Hi everyone,
Snow is forecast for tonight on the higher peaks of the Judean Mountains (that's me, Har Gilo is 1,000 meters, overlooking Jerusalem) so I closed up the office and scurried for home at 3 pm before it got dark. Even so, the fog had rolled in and it was like driving through the downside of a forest fire; could hardly see the road. We had four days of rain so far and it is supposed to continue with rain and/or snow until Monday. No big news for many of you, but we are definitely not used to this kind of weather.
Those of us on the SW face of our village, myself and neighbors, benefit in summer from a sea breeze from the Mediterranean. Today we have the downside, water saturated concrete walls that are streaming water inside the house and leaking like sieves. I had to mop the tiles in the SW corner of the house, most annoying. The cats and dogs are all snug in the house, except for one feral Canaani that refuses to come inside. She looks like a drowned rat but will not voluntarily enter a house. This is a not really domesticated local breed of pariah dog, and she has her own notions……
I'm simmering chicken stock to make kubbeh soup; it's a kind of Kurdish dumpling soup loved all over the Middle East, with meat-stuffed fat semolina dumplings. The first step is to make stock, then add vegetables to the stock like celery, chard and turnips, and finally the dumplings. The best place to have this soup is in the open air stalls of the Mahane Yehuda market where a couple places dish out Turkish and Kurdish specialties from giant pots, but my homemade kubbeh soup could pass inspection with a Turk, I think.
Only a week before I'm off to Europe and this is the stage where overseas trips finally start to feel real. It's a long trip, two weeks, and I dread leaving the critters but at least the worst of winter will be past and they will manage better than in the last month. I'll be first in Brussels for the last meeting of the EBONE project (after four years), then on to the Netherlands for ten days to renew both personal and professional connections. I already have dinner invitations and meetings at Staatsbosbeheer (their equivalent of our organization) and will lecture at Wageningen University in an effort to find some more graduate students to work with us here. That part of the Netherlands is far south and east of Amsterdam, and really Dutch. I've been going there for decades now, and it feels a little bit like going home for a visit….
I need to touch base with Holland, where a lot of the inspiration for my work started. As EBONE is ending, my boss is retiring this year, and my database work is being outsourced, I feel a little bit lost. I still have three years before retirement, time to do one more good project. So, I'm picking inventory and monitoring in nature reserves, something we are supposed to do and don't do. We've talked about it for a decade, but nothing got organized.
I've started a working group to address this, and one reason for the visit in Holland is to restore my network of contacts for consultation. We will need to do reality checks as we go along, and Staatsbosbeheer is way ahead of us. Alterra is another place I will touch base; it's the largest environmental consulting company in the world, and it is based in Wageningen. It is so big that the university's Department of Nature Conservation sits inside its building in a really weird arrangement that I haven't figured out yet.
So I just have to stay healthy and avoid catching a cold in the week before I fly. That's not so easy in this weather. One of my neighbors got deathly sick with mastitis and didn't even know what it was…..and end of winter colds are all over the place. Eat garlic, take vitamin C and avoid people….nothing else I can do!
Shabbat shalom,
Linda
Linda
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