Sorry for the light blogging the last few days but I’ve been insanely busy. Last night, before discovering someone is trying to kill the outside cats, I attended the protest rally in Rabin Square against the plea bargain given to the sex maniac and abuser who was our President. I didn’t think many people would attend and so was really glad to see that about 20,000 people turned out. Men and women alike came out to protest and that was also gratifying to see. I was really tired and needed to get up at 6 this morning and so I didn’t stay for the blocking of roads that occurred at the end of the protest :)

I got up this morning so early as today was the Blogference hosted at and by the IDC. I was scheduled to speak at the second panel and really enjoyed the experience. Each talk was only 10 minutes (thud) –it is extremely difficult to put together a 10 minute talk especially when it is for a very mixed audience with people coming from every field! You can’t really get very detailed in that period of time but it was very interesting conference and I enjoyed listening to the other talks throughout the day. I talked about the Good Neighbors project that is on-going and got to connect with some colleagues in academia that I haven’t seen in a dog’s age and got to meet some bloggers from the States that I highly respect.

One of the things that was really neat was that Carmel was also on the panel and she was speaking right after me. I got to tell everyone the story of how she lives just down the street from me, is a fellow blogger, and a fellow academic and yet I got to know her for the first time by being introduced to her by a Lebanese blogger who was visiting Israel and whom we each knew separately through our online interactions–after which I co-opted her to be a GNB author. Made a nice segue between our talks, I thought.

Oh and I got a cool t-shirt :)

Back later with some of the posts I’ve been storing up like nuts if I haven’t fully collapsed into a hot and tired heap. (This heat wave is really something! I’m meeelllltttting!).

Oh, and does anyone know a good and reliable electrician here in the Tel Aviv area? A bunch of my lights have simply stopped working, one of which was my fault –or rather the cat’s fault that startled me by attacking my foot as I was changing the lightbulb and standing precariously on a chair causing uh harm to the dangling-from-a-thread light –and the others stopped working within a week of my moving into the apartment just for no reason. I want them fixed :)