Back In Action

Public apologies for my un-announced leave of absence from the blogging world... It's been a crazy couple of weeks, and the coming three are sure to be even crazier.

School and home life has been surprisingly challenging over the past four or five days due to the unrelenting torrential downpours.  For those of you who don't know, it has been snowing in Yerushalaim since last night-- a rather exciting story.  But the precursor to the snow, is the very intense rain and wind.  In my neck of the woods it all started on Sunday night, and it has been basically on - with a little off - since then. 

Pause: In my youth, my Dad often read the book Fortunately by Remy Charlip to us and it basically tells the story by starting every other page with "Fortunately. . ." and every other page with "Unfortunately. . ." For example: Fortunately, I found a parachute to jump out of the plane with.
Unfortunately, the parachute was broken.
Fortunately, I landed in a hay stack!
Unfortunately, there was a pitchfork in the hay stack."

And so on, and so forth.  GREAT book- by the way.  Anyways though, for the following story which I am going to tell about this past Tuesday I am going to follow Remy Charlip's method. 

Tuesday:
Fortunately, I had a dinner to go to at a really nice restaurant, in Yerusaliam, on Tuesday night.
Unfortunately, it was a goodbye party.
Fortunately, school is over on Tuesdays at 12 so I could get to Yerushaliam on time.
Unfortunately, I had four hours of Magen David Adom class starting at 2.
Fortunately, I could theoretically get to the bus stop in time to make it to Yerushaliam and the restaurant in a timely fashion!
Unfortunately, there was a massive rain storm all day and the highway to Yerushaliam was closed (due to Israel's complete and total unpreparedness for rain-- similar to Seattle's response to snow).
Fortunately, the buses and highway were open for business again by the early afternoon
Unfortunately, I had to plow through the rain to get to the bus.
Fortunately, my mother sent me a poncho in the mail and I was actually able to put it to use.

Unfortunately, my friend Jason (who came to the dinner) and I had to wait at the bus stop - in the rain - for much longer than we normally do.
Fortunately, the bus came and we got to Yerushaliam with enough time to get to dinner.
Unfortunately, the streets of Ben-Yehuda/Yaffo looked like an apocalypse just hit because of all the broken umbrellas and garbage on the ground.
Fortunately, there wasn't actually an apocalypse and we made it to dinner in perfect time!
Also fortunately, about 16 friends were there and it was SO much fun!

I hope you all go and read Fortunately now, because it's a great book.


In other news, I did something crazy today... I picked up a basketball for the first time since basically last March, and I actually shot around for a while.  It felt good to get a ball back in my hands, and I think I'm going to start playing on Tuesday nights with a couple of other girls from my program.  Should be fun to get back in it a little bit.  After bball, I worked out for quite a while which is always great!  I worked on some boxing stuff, which made me miss my Cappy's even more than I already do.

Finally, I'd like to say that over the next 2.5 weeks Finals will be taking place.  I will surely use blogging as a stress-reliever if and when I have time to do so, but there approximately zero promises that such an opportunity will arise.  We can all thank my sixteen finals for that one.  Hurray! Ha.  No actually though, even though it's a little stressful to have so many big tests in such a condensed period of time I really do like finals.  I learned how to study for and take tests in High School, and I love putting that skill to good use.  So we'll see what we can do.  But again, no promises about maintaining the blog.  February 29th is the beginning of a much-needed, beautiful week-long break.  And I assure you all, I will be kicking that off with a blog post. 

All the best to everyone, Shabbat Shalom.