Stick a fork in me 'cause I am DONE!

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Done with NaBloPoMo 2009 that is! Happy November 30th everyone. What better way to end this year's daily posting frenzy than with a post that illustrates the prickly and somewhat stubborn of those who call my little corner of the world home.
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Native-born Israelis are often called sabras - from the Hebrew for prickly pear - because they are "prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside". Trite and more than a little cliche, but also more than a little true. Israelis can be brash and overly agressive but when you look a bit deeper they're a bunch of big softies. Like the hard-talking barber down the block - he talks a good game, but when Itai did his own version of a sidewalk sale last Friday this tough guy walked over, asked the price of two little matchbox cars (about 50 cents each) and handed over nearly three dollars just because Itai looked like a good kid. And then of course there's always this. Examples of Israeli kindness don't come any better than that one.
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The sabra you see here isn't a prime example of its species, but I do love it's reddish yellow coloring. Objectively though, I'd have to admit that it's a bit misshapen. The other sabras growing on the same plant were fuller and of the more common barrel shape but it was this little one that particularly caught my eye.
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It was growing on this sabra plant, tucked away under an Ottoman-era arch, remnants of what is thought to be an old agricultural storeroom. I love the way the arch has gone from ceiling to floor, with grass now growing on top instead of below. Very circle of life, isn't it?

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Gratuitous Cute Kid Pics

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Why yes, it is November 29th, which means I've been posting for 29 days straight. Why did you ask?
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NaBloPoMo - the end is in sight!
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Coastal Agriculture

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View of the greenhouses and fields belonging to Kibbutz Maagan Michael (I think) with the Mediterranean Sea in the background, as seen from the foothills of the Carmel Forest.
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I like the vintage feel that monochrome gives this image, as well as the contrast between the different geometric patterns.
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Building Facade, Tel Aviv 2009

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Another more vertigo-inducing view of this building. It had been hanging around in my archives for a while and seemed tailor-made for Carmi's Thematic Photographic, which is looking at buildings this week. It's been ages since I participated, I'm glad this week's theme gave me a way to jump back in.
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I hope you're all enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend, or for the non-Americans out there a wonderful not-a-holiday-where-we-live weekend.
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(Damn, this image looks really distorted shrunk down. View it full size for a much crisper view without any of those horrible wavy lines.)

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Oh crap I forgot to post, a/k/a Thanksgiving Israeli style

I'm leaving the house in 10 minutes to head off for a girls night Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings and won't be back until after midnight so this sorry excuse for a post is all you get. And on Thanksgiving Day too. Be grateful I'm not singing for you I suppose. That's something.

Our main Thanksgiving celebration will be on Saturday and will involve a whopping 23 people this year (thankfully NOT being hosted by me - all I need to do is bring the sweet potato souffle (done today since I needed one for tonight) and roasted cauliflower, and Jay is making rolls. We all decided years ago that trying to do a full Thanksgiving dinner on a day everyone has to work is just too tough, so it's been Saturday for at least fifteen years now. It works for us and allows up to keep up this little but very beloved bit of Americana even after twenty years away.

Speaking of which, I'm late!

I'm Stumped

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I don't have any bright ideas for today's post and I'm running out of time. Aww heck, it's nearly Thanksgiving, there can't be that many of you out there reading anyway. Right?
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*hears crickets chirping and heads off to pour herself an end of the day glass of wine*

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G'night all.
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Happy Thanksgiving

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Not quite wordless today...

Red Hibiscus

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The hibiscus are still blooming here in Israel. Not quite as many as during the height of summer but still enough to add delightful bursts of color here and there. That's actually one of my favorite things about Israeli winters - they may be cold (relatively speaking) and wet, but they are full of color. Because winter is our rainy season, it's actually peak season for many wildflowers and plants. The summers are hot and very very dry, making it easy to plan picnics or a day at the beach, but things do start to get a bit parched looking. In winter all those brown fields and hills burst into colorful bloom and new growth is everywhere. There were no roses blooming in January when I was growing up in New York, that's for sure, and certainly no wild daffodils like the ones below, blooming right now in Nahal Shimri.

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Have an image with a bit of red in it? Or a lot? Come share it for Ruby Tuesday over at Work of the Poet.
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PS Notice anything unusual about the images in this post? They're bigger! I finally learned how to override Blogger's automatic resizing thanks to CoffeeShopBlogger. So much nicer this way, although they do make me think that a two-column template might work better with the larger format images. I think you can still click on them to see the image full size as well.
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Olive tree against a stone wall

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This was really more of an olive trunk, rather than a whole tree. In fact, I'm not sure it was still growing at all. If I remember correctly it was now just a decorative piece in the garden, a semi-living sculpture if you will. To me this one looks like a figure with its arms upstretched.
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Visit Monochrome Weekly (which now goes live on Saturday nights - I'm coming in quite late to the party this week) for more black and white images from around the world.
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November 22nd. Still hanging in there with NaBloPoMo.
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White Not-A-Rose

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I don't know what this flower actually is but I love it. When I bought it the woman in the store told me its name (and no, it's not a rose) but I can't remember what it is to save my life and a search of google images didn't turn up any likely candidates either. [Commenter Abbi to the rescue - it's a lisianthus!] I'm really pleased with how soft and subtle this image turned out with the application of a few textures, too.
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On a completely unrelated note, Maya woke up this morning dancing, singing and asking for latkes - and completely fever-free* - so we danced, sang and made latkes, and then we all joined our friends for our planned hike to Shluchat Ayala and Nahal Shimri after all (the hike link is Hebrew only, but there are a few photos on the site - my own will follow eventually). It was a good choice for today - easy (which our post-slumber party and post-fever kids both needed) but very pretty and not overly crowded once we got out of the parking area, and close enough to home that soccer-obsessed Itai still made it back in time to join a friend at today's game, where the internet has just informed us that his team creamed the other guys 7-1. I expect he'll be bouncing wildly off the walls from all the excitement when he gets home.
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And just like that another weekend has come and gone. Tomorrow it's back to work in our corner of the world.
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* I suspect her fever was a reaction to the second half of the flu shot she'd received the day before. It passed quickly though and hopefully getting the shot means that the flu will also pass her (and the rest of us) by.
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Frailties and Flowers

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I've got a sick and feverish one of these (she did perk up a bit for a glass of "choco" as it's known here)
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So I didn't have time to play much with these
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I did manage to get in a decent (or at least extensive, decent remains to be seen) photo shoot this morning with the flowers I'd bought yesterday but I haven't gotten a good look at the results yet. I may find myself with some unplanned downtime to have a go tomorrow though - we're supposed to join friends for an afternoon hike but at the moment it's looking like Miss M and I will be sending the boys off to go play in the woods without us. Hopefully this is just a short-lasting reaction to the flu booster (regular flu, not H1N1) she got yesterday and not some really evil virus but either way she's definitely feeling under the weather today, to say the least. Poor thing was most upset about missing kindergarten this morning.

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PS She's eating omelettes now! (Well not NOW now, NOW now she's lying on the couch with her eyes half closed staring blankly at Spongebob, but yesterday and the day before she did.) Anyone who's been reading this blog for a while will know that among other factors at play Maya's also got enough food issues to qualify her as officially neophobic. This child leaves picky in the dust. We were told all along to focus on the other issues and the food would take care of itself eventually. It didn't really, she'd add a new food at the rate of about one or two a year (yes, a year), BUT, and this is a huge but, since she was doing so well with everything else we told her that once she turned six she'd have to start trying new foods. No more saying she doesn't like it without even tasting it. She'd have to have at least one bite of something new each day. She wouldn't have to eat more than a bite if she really didn't like it, but she would have to at least taste it. We gave her a full month to get used to the idea before we began, and so far it's working. She certainly isn't breaking any land-speed records for the rate at which she's adding new foods, but in the past few months she's added carrot sticks and red peppers (vegetables! my daughter is eating vegetables!), homemade chicken fingers made out of actual food rather than only the frozen processed ones, pizza with sauce (still no cheese, but it's not just naked crust anymore), brown rice instead of white, and now plain omelettes! She decided she wanted to try it on Wednesday evening (mid-yogurt I might add). I jumped on the initiative and made her promise that if I made it for her special that she'd eat at least three bites, and more if she liked it. Damned if she didn't eat the whole thing. She was so excited about it that she called her dad at work and her grandparents in the US to tell them! The next night she even accepted her brother's offer to make her another one.

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Maya funny: after eating the omelette Itai made she promptly declared it "the best in the world, better than god makes", then thought about it for a minute and asked "does god even make omelettes?" This kid cracks me up.

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Didn't we see a castle back there?

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Nope. Not a castle (but lots of imaginary bonus points to you if you got this fairly esoteric Rocky Horror reference). It's the crenelated top of Notre-Dame de l'Arche d'Alliance in Abu Ghosh.
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Those of you who are tiring of my Abu Ghosh images can breathe a bit easier now - I just went out and bought a bunch of flowers (including a very cool looking variegated gerbera daisy and a white not-a-rose, aka something I can't remember the name of but which looks quite like a rose) for the express purpose of photographing them tomorrow morning.

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More skies from around the world can be found here.

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Benedictine Monastery - 12th Century Frescoes and Window

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Click to better see the delicately painted figures that surround this wonderfully unusual window.

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My internet (and phone and cable) service is really acting up today so I'm going to post this as quickly as possibly before something else goes wrong. Look here for a better description of where I went and what I saw on my Abu Ghosh photowalk.
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Benedictine Monastery

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One more from Abu Ghosh. This photowalk is turning out more successful than I originally thought.

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Visit Wordless Wednesday to see what everyone else isn't saying this week.

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And then the angels sang

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I told you the other day that I'd had a really special experience on my Abu Ghosh photowalk, one that made the whole gloomy rainy day worthwhile - and here it is. These few photos are the only ones I was able to grab after the whole "left on manual focus" debacle, but the story itself shines through as the highlight of my day.
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After leaving our first stop we headed for the nearby Crusader-era Benedictine Monastery. This beautiful building, restored by the French in the 19th century, has beautiful 12th century frescoes, lovely grounds, and more relevant to my story (especially since with the rapidly approaching dusk we could barely see the frescoes) some of the most magnificent acoustics you can possibly imagine. So lovely that the church (and Notre-Dame as well) are used as venues for the semiannual (that's the one that means twice a year, right? I can never remember.) Abu Ghosh music festival.
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I walked around the church's exterior, growing more and more frustrated that we'd missed the light completely and it was too dark to shoot. Another frustrated photographer and I decided to look into the interior of the church and see if anything more promising was on offer there. When we stepped inside, to our surprise and utter delight, we heard the most magnificent singing imagineable, but where was it coming from? The chamber we were in was completely empty. We went down a set of stairs, up another set and around a corner in pursuit of the music. At one point we even heard a guitar of all things, but where on earth was it coming from?
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And then we found it. These magical, angelic sounds were coming from a large group of Philippine Catholic pilgrims. We snuck in on tiptoe, not wanting to disturb or break the spell, not daring to lift our cameras.
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That lasted as long as it took us to realize that EVERYONE in the group, and by that I mean everyone, including the 37(!) white-robed priests in the group all had their own cameras out and were shooting at a speed that would make a papparazzi pale! It was an utter free-for-all. At that point we figured it was acceptable (practically required) to immortalize the moment and raced for those cameras. I caught some GREAT shots of clergymen taking pictures from right in the middle of the choir, leaning over, under, around and in front of anyone in view. Unfortunately, that was also exactly when I forgot to put my camera back on automatic focus and not a one of those images turned out, so you'll just have to take my word for it that it was quite a scene.
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I did get these few just afterwards though - by invitation no less. They were all so excited to be there that they were actually asking to have their pictures taken, handing us their cameras to use, and even inviting us into their pictures (I lost count after being asked to pose with five different groups of people). I was trying not to use my flash because by then the nun in charge of the church was getting (rightfully) agitated so they're not the greatest photos, but what wonderful memories they hold. (And they even hold a bit of red too, enough to sneak them in as my Ruby Tuesday post - did you find it?)
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Church window

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I took this natural monochrome in the very dim interior of the Notre-Dame de L'Arche d'Alliance church in Abu Ghosh on Friday. I was taken by the way these windows high up on a wall seemed almost to "float" in the darkness but what really delighted me was something I never noticed at all until I got home and began sorting through my images from the day's photowalk. Click on the image to enlarge it and then look in the top right corner of the window to see what a fun little surprise I received.
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Once you've done that swing by Monochrome Weekly for more black and white shots from around the world.
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Notre-Dame de l'Arche d'Alliance

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Yesterday I braved some fairly dreary weather and tagged along on a photowalk sponsored by a local photography forum (that I don't participate in, my photographer-neighbor invited me along) to Abu Ghosh, an Israeli-Arab town up in the Jerusalem hills. In addition to being locally famous for humus Abu Ghosh is also home to two well-known churches which were our destination on that gloomy rainy day.
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Our first stop was Notre-Dame de L'Arche d'Alliance (Our Lady of the Ark of the Covenant), built in 1924 on the ruins of an ancient Byzantine church. Surrounding the church are gardens with wonderfully ancient and twisted olive trees and flowers of many types, including the rose you saw in yesterday's post. The church itself is well known for the large statue of the Virgin Mary on the roof (which may appear in a later post) but I was particularly taken with the mosaic work on the church's facade.
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A single rose can be my garden...a single friend, my world *

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Getting this one in just under the wire today. I'd say it's because I was busy and needed a quick NaBloPoMo post, which I was and which I did, but the truth is that even though I spent half the day on a (nearly cancelled due to weather) photowalk in Abu Ghosh and returned in the evening to find my house full of company I did have plenty of time after that to put a post up. Or at least I would have if I wouldn't have spent it all photoshopping this image from today's walk. It needed a bit of work to pull it out of the doldrums and even now it still isn't really zinging for me. Conditions today weren't great. It was overcast and dim most of the time with intermittent drizzle, and by the time we got to the heart of the trip the light was pretty much gone but we did have fun and a few truly great experiences along the way which I'll share later. I lost some would be great images because it was simply too dark, even with my ISO bumped up to 1600. (And then I lost a few more truly incredible ones because I'm an idiot. My camera suddenly wouldn't focus, I kept snapping and image after image were blurry. I began to panic, wondering what on earth I'd done, when my friend pointed out that I was still on manual focus following some experiments with his extension tube. Unfortunately by then it was too late and the shot was gone. I could have kicked myself.)
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I'm going to revisit the whole batch tomorrow with a fresh eye. Sometimes the best images take a while to make themselves known. Right?
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* Leo Buscaglia
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Cloud Nine *

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Straight out of the camera, taken out the window of my dad's plane last summer. Don't they look like fluffy cotton?

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* For those of you who aren't native English speakers, to be "on cloud nine" means to be very happy.

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More skies from around the world can be found here.

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Cactus Jack

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Meet Cactus Jack. He was busy selling ribs the day we met, but he was happy to stop for a second so that I could grab this quick photo. I think he looks quite distinguished (and frankly much less garish, but don't let on I told you) in sepia, don't you?
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This one's going on the wall

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Visit Wordless Wednesday to see what other people aren't saying this week.

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Pushing boundaries

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No, not photographically. Developmentally. As in, my son won't live to see his next birthday if he doesn't wise up. This particular phase of boundary pushing is a doozy, and is the reason that said son is now grounded and mom is seeking out the excedrin, because I don't just have a headache, I have an excedrin headache.
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The thing is, he's a good kid. A REALLY good kid. But he's also a kid who's smart enough to look for ways to abuse his new-found independence, and young and dumb enough to be talked into some really stupid stunts by some of the hooligans he's decided to hang around with lately. I thought we'd turned a corner last week and then today happened. The specifics don't matter, suffice it to say that we've done some pretty serious privilege-revoking around here today, and that a very chastised boy is doing a whole lot of homework and room cleaning. It's a good thing his room will be clean, since he's going to be seeing a lot of it this week, which will hopefully send a strong enough message that a) we're not going to stand for this crap and it better stop Right. Freaking. Now. and b) his parents are nowhere near as stupid as he apparently thinks we are. I wrote the book kiddo, and your father wrote the damn manual. We WILL put a stop to this.
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Appropriately, I already had a shot taken in his room lined up for this week's Ruby Tuesday. Of course there's a better than average chance that I will be removing it's subject soon...
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Moroccan Bowl

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I'm hitting publish on this one right now mainly so that I can stop sitting here tweaking it - 5% brighter, 5% darker, slightly more contrast, slightly less contrast, add a texture, don't add a texture. Ridiculous, since all of the changes I'd been making were so subtle that they were barely visible. Ah well, it's more fun than working ;). A glimpse of the full color bowl can be seen here.
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Visit Monochrome Weekly for more (wait for it) monochrome (bada bing) images from around the world.
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Cat's Cradle

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We took the kids to a local pub a few weeks ago for an afternoon of family-friendly live blues. When Itai got tired of listening to the music he pulled out his cat's cradle string and tried (with little success) to interest one of us in playing with him. The woman at the next table took one look and literally jumped out of her chair to teach Itai her party trick - she had a way to do cat's cradle solo, with no partner, using her two hands and her teeth! As someone who never got past the basic steps myself I have to admit it was pretty cool and I love the sense of high drama in this image, you'd never imagine that she was talking about something as ordinary as cat's cradle.

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You can see here too, for better or for worse, how Israelis don't hesitate to jump into a stranger's life when they feel they've got something to say. Happily that day was one of the "for better" ones, and over the years I've developed a thick enough skin that there aren't too many of the "for worse" ones. (That and the fact that my kids aren't babies anymore - mothers of babies attract criticism like flames attract moths ("Put on his jacket, he's too cold! No, he's too hot, take it off! No, dress him in stripes, or plaid, or..."). The worst was the time some supposedly well meaning woman took a look at my infant's bright red face and informed me that I had let him get terribly sunburned. "Umm, no. Actually lady, he's pooping right at this very moment. Happy? Would you by chance like to hold him now?" On the other hand, there are moments like this. It's worth a thousand negative comments to get one morning like that one, and it's the reason I have been able to live here for twenty years without going mad.)

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If you can read this...

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... then you've definitely had too much to drink. Or alternatively, you've forgotten to check the settings on your camera before shooting. Makes a funnier picture the first way though, doesn't it?

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(Yes, this is a lame NaBloPoMo post - I've got company coming in two hours and neither the food, the house, or the hostess are at all ready. Must dash.)

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The Rain God

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Doesn't it sometimes feel like the sky is brighter somewhere else? Somewhere you aren't? Have you ever wondered if you may in fact be another Rob McKenna*?
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It was starting to feel a bit like that in Israel earlier this week, as the country experienced the first major rainstorm of the season. After four days of nearly constant rain things were looking and feeling pretty soggy, which made this sky, with the sun trying so valiantly to break through, all the more welcome.
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Visit Skywatch Friday to see what everyone else's skies look like this week.

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* And as he drove on, the rain clouds dragged down the sky after him for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him and to water him.~~~So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (the fourth book in Douglas Adams' fabulously wonderful Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy series)
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Dona Nobis Pacem

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Now, more than ever.

Because if anything, we're even further away than we were last year.

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Dona Nobis Pacem. Grant us peace.

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Street Cat, Tel Aviv 2009

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Visit Wordless Wednesday to see what other people aren't saying this week.

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Go fish!

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I'm trying something a little different for this week's Ruby Tuesday image. I've been playing with obsessed with textures the past few days and knew I wanted this image to look more like it was taken through the dusty and scratched glass of an old aquarium, rather than just of the (just as old and even more dusty) mobile hanging in a corner of my son's room. More fishlike, if you will, and less "garishly painted wooden object", and of course since it's red it was the natural choice for Ruby Tuesday.
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What have you tried lately to step out of your photographic comfort zone?
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It's raining, it's pouring

Yes, it most certainly is. Raining cats and dogs that is. So much so that I'm fairly sure I just saw a golden retriever go by outside my window, sodden paws flailing. Israel is still in the midst of our first really big storm of the season. It's not too cold yet but we're getting rain and wind and thunder and lightning galore and my broken pergola cover is starting to make that horrible flapping about to take flight sound again. (Note to self: call the guy who's been promising to fix it for the past month, again.) It's hard to imagine that just a few days ago everyone was sweating in shorts and now, just like that, summer is gone.

The kids were packed off to school this morning with jackets and umbrellas and the sandals have been banished to the back of the shoe drawer. They (the kids, not the sandals) were even driven to school this morning - by my normally bike-commuting husband. I took one look at the pouring rain and offered him the car, he accepted grudgingly, and then didn't even get wet on the way to work. Now he's aggravated that he left the bike home and sat in traffic and I'm aggravated that I have no car and have to do all the afternoon kid-ferrying, and there's a fair amount of it today, by taxi. Can't win for losing.

On the bright(er) side we really do need the rain - I may gripe but the rest of the country is out there rejoicing, and rightfully so - and since I work from home I don't actually have to go out in it until this afternoon, and best of all I've got a great big hunk of meat in the crockpot slowly turning itself into bbq sandwiches and smelling incredible. Even better than best? I can send my kid downstairs to the bakery to pick up the rolls - he'll be happy to do it and I'll be happy to stay warm and dry.

And now the power is flickering. Great. Just great.

Is it summertime yet?

Speaking of rain, have you seen that Grace over at Sandier Pastures is having a contest to guess when Dubai will receive it's first rains of the season? Be sure to check it out and place your own guess.
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Sitting on the dock of the bay

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Kind of gives a new meaning to sitting on the dock, doesn't it?
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It's November 1st again, which means another year's NaBloPoMo kicks off today. It sort of snuck up on me this time (yes, I realize that November 1st doesn't tend to float throughout the year's calendar, but still, work with me here) and I'm not feeling all that committed but I'm sure I'll get into the swing of things as we go, I generally do. Why don't you join me, a herd mentality kind of thing would help keep me honest. (Well gee, with an invitation like that, how could you refuse?)
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For daily drivel interspersed with a wide variety of photographs check in here at the Island all month long.
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For a more aesthetic and dare I say highbrow approach to blogging visit Monochrome Weekly which is chock full of gorgeous black and white images from around the world.
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