Blog/January 2010/Jan 1st
From RonWareWiki
< Blog | January 2010
Jan 1st (See this week's devar torah)
Send Ron feedback on this blog
Hi again!
One of my friends recently chastised me for two things: that I have too much political stuff in my blog, and that there is no obvious way to give feedback. So in deference to her remarks, I've taken the following steps: first, there is a link on each blog page at the top, which if clicked will allow you to email me and send feedback. Secondly, I will put the 'personal content' at the top of the page, so you don't have to read my political etc. content if you don't want to. So here goes ...
We had a 'parent-teacher' conference night at Sarah's school this week -- probably it's the last one we will ever have. As usual, her teachers told us what a nice girl she was, that she's doing ok in her classes -- but in addition, they told us she was showing more responsibility than she had in the past, which we were very glad to hear. Daniela is enjoying the snowy New York weather, but secretly (or perhaps not so secretly) longs for her mother's food. She's very busy writing papers and getting stressed out. My nephew just joined the USAF -- though I tried to get him to join the IDF instead, I was unsuccessful. A dear friend of ours from the Old Country visited us to day (she of the aforementioned chastisement).
A family of olim who arrived here just this week will be joining us this shabbat for dinner. It's nice to be able to help the newcomers as we were helped by others. Hopefully their transition will be smoother than ours was. During shabbat day, we'll have four seminary girls over for lunch.
Esther has been busy trying to keep one step ahead of the changeable weather. She managed to get all the laundry done even though it was raining off and on this week. She cooked up a shabbat dinner for a family who just had a new child. She cleaned up the garden, pruning and getting things to look nice. And she harvested the last of our lemons and kumquats. "A woman of valor", indeed!
I've been (as usual) extremely busy with work. Our most immediately important client has been "anxious" to get our product for the CES show next week... and we sent them a release on Monday (and Tuesday, etc...). Come to find out that, no, they didn't look at anything until Thursday -- and then they ignored the disclaimers we had made about what was not yet working. <grrr>
From the headlines:
- Israel's right to the territories
- Shawarma delays wedding
- Security on flights, and also idiocy vs terror.
- And a poll shows the majority of Israelis opposes gender-segregated buses.
Regarding that last item, I wonder: why do people who have never taken, nor will ever take the gender-segregated buses, care? Nobody is forced to ride these buses -- they are provided because the bus company (Egged) is trying to be responsive to the needs of the particular communities where these buses run. In fact, in certain areas, Egged lost contracts to its rival SuperBus because they were not quick enough to provide the services the population wanted.
This is not a 'sex discrimination' issue, nor is it in any way parallel to the segregation practiced widely in the US in the early to middle part of the last century. It is in fact both a freedom of religion and a market issue. The vast majority of the residents of the places these buses run, want the service available. Therefore the bus companies provide them. Just as the vast majority of people in my town do not want such service, and therefore don't get it. The Leftist ideology of political-correctness is merely a thin veneer providing respectability to the fascism which dictates all must think alike.
In any case, we just had our sewer line unblocked -- thank God! -- by our neighbor the plumber. Esther noticed the sewage coming out of the manhole in our yard, and both she and I became upset pretty quickly about it (it was only a year ago we had the line unblocked). The neighbor says that it blocks up periodically, because it wasn't installed correctly -- and that the only thing to do is to unplug it when it gets blocked.
So here's wishing everyone a free-flowing shabbat! May all your problems be as easily solved as this one was.
Until next week,
Shabbat shalom!
| Top: Blog | Prev: Dec 25th | Next: Jan 8th |