Posts tagged "diary":

Fixing a leak

Around lunchtime, Regina called from the village office to ask if I'd tried to do anything about that leak that she'd told me about a week or two ago. "It shows 20 cubic meters for yesterday", she said "haval - that'll cost you a lot of money!"

Jerusalem

Sometimes I aspire to the kind of life lived by Sri Aurobindo, in his later years, or Ramana Maharshi, in his earlier years, i.e. mostly in seclusion and never venturing out into the world. Perhaps I'd just go on long solitary walks, read, or spend time in meditation. I'm invariably cheerful in my own company.

Afternoon walk

On my afternoon walk today I wore for the first time a pair of multifocal glasses that I just had made and picked up today. As anyone who has such lenses will be able to attest, the initial experience is a bit disconcerting, so walking out with them for the first time across uneven ground gave me a slightly drunk and giddy feeling. In addition, I was trying out some of my camera's special colour effects and filters, so it was a special kind of walk.

Machsoum

I brought the Palestinian workers from the "machsoum" (army checkpost) in the morning at 6:15 as Tuesdays is the day I volunteer for that. They go back in the mid-afternoon but one of them, Issa, stayed behind to do a bit of side-work, gardening for my daughter, and I took him back at 6:15 in the evening, exactly 12 hours later. And that on a day that the temperature got up to 36°.

Independence Day Evening in Tel Aviv

Tuesday was my last day at work, so I'm now officially retired. I sat with Ira again, explaining a few more of the responsibilities and departed the office in the early afternoon.

My afternoon

In the afternoon I picked up from the local junction a Glaswegian photographer and sangha member doing a project over here (she sent the photo below from the bus stop at Latroun to make sure she was at the right one)

2022-12-30

For Christmas, one of my sons gave me a new set of in-ear noise cancelling bluetooth earphones, which are very nice; great in fact - they remain comfortable after hours of use and I'm not bothered by things like the TV.

Diary

For several months, at all times of the day and night, there have been sounds of distant shots being fired. Seems to be hunters - probably of quail. On my walks, I've never seen or met a hunter, which leads me to imagine that these are deeply personal men, hiding somewhere in the undergrowth, unseen, vigilant, harboring a passion for killing things that keeps them up even through the summer night.

New walk planned, film

It took several hours today to decide on a flight to Porto, in Portugal, in order to walk again on the Camino trail. Perhaps we will make it to Santiago on this one. Flights are expensive in this season - and increasingly immoral. But the only way to reach the European continent from this country is to fly, so it's either that or stay at home. At least when we reach our destination, our manner of vacation will be environmentally friendly. The trip is planned for September.

2022-05-29 Solarpunk conference, "Children of Peace", diary

On Friday there was the DocAviv screening of "Children of Peace", a documentary made by Maayan Schwartz on the second generation of kids who grew up in the village. It's based on conversations with friends who grew up with Maayan. Some of them have returned to live in the village; some have made their home in different places around the world. A central theme of the film is the mixed identity that some of them feel, as people who have grown up with the narratives of both peoples and the ongoing conflict; the ways in which the conflict penetrates the village itself. It's a powerful film, I think, though it's hard to see it as someone who doesn't know the people and the village might.

2022-04-15 Shelf-hanging fail | links

My daughter sent a photo of the shelf I hung for her a couple of years ago, above the bed where her 6-year old sleeps. The shelf collapsed while he was sleeping, though fortunately, with his head on the opposite side of the bed. Nobody woke up. This could have been serious! Shelves should never be hung over beds.

2022-04-13 A walk | the blog | browsers | Signal messenger | links

I have been feeling a need for a bit of seclusion lately. Maybe because in Israel-Palestine the holiday season with its seasonal tensions is on us again. I went for a walk in the woods and fields today and ran into a battalion of boy/girl scouts. One of them - maybe their security detail - was waiting for me as I approached, with questions about where I lived, whether I was Jewish, how relations are between Jews and Arabs there - he got mostly a stony silence from me as I marched through. Luckily I'm harmless.

2022-04-05 Hubzilla | Deezer | Gardening

I updated my hubzilla to 7.2, which was painless, except I discovered that PhpMyAdmin had stopped working. Shrug. Not sure why; hoping it will fix itself through Debian updates. I normally use it to make backups, so I had to do a backup independently.

2022-02-09: A prodigious amount of paper

In North African and Middle Eastern countries, Jews traditionally preserve every scrap of paper in storage places called genizot - sometimes temporarily for formal ritual burial. I first learned of this from Amitav Ghosh's book, In an Antique Land - in which he describes his research in the Cairo Genizah, which is the most famous of them all.