Excuse Me While I Reconfigure My Life

I had a few electronic disastors just before and also on my trip, which require a small exercise in reconfiguration. It will take a bit of plugging in and typing and clicking, but also changing a few habits, which is much harder.

1. The DVD player gave up the ghost just before I left, so I bought a replacement at the duty-free. Fine, except the replacement includes a DVD recorder, with cables for connecting my VCR player/recorder, so I can now copy selected videotapes onto DVD, thereby preserving "Grease" and family movies for the next generation. More things to do in addition to albumising.

2. En route from LAX to JFK my PalmPilot gave up the ghost. I had synchronized it with my PC before I left, so the data wasn't lost, but it wasn't with me either. I managed to contact my NYC friends by email and even though they don't all know one another, I could patch together enough contact info to see all of my old friends at least once. Not to mention the museums, the concert at Carnegie Hall, the shopping, and best of all, the walking. New York was blooming and glistening just for me, and the PalmPilot's demise receded into the background.

3. Somewhere between LA and Tel Aviv my Israeli cellphone disappeared. It didn't affect communications while I was away, but kept me in phone limbo as soon as I returned. I don't have voicemail on my home phone's land line, so I could only receive or make calls when I was at home. How quaint!

So, yesterday I got a replacement cellphone, one in keeping with my fierce brand loyalty to Nokia. And a matching USB cable. Now I'm in the middle of exploring the Nokia PC Suite, which is rumored to enable me to download (upload?) the information from my PC into the phone, thereby obviating the need for a replacement PalmPilot. I'm saying a cautious "yea!", with fingers crossed that it will work.

These are ordinarily rather simple albeit tedious projects, but more dangerous to undertake while in the throes of jet lag. After a trip, I find that I become a kind of dolt for about two weeks, forgetting my train of thought in mid-conversation, and spacing out unpredictably whether alone or in company, regardless of how well I've slept. I visualize my brain wending its way across the miles at ocean liner speed, even as my body arrived at jet speed. The word "lag" fits perfectly, but it's not the jet that lags, it's my mind. At present, my body is about four hours ahead of the rest of me.

Mermaid Girl at the American Girl Hair Salon

Mermaid Girl at the American Girl Hair Salon
Originally uploaded by savtadotty.

My granddaughter watches her doll getting braids. The stylist stands all day to work on the hair of American Girl dolls. For background, read this.

A Gorgeous Summer Day in NYC

Yes, I know yesterday was Spring, but the heat continues and it's beginning to feel like Summer.

Today was astonishing because I met a cousin I hadn't ever seen before. Technically, he's my half-cousin, because he and I share a grandmother but not a grandfather. He's one year older than I, and he and his wife took up amateur genealogy as a hobby when they retired several years ago. That's how they found me, thanks to the explosion of information available on the Internet.

We spend a fascinating four hours together discovering that we had both graduated from college the same year, both majored in Math, and his wife's best high school friend was in my class in college. I also learned that I had lived for the years 1971-1985 in the next town from our grandmother's grave, and not known it. Neither one of us knows what Polish town she was born in, but we do know that she had one maiden name and three married names but only two husbands (one at a time), because her second husband (not my grandfather) changed his name when he moved from Poland to Liverpool, and she sometimes used his Polish name and sometimes his English one. I wish I could ask her what circumstances dictated which name she used, and amillion other questions.

A Gorgeous Spring Day in NYC

Today was my first full day as a tourist in New York, and the weather was most cooperative. All around I saw tulips, daffodils, magnolia and dogwood trees in bloom, and people, lots of people, walking, running, skating, biking, and scootering. The only place I can think of in Tel Aviv as crowded as today's NY sidewalks is the shuk. Lunch with one friend, dinner with another...and a really good cup of coffee, at last. The city feels both familiar and new...I haven't been here in two years. The classic New York accent sounds so cute to me now.

I Don't Know What to Say, But I'll Try...

Today elswhere, mermaid girl, my 89-year-old cousin, and I spent about three weeks hours at American Girl Place.

Masquerading as an amateur cultural anthropologist from another planet, here is what I concluded: American girls are clean, bright-eyed, acquisitive, inquisitive, between 5 and 9 years old, well-behaved, surrounded by loving mothers or other female relatives, and they all have at least one American Girl doll which they spend weekdays dressing and grooming. They eat only mini hamburgers or hot dogs, french fries, cookies and cake, and drink only pink lemonade. They all wear pink and they can all read. Catalogues.

A Birthday in the Park

Yesterday I had not one but two birthday celebrations: a delicious brunch (Eggs Benedict) with my son, granddaughter, and visiting sister-in-law, and a High Tea at the park/playground with my daughter-in-laws friends, whose children are the ones said granddaughter is most comfortable ignoring (at two and three-quarters she has announced "I don't like people, only my family and 'my guys'" - her mammoth collection of stuffed animals), and with new friends. This birthday is a moveable feast: I will celebrate next week with the rest of my family, in LA, and the following week with my oldest friends, in New York. Photos of the park party currently reside in somethingsomething's mother's camera, and photos of the brunch do not exist - all interested photographers were too busy eating. And if anyone out there knows the whereabouts of sister-in-law's checked suitcase, kindly send it to her home address...she managed to visit here for three days with borrowed socks, shorts, and shirts, frequent laundry, and many phone calls to the baggage-tracking department of her airline, resulting in no suitcase.

Chag Pesach Sameach** from Flahdidah*

*"Fladidah" is how Little Bear referred to her home state when she was two: she was already at day care when my plane landed this morning, so I'll have to wait until later this afternoon to hear how she pronounces it now that she is eight months older.

** Happy Passover!

My flight from Tel Aviv to Atlanta was so boring and uneventful that I slept for about eight hours out of thirteen. The other five were spent seeking something good to watch or listen to on the non-entertaining entertainment system, and eating three undistinguished meals. I missed the translatlantic trifecta (Noorster, thank you for enlightening me): no very fat seatmate, no talkative seatmate, and no bawling infant or screaming child seatmate - in fact, no seatmate at all! The flight was not full. It wasn't so empty that I had a row to myself, but I would be happy to have my slim, quiet, childless row-mate on all future flights.

So here I am at Prowesslesslessness's home, waiting for him to finish making his special kosher for passover chocolate mousse so I can get in the kitchen to bake my special 10-egg matzo meal cake for tonight's dessert. Happily we're celebrating seder at their friends' house, so dessert is our only responsibility.

To all my readers who are not attending seders this year, do cultivate someone to invite you next year! Warning: communal seders are not necessarily as much fun, because they can degenerate into either bully-pulpits for longwinded rabbis or total chaos, but home-based seders with warm-hearted people are super. It's my favorite Jewish holiday, the first one I ever observed.