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

On Sunday I managed to convince my dental hygienist to fit me in and promptly wished I hadn’t — as she was polishing an old filling, right in the front, started to come apart. She stopped polishing that tooth immediately, of course, and noted I needed to come in as soon as possible to have a new filling done…BUT in the meantime what was under that bit that fell off is not pretty. Groan. I got a lot of other things done on Sunday, most of which hurt my bank account — dress, shoes, etc. — or made me work frantic.

I’m leaving in just a few hours and don’t plan to sleep tonight at all, for fear of oversleeping my “must depart now for the airport time.” I figure with the nearly 20 hours of flying time, I can sleep on the leg to Paris and then from Paris on to Japan –and will most certainly prefer to be non-conscious as much as possible during that journey. I mean, who wants to be awake and aware of having no room to stretch your legs and sitting in an uncomfortable, non-reclining position for hours on end? And the deal is, is that I can almost never sleep on airplanes, despite heartily wishing to have those uncomfortable hours slip by blissfully unaware. If I’m really really tired, however, maybe just maybe….

I am very worried about Shachori. I still haven’t managed to get her inside. Yesterday morning she came to the window (the wrong window) and cried as I fed the inside cats and tried to coax her to the window she could enter through. No luck. (She is black-cat stupid, I tell you). I put food outside for her but have no idea if she managed to eat any of it since there are a lot of cats in the neighbourhood, including many that are owned cats but outside, who came running at the sound of food –and she is terrified of the black and white apartment resident who I generally feed (his owner abandoned him 3 years ago, and he is lovey to me but not to other cats AT ALL –attack on sight). I’m just going to have to put a big tub of food on the sogrim outside my window and hope she finds it, the other cats don’t eat it all, and the rain doesn’t soak it).

Speaking of rain, what is going on??!! I’ve been here for like 4 years now and, while we’ve had an occasional shower in October and November (really really occasional and lasting like maybe half an hour between sun in general) , we’ve not experienced rain like this until late December or January. It almost didn’t ever rain at all last year. And even in the depth of winter, it doesn’t usually rain like this. We are talking gully-washer, people. We had severe flooding (floating cars, water 3 feet deep in houses) in the central region last Friday. There were more showers on Saturday. It rained a bit, then cleared on Sunday. The heavens gushed forth most of Monday. This morning it was pouring like it would never stop…but then it did in a big way. I left the house with a light jacket because I was expecting the air-conditioning at school to be severe but was so hot in the sunshine that followed the rain I was regretting that I’d brought it. Ohhhhhh but was I thankful 6 hours later when that clear, not a cloud in the sky, sky turned dark and water poured forth and we had approaching winter-cold with it. It has now been pouring forth for like 5 hours and showing no sign of an end. [See, never trust a weather forecaster because they said rain early morning and then clear skies for the next few days].

I still need to clean all the litter boxes, do a final sweep and mop job, then pack. I’m packing last minute because I’d planned to pack on Monday night and have everything ready to walk out the door but after I took the carry-on duffel out of the closet and sat it on my bed, I left the room for just a few minutes to transfer laundry and fold up a couple things I planned to take along, and I came back to find it peed upon. So today I had to buy a new mini duffelbag and decided I won’t pack until the very very last minute to bar any further, ehhh, accidents.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Hamas, Israel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.