God bless the Tsar and keep him far from Anatevka

Wild cyclamen growing out of rock, seen near Wahat al-Salam - Neve Shalom

Journal:Photographers, reflections

It's a Saturday; my wife is in a mindfulness retreat, and my day is even less structured than usual. In the morning, my brother, an aviation buff, had sent me a link to an air museum in Sirvihisar, in central Turkey, joking that he'd love to see it some day. I looked up Sirvihisar in Wikipedia and noticed that one of the central personities who hailed from there was an Armenian poet, Moushegh Ishkhan, who once wrote that, for Armenians, whose diaspora lacked a territory,

The Vegetarian

Read Deborah Smith's translation or adaptation of Korean writer Han Kang's "The Vegetarian", which won international awards. Han Kang herself won the 2024 Nobel in literature. It's the first Korean novel I've read and it's pretty good.

Among the anemones

It was a beautiful day, so in the afternoon, we drove with the wife's 92-year-old mum a little down the hill to sit in a field which every year lights up with bright red anemone flowers. There, we happened to meet a few other of our village friends who had had the same idea, and sat with them.

Day trip to Dead Sea

Picked up Yael in Jerusalem for a drive out and down towards the Dead Sea. With the recent rain, the desert was tinged an emerald green. The plan had been to stop off at St. George's monastery in Wadi Kelt, however we found the road blocked by the gate of a new Jewish settlement, so we circled back to the junction of the Good Samaritan, where there is a small museum. Two employees of the Parks Authority were sitting outside, leisurely puffing on a nargilla (waterpipe).