A woman of valour who can find?

As my readers might remember, my flat is ...high up in the sky. This has a lot of advantages like a roof terrace, great view and a lot of fresh air. However, it naturally has many downsides. One of them is the difficulty with which one has to clean the windows...especially given that some of them do not open at all and have to be cleaned from the outer side. Sitting on the edge of the window sill and stretching yourself accross the window tens of meters above the ground when there is -5C outside is an achievement. Two days ago, I plucked up the courage and did it and survived. If you forget me saying so, I am very proud of myself:-)

And more very good news

My friend Tom Feeney and his girlfriend Elisabeth are engaged to be married next August. This indeed is very good news Mazal Tov! (The picture is from our trip to Blenheim Palace last summer. Tom is the second from the left.)

Sexual harassment and you

As my readers already know, my brother is a top ranking Czech PC specialist. He goes to work in a suit and a tie, spends days and night creating bank software of the utmost importance for my country and - quite understandably - gets a very good pay for his work. At the end of each day he goes home with his head full of PC troubles to solve and his PDA overloaded with tasks to work at during the night. This is what he came home with on Friday afternoon.

New year´s resolutions

As the year slowly comes to its end, I started to think about new year´s resolutions. Don´t worry, I will not start to give reasons why you should or shouldn´t make them or whether Jews should make them in January or at Rosh ha-Shana :-) – I just recently remembered Robert Fulghum´s book "From Beginning to End, the Rituals of Our Lives" that I liked when I was a teenager. In this book Fulghum describes his personal custom of new year´s resolutions: At the end of each year, he would write down a list of things he managed to do during the previous year. When he is done he heads the piece of paper with a title “My new year´s resolutions for...” and adds the previous year. I think it is an excellent idea. So here is my list:


My New Year´s Resolutions for 2006:

1. Learn to lain (read from the Torah).
2. Learn to be a synagogue gabai.
3. Return from Israel and settle back at home.
4. Buy a bed and furnish my new flat.
5. Find a decent job, which I would find meaningful.
6. Fix my favorite brown sweater, which has been torn for 2 years.
7. Read Virgina Woolf´s "To the Lighthouse."
8. Not to get married to a freak.

Great:-)

Two Holiday Videos

December has come and with December we fight the traditional Jewish fight - Christmas or Chanuka? Recently, I have seen two videos I thought I would share. The first one is
Lex Friedman´s I Wish We Were Done With Christmas, which is funny. The second one is Twas Chanukah Night, which is really scary. Enjoy!

The ups and downs of a life of an employed person

The last couple of weeks since the time I had come back to work after my flu have been rather ...unusual. I would never believe what 10 days of illness and staying in bed at home can do. Despite all the exhaustion and sleepless nights that my teaching causes, I found out I really like and need my job. I realized what a luxury it is to have something meaningful to do every day. Moreover, I found out that as much as the work draws huge amounts of energy from me, it loads a lot of energy into me too. It is a very possitive feeling. Now I have 2 more weeks ahead of me before the start of winter holidays. The two weeks will be full of Chanukah programs - we have prepared all kinds workshops for the kids including a Chanukah school sleepover with my 7th graders, which I hope should be fun and also a bit of more "get-to-know-that-Gafna -is-not-only-a-teacher-but-also-a-human-being" event. I shall let you know how it goes.

On the darker side of things, I have had a bit hard time in my Masorti job. Despite the fact that all the logistics part of my job and "making-sure-things-are happening-the-way-they-should-and-everyone-has-something-to-eat-and-drink" is going well, I have encountered two very painful cases in the community where Halakhah (Jewish religious law) and politics did not give way to a solution of a problem which seemed morally right. These were situations in which I felt painfully hopeless, helpless and lost. I have encountered a situation when I felt I did all I could to achieve something good and it all went down the drain. I wander if this is an inseparable part of an adult life too.

yeah, yeah, I know...

...I should write a post soon. And I will. And I mean it. Soon.