Friday, July 21, 2006

Odds

We got to our house around 1 PM, just in time to hear the first sirens of the day in Haifa. They weren't too loud, so it wasn't to scary. The three booms that followed: boom, boom, boom were close but not too close. They hit downtown Haifa.

But it was a good day for Cholent: we received results from the lab from the "integrated" 6-way test that calculates odds of Downs Syndrome. For Cholent they are 8100:1. That's great news. If you go by my age alone, the odds are like 260:1. So no amneo for me!

No time to celebrate though. There was another siren and another three booms, farther away. And we had more mundane issues to deal with. Sometime between Adi's visit to the apt. on Wednesday and today, the fuse for the refrigerator went down (probably due to condensation from the AC). All the food was fading fast. We quickly went to work, triaging things we had to chuck and things we could salvage and take with us. We cleaned the fridge and left it open with baking soda inside.
Adi dashed off to get the key to our next destination and I did laundry. I tried to spend time with Koshky the cat. She was glad to see us and pretty well but clearly nervous, crying a lot whenever I went into another room.

We were finally ready to go around 3PM. The streets were emptier than when we'd arrived. We drove through the forest, near past where we got married, rather than down the more exposed route.

I'm tired now so more tomorrow but in short we're staying in a big, comfortable house and all is fine. We went to dinner at friends in Zichron Yaakov and had a great time, laughing and talking about the situation as well.

I think that fortunatly the odds of actually getting hit by a katyusha are close to zero. But the odds of being stressed out in Haifa by sirens and booms are close to 1. So here we shall stay until. Until when? I have been thinking that my measure will be 24 hours of quiet in Haifa. 24 hours with no sirens, no booms. But who knows.

Before we went to our house, we visited Adi's parents. "But there hasn't been anything in Haifa since yesterday morning!" his father said. Right, except for the sirens yesterday at 5:30 PM. I amdit that it felt so calm when we drove to our house that I was thinking that maybe we should just stay home. But luckily or unluckily any questions I might have had disolved within the first 5 minutes. I'm not frightened, but I don't want to become frightened or stressed out either.

Final note: Bibi Netanyahu, for all his politics that I don't like really should be Israel's one and only international spokesperson. We saw him on the news this morning. Brilliantly, smoother than the melted icecream in our freezer today he said (I paraphrase).

Israel did what any other country would have done. What France would have done, what England would have done, what Germany would have done. Yesterday in Nazereth which is an Arab-Jewish city, two young Arab boys were killed. Are we to just do nothing in return?


Pure genius. He makes it sound like we're fighting for two Arab (Israeli Arab) boys. Which of course in a way we are.
Those poor boys though, everyone wants to claim them. Yesterday Nasrallah quasi-apologized for their deaths, calling them "Palestinian martyrs". I saw the father kissing their little caskets in the earth. I don't think he wanted his boys to be anybody's martyr.

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