It is snowing again this morning.
This is after Wednesday when we were sent home from work and my Vibe got unceremoniously stuck in my own driveway. A foot of snow will do that to a Vibe. I had three of the men from the neighborhood help me get it unstuck. It would probably still be there is it wasn't for them.
I took pictures that you can see on our Flickr page.
On another Flickr note, I've added a bunch of older pictures to the Asia Set. Mostly of Hong Kong from Thanksgiving 2006. They were sitting in limbo due to my laziness and the fact that they mark the last official trip we took with the film camera.

Enjoy your weekend wherever you are. Don't call me telling me about nice whether wherever that may be either.

Wow this weather is crazy! It started snowing on my way to work around 1145AM. It is still snowing as of 745M. I dread driving in this mess, but hopefully in another hour most everyone else will be home and I can drive slowly and carefully over the river and through the woods.

The week is strangely dragging and flying by at the same time. I have a hard time believing it is Thursday when it seems like yesterday we celebrated the Chinese New Year in Wicker Park. I even got myself all gussied up in a fine blouse and made it into the official pics thanks to drunken photo-taking. This party used to take place in Minneapolis so I thought it only appropriate to share my fave news story of the week regarding the Mall of America. Shark on shark cannibalism that didn't really look like the little fellow was very alive.
As many of you might have guessed, I love and fear sharks at the same time. I am fascinated by them and yet live in constant fear of meeting my doom a la Captain Quint. My favorite movie is not some girly love fest, but in fact "Jaws." I think I either watched this movie too many times as a youngster or my run in with a school of fish while body boarding in my teens. Either way I don't want to end up like little Shark 54 there!

I am also participating in this three weekend long activity at the synagogue with the Sisterhood where we are making prayer shawls. These are called tallit or tallis to anyone unfamiliar with them. Most of the time it is only men that wear these shawls. Since we go to an egalitarian synagogue the wome ncan make pretty things to wear too! I am the youngest one in the group by maybe 15 years. I am the only one with no children. My fingernails were painted the same color as one of the 13 year olds at the luncheon last week. She did not accept me in the teenager group either. This is an interesting site about tallit if you are curious. I really dig the fact that on a site about tallit there is a big add for single muslim dot com.

I had a weird dream that I was on some European tour that involved a large bus and lots of sleep overs in hostels. Also tagging along was this guy: Mathieu Amalric If you saw Munich you might remember him and now he's the new James Bond villian, how will I ever be able to choose between good and evil??? Too sexy, too sexy. Just leave it to me to have dreams about semi-obscure French actors. (he's not obscure in France of course, but in the US a little less well-known). Now I need to find a way to get downtown to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

We are having a helluva storm in the Chicago area today. I'm at work watching the lightening. Hope everyone is safe and dry. I want to go home soon! Or least to go to Ulta to buy this:



I feel like I'm reverting to my Middle School self. Yay me!
On another rain note, the crustaceans on the Black Pearl have probably been washed away. Here is what she looks like on a clean day:


This is a stock photo. She is prettier by far!

Went to Pensacola this weekend...finally! We ate at McGuire's during a torrential rain storm and all got soaked on the run to the car. The weather was super nice otherwise. We took Dad and Martin to the navy base to wander around Fort Barrancas. Both of them had never been but I think they thought it was interesting. We also drove to Ono Island to see Polly and her two boys. We ate ice cream sandwiches, jumped into the sand and played with the fancy steam shower. I played on my old piano a bit and decided to take my piano books back to IL with me and Martin is going to set up his keyboard so I can play. Not quite the same thing as my parents' piano, but it's a start. I will now be looking for fun and different garden supply shops in the Chicago area after finding more inspiration at Duh - the landscape/interior design store that did the flowers and stuff for my wedding. If you're in Pensacola, check it out.

Since everyone else is doing it...

Here is the play-by play from my notes of all the things we did and didn't do in Israel.
Most of the time the trip is half the fun of getting somewhere for Martin and me. On this trip we spent two days trying to get to Israel, well Frankfurt really. We ended up finally at Dulles on Saturday evening and not getting on any flights to Frankfurt.

(Let me interject with an opinion on Dulles. It is quite possibly the longest airport I have ever had the misfortune to walk through. While I love the uniqueness that is the Mobile Lounge and I am appreciative of a Potbelly Sandwiches in the terminal, the place is a nightmare for connectors. No quick way to get anywhere since moving sidewalks aren't de rigeur in the D.C. area.)

So instead of sleeping the airport we rented a wonderfully cheap rental car and drove to our friend Jim's house to meet his family and sleep in their guest room. They have a lovely room very near Mount Vernon. Since most European flights don't leave until the afternoon we had a leisurely morning and then strolled around George Washington's home for an hour or two before we headed back to Dulles to maybe get on a flight. Martin took a coach seat and I was in Business and we were off to Frankfurt. Both of us probably didn't sleep more than 2 hours on the flight until it was time to land and make a mad dash through the airport to see if we could catch an early fight to Tel Aviv.

The Frankfurt airport is labrinthine where Dulles is a straight edge. We wiggled and twisted through the various smoking areas and lounge chairs until we found a check-in counter without leaving security. We got Business Class to TLV on Lufthansa.

Arrival in TLV was typical and speedy. We stopped at the tourist counter to see if they could recommend a hotel. The guy suggested a place and called to hold a room for us. We got our rental car, a Mazda 3 and headed to find our hotel somewhere near the beach. We planned to meet Martin's cousin Moshe and his family for dinner. After driving around and around and forgetting where exactly we were going we finally found the right apartment building. The food! We had burekas, hummus, avocado, Israeli salad... I could go on but I won't.

The next morning we met Martin's other cousin Dovi and his wife for breakfast. Yummy labaneh cheese and eggs and lemonade with na-na (mint). We shopped for a few minutes at the Azraeli Centre mall and I bought some jewelry at Michal Negrin and Martin needed socks so the men went looking for those. After this adventure we decided to pack things up and head North to Haifa! We stopped at Zichron Yaakov on the drive.

Let me preface this part by saying that Haifa is not an easy town to get around in. Our first day in Haifa we got up and took the Carmelite down the hill in an attempt to see the German Colony and the Bahai gardens. The entire vist we saw neither because the rain was a deluge and it was not fun even with an umbrella. So we drove to Ein Hod artist village instead and looked at the artist colony and then drove down to the sea to see the Atlit Immigration Camp. The camp was very interesting and our guide was very friendly. When we returned to our hotel we walked in and saw that James & Rose had arrived from Jordan. We had sushi for dinner and it was quite tasty.

We tried again the next to day to get to the Bahai gardens. No dice. So with rain pouring down we decided to pack up and head south to the Negev and Mitspe Ramon. We stopped again in Ein Hod to buy a pretty painting and a gorgeous leather vase. I'll have to post a pic of that because it is unique. We stopped at Caesarea for a tour and lunch. I had kebab. We walked around the ancient theatre and took the very cool video tour. We also drove down to the aqueduct and wandered around.

The drive to Mitspe Ramon was long but not horrible. We arrived at night so we saw nothing of the desert. We did however, see a lot of rain and hail and occasionally ice on the road. We were staying at the only place in town, the lovely Ramon Inn. This place is the high end hotel but they have no elevators. We were on the top floor :)

The first full day in the desert we drove to Sde Boker and saw David Ben- Gurion's grave and his hut at the kibbutz. We were surrounded by soldiers at both places which was fun. We also wanted to hike through the Ein Avdat wadi but all the rain had made the usual trickle into a raging river. We settled on looking at the waterfall and gorge from the lookout point. On our way back to Mitspe Ramon we stopped at Avdat, an ancient ruin of a Nabatean city on the Old Spice Route. It was full of arches and caves and we were the only people there. It sits on a plateau with a grand view of the desert below.

The final day of our trip and it was a long one. We hiked around the crater at Mitspe Ramon, visited and alpaca and goat farm ( where James made a donnkey friend), had lunch at the McDonalds, drove by Ben Gurion University in Beersheva and drove James & rose to their hotel in Jerusalem. We wish we had more time to spend in Jerusalem but the way our trip was scheduled we couldn't see much of anything there since it was Saturday and everything was pretty much closed. We left James and Rose and continued to Bat Yam to have a last dinner with relatives.

After dinner we drove to Ben Gurion airport (very Ben-Gurion heavy trip, this one). We met up with Dovi who works for El Al and we discovered that flights had been cancelled due to ice on the runway in Newark and that people from those flights had taken seats on formerly open flight to Atlanta with Delta. We were basically thinking that we were stuck until we were given, at the very last minute, crew seats on El Al to Toronto/Chicago. This means we sat in flight attendant seats for the entire trip except for meal services. By far the weirdest way to fly, but the best food I've ever had in a coach seat!

With a winter storm warning in effect my mind harkens back to Florida. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about that. Not that living in Florida was that great. I had a horrible turn as a sportbike girl and got my tongue pierced. Most of my friends except for maybe two (yep two) worked with me in the libary so I wasn't much for getting out and about. Good thing is I'm still friends with these two folks. For now I am slowly making more friends. Most of them are still library-related.
I have tried to get into stamping and I even joined the Sisterhood at the synagogue. I went to a lovely luncheon in the fall where the speaker talked about finances for women over 50. Didn't really apply to me. At the same lunch, one woman actually asked me why I had even bothered to join the synagogue since I didn't have kids. These are the people that give organized religion a bad name. Because apparently they have nothing to offer if I don't have rugrats. I was disheartened that someone would think that way.
Of course, the stamping group is really not that different. (To be fair I've been to two separate stamping groups and one was far more diverse than the other.) Most of my stamping experience again revolves around people asking if I have children and when I answer in the negative they really don't have anything to say to me. This all is shocking to me since most of my friends have 1 or less children and I do not consider them odd. In fact, most of my friends aren't even married. So where did all these women with 3 kids come from? I don't even want to talk about the fact that most of them don't work and then complain that their husband gives them an allowance.
I feel like I live in the Twilight Zone or that I'm surrounded by haggard looking Stepford Wives who don't know how to dress. Aren't there any simpatico people in the 'burbs? Where are the young cool couples? They can't all live in Chicago. . . can they?

I am wearing blue jeans today. I have not had a pair of jeans that looked decent in over two years. For the past 5 months I have seen everyone at work wear jeans on Fridays. Some of these people have questionable fashion sense on a normal day and I didn't want to be part of that crowd. So I am wearing jeans and feeling that I should be hiking or riding a horse. I never caught on to the whole trend of wearing jeans everywhere and every day. I just don't get it.

We are having guests this weekend. It will be cold and they will probably not like that. Other than shopping or a museum, there aren't a lot of indoor things to do in the Chicago area. Not that there are a lot of indoor things to do anywhere, but with guests sometimes I want to get them out and about. Nothing like freezing temperatures and flurries to get me in the mood for something outdoorsy.

Here are some lovely things to do this weekend in Chicago:

• DVA Gallery is having a sale!
• There is an interesting documentary playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It's called "Shakespeare was a Big George Jones Fan" about this famous guy from Memphis called Cowboy Jack Clement. He was big in the music scene i nthe 60's and 70's. It looks like it might be something a little different. Of course, Martin wasn't sure who George Jones is. I was astonished that he didn't know the Possum! But I don't really think that's the point of the documentary.
• The Midwest Home and Design Show This could actually be a fun place to get ideas! And it's not even downtown.