Shabbat at the Dascha

Things have progressed, regressed, and digressed here at the dascha.

Progress:
1. I located the correct hot water switch and now there is hot water everywhere! Apparently this house has three switches that look like Israeli water-heater switches and I had tried only two of them...the two that apparently do nothing. Although you never know...maybe they do something I haven't yet discovered. Scarey.

2. The 14-year-old knows how to make sushi! And she made it for dinner!

3. I've taught both girls how to knit. The 14-year-old is already off and running on a hat of her own design (!) The 9-year old was about four inches into her practice project when she asked me, "What am I making here?" It was such a startlingly sensible question that I quickly made up an answer: "You are making a patch. When it's finished you can decide whether you want it to be the patch for a scarf or the patch for a blanket. And then you can make more patches and put them together." She scampered away quite satisfied.

Regression:
I attempted to barbecue some hamburgers but they threatened to disintegrate and had to be finished up on the frying pan.

Digression (actually, it was a Diversion, but that doesn't scan...poetic license):
Noorster came to visit! Idan and Tif came to visit!

Depression:
Noorster, Idan, and Tif went home.

Atonemints

Atonemints
Originally uploaded by savtadotty.

All ready for Yom Kippur.

My Dascha

When I first read Russian novels (in translation, be assured) I was charmed to learn about the summer vacation home concept, the dascha. It seemed much more informal and less pretentious than "country home" or even "vacation cottage." Anyhow, I never really owned a dascha, but I am currently the custodian (for nine days) of a house, two girls age 9 and 14, one house cat, five yard kittens, and a car, in the beautiful town of Zichron Ya'akov. The father, who has custody of the girls (their mother lives abroad), was invited to be the keynote speaker at a professional conference in New York. It's the first chance he's had to leave Israel since his marriage began to disintegrate a few years ago, and I'm his closest (geographically) relative, so here I am, in soccer mom-land.

Lucky me:

1. The girls are old enough to know how to use cellphones, so I don't have to worry too much about where they are and where I am. It takes a lot of pressure off.
2. The refrigerator repair man came today while I was home (!) and fixed the broken refrigerator.
3. The gas man came today while I was home (!) and replaced the empty gas tank.
4. The air conditioner works (tfu tfu tfu)
5. My dog and the cat have come to terms with each other (for now)
6. School is in session today, tomorrow and starts up again next Tuesday!
7. The 14-year-old has agreed to make dinner!
8. There is a new barbecue grill (charcoal)

Not so lucky me:
1. The custodial father has housekeeping standards that fall way below anyone else's minimum.
2. I don't know where the switch to the downstairs hot water heater is
3. The dishwasher doesn't work
4. The back yard is the domain of kittens and weeds
5. The front yard is the domain of weeds
6. I don't know how to use Skype on this MacIntosh computer
7. The mouse and the keyboard are very sticky (see #1 above).

Things could be worse at my dascha.

You Go, Girl

Every so often (more often than I dare share with the cyberworld), my daughter knocks my socks off, blows my mind, blows me away, really impresses me. She's done it again, with this post. And read the comments too, they're great. I am one proud mama.

Angels, the Backstory

Angels
Originally uploaded by savtadotty.

For knitters only.

A few weeks ago I thought I'd take an "in progress" picture of Mermaid Girl's Angels. All the pieces except the lacy edging were finished, and what remained was primarily weaving in many lose ends and sewing up the seams. I hate weaving in lose ends, so in true procrastinatorial fashion I sewed up one side seam, hoping to get motivated.

What anyone except me can see from this photo, the two sleeves are not exactly aligned. And I happened to pick the seam you see on the left. Starting from the cuff of the left sleeve, I made it all the way to the bottom past the angels before I got irrefutible proof that the front and the back were not the same length. Well, duh, you say. Of course not.

What to do? In true hacker fashion, I went ahead and picked up all the stitches on the shorter back and knitted an extra two inches to match up with the front. Brilliant! Only when I stitched up the right side seam did the truth emerge. Suddenly, with the addition of the extra two inches, the front became shorter than the back.

My mother's voice came again to haunt me: "To become a knitter, you must learn to rip." Hi, Mom.

Last Night

Angels Complete
Originally uploaded by savtadotty.

I had a full-bore Savta evening: feeding several fine specimens of the next two generations and getting two requests for Handing Down Traditional Domestic Skills. One guest (guy) wants to learn how to make pie crust (photo), and another one (also guy) wants to learn how to knit (he was inspired by the just-completed Angels sweater I'll soon be sending to Mermaid Girl). Oy, such happiness!

And don't go jumping to conclusions: only 50% of these guys are gay.

Shana Tova

Shana Tova
Originally uploaded by savtadotty.

A healthy and sweet New Year to all.

P.S. The other photo is in progress. Right, Noorster?

The # 5 Bus

Yesterday at about 5:30 PM I took the #5 bus to meet my friend R. She usually works at home, but is still taking various diagnostic tests before her surgery and has bouts of tension when she can't work, so she called me to accompany her on a theraputic shopping expedition. I sat down on the bus next to a friendly-looking woman who began talking to me in Hebrew, and it took me a minute or two to realize she was my favorite former Ulpan teacher, Ruti!

Ruti has retired now, her son who was about 10 years old when I took private lessons in her home is now a computer programmer. She looks only a little different, shorter hair, but still the same open face and manner of the former kibbutznik I suspect she is. After my initial self-consciousness about speaking to her in Hebrew, I relaxed a bit and felt confident enough to pay attention to my accent. What can this mean?

It was such fun to see Ruti after all these years, and realize that yes, I have achieved some fluency and comprehension in the language that bedevilled me for so long, that I ended up buying myself a new outfit! Rena claims that it cheered her up as much to see me buy something new as it did for her to buy for herself. I am usually not interested in shopping, and only went along as a mitzvah. Photo to follow.

Graphs of Blogs

Graphs of Blogs
Originally uploaded by savtadotty.

Thanks to Claude, I went to Sala's site and watched the applet turn Cousin Lucy's Spoon into a graph.

Consider this a meme, everybody; I want to see what kind of flower your blog turns into!

If I want some red petals, I'll have to learn how to put tables into my blog, according to Sala's color legend:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

No Progress Whatsoever

Hat tip to The Lioness.

There has been a lot of activity here at SavtaDotty Central, and some rearranging, but absolutely no progress whatsoever. Entropy wins. I'm hoping that by posting a picture I will shame myself into making the machsan (storage room) into a "Before" and "After" project, but I'm afraid my life has got stalled in the "Before" stage.

Q: What kind of a person keeps a broken fax machine that someone gave her, for nothing, in working condition twelve years ago, which is too old and too heavy (now that she is carless and elderly) to take to the repair shop but for which she still has a huge box full of rolls of not-yet-used disappearing ink paper?

A: The same kind of person who saves an 18-year-old Panasonic telephone with a defective connector in the hopes that giving it a rest in the machsan will cause another magical recuperation as happened once before.

And the clothes! SavtaDotty is waiting for them to decide whether they need to be a) hung up, b) repaired and then hung up, c) given away (to whom?), d) thrown away (on the bench outside, where nighttime scavengers make them disappear within hours).

Savta Dotty Says You Must Buy

I'm not much for shopping, but this is special: my niece has written a book! Actually, she's written several books, but this new one was just published. And technically she's my ex-niece, because her father is my ex-husband's brother, but I never divorced her. Anyhow, her new book, The Privilege of the Sword, is Highly recommended if you like dashing swaggering wickedness and girl swordfighters, says A Professional Reader who also happens to be her Cousin and my daughter,elswhere.

As if that weren't enough, Ellen's partner Delia Sherman has also just published a new book, Changeling, about hip edgy 21st-century fairies in New York City, according to The Reader.

And if you are not so angry at the New York Times that you refuse to read anything they publish (some people are), sign up for Times Select just so you can look at Maira Kalman's monthly column. They call it a blog, but that's because they don't seem to share my understanding of what a blog is: I call it a column. I'm putting a link to it here, but it might not work if you don't subscribe You can get a 14-day free trial, more than enough time to look at the current month and the preceding two or three that I could find. Anyhow, Maira it turns out was born in Tel Aviv, but has been a New Yorker for a long time, as borne out by her great masterpiece New Yorker Magazine cover, "New Yorkistan." Her NYTimes column has jolted me out of my recent funk, and I strongly advise having a look yourself.

Brooding on Mortality

A good friend of mine is seriously ill, going for some surgery next week: lumpectomy and hysterectomy. I'm worried about what they'll find when the pathologists get their hands on her tumors, and I'm thinking: uh, oh, this is what Philip Roth was writing about in Everyman. I'm brooding on mortality here.