They are in great need of extra bookshelves and storage for comics, so we plan to have all games and puzzles move into storage units underneath the window of the closed-off balcony, thus freeing up space in the current bookcase, as well as adding shelves on the wall between their bed and the clothes closet. We have got rid of an elderly and decrepit fibreboard cupboard that stood in the study, and will somehow find space for everything that used to live there in other shelves on other bookcases. The area behind the door where that cupboard stood will become the hobby space: where the guitar, basses, ukelele and sewing machine will stand.

The major changes will be in the living room and the kitchen. In the living room, we have rearranged the inside of the storage/entertainment unit along one wall for efficiency. We intend to get rid of the big coffee table, and have already got rid of the big carpet we used to have there, allowing us to be much more flexible with the placing of the two armchairs. The long sofa remains along the other wall, and the triangular etagere that used to be in our bedroom is now functioning as a side-table. I would like to buy another side table of Damascus-work, inlaid with mother of pearl, preferably with some kind of storage space. There is a shop in the Christian Quarter in the Old City that sells Damascus-work furniture, but I have no idea how much something like that would cost. I think it would go really well with the Turkish rug that will now be the main carpet in the living room. As for the enclosed balcony, formerly the children's play area, that will now be only one of its functions. We bought Nordli units at Ikea, which will replace the plastic sets of drawers in which the remaining toys are now, AND have space left over for tablecloths, fabric for sewing, and more. The old clothes-drying rack is now broken, and instead of it taking up space on the floor, I intend to get something along the lines of this: an extendable clothesline that folds up onto the wall when not in use. Because I am on the ground floor, on a slope, I don't have an external clothesline, as clothes hung from the outside wall would drag in the dirt. I use a dryer most of the time, but sometimes you need a clothesline, too. 

The major change will be in the kitchen. For this, we are going to get a carpemter and have things made to our specifications. About the only thing that ADC liked in the kitchen in Takoma Park was the pots and pans hanging from hooks rather than in drawers. Our kitchen is L-shaped, and currently the short leg is partly blocked by an ugly white plastic cupboard, which we will get rid of. On the wall against which it stands, we will have a set of rods and hooks from which to hang pots and pans, thus freeing up space in the deep kitchen drawers for the current contents of that cupboard. Additionally, in the pantry area beyond it, currently filled by a rolling unit we got from a credit card catalogue, we will have a set of drawers (for cleaning materials and plastic wrap/silver foil/etc.), open shelves (for a microwave, toaster oven, and all the cookbooks), and closed shelves (for a pantry). The whole will be on legs, so as to retain access to the drainhole beneath the rolling unit at the moment. The dryer will be turner 90 degrees so it is next to the new pantry unit, and brooms, mops, vacuum cleaner will be opposite it, out of sight from the main kitchen but still easily accessible. The only question is where to put the recycling bins, but I imagine we'll find a solution for that ...

These changes are much less drastic than ones involving separating the boys and moving the study into the lounge (how claustrophobic would that be?) or onto the balcony (freezing and with a tendency to leak in the winter; even though the last problem will be solved before this winter, I do not intend to put a computer there), but I think they will make a big difference to the way our house feels. If I were a better photographer I would be putting up before and after photos; I'll see if I can get ADC to cooperate.

Saturday 15 August 2015

The return

We've been back in Israel for a week now - and despite promises, we still don't have internet at home, so I am writing this from my parents-in-laws', where we are spending the weekend. 

The flight home was not an easy experience. It began shortly after my previous post, when A burst into the bathroom just as I was undressing for a shower, and threw up all over the floor. Luckily, he managed to miss the wall-to-wall carpeting on the rest of the upper floor, but it took me over an hour to clean up. He was still not himself when we left in the morning, had no breakfast, and almost passed out in the line for security, as it was very hot and crowded there. The TSA people were very nice and let him take his half-full water bottle through. By the time we reached JFK, A was fine. All was well until after supper was served, at which point S turned to me and said: "I don't feel so well." He spent the reset of the flight shaking and retching over a big plastic bag. The cabin attendants were very nice - they brought him lemon to chew on and a hot towel - butthat didn't help after a while. He slept very fitfully, and I slept even less, feeling as if I was once more travelling with a baby. 

When we arrived at Ben-Gurion airport, late on Saturday afternoon, a new wrinkle emerged, in that one of the suitcases did not arrive. Fortunately, it was not the carry-on trolley that ADC had checked at the gate at JFK (thus sneaking in an extra suitcase without being fined), which contained clean pajamas and a change of clothing for the next day; unfortunately, it was the suitcase containing all my clothes plus stuff for my siblings. (It eventually reached us in Jerusalem at 9 p.m. on Monday, so it could have been much worse.) After that delay, we continued to my parents' house, where we were reunited with my side of the family, plus with my phone - which my mother found on Friday, less than 24 hours before we arrived. 

We spent Sunday resting and recuperating (Y and N came over in the evening), then on Monday ADC rented a car and the two of us went up to Jerusalem, leaving A and S with their grandparents. They stayed in Kfar Saba until Wednesday, then took the train down to Omer, where we are now, while we cleaned and unpacked the apartment. We had rented our apartment with one room - the children's - closed off, where we stored most of our stuff. After arrival on Moday afternoon, ADC and spent nearly two hours walking around the flat and planning changes, which will be the subject of a separate post, as they come to pass. Apparently our tenant had left the house quite filthy, so R, our regular cleaning lady, who had cleaned for him for a while until his sexual harassment(!) became too much, had already cleaned most of it. We still had a few surprises: a connection for cable TV through one wall, a bidet attachment to the toilet pipe in our en suite (both without even asking for our permission), and condom wrappers - though thankfully no used ones - in a drawer in the bedroom. As soon as I could, I began doing laundry ...

On Tuesday R arrived, and finished cleaning the house. I cleaned alongside her, and we made good progress on unpacking, as well. She had some hair-raising tales about the tenant, whose ex-wife (he got a divorce over the course of the year, and apparently the reason he rented the flat was because he needed a place to live quite urgently) was someone she had been to school with. He will definitely not be seeing all of his security deposit from us ...

By Thursday we finished all the unpacking except for things that either belong to the boys, who asked us not to unpack their things yet, or require the proposed changes to occur before we can find space for them. That being said, with a bit of rearrangement and willingness to discard things, we have managed to find space for almost everything that was on top of the kitchen cupboards. We don't want to have anything out there anymore, as they get full of dust and grease, and it makes the kitchen feel more cramped than it actually is. It is such a relief to be back in our own kitchen, though. Not only is there so much more space than we had in Takoma Park, everything is the right height, we have all our tools AND there is a dishwasher again!! It's been working overtime, as I wanted to wash all the utensils before using them again ...

On Wednesday evening we went to the Machane Yehuda market, where we met many of our shopkeeper friends, who were all amazed that the year had gone by so quickly. We ate at a very nice Lebanese restaurant called Manou Bashouk ("Someone in the Market"), run by a couple from France - he's originally from Beirut and cooks like his mother did, and she's of North African origin, so that there is excellent couscous on the menu, too. Interestingly, there are vegetarian options for almost all the meat main dishes, which is great for me. We didn't do much shopping, just a bag of figs and a new draining board. We returned for a proper shop on Thursday morning, and when I finished decanting the different kinds of rice and lentils into glass jars, the kitchen started really looking like home again. 

On Friday we set off first thing to buy furniture at Ikea in Rishon Letzion. ADC was very loath to go there, but his sister E persuaded him that for a storage solution on the closed-off balcony, it made sense to go there. We ended up getting two metre's worth of three-drawer Nordli units, a Ställ unit for shoes, and a few other odds and ends, in about two hours - but I am never going there again, and certainly not with ADC. I hate being rushed when shopping, and while Ikea is not my favourite, they do have some very practical and functional ideas, that I would have liked to have had time to look at and think about, but couldn't, because ADC was determined to spend as little time as possible there. Anyway, the main thing is that on Sunday we will be able to finalise the arrangement of the living room, as the balcony extension will be organised. 

After Ikea we continued to Omer, where we have been relaxing ever since, despite the blips of the coninuing phone saga. That, too, is worthy of a post of its own ... Despite the irritations and inconveniences, we are very close to being organised and it is so good to come home, to be back somewhere where you know and understand how things function. 

Friday 7 August 2015

Last post from America

I can't believe that my last post was only a week ago - we have covered so much distance since then! When ADC returned the car this morning, he had driven it for about 2500 miles. 

On July 29, the first day of our road trip proper, we set off quite early, heading for the Columbia River Gorge. Our first stop was at Vista House, built in the 1920s specifically for viewing the gorge at its finest. The very enthusiastic docent there gave us maps and lists of waterfalls to visit as we made our way along historic Route 30, one of the first roads ever built expressly to encourage motoring to natural beauty spots. ADC, who spent a year in Eugene when he was in fourth grade, remembered many of the names, and the description of the Bonneville fish hatchery, where the fish jump up a ladder ... the and his family then probably made many short trips along the route we covered in a single day. We stopped at Bridal Veils to admire the waterfall, but were unable to stop anywhere else along Route 30 due to the lack of parking. And this was in the middle of the week! As we drove along, we stopped at random places to look at the gorge and/or Mt Hood and for ADC to take pictures. Today was the beginning of a heatwave supposed to continue to the weekend, and we definitely felt temperatures we had not experienced since leaving the DC area. On the other hand, there was very little humidity, so we were able to spend nearly an hour walking in 36C heat. For the first time, it felt like summer should: neither the humidity of DC nor the chilliness of Washington. That was after we had crossed the Cascades into the rain shadow desert of central Oregon. The landscape changed dramatically almost immediately: from green to yellow, looking more and more like the Golan Heights with the basalt rocks and grazing beef cattle. As the temperatures rose, visibility improved, and when we came across a mountain identification plate at the crest of Mt Criterion, we were able to see, in addition to the easily identifiable Mt Hood, also Mt Adams - far away in Washington, Mt Jefferson and the Three Sisters


We spent a lot of time in the car that day and heard a great deal of music, the "West Coast Playlist" that ADC had prepared in advance (including, as well as musicians from California and Seattle, anyone else who seemed to have been influenced/was mocking them). We spent the night just beyond Bend in the kind of place that ADC has been looking for since our first trip in the USA: a small motel called Rodeway, cheap but clean, with very few frills, but with a room large enough for each boy to have his own bed. It is part of a chain, but not one we had come across before.

Next day we set off  for Crater Lake, hoping to escape the forecast heat. In fact, ADC was very worried that we might not be warmly enough dressed and told the children to expect to see snow on the ground (which they interpreted as "it might/will snow", it seems). In the event, there was no snow whatsoever - to the extent that the illustrated signs were false - and the weather was a pleasant low 20s Celsius. Once again, we were in a new plant zone, and on one walk Ariel became quite frustrated by the number of birds he could hear, but not see, and was unable to identify. All the same, I filled over a page in my little notebook with flowers, birds, a rodent (golden-mantled squirrel) and a butterfly (variegated fritillary). Crater Lake itself was an amazing sight - such deep blue water! It seems that even the geology in the New World is younger than what I am used to from Israel, measured in thousands rather than millions of years, but I know that that is an artefact of the volcanic Cascades range. We went on two shortish hikes - we are impossibly thorough in our nature observing, especially me when I'm not familiar with the flowers, so we didn't have time for more than that. 

Once we left the park, we were in the middle of nowhere. We passed through a couple of motels at the side of the road just after 5 p.m., but it was two early to stop, and once we entered the Rogue River Gorge, there was nothing for more than an hour. We were just starting to get a bit concerned when we reached Shady Cove, where we found the Platonic ideal of an old-fashioned motel with a diner alongside it. The rooms were cheap enough that Amos and Shaul could have a room to themselves (which turned out to have ants, so they were upgraded to s suite, thus they each have a room of their own), and at supper I had a butterscotch milkshake, which more than made up for the only vegetarian option being a mediocre garden burger. 

We reached California just before noon on July 31st, and also reached yet another climate/vegetation zone - to the extent that ADC bought me a new plants and animals pamphlet, specifically for the redwood forests national and state parks. The size of the redwoods is truly amazing. Together with the enormous sword ferns growing on the forest floor, I felt as if I were Alice after drinking the "Drink Me" flask, as we walked along the Stout Grove loop (the grove was established as part of an effort prevent further logging of the redwoods in the 1920s and was named by Mrs Clara Stout in honour of her husband, a lumber baron). We left Shady Coves that morning still in the throes of a heatwave, with added forest fires (the car was lightly coated with flakes of ash). When we reached Crescent City and the Pacific coast in the late afternoon, the temperature was 40 degrees Fahrenheit lower than they had been 24 hours earlier! No wonder there is constant fog flowing from the Pacific. To top the natural wonders of the day, we saw a small herd of elk - females and juvenile males - browsing at the side of the road just before leaving one of the sections of the state park. Our original plan had been to stay at a motel in Eureka along US 101, but when we arrived, they were all very sleazy-looking, so we found a place a few blocks into town, where we got a suite, so we have our own room, and each boy has his own bed. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, the first good South American food we've had (the mediocre Salvadoran meal we had as our first lunch clearly had an long-term effect, albeit an unconscious one).

August 1 was a long day, which can be summed up in two words: driving and eating. As our motel did not include breakfast, we decided to eat a few remaining things that we had bought for hikes, and to stop after the Avenue of the Giants for brunch. We set off just before 9 a.m., stopped for brunch two and a half hours' later, and at 3 p.m. really needed another break. We stopped at the closest place Google Maps suggested, Frozen Art in Santa Rosa, where we had some of the best ice-cream I've ever had. The owners are Mexican, and there were some very interesting and unusual flavours - I had a scoop of honey and lavender ice-cream, and another of rose petal. ADC had corn ice-cream! They also had paletas, or home-made popsicles, and there the flavours were even more interesting: cucumber and melon, pico de gallo, and pine-nut were just a few. 

At 5 we finally reached our Airbnb in Oakland. This was our first time doing Airbnb, and we didn't really know what to expect - we were not expecting to get the run of an empty family home, including a hot tub! There are also two cats, that come with the house. The only downside is that there is almost no closet space: the family that lives here has gone on holiday for three weeks, and decided that this was better than getting a house sitter. Finally, we went over to ADC's cousins  J&L  for dinner. It was possibly the best Chinese takeout I've ever eaten - if all Chinese restaurants served food like Shan Dong does, I would have a better opinion of Chinese food for vegetarians.

Much of Sunday and Monday were spent with cousins. We essentially spent all of Sunday with J&L - as BART was not working, we stayed in Oakland. We walked around Lake Merritt, ate pizza from Arizmendi (the original of the pizza place that serves only one flavour in Inside Out), and visited the Oakland Museum of California, which is free on the first Sunday of the month. We spent nearly two hours there, only in the History hall. I had known very little of the history of California previously, and it was good to get the Spaniards, Mexicans and Americans sorted out. It was also very useful to know a bit about the development of San Francisco before going there the next day. At the very end of the hall was a small historiographical exhibition, explaining how curators worked and derived history from material objects. Monday was our first day in San Francisco itself. We used three kinds of transport: BART, the cable car and a historic street car (made in 1948 and originally from Cincinnati, according to the posters inside it). Our first stop was in the Mission district, where we met my father's first cousin W and her family for brunch at their home. I last saw W when I was about seven, and didn't remember her at all. I am not sure we would have met so easily at the BART station if I had not said in advance that I would be wearing my purple skirt! W and her husband T were very welcoming. We talked about all kinds of things, and met their daughter M and her boyfriend J. M is about to begin medical school and J is a chef; I think we persuaded him to seriously consider visiting Israel (he isn't Jewish) by telling him about the goat cheeses made in the desert just beyond Omer. When we left, S asked them to come for his bar mitzvah in two years' time. After over two hours' having brunch, T was very happy to walk us around the upper Mission district, taking us to see Dolores Park and Mark Zuckerberg's house, and pointing out particular architectural features. I must say that the so-called Victorian style in San Francisco is lovely. After we said goodbye to T, we continued down Valencia St, looking at all the weird and wonderful shops, of which the weirdest was surely the steampunk emporium of Paxton Gate. The boys really wanted to buy things there, but we restrained them by pointing out the restrictions on importing animal parts from one country to another. After moving from Valencia to Mission St., we caught another BART to Powell St., where we wanted to get the cable car to Fisherman's Wharf. The line there was incredibly long, but we noticed that the cars were not full when they left - indicating that there were additional stations along the way. We walked just a short way up Powell to the next station, and were able to catch the next but one car, instead of the fifth or sixth car. It's very interesting how people see a line and join it, and very few think of ways to shorten their wait time. We saw a similar phenomenon at Ghirardelli Square, where you could get sundaes either at the Ghirardelli Marketplace (half empty and no queue when you approached the counter after walking past the displays of chocolate bars) or at the Ghirardelli Fountain (queue coming out of the store and around the block, for the same over-priced sundaes). Fisherman's Wharf itself was pleasant to walk along. The boys went down to the beach and paddled for a bit - I also saw small children in puffy coats! We were a bit tired by the time we finished wandering around that area, and took a street car back to Market St., where we wandered more in search of supper. It turned out that Market Street is very like Soho in London, in that the restaurants and the sleazy places are very close to each other. After half an hour, I forced ADC to book a table in an Indian restaurant, just to be sure that we ate somewhere with decent food at reasonable prices. On the way there, we found a jazz bistro called Les Joulins, which is where we ended up eating supper: very good food and even better music. It later turned out that this is one of the premier spots for live jazz in the city; as we had missed hearing a jazz quartet that IB and E like very much in Seattle, this more than made up for it.

Wednesday was a relatively restful day, in that we did not spend all of it on our feet. Instead, we went for a scenic drive (there's something we hadn't done in a while :-)) through Golden Gate Park, over the Golden Gate bridge and along route 1 to Stinson Beach. We had a bit of a late start, and saw the toll change from $6 to $4 while in line at the Bay Bridge at 10 a.m. On the way to the Golden Gate Park we saw some very different SF neighbourhoods from the ones we had seen by foot, like the millionaires' haven of Sea Cliff, where we saw the kind of crescent that in Bath has 18th-century row houses adorned here with mansions, and Richmond, which looked rather like a place we would enjoy living in. The day was chilly and overcast, so we didn't spend too long in the park, as A and S wanted to cross the bridge as soon as possible. We overheard an Irish guide giving instructions to a group of cyclists who were going to cycle over the bridge and A really regretted having to be stuck inside a car! The view from the bridge was as spectacular as promised, and so was the view from the vista point on route 1. I had a bad attack of car-sickness going around all the twists and turns, both coming and going, to the extent that I believe that I made the right decision to skip soft-serve ice-cream at Stinson Beach. Everyone was very sorry for me, and I'm not sure why I was so badly affected while the boys - who also tend to car sickness - seemed perfectly fine. Part of it, I think, was that somehow I was never at the right angle for the win to blow in my face. That aside, Stinson Beach was a lovely day out: we paddled a bit, despite the cold and even drizzle, but were amazed at the people actually swimming! The Pacific is so much colder than the Med, and the posters warning of rip tides and sharks were quite alarming. We found a nice little book shop, and more importantly at the moment, I found a post office, where I picked up boxes so we can send at least some of our books home via media mail and hopefully avoid paying overweight on our flight. The day ended with more ice-cream, this time at Fenton's Creamery, and the welcome news that our flight time had been changed: instead of leaving SFO at 8:30 with a 6 hour layover at JFK before taking off for Tel Aviv, we are now leaving at 13:20 and have only 2 hours' layover, arriving in Tel Aviv at the same time, but hopefully less complete wrecks.

Yesterday we went back into the city, entering and leaving from the Montgomery Street BART station. We began by visiting a tea and chocolate shop we had seen from the cable car, called Spicely. We spent much longer than expected there, and did not walk out empty handed (despite our luggage concerns). If Spicely opened a cafe in Powell's bookstore in Portland, I think we would move in permanently. After that, we resumed walking up Montgomery Street to the Coit Tower. We didn't go up it, but looked at the view. We then took all the steps down through Grace Marchand Garden to Battery Street and began looking for lunch. That took longer than expected, and we ended up at The Planet, an organic cafe where the men each had a different kind of sandwich and I had an interesting tomato and watermelon salad. ADC and I had juices (and I remembered why I actually prefer them without food), and Amos expanded his horizons and had a smoothie. We then went to the Ferry Building marketplace, and bought artisanal bread, cheese and salami for an early supper - ADC and the boys went with Jeremy to see Ant-Man. A and S enjoyed themselves greatly, especially S; ADC, as usual, was distracted by the bad science involved and its inner inconsistencies. I stayed home, began packing, and tried to get T-Mobile to unlock our phones so we can use them in Israel but was defeated due to not being ADC (in whose names all the lines are). This was after we'd made a special detour to a T-Mobile shop in town, having understood that the unlocking could be done there on the spot. I did make some progress, though, and as I used the chat, the agent assured me that we wouldn't need to give all the information again. I think chat helplines are brilliant: I'd tried calling, first, and ended up unsure if the agent had understood me properly, or I him. With chat, everything is much clearer and you can go back and check what you said much more easily.

I'm writing this after getting back from supper with J&L, with whom we spent much of the day today. We got a relatively late start, as there were several errands that had to be done before we could go into San Francisco one last time - mailing books (it turns out that media rate does not apply to boxes, so that was $87 - but paying for overweight luggage and having to check both trolley suitcases would probably have come to more), finally getting the unlock codes from t-Mobile, and returning the car to the rental agency. We eventually met J&L at noon, and went for a walk through Chinatown. L didn't grow up there, but her parents still have close connections and apparently her father takes two buses to go shopping there almost every day. She attempted to haggle with the seller at a jade shop where A bought a small elephant to add to his collection, but he was too quick and paid without question. We had lunch at a place whose name I didn't catch, and whose clientele seemly evenly divided between Chinese and non-Chinese. It was very good. especially the deep-fried salt and pepper eggplant we had as a starter and the garlicky pea shoots. After that, L had to go back to work, and J took us to City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookstore, still a mainstay of radical San Francisco. There were some interesting titles there, but this time we weren't buying ... Everyone humoured me and went into Britex Fabrics, an entire building that is one of the West Coast's meccas for anyone who sews. There is a floor of silks and woollens, another of cotton, linen and more, an entire floor devoted to buttons and trimmings of all kinds, and the fourth floor (which we didn't reach) is remnants and novelty fabrics. I was overwhelmed - I don't know how you can go into a shop like that with the intent to buy without a sewing plan. There is so much choice ... A picked out a couple of silks that he would like me to make into shorts for him; I said I would aim at making him a cotton shirt by S's bar mitzvah (giving me two years to improve my sewing), and see how we went from there. 

At 3:30 we went back to our Airbnb, finished packing except for what we still needed to use before packing up, and went to Dr Comics & Mr Games, the local comics shop, so that S could get one last fix before going home. At 7:00 Jeremy came to fetch us for supper. During supper, L asked what the highlights of the year had been. It was a surprisingly difficult question to answer, but in no particular order, my top five were meeting Patricia Crone, learning to sew, visiting Savannah, cultivated flowers (the Hoyt Arboretum, the bonsais at the National Arboretum, Portland Rose Garden and the cherry blossoms in Washington), and the Tenement Museum in New York. The list could continue, but I need more time to reflect. I'll revisit the question in a month's time, everything is too close now. 

In less than eleven hours a taxi will come to take us to the airport ... next post will be from Israel.