The High Holydays as a screen-free time

I suppose that if I've been insisting that A and S stay off their phones and off the internet over the past two weeks, it's not surprising that I have not updated my blog in that time. 

Rosh Hashana was spent at ADC's parents. In addition to the five of us, and the three permanent residents in Omer, his brother's family and in-laws (4+4), were there, not just for the first night, but for all of the first day. Everyone gets on well, so a good time was had by all, until the septic tank gave up the ghost. Too many small children being too conscientious about cleanliness ... fortunately ADC's parents have an en suite shower and toilet that is on a different line. 

Our pleasure was dampened by two deaths within two days of each other: my great-aunt N died almost a year to the day of his husband IG's passing last year. Her funeral was on Sunday, the day before Rosh Hashanah, immediately after her daughter from Australia - who had been on her way anyway - arrived. Auntie N had Alzheimer's, and she had not been a full box of chocolates for several years (she once actually gave me a beautifully wrapped box of chocolates which turned out to be partially eaten, and that was one of the first instances of her illness), but before that she had been a very outgoing person, the life and soul of every party. She had a song for every occasion, and always encouraged her grandchildren and great-nieces/nephews to perform, too. She had a good life, and her death was a relief, I believe. 

Much more tragic was my mother's best friend, E, dying on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. E was my mother's age, not yet 70, and she suffered a series of three strokes over the course of the past month. Even one stroke is terrifying, especially as she lives alone and her only surviving son lives in Philadelphia (her other son was killed in a border skirmish while doing reserve duty a few years ago). She lost the sight in one eye in the first stroke and the second caused her to become completely blind. I don't know how she would have managed any kind of quality of life, because she would have lost her independence entirely - and she loved reading. My mother was exhausted by Yom Kippur, as she hosted some of E's relatives who came for the funeral, until literally the day before. Furthermore, Yom Kippur is a day that she particularly associated with E, since that was the anniversary of her son's death, and my mother used to visit her with whichever grandchild was youngest, instead of going to synagogue to say Yizkor, the prayer for the dead. 

For me, Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement - is a day of identification with the Jewish people as a whole. I am not observant most of the year (being vegetarian, I keep kosher by default, but no observant person would consider my kitchen to actually be kosher), but on Yom Kippur I fast and spend most of the day in shul. It was a relief to be back home and standing next to my father, after last year in Takoma Park. On the downside, it was ferociously hot - over 35 degrees Celsius when we walked home after Mussaf. I managed to complete a wrap, knitted from the hand-dyed yarn I bought on Friday Harbor and ruffle yarn I bought at Joann in Wheaton, in time to wear in shul, since the AC assumes that you are wearing a tallit, anyway. I didn't have time to block it, though, so it looks at the moment rather like the feather boa Mick Jagger wears in Sympathy for the Devil.  

While everything I've described so far was going on, on all the few working days this month I was on the phone and/or e-mail daily with the shipping company and their agents in Israel. Our lift finally arrived on September 1st, but actually reached our home in Jerusalem at 8 p.m. on the 24th - even with the many holidays, that is ridiculous. Apparently there was no problem with customs, but some miscommunication with the consolidators (we had far less than a full container) delayed the Israeli agents, as they didn't want to pay the extra thousand shekels being demanded. The children were overjoyed to see their things again, I was mainly happy that everything arrived the night before - rather than the morning of - our family holiday at the beach, which will be the subject of the next post.

First week at Friday Harbor + special: A on geocaching!

This is a bit earlier than than my updates have been recently, but I think I will probably be writing weekly from now until we return home. We've done so much this week - ADC even finished the first draft of his article, and only has the figures and drawings to do, so this has been very worthwhile, and I have gone through half of the articles for the special issue on medicine that I am co-editing. While the two of us have been at work, the boys have done a lot of exploring and holiday homework: A has made a lot of progress catching up on geometry, while S has listened to an audiobook of White Fang (an abridged version, by OxfordOwl) and written a new ending of over 600 words. This was his dovrei anglit summer homework, which will go towards his mark at school in kita vav.

What else have we been up to? Last Sunday we walked back into town and explored what was there apart form the market and supermarket. We went down to the harbor itself and watched people setting off on a whale watch ($70-100 a person, I think we'll begin by seeing what we can see from land. Tomorrow we are going to a park semi-officially known as Whale Watch Park), before locating the San Juan Transit station, from which we would take the bus that goes to that park (the blue route) or to the alpaca farm (the green route), where I had been planning to buy yarn for myself and M, until we walked out of an ice cream shop and I saw a sign out of the corner of my eye: Island Wools. As you can imagine, as soon as I finished my ice-cream I went inside, and immediately became overwhelmed. The young woman behind the counter was very welcoming, and showed me the alpaca yarn she had: not from the farm on San Juan Island, but from the next one. The yarn was a bit disappointing to me, as it was much thicker than I really wanted - alpaca is really warm, so not that useful in Israel, and I was planning to use it together with another yarn, a ribbon yarn in a wine colour. As soon as she said that there was a range of yarns that were hand-dyed in the shop, I knew that that was what I wanted. I must say that everyone else was very understanding of me - not to say enabling; S found a pattern for a Robin Hoodie, and tried to convince me to knit his next Purim costume. However, the lack of space in our suitcases (to say nothing of the prices; that alpaca yarn was $34 for 100 gm) forced me to decide that I could only buy one skein. The colours available were all so gorgeous that it was clear that I would have to come back with a ball of the ribbon yarn in order to match the colours. 

Monday was a quiet day, as we were a bit exhausted from walking back and forth twice in two days, but on Tuesday the boys and I had a lot of fun: first of all, after a safety review on the docks, we were allowed to look at plankton that ADC had helped collect with the invertebrate embryology course. It was really fascinating, seeing all the tiny shiny balls that are actually real animals. After lunch, we walked into town, and while I went back to the yarn shop with the ball I wanted to match, the boys went geocaching. I will let A tell you all about that, and just say that buying yarn was even more fun than just looking. M also decided that she preferred colourful fingering-weight yarn to thicker alpaca, and I bought six mini-balls for her, and one large hank for myself, in a colour called Black Cherry. With excellent timing, the boys arrived just as I had decided what I wanted, and they were able to watch the hank being wound into a centre-pull ball. Not only did they enjoy watching that, they were relieved to hear that now they would not have to help me do the winding by hand :-) On the way home, we went past a second-hand bookshop that claimed to have 50,000 books and a computerised catalogue. Interestingly, the boys were not that keen - they preferred the new book shop we had gone to on Sunday. I think they lack the formative experience of second-hand bookshops being the only way to get books in English at a reasonable price. We are planning to visit what is supposed to be the biggest second-hand bookshop in North America, Powell's in Portland, on our road trip, so maybe that will help change their minds. 

On Wednesday, the highlight of the day was the ice cream social at the dining hall, where you could have all the ice-cream you wanted, with all kinds of toppings, while on Thursday, the highlight was the farewell party for the invertebrate embryology course where ADC had given two talks. A helped grill (on a gas grill), and a good time was had by all. On Friday, we finally got on the water, and when for a brief practise row in the immediate vicinity of the labs, which are across the bay from the town of Friday Harbor. It was a bit nerve-racking at first, and S in the bow and me at the stern was the wrong way around for balance (and I got very wet from the rowers), but all in all, ADC and A gained enough confidence to row all the way across this morning. It is indeed quicker than walking, just under half an hour rather than slightly over 45 minutes.

We started a bit later than we had intended, so instead of beginning at the Whale Museum and continuing to the farmers' market, we started at the farmers' market, went to the San Juan Cheese Shop and ended up at the San Juan Island Museum of Art - the Whale Museum will have to wait for another day. I had wanted to go to the SJIMA from the moment I saw an advertisement for one of the exhibitions there: a photographer at the Whiteley Centre (where ADC has his fellowship now) had taken pictures of the invertebrates studied at FHL and printed them on blank backgrounds - they looked absolutely gorgeous. My favourite was the stalk jelly, which looked like something from a kaleidoscope. A liked the curly-headed spaghetti worm, which he believes proves the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. S's favourite was two starfishes touching each other, which he thought reminiscent of the Creation of Man from the Sistine Chapel. ADC refused to say which picture he liked best, claiming to be used to the animals. 

After getting home, we went out again in the late afternoon, very kindly being lent a car by one of our neighbours, who is teaching at the marine invertebrates course, and drove off to explore some of the south coast of the island, via geocaching. We also took the time to watch the tide coming in, as high tide was at 5:45. I will now quote A on geocaching: 

"Geocaches are small caches hidden on trails in various places. The person hiding the cache opens a cache page on a geocaching website with the coordinates for the cache and a brief description of the cache and hints how to find it. If you want to go geocaching somewhere you search the websites for caches in that place and choose caches that look interesting and send their coordinates to your GPS. When you make sure the coordinates are on your GPS you can go to the place you are going geocaching and start looking for the cache. The caches are usually small boxes hidden somewhere not obvious but findable after a search. Once you find the cache you open it and see what’s inside. Common things found in caches are marbles, stickers and travel bugs*. In every cache there are a few pieces of paper for writing your name and the date you found the cache. Once you sign the cache you leave something in the cache and take one of the things in side of the cache. When you get back home you log your visit and write you found the cache (or didn’t).

*Travel bugs are small discs with a code you move from place to place and write on the website where it was moved and then you can track its trip.

My personal experience of geocaching is very fun and extremely fulfilling. it’s a very enjoyable extra to add to every hike. It was very exciting to find my first geocache with S. While Mummy was in her knitting shop S and I went to look for an interesting geocache called “Quick Trail!”. We followed the directions in the description and what the GPS said was the right direction (it’s not a GPS like waze but a GPS for geocaching and tracking where you went and it has a compass and stuff) until we reached the middle of a short trail between two streets. After about 20 minutes of searching and S trying to persuade me the cache wasn’t there we found it between the bushes next to a broken cinder block (like the description said). When we opened the cache we signed our names, took a marble and put in a travel bug from a previous cache we didn’t actually find but just asked the people at the reception counter after looking for it outside and they pulled it out from under the table, so that’s not a real find after looking. S and I were very happy after finding “Quick Trail!” and kept talking about it until the end of the day."

I expect I will write again when we are back in Seattle, next weekend. 

From Takoma Park to Friday Harbor

I last posted while we were waiting for the shippers to arrive. They arrived within the time slot they had promised and were done - inventorying, sealing and some re-packing - in under an hour. A few days later, we were told that the shipment had been containerised and came within 5 cubic feet of the estimate, so no need to adjust the payment. All that was left for us to do in Takoma Park was to have the house cleaned, on the 8th, and to sample restaurants we had not got around to previously, since the house was completely empty - anything M and D had left, was taken by our next-door neighbours. All of that was highly successful: both Middle Eastern Cuisine, where we had supper, and Mark's Kitchen, where we had brunch, were excellent, and the cleaners left the house spotless. I think that the kitchen sinks were cleaner than they had been when we arrived!

The first leg of our journey was uneventful, apart from two suitcases being overweight. In the end, we underestimated what we had left to pack, and everything was a very tight squeeze indeed. We bought another small suitcase in Seattle - which added the excitement of taking the Monorail to our day there - but we really should have bought it already in DC. Not only would that have saved us $50 in overweight fees, Washington State has a 9.5% sales tax!! The only place we could easily find suitcases was at Nordstrom Rack, where the prices were higher than ADC had paid for a large suitcase in DC. Nothing to do about that now, and another suitcase had made things more comfortable. 

Our day in Seattle was lovely. We woke up early, of course, and after breakfast made our way to the Chihuly Glass and Gardens Museum. After walking into Takoma Park mid-morning in the humidity and heat the day before, what Seattle considered to be a heatwave felt like perfect weather to us. ADC and I had been very unimpressed by the Chihuly in the Light of Jerusalem installation at the Tower of David in 1998 (it was hugely successful, with over a million visitors, but I don't think I've met anyone who actually thought it looked good), so we were eager to see what the glass sculptures looked like on their home ground. And they were magnificent. Some pieces were better than others, but they all "worked" much more than they had in Jerusalem. I have come to the conclusion that the Tower of David was not green enough. All the other installations outside of museums have been much further north than Jerusalem (Finland, Venice, Kew Gardens), in places with much more water - much more like Seattle, in fact. I think that the lack of green, the different light and the dust in Jerusalem, were what subverted the installation. Anyway, we all enjoyed the museum very much. A took a lot of pictures, and S is convinced that Chihuly is a genius. We spent about an hour and a half in a rather small museum before going on to the EMP, possibly the strangest-looking building I've ever been in. 

We spent most of the rest of the day at the EMP, which stands for Experience Music Project. The museum began as a collection of rock memorabilia, but has now expanded to all kinds of popular culture. We spent the morning at three exhibitions: First, we went to the special exhibition of costumes from the Star Wars trilogies. It was amazing to see the costume designer and her team of 60-100 people at work making all the varied costumes. So many different materials and skills were involved! It was rather funny to see a video of Natalie Portman enthusing about her exotic dresses while wearing a plaid shirt, too. And of course there were the costumes themselves, with swatches of the materials to feel, which was great. We then continued to an exhibition on science fiction and another on fantasy, where again we saw many props and costumes from movies. The children were particularly excited to see costumes from The Princess Bride. I feel that there was a typo in the note about David Bowie's costume from Labyrinth, which says "the legendary David Bowie in Jareth the Goblin King's costume" rather than "David Bowie in the legendary Jareth the Goblin King costume."

After lunch (hot dogs in the park - with a vegetarian option! The West Coast is clearly much better at catering to vegetarians), we went to the music side of the EMP, where we saw exhibitions on Jimi Hendrix, the development of the electric guitar and ended the day with learning to play drums and a jam session. After a brief detour to buy a suitcase, we met ADC's first cousin once removed, JG, for supper. He took us to a Cajun restaurant, although none of us ended up ordering things that were specifically Cajun. JG struck me as being something of a combination of my father-in-law and his older brother, although not as tall. He was very enthusiastic about Friday Harbor, and very unenthusiastic about Chihuly. 

On Friday we got up at the crack of dawn, missing breakfast, in order to be at the pier by 6:45 in order to catch the 7:45 Victoria Clipper to Friday Harbor (a catamaran that goes between Seattle and Friday Harbor once a day, and to Victoria in British Columbia several times a day). The idea had been to have the best view of seabirds and possibly whales, and to get to Friday Harbor fairly early from a conveniently central location. However, it was not to be. The clipper was cancelled due to mechanical problems (they had sent out an e-mail to that effect at 6:15, but considering that the shuttle had been canceled on Thursday as well, I think that they could have made the announcement earlier). We received a full refund, of course, and coupons for coffee, and they paid for a taxi to the Seattle convention centre, where we could get the 11:30 shuttle to Anacortes, where we could take the 2:00 p.m. ferry to Friday Harbor, arriving at 3:00 rather than at 11:00, as planned. We waited until the luggage storage opened, and then improved our mood by going to Pike Place market, where we bought excellent build-your-own sandwiches to eat on the way to the ferry. We arrived at the convention centre about half an hour before the shuttle was due to arrive, assuming that it would arrive early so as to allow luggage to be loaded. Wrong! It arrived 40 minutes late, with not a word of explanation or apology. When we discovered that we had to move to another minibus to actually get to the Anacortes ferry terminal, it was clear that we were not going to make the 2 o'clock boat - and the next one was at 4:45, arriving at Friday Harbor after six - seven hours and much irritation later. At that point, however, our luck began to change. As the ferry had been having its own problems, the 2:50 ferry to Sidney, BC, was making an unscheduled stop at Friday Harbor, and we were able to embark almost immediately. The voyage was very pleasant, we had a good enough view, and we got a taxi immediately as we walked off the dock. We were at Friday Harbor Labs before the office closed.

Once we arrived at FHL, we were able to book supper at the dining hall before we went to unpack at our cabin. The cabin is great. We were surprised at first to realise that there was no air conditioning, but since then we have realised that heatings and fans are all you need. The kitchen is about triple the size of the one we had in Takoma Park, with a table that seats 4-6 which is where we will be eating most of the time. The crockery, cutlery, pots and pans are a bit random, but sufficient. The children each have a single bed, and the pressure in the shower is good. In short, we have all we need. 

Once we had settled in, we went to the social hour and ate popcorn and met people. I am proud to say that I was able to ask people about their work and carry on an intelligent conversation, understanding almost everything (or at least, the words were familiar and I have a vague idea of what they mean). We had supper at the dining hall and then breakfast yesterday. We were advised that the best meal of the week is Sunday brunch, and we duly registered for that (which is why I am writing this in the morning rather than the evening, as we are still waiting for brunch).

Yesterday (Saturday) was largely spent shopping. We walked into the town of Friday Harbor - which is significantly further away than we had understood, 45 minutes rather than 20 minutes - and shopped both at the grocery store and at the farmers' market. The market is all local, and there was far less fruit available than we are used to, only berries - but they were some of the best raspberries and strawberries we've ever eaten. We planned well in having brought along a cooler bag and two shopping baskets, as we needed all of that as well as our backpacks to carry everything home. Of course, once we got back we realised we had forgotten some vital items, like serviettes, but the plan today is to go back into town after brunch today, to explore the town itself and visit an art fair. 

After lunch and a rest, the boys went back to the dining hall to play ping-pong, and ADC and I walked around FHL, identifying the trees (there weren't many birds around). We found ten different species in the short distance from our cabin to the Whiteley Centre where ADC has office space to the actual labs themselves. As we approached the labs, we met one of the people teaching there, who invited us to come and see the sea creatures. The boys turned up just then, and we had a very interesting half hour looking at the weird and wonderful invertebrates being studied. On one of the benches I saw a copy of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, a particularly appropriate choice given the amount of time he spent investigating marine invertebrates with Theo. 

ADC then went to play pool with the boys, while I continued knitting. I may want to complete this cardigan as soon as possible and actually wear it - it is currently 15C outside, at 9:30 a.m. I am very glad that I insisted that we all bring two sets of long clothes, rather than shipping all the winter clothes. 

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.

SED 18 + 19 - getting over jetlag and getting back to work

Yeterday was all about jetlag - although I woke up what seemed like a reasonable time, I was completely washed out the whole day, and found it difficult to concentrate well enough to work. The heat didn't help, although at least our AC is working, unlike A's school ... It was such a relief when the heavens opened about 8 p.m., and it continued raining at least until I went to bed at the absurdly early hour (for me) of 10 p.m.

Today was a much better day. I filled in my bimonthly income tax and VAT reports for the Israeli tax authorities, finalised a grant proposal (but can't submit it yet, as the admin people have to first upload the sections they are responsible for), put the final touches to the book I was editing before leaving for Israel, and began peer-reviewing three articles for a collection to which I have contributed (and will be paid for). So a very productive day all round. Now to make supper, and afterwards to sew buttons on ADC's trousers, a top of mine, and the cardigan that will be M's.

SED 10 - arriving

The flight was OK in the end - the boys were not bothered by sitting apart from me, but I got a bit claustrophobic towards the end, sitting between two men larger than myself, and the person in front of me leaning back. It was lovely to see my parents, siblings and nieces and nephews. Everyone was very pleased with their presents, and very impressed with my sewing and knitting. After my sisters tried on the Miette, I decided that it fit M much better than myself, and I would give it to her, and reknit it with a needle one size larger.

The only irritating thing was that I have mislaid my Israeli phone - I thought I had left it with my parets, but it can't be found. Maybe I did take it with to America, and it is now inside the box in which my American call phone came? That would be such a smart and obvious place to put it that of course it would be forgotten ... at least there is a place that sells SIM cards just down the road, and I'll go there first thing in the morning. 

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.

Just squeaking under the wire

This is almost the first moment I have sat in front of a computer today (can't compose a whole post on my phone). Today began with Skype conversations with both sets of families back in Israel, continued to Free Comic Book Day in Silver Spring, then while ADC made zucchini salad and onion bread for the departmental picnic, I completed the second sleeve of my cardigan. The departmental picnic was followed by a Mozart concert at Strathmore. I'm exhausted!

SED - first participation in a challenge of sorts

I have been thinking for a while about making this more of a blog and less of an open archive of letters home, so when teddyradiator announced a challenge to post Something Every Day during May, I jumped at the chance for a framework. This is a good month to do something like this, as I will be spending a week in Israel, so less letters home will be written in any case. 

I will start with the list of the things I want to do before the 9th, which is when I will be travelling with A and S to my nephew's bar mitzvah. Workwise, I have just finished editing one book-length manuscript and already started another. I will be meeting both authors in Israel, so I definitely need to finish book two, but instead I cleaned the house and went shopping. My supermarket trolley was a bit schizophrenic: healthy fruits and vegetables for us to eat over the coming week, and chocolate bars, ice cream toppings, peanut butter and maple syrup to take to Israel (well, the last two are OK, I suppose). 

Craftwise, I want to complete my Miette cardigan (only the second sleeve ribbing, buttonbands and neckbands left, and my Hollyburn skirt (only the hem left). This is the first time I have made any kind of garment - knitted or sewn - for myself. I've only been knitting for 17 months, and I got my sewing machine in March, so I think I can allow myself to be very pleased with myself. If I have time, I want to make drawstring pouches for some of the presents I'm bringing, and maybe a pair of shorts. 

Wow. This has suddenly reenergised my editing mojo - maybe I should start my work day like this?

A more academic post

Chag sameach! I hope you all had a lovely Seder. We were at the Ps, where the usual chaos was "enhanced" by an extra dog: another retriever, visiting from Boston with GP's family. The was at least one dog under the table at any time. It was strange to have a Seder which was read almost entirely in English, after so many years of everyone being able to follow the original text. And we skipped a lot more than we do at home, except for singing Echad Mi Yode'a twice, once in English with a weird tune. 

The past couple of weeks have involved a lot of travel for me, some of which was on domestic flights where there is not enough elbow room to knit, so I have finished two books which I read purely for enjoyment: Evolutionary History by Edmund Russell, and A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Evolutionary History was one of a bunch of books that ADC received from Cambridge University Press as payment for reviewing a proposal for them, and he read it first. In a way, the point of the book is to take the ideas of books like Guns, Germs, and Steel and show how evolutionary biology can help understand historical processes. One of the major case studies is a new interpretation of the Industrial Revolution, where the emphasis moves from English exceptionalism and ingenuity, to the importance of the evolution of cotton - both before and after domestication - in the New World. It turns out that New World cotton has a different genotype from Old World varieties, enabling extra-long staples, or threads, that can be woven by machine without breaking. In other worlds, New World cotton had to arrive in Lancashire in order for it to be worth anyones while to invent the machines that kicked off the Industrial Revolution. A Discovery of Witches was quite different. It is paranormal fantasy, set in a world that is identical to ours except that in addition to humans, there are three races of "creatures" - witches, daemons and vampires. The author, like her heroine, is a historian of science, specialising in the early modern period (that, in retrospect, is why her name was familiar), and the first scene takes place in the Bodleian Library, consulting a 17th-century alchemical manuscript.

On March 20th it snowed, for the last time this winter. Despite that, next day we went to the National Arboretum. Very little was actually in bloom yet, apart from crocuses and snowdrops, but we still managed to spend a long time there, enjoying the first warm sunny day in a very long time. We were all very impressed by the extensive bonsai collection, some of which - presents from the Japanese government - are hundreds of years old. My favourite, though, was a pear tree, which was blossoming. You could smell the pear blossoms as soon as you entered that part of the display, and it took a while to realise where the scent was coming from. As well as the usual Japanese trees, as you can imagine there were also native American trees that had been trained into bonsai. The bald cypress (complete with knees) that we had seen full size in the South Carolina swamps in December was very cute!

I have also had my second sewing lesson, in which I learned to make pyjama shorts (which most of you saw me wearing to clean the house). It was a very simple pattern, and I was surprised at how easy it was to sew a more-or-less straight line even over longer distances. I imagine that this feeling was very much influenced by the fact that the previous night, I had cannibalised one pair of S's tracksuit bottoms to make knee patches for another - which involved sewing two pieces of knit fabric (much stretchier and less stable than the woven material I'd used in my previous lesson) AND having to scrunch each pant leg beyond the needle, so as to actually be able to access the knees! The result is not something that I would wear out of the house, but S seems very pleased. 

The next day I set off to Conway, South Carolina, where I participated in a colloquium on Coastal Carolina University on disease and society throughout the ages. I spoke for 20 minutes on the image of the pharmacist in medieval Egypt according to non-medical sources (this was basically a section of my dissertation, so I really did not have to prepare very much, apart for looking for images for my PowerPoint). Another speaker discussed the day of thanksgiving in February 1872 celebrating the Prince of Wales' recovery from typhoid, and what that can teach us about the construction of disease and the construction of empire at that time, while the last one spoke on her experiences as a medical anthropologist working in Sierra Leone during the outbreak of Ebola last summer and after she returned to the USA. I learned a lot from both talks and my own one seemed to fascinate the audience (I think my accent did too - most people once again assumed I was British). Coastal Carolina was formerly a two-year college and is now reinventing itself as a four-year university, including graduate programs, with the help of which they hope to increase enrolment by 50% over the next five years. A very different world from the research universities I've been to up to now. The conversation at dinner was fascinating: I was the only non-South Carolinan, as the other speakers were from the College of Charleston  and CCU, respectively. A lot of time was spent on the local sailing options, and whether it was was better to own a boat or to belong to a club and have use of one when you wanted. invited by Eliza Glaze, a thoroughly nice person whom I met last July at the Leeds conference. I hope I will be able to host Eliza in Jerusalem some day. Not only did she fully fund the trip, she also sent S a box of comics abandoned by her teenage son when he left for college, and is planning to send us a box of South Carolina delicacies to make up, as she put it, for missing a trip to Charleston. As I had an almost absurd amount of free time, I took advantage of the spa packages offered by my hotel, and had a facial and head/arms/foot massage in the morning before I gave my talk. It was a nice surprise to be told that I clearly take care of my skin, seeing as I haven't had a facial in ten years or so, and especially after all the teenage years of being scolded for having oily skin and blackheads. 

I got back from South Carolina to a terrifying cold snap, and to ADC's cousin from San Francisco and his family - none of whom had really sufficiently warm clothes. Fortunately I could lend LC a scarf, but the others had to shiver (well, mainly JC - the little boys seemed quite happy). The main thing we did with them was go out to St Michaels, an almost self-consciously quaint village on the far side of the Chesapeake Bay, which involved crossing the local Bay Bridge. A and S had fun riding in the rented van, while LC enjoyed riding with us, without any children. St Michaels was rather reminiscent of Zichron, with the same kind of boutique-y shops and restaurants. We had crepes and hot chocolate for lunch, after a freezing walk (it was about 10 degrees, and windy) through the town to the old harbour. After lunch the weather warmed up considerably - mainly because the wind had dropped - and we walked in another direction, admiring the nineteenth-century houses. Owning a house like that is a full-time hobby, I should think. Many of them looked as I would imagine the houses in Anne of Green Gables would have looked, except with electricity instead of gaslight. 

I didn't really get to spend much time with JC and LC this time, as I was away for so much of the time there were here, but it was clear that the four boys picked up from where they left off at Thanksgiving, and no doubt will do the same in August, when we get to San Francisco, the same way they picked up where they left off with GG and AG just before we left Israel. I should add that we now have firmer plans for the summer: ADC got approval for two weeks at Friday Harbor Labs, from July 10-24, and we are flying back to Israel on August 7 - so we have two weeks to get down to San Francisco and spend time there. 

The busy week continued with a fascinating seminar at Johns Hopkins on the matatu minibuses of Nairobi on Monday, and finally, my talk on Galen at Rutgers on Tuesday (it was postponed from January due to snow). My talk, which I had been a bot worried about, as I had no idea what to expect from the audience, was very well received. The Q&A afterwards was very different from The Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton: most of the audience were Europeanists, and I was forced to admit that not only was everything after 1500 rather fuzzy, so was everything west and north of Istanbul (except for Spain). I had decided not to stay over in New Brunswick, and got home at 11:00 at night, having made by that time significant progress on my cardigan. 

All that academia was great fun, but rather exhausting, which is why I did not write this letter on Wednesday and send it out before Pesach. Since then, I've been dividing my time between cleaning the house and completing the editing of a dissertation that had to be submitted immediately after Pesach. Since I will be away most of next week, and in any case my client needed time to reread everything, ask questions, and print it out, that took up most of my time the last few days. The dissertation was very interesting, on the sacred stones of Jerusalem in the Crusader period from an art-historical point of view. It is nice having a non-university client from time to time, as I finished that on Thursday and have already been paid!

Cross-posting from LiveJournal, 21 February 2015: Tempests of various kinds

It has been blizzarding for the past five hours as I begin to write this letter, and ADC and the boys are baking a cake together, after a morning spent playing board games and Skypeing family. It seems that here, too, winter only begins after Christmas, and February is the coldest and wettest (well, snowiest) month).

So, what have we been doing? It seems like a very long time ago that we went to the National Gallery of Art, but really it was only two weeks ago. We had a great time there, beginning with a special exhibition of eighteenth-century American furniture. There were some really lovely pieces there. I particularly liked the the ladies'  worktables, which had a soft-sided basket below where unfinished knitting/sewing/embroidery could be left when it wasn't being worked on. I could really use something like that, as I have been knitting a lot - I've made a hat, neck warmer and hand warmers for myself, finally completed GB's vest and sent it off, and almost finished my mother's legwarmers-for-next-winter in the past six weeks, almost entirely on the weekends. We then went to the sculpture galleries, which were most impressive and then had lunch. To our surprise, lunch was excellent and very good value for money: $14 for ravioli or roast chicken or a trio of salads AND the receipt gave a 10% discount at the museum gift shop. ADC and I bought mugs - his in the shape of a camera, mine with a Qing dynasty pattern, based on a vase that I had stood in front of and admired for several minutes in the exhibition of French pre-revolutionary rooms - and S bought coloured pencils. We finished the day by going to a special exhibition on Piero di Cosimo, and a quick look at nineteenth-century American landscapes and portraits. We will have to go back to look at the American material properly.

The following week, ADC went to Connecticut for three days, to give talks at Trinity College and UConn-Storrs, where he saw snow six feet high, and everyone used snow tyres. This was good mental preparation for the last week or so: After a day for ADC to recuperate, we set on last Sunday midday for West Virginia. We decided to celebrate President's Day and the long weekend by going to stay at a B&B - the first English-style B&B we have found here. The plan was not to do anything too energetic, because the forecast was for extremely cold weather, and to stop at a steakhouse in Front Royal where we had bought excellent wine on the way back from our previous stay in a cabin in the woods. We set off later than we had originally intended last Saturday (only a week ago!), as we waiting for the wind to die down so we could clear the driveway and put down salt before setting off. It took us nearly three hours to reach the Breath of Heaven B&B outside Peterburg, WV, and as we got higher and higher the temperatures dropped - but there seemed to have been less snow there than there had been in Maryland. The geology of WV seems to be quite different from Maryland the rocks were a different colour) and we saw several frozen springs, that at other times of the year would have trickled down the mountainside.

The B&B itself was lovely. We had the upper floor - two bedrooms and a bathroom - to ourselves. Everything was beautifully set out, and the decorations included a guitar and a banjo, which ADC and S jammed on for a good half an hour, before we went back downstairs to the main room, where we were plied with tea and homemade chocolate chip cookies by Geri and Ed, our hosts. This was very lucky, because when we set out for supper, the only places we found open were fast-food joints, and we took Dairy Queen over Macdonald. We retreated to the B&B and played a card game, Duco, that we bought from its developer at I-Con last year. That was very enjoyable, although I think that A should have a time limit on his turns ... Once we finished that, we finally took out the art puzzle that we bought at the MFA in Boston. We decided to recreate Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the isle of La Grande Jatte from 130 cubes, as it looked like the easiest of the six choices. It took all four of us just over an hour, but our hosts were also fascinated, and took down the name of the puzzle, since they have grandchildren who are keen on art.

Next morning we began the day with crepes, scrambled eggs and toast (and bacon and sausage), and met the other guests, who included an American journalist working for an English-language Russian newswire in DC (kind of a mirror image of ADC's cousin who used to work for Dow Jones in Moscow), who had previously covered the Middle East, including spending a couple of years in Iraq. We stayed away from directly discussing politics, apart from agreeing that anywhere else in the world was probably less crazy. After breakfast, we decided to book another few days during spring break, when it would be warmer and we would actually be able to go on some of the very interesting-looking hikes in the area. The forecast at the time was for snow to begin "in the evening" and move south, so we decided to stick with our original plan and visit the Smokehole Caverns - a stalactite cave which remains a balmy 13 degrees Celsius year round (I remind you that it was at most 13 degrees Fahrenheit outside at the time - the oranges that we left in our car overnight had frozen). The drive to the caverns was very scenic, and full of riverside cabins advertising trout fishing and honeymoon suites. We got to the site as the giftshop opened (we stocked up on jams, but decided to pass on the moonshine), and had a semi-private tour of the cave: just us, and a young couple from Calhoun, WV. The guide was quite excited to hear that we were from Israel; we are probably the most far-flung tourists they've had in a while. The stalagtites were very impressive, and much more active than any other such cave I've been in: I was dripped on several times during the 40 minutes or so that we were inside. As we came out of the cave,just after 11:00,  it began snowing, and it was clear that the storm had arrived ahead of schedule. We got into the car and began our journey home, that ended at about 6 p.m. First of all, we debated how best to get back to the main highway to Virginia and Maryland, and ended up driving on a section of the WV-55 that was still partially under construction and thus little travelled. The road was covered with ice, and ADC went down to second gear; the "Runaway truck ramp" signs did nothing to improve my peace of mind and I may have actually prayed for a few minutes. At one point the car told us that it was 5 degrees Fahrenheit (= -15 in real money) outside. It seemed like forever before we saw signs for Moorefield and Petersburg again ... we stopped at a petrol station to refuel ourselves and the car: there was no way we were going to go to Front Royal. We got back to DC in time for the evening rush hour to begin, although presumably the fact that it was a federal holiday made things easier, and were lucky to reach the supermarket while there was a brief respite, so that we didn't have to dig the car out of the parking lot. Next morning, Tuesday, was a snow day, of course, and on Friday (yesterday) the boys started school late due to the dangerous cold: -15 before wind chill. ADC didn't go to work, either, as he had really suffered walking to and from the Metro on Thursday. It's now after supper, and the snow has begun to give way to icy rain. Hopefully this will wash away the snow covering the car, so we can possibly go to the farmer's market tomorrow.

On Thursday night ADC and I began to take advantage of the cultural opportunities afforded by a big city, and went to see a fringe production of The Tempest, with an all-female cast. The actors were excellent, especially Miranda/Tirinculo (apart from Prospero and Alonso, each person played two characters). I thought that having the same person play Ariel and Caliban was inspired (although I had thought that there were scenes in which the two interact, but I suppose that these were cut). The play was performed in an arts centre in a DC residential neighbourhood, and we sat in what called a "theater in a box", and what I would call theatre in the semi-round. The two island sprites were constantly in movement both on the stage and on the steps alongside the audience's seats, where some of the action also took place. It is quite amazing the difference that changing a costume and a hairstyle can make - and I had forgotten how idiotic Shakespeare makes teenage girls seem. We drove home in driving snow. I had to scramble through snow to get into the car (the driver side is next to the cleared street, while the passenger side is next to the pavement, of course, and my boots - while remaining dry inside - did not hold up to the cold. I think that my mother made the right decision not to come visit at the beginning of March - the forecast is for another arctic blast late next week and more snow and ice next weekend. I am looking forward to winter being over, and cannot say how glad I am that we did not go to Boston, say, for sabbatical.

Being somewhat housebound, we have been watching quite a lot of movies. We saw Singing in the Rain on the snow day after returning from West Virginia, and agreed that The Sound of Music was a better film - because it had a bit more plot, and the songs advanced it, rather than being showstoppers, as in SitR. It was still very enjoyable, though, and an important part of the children's ongoing education in classic films (we have booked tickets for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Folger Theater in May, so will have to see Hamlet before that. Any thoughts on whether the Zeffirelli/Mel Gibson or Kenneth Branagh version is preferable? I think that the Laurence Olivier one will be too stagey for the boys). Today we watched Last Action Hero, which I don't think I had seen before. It had surprising similarities to the film Ariel and I watched last night, Adaptation - both deal with the relationship between films and reality, sometime literally breaking the fourth wall.  I don't want to say anything more about it, as it should be seen when you have no idea what is going to happen. We also saw a few episodes of classic Star Trek last week on Netflix; so far, our favourite is The Trouble with Tribbles. A and S are finding the 60s imagining of the future quite fascinating.

Stay warm, everybody!