| Hi everyone, It is Thanksgiving Day in the USA, and although this is a regular working day in Israel, many American immigrants celebrate it. Thanksgiving is one of the few popular American holidays without a denominational connection, so it is as popular among Jews as with anyone else. We have a communal dinner in Jerusalem with an estimated 40 people coming, each bringing a traditional dish. I got the sweet potato assignment, with a request for "not sweet", so I'm making it Middle Eastern style, with olive oil, red pepper, za'atar, and garlic like the Moroccans prepare it. Americans in Israel acquire the Middle Eastern food preference fast, so everyone I asked thought the recipe sounds really good. Hope it works. So I take the day off work as a vacation day and stay home to cook. It's been a busy week; I need a day off anyway and the three days of weekend until work starts again Sunday will be very welcome. It's finally life per usual after settling down from hosting a conference and flying to a conference in Greece. We had a working meeting on database design with my programmers and the network managers. Finally, after so many years, I have the budget to migrate all my databases to SQL-Server and hook them up together in a unified system. We only talked about it since 2000, and even then, that was the professional recommendation. Things take time here. My Dutch student returned to Holland on Tuesday. He didn't get accepted to grad school here in the end. (BGU got higher standards since our Russian immigrants came.....) So he will take some time out, working with our Dutch colleagues on data analysis for the EBONE project, and then return to Israel in January to begin field work on sampling species diversity for me in the Negev Desert. I have made arrangements for him to spend 3 months at Sede Boqer's Insititute for Desert Research while doing this. It will be interesting: I spent ten years as a desert ecology researcher in Sede Boqer before joining the Nature Reserves Authority, and haven't been there much since. But I have many old friends in the station, and it will be good to reconnect with them. One will be the local supervisor for my student, now a technician. Maybe this is for the best. This student is a very sweet young man, intelligent and ready to please, careful in his work and hardworking. But he lacks that spark of curiosity and ambition that makes the difference betwen a scientist and a technician. It's not a matter of intelligence but that inner fire that makes the scientist. He will be a great technician and we need them too; it's not an inferior position, but a different one. I hope these months will help him figure out what he really wants to do. I did routine work all week but things got "interesting" on Tuesday. I ran my Mazda over to the dealer's garage for the 90,000 km routine maintenance treatment. Seemed okay; got a call at their closing time to pick it up. Nothing wrong with it; this Mazda Lantis is as reliable as draft horse. But when I drove away, the engine died at the first traffic light. Sat and waited, in the middle of the worst traffic intersection in Jerusalem, the entrance and road to Tel Aviv, in peak afternoon traffice. EEEA. Crept across the intersection and it died on the other side. Called the garage, freaking out, and they were still at work. A couple mechanics came out and checked, couldn't find anything wrong, followed me a distance to see it was working okay and told me to come back to the garage in the morning. No further trouble. The next day I had to do comprehensive blood testing, fasting. Got to the clinic okay, gave the blood and drove out to the garage. Once again it died, 2 km from the clinic. Started it again and it died half a kilometer later. AAARGH. Called my towing service and they took me to the garage. It turned out to be an odd problem: the plastic air intake pipe for the engine was rotten and full of cracks; one developed a big hole. So the engine was starved for air and died after a little use. No idea why it got me home; I guess it popped the big hole in the morning. I hate car trouble; it gets me shaken. Had to spend the rest of the day guiding a researcher on analysis of her diversity data and by the end of that I was quite flattened. (It's hard work focusing on someone else's research and advising them what to do with their data to get what they want.) So I crawled home and slept ten hours. Much better now. Winter has come although we have sunny days. Since these old cottages have no central heating, keeping them warm is a problem in winter. I keep looking for better methods. This year I'm trying an electric oil radiator, and it seems to work well enough to keep one corner of the house warm. The cats have discovered this:  So I am keeping the heater on for them during the day when I am at work. It is going 24/7 right now and I shudder to think of the electric bill, especially after paying 3900 shekels (more than 1,000 dollars) for the routine maintenance on my car. Still it will reduce vet bills as kitties avoid getting chilled and sick during the winter, so it pays in the long run. People forget how hard it is for these little furballs to stay warm. I guess that is it for now. I have to start peeling 4 kilos of sweet potatoes and other household chores. Haven't seen the news yet but it seems we are closer to getting Gilad Shaleet home from captivity, and there is a great fuss about Netanyahu freezing settlements. So it could be interesting. Wonder if that means construction is halting on the houses here at Har Gilo too. shabbat shalom, Linda |
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