Aliyah! Step-by-Step: Making a Life in Israel

Who is that on my computer screen? Wait, what?! This morning I turned on the computer (still without the proper vista or any of my files and I’m pretty furious about that) and went into the kitchen for my first cup of coffee. By the time I came back the computer had gone to the Acer screen saver, showing pictures of vibrantly coloured frogs and so forth in succession. As I leaned back on the sofa, coffee mug in hand, I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of something on the screen that caused me to do a double take. Then there I was, staring at myself staring at myself in full colour. Thinking to myself, ‘damn you seriously need to go back to braiding your hair when you sleep because your morning hair looks like a tangled up (American) mop’ I tentatively waved at the image and saw it wave back before a brightly coloured picture of another frog replaced it. I was dumbfounded. I hadn’t had enough coffee to process things. I wondered briefly if I were suffering some sort of hallucination. Because I mean, how the heck was I live in real time on the screen saver of my computer?! I sipped and stared as the screen saver went through its little routine and then, yes, there I was again. Hi me!

It took a bit of investigating until I discovered that this model comes with a built-in video camera right on the screen frame, cleverly blending in with the frame. I mean, there are the words ‘crystal eye’ on the frame but I thought that referred to the brand of the screen. Clearly the screen saver turns on the video for a brief moment as part of its routine!

Sorry by the way for all the downtime. Gnblog is under concerted dns attacks by fans of Ahmadinejad and since this blog shares the server…unfortunately even when the blog is not down I am often unable to get in to update because the repeated accesses cause posting and logging in and so forth to time out. In light of that, keeping it short and sweet while I’ve got a window.

My mother has kewl friends. One of her fellow teachers, a few years younger than me, arrived for her first visit to the region and I got to play her israeli tour guide. While she spent most of her time in Bethlehem helping her best friend from childhood get ready to be married, I got to hang out with her for her last couple of days. And boy did we hang. We clicked immediately and, in between wandering the city, talked and talked literally until the early hours of the morning every single night. On Friday we set off exploring the city at 10 a.m. and ended up walking for almost 13 hours and talking for far more. We went through Florentine trying to find the supposedly ‘now gentrified area’ (somehow, we couldn’t really identify anything that looked spectacularly re-gentrified but did see a lot of spectacularly un-gentrified bits. ya know, Florentine is well Florentine). Then we tried to find some russian church she wanted to see and found the school attached to the church but couldn’t figure out how to get into the church itself. Hmm. not exactly, we figured out we’d have to walk clear around yet another long block and maybe then some and decided naaaa. Then we headed in to tour Yafo (Jaffa) where we stopped for a couple of hours to eat more food than any human being should be fed and left even more of what was served untouched. I thought someone might need to bring along a gurney just to get me out of the seat again. We toured more of Yafo and then walked back to tour around Sheinkin, King George, Dizengoff and Bograshov. We sat and had coffee at a cafe on Bograshov, then took a quick break for her to check email and set off again to ‘do” north Tel Aviv and the port and have dinner at Jeremiah’s. We stayed up until 3 chatting away. On Saturday it was up and out early to do more walking and talking before I had to take her to the airport. Whew, I haven’t walked so much in one stretch in a long time. My calf muscles today were like, what did you do to me??

My computer cannot be changed from hebrew to english with the basic vista that is on it. I have to take it in, hopefully tomorrow if they’ve received the disc, to have the whole vista system re-installed. That meant I couldn’t have all my files from my previous computer (ya know all the stuff I need to do work and I really really need to do work) put on the computer yet as installing the new operating system wipes everything from the hard drive.

The new Acer computer is fantastic. I’m in love. Of course, I’d be in love with anything that allowed me to actually connect to the Internet by now. Everything on this puppy is in hebrew –except I can’t get the keyboard to type in hebrew (ye olde alt shift doesn’t seem to work) so I can’t search around for how to really set things up (that is, my help files are all in hebrew but I can’t access the topics I want because I can only search in english, argh). I find vista confusing thus far –nothing is where I am used to it being. I won’t have access to any of my programs or files until Sunday when they can be transferred from the dead little computer to this one –and thankfully they not only can be transferred but the shop I bought this puppy from is doing it for me for free. That means though that, other than email, I can’t do any actual work until Sunday. On the other hand, I have so many emails to answer it may take me at least til then to get through them. Tomorrow, I suppose while I am off to the wild south of the negev, I’ve got to put the battery in the computer and let it sit totally untouched for 12 hours while it sits on the electricity or else I’m told horrible and dire things will happen to the battery and computer.

The final damage came to 3,800 shekels. The computer itself was 3200 but I felt it well worth the extra 600 to get a 3-year warranty and “know its mother and its father” as the idiom goes here (in other words, be able to take it to its “parents” and have it put in order for free when it misbehaves long after they usually start misbehaving).

One of the major things I’m already experiencing serious appreciation for is how light it is. I carried it home in my backpack and, instead of feeling like I had a bowling ball pulling my shoulder out of joint, I kept stopping to make sure it was still in there because the backpack felt like nothing! I don’t have to experience it yet to know that I already appreciate having a 250 gigabyte hard drive rather than the 30 gigabytes of the dead computer.

And I’m very glad I have a new computer in my life since the new man in my life is no longer or rather will be next I update him. I’m simply not willing to wait 3-4 years to have a child, to have only one child, or to give up my job and be a “traditional wife and mother” once I marry, the latter because I am not stupid.

The eyewitness reports coming in from the protests in Iran today are going from bad to worse. Al Arabiya tv is now reporting that the 19 year old girl who was shot in the neck earlier today has died. Reports are coming in right now via twitter from people who have proved quite reliable in their reporting of what is going on (many of them cited in news reports themselves, others who reported information that hours later was confirmed via news reports) that many many more people have been shot, killed and injured in the last hour. Reports from Lalezar Sq say that there are “murdered people everywhere.” Reports from Baharestan square, where the young woman was killed, indicate that now many more people have been shot and killed there.

Trying to find a computer that comes with xp rather than vista in this country is a near impossibility and when you do, you find that the cost skyrockets by several thousand shekels. Clearly I am going to end up with the cheaper but world’s worst resource hogging freedom robbing blighted piece of operating system crap ever developed. I am so not a fan of windows vista. I am hoping to get a computer by tomorrow. Currently looking at lenovo or acer. Definitely want an extended warranty. I’m hoping I won’t have to pay more than 3,200 sheks. I can’t afford that much but what can you do.

Very worried about friends in Iran at the moment. Those folks are seriously brave.

Am at an internet cafe at the moment. If you’ve sent me email, sorry to have not responded as yet. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have a computer and be able to get into the email and deal with the nearly 2,000 emails that have hit my inbox since last week.

Heh I’m so computer dependent that, not having a calender other than what is on my computer (google calender rocks), I missed my own darn birthday!

hi folks,
I’m hoping to be back online on Wednesday or so. My computer died on me last Thursday in the middle of chatting with mysticaljett. It has been in the shop and very much looks like the motherboard (a motherboard from 1998 and not 2007 from the theoretically ‘new’ computer). I’m trying to find a decent replacement currently but it is going to take a few days it seems.

Back online as soon as I can manage it! Going a bit nuts with no connection to the outside world!