First day of school - an update

It is scarily easy to fall out of the habit of blogging once I'm home ... I would try another SED for September, except that the month is chopped up by the High Holydays, and I will be away from my laptop quite often. I'll try for twice a week posting and see how that goes.

Now that the accountability disclaimer is up, what have I been up to in the last two weeks? Slowly but surely, the house has taken shape. The Ikea drawers and shoe closet have been constructed (thanks to ADC and the boys); the dining room chairs have been re-upholstered in dark red basketweave (thanks to my sister-in-law E and the boys), replacing or rather re-covering Very Stained Beige (I didn't realise quite how awful it had been until we went to ADC's cousins for lunch this past Saturday, and their chairs had that same upholstery as we had had); we've bought new carpets and sent an old Turkish rug for cleaning and mending; we've bought a car (or rather leased one); all the boxes have been unpacked apart for two containing large kitchenware, which is waiting for the new kitchen cupboards (due sometime next week, I hope); I've made dentist and doctor appointments (just check-ups). Our lift is due to arrive at Ashdod port any day now, so - taking all the non-working days in September into account - the house should reach its more or less final shape by the end of the month. 

ADC has gone back to work completely, and I've also been working quite a lot. I finished translating an article, really not in my field and really poorly written, yesterday and today I had much more fun editing an entry for the Encyclopedia of Islam, third edition, and then finalising an entry I had written myself. I don't think that there are that many editors who also write the same kind of things that they edit, and I am glad to polish my USP from time to time. 

A and S had their first day of school today. Both returned to the schools they had attended before the year in America, and it seems so far that the transition is going very smoothly. Since getting back to Jerusalem both have been spending a great deal of time with friends, including sleepovers - making up for a year apart. Hard to tell yet what re-adjusting to school in Israel will be like, and I'm much more concerned about A, who has to get used to being back in a competitive environment where everyone is clever and wants to study.  

It has been so nice to sleep in my own bed with my own sheets again. Last Friday we had TB over for supper, and I could see how happy ADC was to be cooking in his own kitchen again. I love my dishwasher!! The week before we had a family event, another bar mitzvah, so I got to see all my cousins - everyone is back from the US now, and as someone said, now that the older children are heading into high school and then the army, nobody is planning to leave for a while.  

End of the year

Last  time I wrote, we were about to embark on a very busy weekend. On May 30, we spent the day at AwesomeCom, which really was awesome. We went to a Q&A session with John Rhys-Davies and Sean Astin, which was hilarious; a panel on the "strong woman character" trope in genre and its problems, which began slowly, but quickly developed into an interesting discussion once audience participation began; tried new games; and wandered around the immense exhibit area, looking at t-shirts, original comics, merchandise and more. The most fun was looking at all the cosplayers, some of whom had amazingly detailed costumes, and some of whom were just having fun. A and S fell into the latter category: A bought a Deadpool mask a few weeks ago, and wore red and black, generally, while S recycled his Halloween costume of Rorschach (whom he has no real idea about, just thought the mask looked cool on Amazon - I have no real idea who Rorschach is either). The food situation was not great, and in retrospect it might even have been quicker to go outside the convention centre for lunch, but we made an executive decision to regard food as fuel that day, as we barely had time for a very early supper before heading to Strathmore to hear Fauré's Requiem. I had never heard it before, and I enjoyed it very much, especially as the program kindly provided full words with translation, so we could follow along. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the wording looked like slightly skewed versions of Jewish prayers. 

Next day, we spent the afternoon at the Folger, watching Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I had such fun! I saw the film with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth when it came out in 1990, in one of the now-gone cinemas in north Tel Aviv, and I remember laughing out loud at some point, and being the only person in the theatre to do so. That certainly didn't happen this time, everyone was laughing at all the jokes, including A and S (when S saw The Lion King on the last day of school, he came home convinced that Timon and Pumba were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - or vice versa). I'm not sure that they have seen enough live theatre to undesrtand all the conventions that were being played with, but they have seen Hamlet, so they had an idea of what was going on. In this performance, the Player was particularly good, much more of a presence than I remember Richard Dreyfuss being in the film. Guildenstern (Adam Wesley Brown) and Rosencrantz (played by an understudy, Luis Alberto Gonzalez) were both excellent, too. When I saw the movie, I don't think I had much of an idea who the main actors were, and I was surprised to meet them years later as Sirius Black and the Abomination. The play owes almost as much to Waiting for Godot as it does to Hamlet, and ADC asked me why I enjoyed R&G so much, yet disliked Waiting for Godot. Well, to begin with I think that WfG would have been improved - the one time I saw it live - if I had not just come off a five-hour flight to London. I fell asleep there, but I am told that I did not miss much, as nothing happens in the first half, and that is recapitulated in the second half. I don't think that that is true of R&G - yes, they spend a lot of time waiting, but things do happen. Also, since I saw this first as a film, I didn't experience it as occurring on a single stage set, but in a variety of settings, with the journey actually taking place on horseback etc. Finally, I am sure that my own enjoyment of verbal dexterity deriving from a great classic has a lot to do with it; I may simply prefer the register in which Stoppard works to Becket's.

The following week was "spirit week" at the elementary school, and S had to wear interesting clothes all week, culminating in a superhero outfit on Friday - he was given a Batman suit by a friend. Pity he didn't get it in time for AwesomeCon, but he is now sorted for Purim next year. A was invited to the honors evening at school. About 800 names (some two thirds of the student body) were called up to receive some kind of honor, with some children being called up more than once. A was in the next to last group, children who had received straight As all year (the last group was 27 children who had received straight As for eleven quarters, their entire time at TPMS). I am glad that ADC went without me, as I think I would have very much resented not being able to knit had I gone. This paragraph kind of sums up the entire year's experience for the boys: S had a great time, and A was rather bored. 

Last weekend, its first half  - Friday evening through Saturday afternoon - was spent visiting the Ms and their kids in Baltimore. We were very pleased to be invited for the weekend, actually just as ADC had been about to call to ask when we could see them, as this will be our last chance to see them before we come home. As we left Takoma Park during Friday evening rush hour, Google Maps took us on a different route from our previous visit, and after a whole year in which I had only seen the part of the Baltimore that was the route between Penn Station and Johns Hopkins' Homewood Campus, this weekend I saw two areas that were quite different. To begin with, we ended up going through a rather depressed area of Baltimore before we reached the Ms' house, on W 34th St. We discussed with the boys how you identified a poverty-stricken area: peeling paint, boarded up windows, no greenery, no chain stores but rather corner shops prominently advertising liquor. A added children playing outside on the pavement and adults sitting on the steps leading up to the row houses, and S added that those adults were smoking. As we moved north, the neighbourhood improved - this seems to be a near constant, north is better than south (if your city has an up and a down, like Haifa does, with Mt Carmel, then up is better). I wonder if there is any explanation for that. 

After supper, we went to get ice cream at the Charmery, just around the corner on W 36th St., and saw another side of the city. This was the hipster Baltimore, which KM and AM had said was like Zichron, with boutiques selling various kinds of handmade food and clothes. They were quite right, and we were sorry to see that we had missed happy hour at a chocolatier. We were not too late for an oyster stall, and to our surprise, S agreed to try one (we assume because IM, rather than one of us, told him that it tasted good). He wasn't impressed, but at least he didn't reject the suggestion out of hand. We had planned to go to the Aquarium in the morning, but once again we didn't make it. IM and AW are very big on board games, and had specifically requested that we bring Seven Wonders with us. We played after coming back from the ice cream, and ended up going to bed very late. Once we got up in the morning, AM made waffles, after which the boys (including the fathers) began playing Clue, while AM and I took sixteen-month-old CR to the playground. When we got back, because CR was getting hungry, the game was still going on, and by the time it finished, we decided to just go back home and do homework and watch You Can't Take It With You, which is exactly what we did.

First thing Sunday morning, ADC mowed the lawn. He did a much better job than A does, a combination of greater weight and power brought to bear when pushing (although it is an electric lawnmower) and greater motivation (I think no one could be less motivated than A: he liked the idea of mowing the lawn - similarly to the idea of shoveling snow - much more than he did the reality). This set the stage for a horticulturally-focused day. Our previous visit to the National Arboretum was the day after a snowstorm, and we decided already then to returm in the spring. As we are now almost at the summer solstice, and running out of time left to visit, we decided to go yesterday, after a rainy week that ended in sunshine and humidity. Sadly, once again many flowers were not yet blooming - although many other were already past their peak. It seemed as if what would have been the best areas to look at are now out of bounds due to the nesting bald eagles, which is a great pity, to my mind. However, we did see the late-blooming satsuki azaleas, and found a Japanese-style pond, with godfish, water-lilies in bloom, and most excitingly, several frogs, one of them almost on a lily-pad, in best Princess and the Frog style. The herb garden was at one of its peaks, too, and I really enjoyed that: there was a whole row of mints in pots, and you could rub the leaves and smell the differences as you walked along. It was fun seeing all the familar names and shapes in the industrial and colonial sections, as well as noting which plants appeared again and again: seasonings and bases for alcoholic drinks :)

The last week of school was fairly uneventful, with a lot of time spent on final exams. The last quarter report card will arrive in the mail, apparently. Oh, and S had his class trip to Baltimore on Monday. His main comment, when he got home, was that he didn't understand why, after having seen a film about the Star-Spangled Banner at Fort McHenry, they saw another such film at the Science Museum instead of doing something related to science there. 

Friday was the last day of elementary and middle school in Maryland. Since A has finished 8th grade and S has finished 5th grade, Friday was devoted to their promotion ceremonies - a new usage to me, BTW. I had not previously run across "promotion" in this sense. I would have just said "finished primary school" and/or "finished junior high". Anyway, we split up, with ADC attending A's ceremony (12:30-14:00) and me attending Sl's (11:30-12:30, clap-out at 15:15). It sounds as if both ceremonies were very similar: the children marched in, speeches by the principal and student representatives, a musical number, prizes, names of each student read by homeroom teacher. A's ceremony, from his report, was of course more elaborate, with a PowerPoint with pictures of all the children and a short film with all the teachers wishing them luck. The TPMS principal apparently spent her day going to various promotion ceremonies, elementary schools in the morning and the middle school in the afternoon. S received his certificate in his classroom. While everyone was milling around before the children had a picnic lunch (parents were sent home and returned to clap the mortarboard-wearing children out of school at the end of the day), I took pictures of S and his teacher and best friends on my cell phone. I hope they are viewable. ADC said the same for his pictures of A's ceremony, taken on a real camera and by a far better photographer.

On another note entirely, I spent quite a lot of time this past week on crafts: I finally finished my hiking shorts, which I decided to lengthen by adding a cuff (just in time to go rafting on Saturday), and I swatched my next cardigan. It seemed oddly appropriate to be knitting while watching Terry Gilliam's Brazil on Thursday night. Very excitingly, when I logged into Ravelry on Friday, I saw I had a message from the designer of the baby blanket I knitted for my latest neice, asking permission to feature my project on the pattern's main page. Admittedly, I knitted the blanket in December, but only added the pictures (again, ADC must be credited) a few days ago. What a compliment! 

The weekend has been boiling hot, and spending Saturday on the Shenandoah River was a very good idea. We reached the rafting company at Front Royal around 10:30, and were on the river just after 11:00. We floated along until 15:30 - the Shenandoah was much wider and slower than the Jordan was when we went rafting there, and we got stuck at every "riffle" - places where rocks are high enough to cause very mildly choppy water, but it was still great fun. ADC and A did most of the rowing, and every so often we stopped at an island and had a dip in the lovely cool water. I am still trying to get the algae out of my shorts - admittedly I made them for this kind of activity, but still, I'd like them to look newish after only one wearing. You can float so well when wearing a life jacket! The boys insisted on racing the other people who had been in the shuttle to the rivers with us - two men who were camping with their six-year-old sons. Unsurprisingly, we reached our end point - 7 miles from the start - before them. On the way back, we decided to take a scenic detour along the Skyline Drive, in the Shenandoah Valley National Park. We had been there before, in early October, and this was our last chance to be there again. Unfortunately, I think we were too tired to appreciate it properly - and also the view, when we stopped at overlooks, was quite hazy. After such an exhausting day, we had a much quieter time yesterday. Ariel finally went to buy bagels for Sunday breakfast. He said that he was one of the few male customers not wearing a kippa, and that all the staff were clearly Orthodox Jews - which to my mind seemed a good indication of quality control, and indeed the bagels were delicious. I wonder why American bagels are so much softer than the ones Granny and Grandpa used to make - a difference between Polish and Lithuanian traditions, perhaps? We then slowly wended our way to the weekly farmers' market and listened to a few acts at the Takoma Park Jazz Festival. It was incredibly hot and humid - Tel Aviv seemed cool and dry in comparison - so we didn't stay as long as we might have. We ended the day by watching Flash Gordon, which A had been very eager to watch due to the soundtrack being by Queen. I saw sometime in my childhood, but remembered very little of it. It was quite hilariously campy and bad, with enough woodenness to furnish a carpenter in every scene with Flash and Dale Arden, on the one hand, and Brian Blessed chewing all scenery he came within point blank range of: "Hand me the remote control!!" sounded just like "Release the Kraken!!" 

Today was the first day of the summer holidays. The boys and I have begun packing - in the sense that they went through all their school stuff, and there is now a pile of paper almost 23 cm high waiting to be recycled - and I began inventorying which of the things we bought for the house we plan to send in a lift and which we plan to leave behind as it's not worth sending them, when you factor in the cost of shipping and customs. Tomorrow a rep of one of the shipping companies I contacted is coming to do an in-home survey; another company estimated (based on my very preliminary listing) that we had about 5 cubic metres to ship. I think the cost of shipping will come to almost equal the value of the things that we are shipping, and that's before customs is calculated. The state really wants you to buy things in Israel, rather than importing them personally!

Next letter will probably be after the Fourth of July, for which we apparently will have front row seats for the fireworks, as they are let off at the middle school sports fields across the road.

Israel and Philadelphia

It's difficult to believe that two weeks ago I was sitting in J's kitchen translating SR's bar mitzvah sermon, and her and LR's speeches. As we have a very cultural weekend planned (AwesomeCon followed by Fauré's Requiem on Saturday, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on Sunday), I have to finish writing this letter today!

So, as everyone knows, A, S and I had a very action-packed week in Israel between May 10-16, while ADC spent part of that time visiting colleagues in Arizona with whom he has a BSF grant. We managed to see a lot of people, but not everyone we would have liked to, and most people we did not get to see enough of, for my part particularly not enough of my siblings J and R (I think I saw more of my brother-and sister-in-law than I did of them). It was lovely seeing my uncle and aunt from South Africa and my cosin from London, their son, too, and I'm sorry we only overlapped for 36 hours or so. 

A and S's favourite day was Tuesday, which we spent in Jerusalem, each one of us seeing friends separately. I think that this week has actually made them  more eager to come home: seeing all their old friends really emphasised the extent to which they have made acquaintances rather than friends in Takoma Park. I think the day I enjoyed most was Thursday, when I spent the morning at Tel Aviv University meeting friends and the early afternoon seeing eumelia s flat and having lunch with her at a very pleasant café down the road, before she took the three boys to see Avengers: Age of Ultron, which they all enjoyed thoroughly. ADC and I are very grateful to her for doing so, otherwise we would have had to take the boys to see it, and we would rather do other things on our weekends.... The bar mitzvah itself, of course, was in a class of itself. I was highly impressed with SR's reading from the Torah, and J and LR's speeches thoroughly embarrassed him, as is the custom. 

The trip home was much less traumatic than the cancellation of the Amtrak line between New York and Philadelphia following the derailment would have suggested; after spending close to an hour on the phone to America, we were able to be rerouted to Baltimore, and ADC came to pick us up. By the time he went to Princeton to give a talk last Thursday, the train was running as normal again.

Last weekend was Memorial Day weekend, and we went on what is probably our last out of town trip before we leave Takoma Park in July. We spent Saturday at Gettysburg, and Sunday and Monday in Philadelphia. It took quite a long time to get to Gettysburg, and even longer to get from there to Philadelphia; about half the day was spent driving. The national battlefield site is very interesting and informative, with a film (narrated, of course, by Morgan Freeman), a nineteenth-century cyclorama and an excellent museum at the visitor centre, and the most authentic living history we've seen yet in the US (ADC questions whether we've seen any other living history; the RenFest in October certainly doesn't count). As we are so close to the solstice and so far north, despite arriving in Philadelphia close to 8 p.m., it was still light, which was very nice as we wandered around looking for a restaurant bear our hotel. We ended up at an Indonesian place, adding to the list of cuisines we are sampling here. Each of us thought that he had chosen the best choice of the dishes.

Saturday was our only full day in Philadelphia, and we were extremely thorough in our explorations, returning to the hotel nearly 13 hours after setting out in the morning. We didn't get to see the Liberty Bell, as the queue was incredible, but we did go to the National Museum of American Jewish History, Independence Hall, Reading Terminal Market, and the Delaware River Waterfront. At the NMAJH, we started with a temporary exhibition of Richard Avedon portraits, many of which came from the Israel Museum's collection. I found the permanent collection more interesting, though, especially the sections on the development of Reform Judaism and the post-WWII move to suburbia. Like the Tenement Museum in New York, a lot of the museum was a walk through ADC's family history. The Tenement Museum was a more intense experience, focussing as it did on only one of the times and places covered by the NMAJH. A particularly interesting aspect for me was the historiography: the presence of Yiddish, for example, alongside Hebrew in many cases, and the total absence of the non-Ashkenazi experience in the historical introduction, apart from the mass aliyah to Israel. At the same time, there was both a great emphasis on Jewish involvement in civil rights and feminism (neither of which would have happened, it looked like, without the Jews) and an acknowledgement that Jews today are both Republicans and Democrats. 

After we finished at the museum, we had just enough time for a cheesesteak before going to Independence Hall. Everyone approved of the cheesesteak (even the vegan one I ate), as one should always try local foods, and it was the right thing at the right time. Independence Hall was a guided tour of a small building, with a very enthusiastic guide with great voice projection. I must say that I remain resolutely Old World-centric in what really interests me in history ... We continued from Independence Hall to Reading Street Market. We had begun our day there, as it was right across the road from our hotel, and the boys were enchanted by Mueller's chocolate, which featured various body parts made from chocolate. They desperately wanted to buy a heart or a kidney as an afternoon snack, but these were quite large and correspondingly expensive, so we forced them to make do with a nose each - which seemed like quite a lot of chocolate, in any case!

We then decided to take advantage of Philadelphia's street art, and explored the city centre further by way of walking the abridged version of the Mural Mile. S took pictures of the murals, which were almost invariably on the walls of building that abutted parking lots - I don't think I've seen so many parking lots in such a small space! The murals themselves wee fascinating, and we spent much longer than the suggested 30 minutes looking at them and discussing what we were seeing. By the time we finished, it was past 6 p.m. and we were all starting to droop. We had supper at an excellent Italian restaurant, Giorgio on Pine, where our waitress was Italian and supper was still going strong when we left, just before eight - unusual for American restaurants, which often close for the night by eight. We finished the day by walking to the Delaware River Waterfront, mainly so as not to retire to the hotel too early. When we got to Penn's Landing, we were startled to see a Cold War submarine next to a floating fish restaurant. 

On Monday, we spent the entire day at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We walked there from our hotel, down Benjamin Franklin Parkway and looked at all the flags, in vague alphabetical order (except for the flags of Poland, next to a statue in memory of Copernicus, and of Israel, next to a Holocaust memorial from 1964). At the museum, ADC declined to take pictures of the boys by the statue of Rocky, as he doesn't like taking that kind of picture - and in his defence, there was quite a long line of people waiting to take that same picture ... We were too early for what looks like a very good exhibition of the Impressionists, but enjoyed looking at the Museum's own collection of that school. We stuck to nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, this time. A was very keen to see the Surrealists and Marcel Duchamp's urinal, while S was happy to see a Roy Lichtenstein. Both of them spent the last hour or so at the arms and armour hall by themselves, while Ariel and I looked at decorative art and rooms from English stately homes that had been transferred piecemeal in the 1920s and 1930s. I have to admit to being slightly underwhelmed by the PMA. Admittedly, the National Gallery and the Met are in a class by themselves, but I think that there was more art that spoke to me, personally, at the MFA in Boston. But maybe I was just tired after Saturday ... 

Last Friday, the 22nd, A's entire year, the 8th grade class of 2015, went to Six Flags. He had a lot of fun, going on a roller coaster and dodgem cars, playing games at an arcade and eating pizza. Very sweetly, he bought fudge and brought it home for all of us. The same day, S had Authors' Tea at school: parents were invited to class to hear the children read poems or short prose pieces they had written. About half way through, juice and cookies were served. S read an alliterative alphabetical poem about superheroes. Apart from him, the best pieces, I thought, were an extract from a description of a baseball game from the ball's point of view, and a poem entitled "Divorce" in which one of the girls reflected on how life was in face better after her parents' divorce - everyone was much happier, and shhe had double the family. Almost all the children read something and some of them read two pieces. As usual with this age, the difference between boys and girls is immense. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the boys are still children, and the girls - at least some of them - are becoming introspective, mature.

As a result of the Authors' Tea, I have decided to sign up for a poem of the day by e-mail. I was surprised to see how much choice there is. Should I go for a classic daily poem, or a contemporary one? When does contemporary start? Does anyone have a recommendation? 

SED 23 - fun times for A and S

A's entire year, the 8th grade class of 2015, went to Six Flags today. He had a lot of fun, going on a roller coaster and dodgem cars, playing games at an arcade and eating pizza. Very sweetly, he bought fudge and brought it home for all of us. 

S had Authors' Tea at school today: parents were invited to class to hear the children read poems or short prose pieces they had written. About half way through, juice and cookies were served. S read an alliterative alphabetical poem about superheroes. Apart from him, the best pieces, I thought, were an extract from a description of a baseball game from the ball's point of view, and a poem entitled "Divorce" in which one of the girls reflected on how life was in face better after her parents' divorce - everyone was much happier, and shhe had double the family. Almost all the children read something and some of them read two pieces. As usual with this age, the difference between boys and girls is immense. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the boys are still children, and the girls - at least some of them - are becoming introspective, mature. 

As a result of the Authors' Tea, I have decided to sign up for a poem of the day by e-mail. I was surprised to see how much choice there is. Should I go for a classic daily poem, or a contemporary one? When does contemporary start? Does anyone have a recommendation? 

SED 21 - helping with homework

Things are really back to normal now: I've just finished helping S with his spelling homework and given A his weekly Arabic lesson. Both of these things are part of our Thursday afternoon routine. 

S has a spelling quiz every Friday. His teacher gives out a list of 30 words every Monday, divided into 3 groups of easy, middle and difficult. When we first arrived, S was doing the easy and middle words, but within 6 weeks he was moved to the middle and difficult group. He learns all the words, anyway, and I give him dictation every Thursday evening. This week's topic was words with TH, CH and SH. Interestingly, after only a week's break, S did much more poorly than usual - he normally get less than 5 words wrong, and this time he got 8 "wrongs", as he calls them. He was quite philosophical about it, and it was proof, to my mind, of the importance of reading in learning spelling - he read much less than usual in Israel, and even not having his cell phone this week hasn't meant that he's read more than usual, since he and A have played a great deal together (and of course, they have had to make up the lessons that they missed). 

A's Arabic lesson went as could be expected. After a week's break, his reading had deteriorated, but I remember that happening to me after the summer vacation as an undergraduate. I am glad that I've set a specific day and time for the lessons, because they are actually happening and he's not dropping too far behind his class. After the Memorial Day weekend, we'll start having two lessons a week, beginning with a review all the vocabulary of the current plus the present-future tense (more correctly, the imperfect).

ETA: this is uploaded on Friday, as ADC came home just as I was about to do so yesterday.  

SED 17 - back in the USA

I was a bit too optimistic at the end of my last post - while I had a reasonable flight, sleeping quite a lot and almost finishing my book, S had a rather bad one: he threw up twice, after overeating at the bar-mitzvah. The first time was in the aisle, and the stewardesses sprinkled a clumping material (similar to kitty litter, I should think) and asked my help cleaning up. The second time was after he drank some water - he just spat that up all over himself ... I felt very sorry for him, but when we were about to disembark, and he couldn't find his cell phone, I did get upset. I couldn't understand how he could have lost such a thing, and we spent quite a while during our connection at Newark filling in an online form to report its loss.

Apart from that hiccup, landing went smoothly. As always, my J-1 visa raised queries from the immigration officer, but I was able to convince him that medieval medicine was actually effective (quite a few modern cough medicines, both over the counter and prescription drugs, are based on the same materia medica) and also customized to individuals (a very brief description of the ideal of Galenic practice, I know).

We arrived at BWI at 9:30 a.m., still on Israel time, i.e. 4:30 p.m., having set out from my parents' house at 8:30 the previous evening. When we got home and unpacked, Shaul's cell phone was discovered in a side pocket of his backpack - a pocket that I had not realised was there. So, all's well that end's well, but I'm still confiscating his phone for a week, so that he learns to be more careful with his things.

It's now 8:30 in the evening, and the boys have been in bed for an hour. I deliberately had them shower as  soon as we got home so that they could go to bed quickly in the eveing. In the afternoon we watched Kurasawa's The Hidden Fortress, apparently one of George Lucas' inspirations for the original Star Wars. We'll listen to the interview with Lucas tomorrow, as despite the thrilling story and set-piece duels, the boys nearly fell asleep watching the movie, and absolutely did so while Ariel made supper.

I shall go to bed shortly myself ... tomorrow normal life resumes.

SED 11 - it's still Monday in Washington

Just finished Skypeing with ADC - tomorrow he leaves for Arizona, so I'll speak to him again only on Saturday, just before we go back. Both of us had relatively relaxed days. 

Mummy woke us up at ten, so that A and S could go to have their haircuts. I sorted out the phone situation, with the result that I now have a temporary stupid phone for calls and my US phone (locked to the US, it turns out) for Whatsapp and e-mail/internet when there is wifi. And my laptop, of course - I'll be taking all three to Jerusalem tomorrow.

Y and N, ADC's brother and his wife, came over this evening. They were very happy with the maple syrup and their children, R and Z, were very happy with the Playmobil. After the left, my friend T came over, and we discussed, among other things, how The Imitation Game had played fast and loose with military history,  cryptography, computing and Alan Turing's personal life. I pointed out that people with any kind of deep understanding in these fields were not necessarily the target audience, but agreed that the dumbing down had been excessive.

SED 6 - an ordinary day

... but a productive one. I completed about a quarter of the remaining part of the book I am editing, so I am well on track to finishing it by Friday. After supper I sewed for an hour, and then completed the neckband of my cardigan, and wove in all the ends. Only the buttons left!

The children had more exciting days. A's English class had their dramatic readings today, and apparently he did quite well. He chose an abridged version of Pirate Jenny from the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weil Threepenny Opera (the link is to Judy Collins' performance of it). Not being very musical, he had to work quite hard to learn it by heart and to be able to recite it not in a monotone. S, on the other hand, registered today for a MOOC run by the Smithsonian, called The Rise of Superheroes and Their Impact on American Culture - right up his street, and I'm glad ADC knew about it. He is very enthusiastic about it, and I wouldn't be surprised if he was the youngest participant.

So much snow ...

Part of the reason I haven't written in so long, I think, has been snow-induced depression. The second half of February was appalling, with the schools closed or starting late almost every other day, either due to active blizzards or due to extreme cold and ice. It was only when daylight saving began, and we had a thaw, that I realised how much better I felt with the sun shining. That being said, we did do a number of things ...

We continued our exploration of the Smithsonian Museums with a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian. This had been highly recommended by DE, ADC's host, who also warned that this was a museum that aimed to celebrate the community,and thus was more activist and less strictly academic than the Natural History Museum, for example. All museums are political, I thought to myself, and thesis simply explicit about it. I must say that while I enjoyed the visit, and learned a great deal, I came away feeling rather depressed. In the end, museums dedicated to recording and preserving ways of life that are dying - if not dead and attempts at resurrection being made - are, in a way, an argument for white supremacy; or at least, for the supremacy of the Mediterranean basin, a region where teleological worldviews joined the Hellenistic scientific heritage (all shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam) over the rest of the world, in which cyclical worldviews (shared by most "pagan" native religions) did not advance technologically (cause and effect here is hard to judge). The museum rather reminded me of the Khoi-San museum/cultural centre we visited in the Western Cape, and a Bedouin village we once visited: traditions that once were vital for survival are dying, because they are no longer necessary. And since they are based on oral traditions, once they are gone, they are gone. And even if they survive, they are partly a game: there was a video of the whale-killing ritual of an Eskimo group: not only was everyone wearing parkas made of technical material rather than sealskin, it is no longer the case that they will not survive the winter if they don't have a store of blubber - you could see the tins of Heinz baked beans on the shelves. I definitely felt sorry for the North American Indians - most of them really didn't have a chance: their surrounding were so harsh that their material culture (or what remains of it) is really pitiful compared even to pre-Columbian Central/South America, not to mention the Old World. The attempts to restore traditions were interesting, though: one group, from the Hupa Valley in California, were so Californian when they talked about being one with nature etc (wearing plaid shirts, that well-known item of Amerindian dress, as they spoke to the camera). In Chile there are indigenous professors of the languages, who are academics as well as activists, and a case of a Catholic priest who in old age left the Church and returned to his ancestral traditions, becoming a shaman. We bought a book on the world in 1491 at the museum giftshop, which is now in my TBR pile.

Due to the snow days, the testing regimen at Montgomery county schools has been severely disrupted, and it feels like the PARCC assessments have been going on forever (S has maths today, still). These are tests meant to assess the schools, rather than the pupils, as I understand it, and both boys reported that the English/literacy tests were quite easy. A said, though, that the maths segment included material that he had not covered at school ... I really hope he will not have too much of a shock when we get home. He is making quite good progress in Arabic, now that we have set up a definite time and day of the week. Once or twice he has "cancelled" due to the science project measuring the relative rates of freezing of water, apple juice and Gatorade, but then I have insisted on a make-up class on the weekend; the only advantage of having been housebound by snow has been Arabic lesson for A, ukulele lessons for S (he can play several songs now, but is not keen on performing on Skype), and watching movies. We had a Kurosawa weekend a few weeks ago, when ADC and I watched Rashomon on Friday night, and then we all watched Yojimbo together on Saturday. The boys enjoyed Yojimbo very much, and we are considering adding A Fistful of Dollars to the Netflix queue (my memory is that is a rather more graphic. I'm glad we didn't show Rashomon to the children, even though it is deservedly considered one of the greatest movies ever made - I think they are too young for it, still, despite A' belief that now that he is 13, he can see anything that is defined as PG-13 and above).

We have finally begun to take advantage of the cultural opportunities available in Washington (apart form ADC's Meetup group), and have booked three classical concerts and a play. Moreover, at the beginning of March we went to a performance of The Chieftains, a Dublin-based group who have been performing together for sixty years. We have one disc of theirs, The Long Black Veil (with Sting, Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler, Sinead O'Connor, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful (separately) on vocals), which is one of my and S's favourite albums. We had no idea what to expect, really, at the concert, but it was like being invited to a party where all the other guests could play an instrument and/or sing and/or dance. The other guests included an astronaut, who played the pipes - and had played the pipes at the space station - and the Leahy family, who all played the fiddle and danced. They came on one by one: a 15-year old girl, a 12-year old boy, a 10-year old boy, a 7-year old girl and a 4-year old girl. Every time we thought now, that was the youngest, and then another child came on - playing the fiddle. Then they danced while playing the fiddle (except for the youngest girl, who conducted!). There were also a couple of local children's groups: a choir and one of the Irish dancing schools (whose upper bodies were much stiffer and more motionless than the dancers who were part of the Chieftains backing group), and a local bagpipe band, who wore eyesearingly mismatched tartan kilts. It was great fun, and good preparation for the St Patrick's Day Parade last Sunday (the 15th). The parade was amazingly well-behaved on the part of the crowd (almost nobody stood in the road), much quieter than expected (there was music only when the actually marching bands and/or Irish dancing schools went by), and including a bewilderingly large number of vintage fire engines. We speculated that this was a trial run for the Fourth of July parades for the fire engines, since I'm not aware there's anything particularly Irish about the fire brigade in the US (on the other hand, the large number of marchers affiliated with the police seemed to be obvious. Even Richard Scarry's police man is Sergeant Murphy, with his daughter Bridget).

The weekend before last continued our cultural activities: in reparation for seeing Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead at the Folger Theater in May, we watched Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet. We offered the boys the choice of Kenneth Branagh or Mel Gibson, and they immediately chose Kenneth Branagh, because they know him, both as Professor Lockhart and as Henry V. I suppose a completely uncut version is not the worst way of being introduced to Hamlet - we did split the viewing over two sessions - but I'm not sure this is my preferred interpretation of the play. Kenneth Branagh doesn't have enough self-doubt for Hamlet, in my opinion; he's too pleased with himself to consider suicide seriously. I think we will see the Zeffirelli version closer to the time, so that's what we have in mind when we see Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead. Derek Jacobi as Claudius (yes, we got the joke) was very good, as was Richard Briers as Polonius. I'm not sure about Kate Winslet as Ophelia; again, I didn't like the interpretation particularly, so that's affecting my view of the acting. I'll have to see how Helena Bonham-Carter measures up ...

We have finally given in to homesickness and gone to see Jerusalem 3D at the IMAX theatre at the Natural History Museum (we also went to see the insect and non-dinosaur fossil galleries). It was so wonderful to see all the bird's eye views of so many places we miss, not just Jerusalem. I thought that it was very well done, not just Benedict Cumberbatch's narration and the chance to see the interior of the Dome of the Rock, but also the fact that they found three girls - Jewish, Christian and Muslim - who looked similar enough that at first glance you couldn't tell which was which. The Jewish girl had grandparents from Poland and Algeria, and the Christian girl had ancestors who came to the Holy Land from Greece. And everybody seemed to be eating the same food around big tables with large, noisy families. It was a good thing to see just before the elections, to remember why we want to go home.

We have new neighbours: T&S  moved to a condo in Bethesda, and have been replaced by AN &LN, and their children R (5) and T (3). We invited them over for tea the week before last, and had a lovely time (and this has already paid dividends in that we were able to find a connection from whom to borrow a travel cot for when JC and his family visit). AN is a lawyer, working for the appellate division of the Department of Justice, and L works for the Government Audit, where he writes guidelines (he has a graduate degree in philosophy). R had a wonderful time playing with A and S, although T was a little overwhelmed by all the newness, I think.

Of course, a high point of the past month for me was my birthday. A and S very sweetly bought a heart-shaped paperweight. My sewing machine arrived the day before, and ADC (who bought me sewing books) hid it so I would open it on the day, which I did. It took me an hour and a half to set it up for the first time, including winding thread from the spool to the bobbin (I love technical terms) and several attempts before I managed to get the thread through the eye of the needle. My machine is a Janome Magnolia 7318, which is highly recommended on the internet for beginning sewers. It has 25 different stitches, including a button hole, and I am very excited about using it. I've had one sewing lesson, so far, in which I learned a trick for threading the needle more efficiently, and made a drawstring bag. Sewing is definitely much more instant gratification than knitting - although I suspect that as soon as I try making something larger and more complex this will not be the case. I have bought fabric for the next lesson tomorrow, in which I will learn to make pyjama shorts, which I have washed but not yet ironed. I've also bought fabric for t-shirts and skirts, and I'm assuming that the first things I make will not really be wearable outside the house. But I'm having fun, and A and S have asked me to make them summer pyjamas already.

Cross-posting from LiveJournal, 7 December 2014: Thanksgiving in Boston

This has been a very busy couple of weeks. Among other things I did a ton of knitting and also went to Baltimore twice, so apologies again for the lateness of my update on Thanksgiving and the week before. 

I'll actually start at the end, what we did today, because it is closely connected to what we did two weeks ago: We spent the day at the Spy Museum. This involved a bit of sticker shock, as up to now all the museums we have visited in Washington have been free, but the children had been very eager to go since we arrived, and especially after we visited the cryptology exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library two weeks ago. That exhibition was extremely well done, and had several activities for children that S really enjoyed. The connection to the library is that two of the parents of American cryptology, William and Elizabeth Friedman, also researched Shakespeare, and were frequently to be found at the Folger, since they lived in Washington. The exhibition covered the entire history of codes and ciphers, with particular emphasis on the Renaissance (lots of names familiar to me from my article on possible Arabic influences on the development of cryptology in Renaissance Italy) and the Friedmans' career - William headed the team that broke Purple, the Japanese cipher used during WWII, and he considered Francis Bacon's idea of the biliteral cipher, where anything can be made to mean anything, to be binary code. 

The Spy Museum of course covered much more ground. As you go in, you are asked to choose one of 16 covers, and throughout the museum there are places where you are asked questions relating to the cover and its associated mission. There is a long and interesting section on how spies are trained, followed by a smaller exhibition on the history of espionage from an American point of view, so a lot of emphasis on the Civil War and the Cold War. The current special exhibition is on the villains in the James Bond movies (very amusingly, a lot of the voice-overs throughout the museum have British accents, and the briefing movie, which starts the self-guided tour, almost sounds like Judi Dench). In addition to a lot of props, the most fascinating parts of the exhibition for me were the interviews with various retired intelligence operatives, either giving their opinion of aspects of the movies (like the CIA's equivalent to Q) or describing their own James Bond moments.

To go back nearly two weeks ago: on November 22, I spent the day at the MESA conference. I haven't heard so much Arabic in a long time - and the second most common non-English language apart from that was Hebrew. I didn't attend any of the talks, since there was no option of a one-day pass, and spent my time meeting people, either planned or unplanned. I had a lot of fun, and added two invitations to give talks to my future plans: one at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton in January, the day after my postponed talk at Rutgers (since it is on the way back to DC anyway), and another, to be confirmed once I am back in Israel, at NYU-Abu Dhabi (since I have a non-Israeli passport). 

Abu Dhabi seems almost as far away as the moon, actually, but it is very exciting to think that I might go there. We saw two movies involving space travel - Apollo 13 at home with the children, and ADC and I went by ourselves to see Interstellar at the Air and Space Museum, where it was shown on IMAX screens. We also saw another episode of Cosmos, which discussed, among other things, black holes and wormholes, which was good preparation for seeing Interstellar. On reflection, I enjoyed Apollo 13 more, as the science made more sense to me. I will not go into anymore details, in case anyone is planning on seeing it and has not yet done so. But I think I am beginning to approach sic-fi the same way I approach historical dramas. Let me just say that I was impressed by the way Anne Hathaway's character was apparently able to cut her own hair very nicely and keep it trim through decades of space-time travel. 

On a more mundane level, we went to ADC's uncle and aunt in Boston for Thanksgiving. It was lovely to see them, as well as their son and his family. While Number 2 Cousin is still too young (not a year yet) to really interact with A and S (although S did read to him and that was appreciated - by his mother), Number 1 Cousin clearly was thrilled to have new friends to play with and the three of them got on very well together. Unfortunately, it was much too cold to spend any time outside, where I think they would have had even more fun. 

We arrived in Boston on Thursday, and basically spent our free time with ADC's family. On Friday, we spent most of the day at the Museum of Fine Arts, which was half an hour's walk from our hotel. We had been at the MFA during our previous visit to Boston in 2012, so there was less pressure, and we tried to see things that we had not seen before. ADC's aunt and uncle very kindly lent us their member cards, so we went in for free, and also got a discount at lunch and at the museum shop (which had a 30% Black Friday discount in any case). We had thought we would go to the Goya exhibition, but the queue was so long that we gave that idea up, and instead went to a number of smaller exhibitions: one on model planes and trains (and then continued to the permanent exhibition on model ships), another on the gowns and jewels of 1930s Hollywood, and another on current representations of national feeling, where we watched and excellent piece of video art called English Magic. Of course, the main thing that the boys came away with was a work from the mid-century American gallery, in which Andy Warhol took Jackson Pollock's drip art (and Marcel Duchamps' urinal) a step further by urinating on a canvas treated with copper sulphate(?) ...

Saturday was absolutely one of the coldest days we have experienced so far - and we spent a lot of it walking around. I am very glad I bought thigh-high terrycloth socks, they kept me very warm over fleece-lined footless tights. We spent the morning walking and shopping in Brookline's independent stores - Brookline Booksmith (where A bought the book of The Princess Bride and S bought both I, Robot and The Graveyard Book - I can hear my siblings cheering); Eureka, a games store where I bought (for S) a puzzle in which 120 cubes create together one of six works of art. This is obviously much more difficult than an ordinary jigsaw puzzle, since there is no help from the different shapes. I think we will work on it tomorrow while A is at flag football and ADC is playing bass for Abbey Road with his musicians' Meetup group. We met my father's cousin M for lunch, which was very nice. It always surprises me a bit when distant relatives thank us for making time to see them, because to me it was so much killing two birds with one stone: we have to eat anyway, so why not also meet someone at the same time? 

After lunch we walked to Brookline High, and from there to ACD's uncle's house via Tappan Street, and ADC showed us where he had lived in 1984. We had the surprising experience of seeing a flock of turkeys cross the road (literally: a USPS van came along, the driver stopped and put his head out the window to ask: Why did the turkey cross the road?). We wondered if the school playing fields were a kind of common, like the cows that grazed on Parker's Piece and Jesus Green in Cambridge, but we were later told that the turkeys were a Brookline "thing" and wandered around people's gardens, usually.

Our last day in Boston was much warmer, around 9 degrees, and we went into Boston itself, and walked the first part of the Freedom Trail, from Boston Common up to Paul Revere's house. We decided not to go into any of the museums along the way, but to stay in the streets. We did go into the Old Granary Burying Grounds, which was fascinating. The link is to a handout that we used, which added a lot to the experience, even though the cemetery itself is very well signposted. I also really enjoyed the Old Schoolhouse, with the picture of a small John Hancock practising writing, a tiny Sam Adams standing and orating, with Ben Franklin running with a kite in the background ... We went past the monument to the Irish Famine, which I remembered from 2012, and noticed a new memorial, the New England Holocaust Memorial, six granite and glass towers with steam rising from eternal embers. The contrast between the abstract form of that memorial and the two sets of statues - starving Irish and well-fed Americans, who were actually the same people - seemed to express the different scales of the disasters. 

The past week has gone by very fast. A has learned how to write a business letter (the assignment was to persuade the Board of Education that sports should be made compulsory in high school), and S has started a unit on swimming. ADC and I are trying to complete our self-imposed hobby-related tasks so that we can go back to reading and watching movies. We did watch the first half of Kurasawa's Seven Samurai this afternoon as a family, but we were too tired to watch anything by ourselves last night.