| Linda Olsvig-Whittaker |
Hi Everyone,
The Passover holiday week ended on Monday and we all went back to work on Tuesday.....a little hard to adjust after lazing around for so many days, but I found I felt better when working. Make a note of that for retirement.
Steroids and antibiotic did the trick for my little blind cat Homer, who turned the corner on his kidney infection and has regained appetite and strength.
That is a big relief. It's amazing how a 3 kg ball of fur can mess up your life when it develops health problems. This time, I expect Homer used a couple of his nine lives. However, he's now well enough to steal food from other cats' dishes and try to get outdoors (forbidden since he is both blind and deaf), so he's at least acting like a normal cat again. He's on a lowfat diet for the next two months as his liver recovers, but otherwise no special medical care.
I have a brief slow period at work, and found myself dangerously close to getting bored until I got an email from Europe informing me that the Society for Conservation Biology has put me in charge of their Ad Hoc Committee on conservation in the Mediterranean, and now I have to pull the group together and formulate a workplan. So much for being bored. My own fault, I had nudged on this in the last SCB congress in Prague, and all the folks from Spain, Italy, and Greece say yeah, good idea. So we submitted a proposal and it got approved. Well..... It's fair. My thinking in the last few decades really has focused on the Mediterranean, which is a region I love. We have problems in common as well as a shared history and culture, and the environmental problems are interesting. This should keep me occupied for a long time to come, especially if that grant proposal with the Sicilians to establish a pan-Med marine monitoring system gets funded by the EU.
I've got one grad student in the field at Avdat (Negev Desert Highlands) finishing his sampling on reptile and beetle diversity for our EBONE project, and another one coming from Holland next month to start habitat mapping in a wetland reserve up north, so in two weeks life will get back to its usual business. Meanwhile, this is a time to breath, read and reflect, and I don't get so many of those.
Yesterday I went to the funeral of a colleague who had died of cancer. She was a bit older than me, and had built the database I manage now, but left our organization some twenty years ago, before I arrived. I didn't know her well, but we moved in the same groups. It's always sobering to bury people my own age. According to Jewish custom, the body is buried within 24 hours of death, so the burial is a hurried affair and not the formal matter most Christians know. The formalities occur during the mourning period and setting the gravestone 30 days later. Also, inside the Land of Israel, the Jews bury the body without a coffin so that it can return to the holy soil. (Outside Israel, they use coffins, and sometimes ship the body here for burial.) So we carry a bier with the body just shrouded in cloth. It's interesting.
I met some people there whom I don't see too often so these hasty burials are often a chance to get reacquainted. One of them was my old boss from the Negev, who had been the woman's supervisor for her doctoral degree. He's had to bury several of his students over the years. He gave the eulogy, a reminder to me that the bond between professor and grad student is often a relationship that lasts a lifetime. These are our academic "children" and it is indeed hard for parents to bury children, when it should be the other way around.
Another person was a botanist who helped me a lot when I first came to Israel in 1981-1982. In later years, he did some interesting projects, including working as part of the authentication team on the Shroud of Turin.
http://www.shroud.com/history.htm
(In brief, his studies as a botanist of the plant remains on the Shroud showed that the plant species were native to Israel and specifically the Jerusalem area.) He's Jewish of course, but he's convinced the Shroud is authentic, and was the cloth in which Jesus of Nazareth was buried. I have no idea how he connects the dots on that, and am curious. So, I've invited him to give a lectura at our congregation as a Friday seminar, and will invite some archeologists as well. This should be very fun.
Not much more to mention, but I guess that is interesting enough.
shabbat shalom,
Linda
I have a brief slow period at work, and found myself dangerously close to getting bored until I got an email from Europe informing me that the Society for Conservation Biology has put me in charge of their Ad Hoc Committee on conservation in the Mediterranean, and now I have to pull the group together and formulate a workplan. So much for being bored. My own fault, I had nudged on this in the last SCB congress in Prague, and all the folks from Spain, Italy, and Greece say yeah, good idea. So we submitted a proposal and it got approved. Well..... It's fair. My thinking in the last few decades really has focused on the Mediterranean, which is a region I love. We have problems in common as well as a shared history and culture, and the environmental problems are interesting. This should keep me occupied for a long time to come, especially if that grant proposal with the Sicilians to establish a pan-Med marine monitoring system gets funded by the EU.
I've got one grad student in the field at Avdat (Negev Desert Highlands) finishing his sampling on reptile and beetle diversity for our EBONE project, and another one coming from Holland next month to start habitat mapping in a wetland reserve up north, so in two weeks life will get back to its usual business. Meanwhile, this is a time to breath, read and reflect, and I don't get so many of those.
Yesterday I went to the funeral of a colleague who had died of cancer. She was a bit older than me, and had built the database I manage now, but left our organization some twenty years ago, before I arrived. I didn't know her well, but we moved in the same groups. It's always sobering to bury people my own age. According to Jewish custom, the body is buried within 24 hours of death, so the burial is a hurried affair and not the formal matter most Christians know. The formalities occur during the mourning period and setting the gravestone 30 days later. Also, inside the Land of Israel, the Jews bury the body without a coffin so that it can return to the holy soil. (Outside Israel, they use coffins, and sometimes ship the body here for burial.) So we carry a bier with the body just shrouded in cloth. It's interesting.
I met some people there whom I don't see too often so these hasty burials are often a chance to get reacquainted. One of them was my old boss from the Negev, who had been the woman's supervisor for her doctoral degree. He's had to bury several of his students over the years. He gave the eulogy, a reminder to me that the bond between professor and grad student is often a relationship that lasts a lifetime. These are our academic "children" and it is indeed hard for parents to bury children, when it should be the other way around.
Another person was a botanist who helped me a lot when I first came to Israel in 1981-1982. In later years, he did some interesting projects, including working as part of the authentication team on the Shroud of Turin.
http://www.shroud.com/history.htm
(In brief, his studies as a botanist of the plant remains on the Shroud showed that the plant species were native to Israel and specifically the Jerusalem area.) He's Jewish of course, but he's convinced the Shroud is authentic, and was the cloth in which Jesus of Nazareth was buried. I have no idea how he connects the dots on that, and am curious. So, I've invited him to give a lectura at our congregation as a Friday seminar, and will invite some archeologists as well. This should be very fun.
Not much more to mention, but I guess that is interesting enough.
shabbat shalom,
Linda
Posted by PSL
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http://shabbat-shalom-jerusalem.blogspot.com/
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