Blog/January 2011/Jan 21st

Jan 21st (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!

This week was Tu Bishvat, which is the new-year for trees according to Jewish law. What that means is we calculate the age of a tree based on the year beginning on the fifteenth of the month of shevat. This is important because the Torah prohibits us from eating tree fruit from trees for the first three years of their existence. However, in modern Israel it's become one of those celebrity holidays that people celebrate because there is no particular reason to celebrate it.

However, there is a good reason it's mentioned as the "new year for trees". In the Land, trees start budding and new growth starts in earnest right around this time. The dead looking roses in our front yard are resuscitating nicely (despite not ever having been watered through our hot summer), and the fruit trees are budding -- right on schedule.

Daniela is wrapping up her "winter-vacation" from school and getting ready for the next semester. She's also trying to settle what programs she'll be in over the summer -- at the moment, we're all in suspense.

Sarah has become just a little too buddy-buddy with her elderly charges. This week she came home with a pair of slippers one of her ladies knitted for her. Another one is teaching her to crochet. Another one may be teaching her French. And they all are trying to "set her up". I would say yiddische-mama, but almost all her "ladies" are Sephardi...

Esther and I have been working as usual. I had the pleasure one night of getting an emergency call from our CEO, because the server we set up for our Very Big Client was not responding at all. It turns out that it had been offline for at least half a day. This is the server with the special, very expensive setup to ensure that this sort of thing never happens. After blasting emails back and forth, and having a conference call with them, we got the servers back online, which is fine. But the hosting company to whom we are paying lots of money for the special hardware, claims our servers were not configured properly. Given that we worked just fine for more than a month, that is not possible. Moral of the story: if you want reliable hosting and good technical support, do not use Server Beach. I'm recommending to our CEO we move away from them as soon as we feasibly can.

Here and there in the Middle East:

• Tolerance and interfaith-dialog Egyptian style and Fakestinian style
• Camel-race fixing in Dubai.
• The arrest and B"H release of the Zionist vulture

We're doing a "quiet" shabbat this week. On the menu: tuna salad, roasted peppers, roasted eggplant, hummus, beet salad, tomato and avocado salad, chicken soup, orange chicken, roasted potatoes and yams, green beans and mushrooms, date-nut "blondies", short-rib chulent.

Until next week,
shabbat shalom!

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