| Hi everyone, Uffff, I'm tired. We had to move the department from one office to another this week. The usual Israeli mess: we were notified on Sunday to start moving NOW (no scheduling ahead of course). No boxes. The idea was to schlep all our gear down in great wheeled cages (like in the post office) and put directly in shelves, desks, and closets. Only problem was that most of the shelves, desks and closets had not been built yet. I had decided the situation was insane, and can't move without shelves at the destination, so I was sitting tight until Tuesday, when the maintenance crew came to my office and had hysterics all over my carpet. I just kept pointing out that I can't move until there is someplace to go. They finally coughed up about 50 packing boxes for me, crying and moaning all the time about the painters coming in on Sunday..... So on Wednesday my two technicians and I began to pack up the shop. We worked like dogs on Wednesday and Thursday, and finally got the boxes all down in our new offices. No furniture yet. That is supposed to come on Sunday. Same day as the painters in the old offices. Talk about precision planning. I used to work with a South African scientist in my Negev Days. He was sharp, pungent and impatient with stupidity. Periodically he would throw his hands up in the air and shout that Israelis "could not organize a f**k in a brothel". That is the perfect expression for how this last week went. I'm standing by to be amused again next week. The carpenter measured my wall to make floor to ceiling cabinets to hold my gear. I wanted one whole wall. Thinking back I don't believe he took into account that the door has to open too, on that side. I'm fully expecting him to realize that when he comes with the cabinet pieces and has to assemble them. And then I should learn some very useful Hebrew. The rains are coming at last. It's supposed to pour buckets from tonight until Tuesday. We haven't gotten any real rain since last March so the country is now in emergency mode. Seriously. The hospitals have put their emergency wards on alert, and there are warnings on the news about road conditions, flooding, etc. Three days of rain, and you would think it was the blizzard of '36. Still, our guys forget how to drive in the rain from one year to the next, so these preparations are no doubt wise. I hope to just spend shabbat indoors snug by the fire and relax. On Sunday I will have to get up at 4 am to get to a monitoring conference starting at 8 am. It's important though; we have serious work to do after the terrible fire on Mt. Carmel. Other news. A few of us met in Har Gilo and agreed to organize a get-together with our Arab neighbors in Walaja. We will hold it at the Everest, which is "neutral" ground and trouble-free for everyone to reach. I have no idea where this will go, but it is long past the time that Har Gilo and Walaja should get together with all the problems both of us have with the security fences and being walled off. What surprises me is how many people at Har Gilo have told me this is a great idea, they want to take part, and that I'm very brave for doing this. Brave? For organizing coffee and cake? The only one really pissed off is our village administrative secretary (this is a guy assigned to us by the regional council.) He doesn't even live here and hasn't even worked for us very long so he doesn't have a feel for the history of Har Gilo. I won't lose sleep over that. Finally, the big event of the last week of course was the Carmel Fire, a huge and devastating fire that burned a large part of the natural area of Mt. Carmel and killed 42 people. We didn't have adequate firefighting power to control this blaze, and if it were not for the help we got from neighbors like Cyprus, Greece, Turkey (yes, Turkey!) and Russia, it would probably still be burning. But if there is any good to come of this disaster, it is that the Turks are talking to us again. They were cursing us to the skies last summer after the flotilla affair, but their rapid response to our need here has perhaps given Israel the way to climb out of the tree we got stuck in. The Turks want an apology for last summer's conflict, and now we owe them a favor, so it will be much easier to give one. The Greeks were returning a favor; last year we came to their help in terrible wildfires. The Cypriots and the British teams who flew from there were simply being gallant. In fact they were all gallant and flew like WWI aces for two days. It was wonderful to see them. Now that the fires are out, comes the work of the conservation biologists, and I'm involved in that. Carmel was anyway going to be one of my pilot studies for monitoring by remote sensing and suddenly this has gotten a lot more interesting. Sunday I am off to a meeting of monitoring people and later I will inspect Carmel to figure out how to do our monitoring. Funny how things come full circle. Maybe 30 years ago I did my doctoral work on post-fire succession in pine forest, from Minnesota to Cape Cod. I spent a lot of time in burned forests, got to know the firefighters and the foresters very well. I haven't touched the subject since, but now at the end of my career it's back to pine forests and smoke jumpers, halfway around the world from the jack pine forests of Minnesota. Closing the circle, as it were. shabbat shalom, Linda | 
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