shabbat shalom 18.02.10

Hi Everyone, The world starts to look a whole lot better here in Israel.  It is spring, and the air is soft and warm.  Where we were shivering in our homes two weeks ago, now everyone has their doors and windows flung open to welcome the fresh air after the winter months.  It wasn't much of a winter, maybe six weeks worth, but we are never really prepared for rain and cold weather here.  After a few weeks of the warm Mediterranean sun, we forget about it until the next time it comes around. As for me, the spring is more then welcome.  My health returns with the warm days.  I went to see my doctor this morning and he confirmed the dizziness and ringing in my ears were from fluid in my ears which will just have to take its time getting out.  This was no doubt caused by a month of severe "common cold", and the virus probably got into my ears with all the sinus congestion and nose blowing I did during January.  That Norwegian blood must be thin as water now; I hate the very idea of cold weather.  Well, no worries for many months and by next winter I plan to have an air conditioner at home! On Monday, my Dutch former student and I went with my director to the Dead Sea.  My director was going to teach us how to find snakes and lizards and I was going to teach the student vegetation sampling methods.  It was WARM, about 28oC  (uh, somewhere around 80oF, I guess) and the change in climate was a bit of a shock to the system.  Still, we spent some hours out there in the desert and I must admit the next day I felt like my normal self again.  Snake hunting wasn't a good idea; just are not that many snakes around.  But lizards are another story; they were popping out all over the place.  It occurred to me we ought to just focus on lizards.  We get the numbers, and they are not poisonous, so I don't need to worry about shipping a student back to Holland in a box....  The student caught the vegetation sampling method quickly.  The district biologist for the West Bank came to join the fun for a while, and then invited us over to En Fescha, my favorite desert oasis, for lunch with the park staff.  (Everybody pulls out his lunch and shares, like they did in the Loaves and Fishes stories.) Sure was great lying around by the water under the date palms and eating oranges....... On Wednesday, another colleague and I went up to another wetlands, this time En Afeq, the headwaters of the Na'aman River.  That is a coastal wetland where I also had students working on projects for more than fifteen years. I've got another Dutch student coming for maybe 5 months of M.Sc. work with us at this little nature reserve.  So we had to hammer out some details of accommodation and project description, but I also had a walk around for the first time in more than two years, to see the changes taking place here.  They cleared out the old Crusader water canals (two flour mills were working a thousand years ago, one Hospitaler and the other Templar, fighting with each other of course, and using the river to grind flour for the Crusaders in Akko.  So the wetland functions best when those ancient canals are clear and working. We stopped at Kibbutz Yagur (at the foot of Mt. Carmel) to hit the giant greenhouse and nursery for some houseplants and just revel in acres of garden plants for sale.  Yagur is one of the more successful kibbutzim, partly because they savvied onto the needs of urban dwellers in Haifa, who flock in during the weekends to shop and swim in the pools there.  It's a nice place for a stop on the way back to Jerusalem. At last I think I'm strong enough to get back to volunteer work at the animal shelter this weekend, so I am getting this out of the way early.  Not much planned except that, but it is good to feel healthy enough to do physical work again.  And it is very good to be able to appreciate our glorious spring. shabbat shalom, Linda