bad fit, worse attitude

Yet ANOTHER holiday approaches. If I were working, I'd be delighted. But I'm job-hunting, and nothing moves in this country until "after the holidays". And there are a LOT of them. This time it's Succot, which is the plural of "succa", the little 4-post tent-like affair where religious Jews are supposed to eat (and sleep?) for a week. This is much easier to do when it's 30 degrees celsius, but not much fun in this 90% humidity. Damn, it was humid today.

So tomorrow is the holiday-eve ("erev hag") again. Another duty dinner with the in-laws. Thursday is the full-on holiday, but Succot is not just one day -- it's a whole week of holiday spirit akin to the week between Xmas and New Year's, where not much gets done, and people that work usually go home in the early afternoon (if they're not taking a whole week off to take care of their children, who have another vacation from school!) Whew. After this, it's clear sailing for a good two months plus a bit, until the Hanukah holiday!

The best part of the holidays: sleeping in! Beautiful respite from those mad morning rushes to get the kid to school by 8am. We sleep till at least 9 before the noise outside makes it impossible to go on, although last Friday the bloody gardeners with their hedge-trimmers and leaf-blowers were at it with deafening decibels already at 7!! We are blessed with so many gardens and hedges around here, that the city's gardeners make me crazy almost daily.

Erev-Succot also happens to be the anniversary of our move to Raanana ten years ago, the big move from Tel Aviv to the burbs. How well I remember the aggravation of that move, unwisely and unknowingly scheduled for an erev-hag when movers would be really really annoyed as the assembling of our cupboards dragged on into the afternoon. Not one of my more pleasant memories.

We finally replaced our stolen car today. We now have a new 5-yr-old Mazda. We were determined not to buy another Mazda, since that seems to be the most popular car in Israel, therefore the kind thieves want for parts, but after several deals with sellers of other makes fell through, this is what was left. The good news is that it has very low mileage on it, so it's like a much newer car. Let's hope we can hang on to this one. We've now had our parking space fitted with lockable posts that will make it much more difficult to remove the car, but with four cars stolen so far, we seem to be a special project for these thieves, so who knows? I'm not laying any bets. The most annoying aspect of this is that we are required by our insurance company to fit the car with a special car alarm which has already been proven to be no deterrent, and which cost us another 620 shekels (C$180). The expenses have been endless.