Blog/December 2008/Dec 26th
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December 26th (See this week's devar torah)
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Hi again!
Lots of stuff... where do I begin?
Plumbing -- we have a love/hate relationship with it. On the one hand, it's convenient and useful. On the other hand, when it "backs up" -- whoa! -- you don't want to be near it. This week we finally got our sewage system fixed (thank God!). At first, we called the contractor we had used to redo our internal plumbing. He said he would send out his plumber... which he did, after five days of nagging. The (Arab) plumber showed up without any actual tools, and after poking about ineffectually with a rubber tube told us he would have to order a biuvit -- which is a sewage-sucking truck. My neighbor (who is also a plumber) said, "ma pitom!" (Hebrew for, "what are you, stupid?"), "you only need a blickibobberheim". I didn't know what that was, but he recommended some other plumber (a Jew) who lives locally. So we got him to come over the next day and he fixed the problem, without a sewage-sucking truck (it turns out the blickibobberheim [not its actual name] is simply a set of mating rods with a spiral cutting thing on the end, which are fed into the muck and pushed in until they hit an obstruction. Low-tech, but effective.
Speaking of plumbing, I've mentioned before that people seem to feel it is OK to urinate in public here. It's as though they think they are wearing an invisibility cloak. Some jokers put up signs in an English city claiming it was legal to relieve oneself publicly there. In India it may be fatal. And in Pakistan it's apparently just part of the scenery.
This past shabbat we hosted two very nice seminary girls. My daughters told me "please don't be weird". Wasn't that nice of them? Anyway, we had a very pleasant shabbat and I think we'll try to join the program they were part of so we can help host more.
Hanukkah is here! The festival of lights. The celebration of religious fanatics' intolerance for assimilationists. The holiday of the sufganiyah (heavy doughnuts). I never did like sufganiyot, but once a year I have one or two. And that suffices to confirm to me why I don't like them. On the other hand, it's also the holiday of the latke (levivot, or potato pancake) -- and B"H, Esther's latkes are absolutely the best I've ever had, even if she says so herself! We also have the obligatory meal of falafel, and today I'm having malawaH for breakfast -- so I think we've fulfilled the custom of eating oily foods during Hanukkah, to the fullest extent possible...
Until next week,
Shabbat shalom!
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