reveille

as anyone who still checks in will attest, i've been a wickid slackah with blogging. i was thinking that once school was over (which was done more than 5 months now!) i would get back to regular posts, updates, pics, commentary- all the things i used to enjoy. but it's just not happening. maybe i'm still recovering from years of the wear'n'tear routine of full time work + school at night and this is some sort of writing PTSD. it used to be that blogger was my best bet for wasting time online. but now i can easily lose an hour poking around on facebook. we'll see, maybe i'll get to back to it. maybe not. upwards and onwards for now.

so daylight savings time ended last night. ahhhh, an extra hour of sleep. or not- perhaps instead the dog will get up at his 'usual time' which is now conveniently one hour earlier than normal. i was hopeful that if we ignored him he would go back to bed. normally it works, but not today. it was 6.45am and we were up and prepping for a frosty early morning walk. blimpie, our resident mensa material cat and all around dog disser, was curled up on the bed- one eye scathingly watching him pace back and forth, undoubtedly saying to herself: 'ugh, of course this cretin's circadian circuitry doesn't know the difference between daylight savings time and the cat poop he occasionally tries to fish out of my litter box.'

speaking of circadian short circuits... i'm beginning to think i may have a diagnosable case of some sort of syndrome. i've always had a healthy appetite for sleep. but it's been way worse than usual the past few days thanks to my trip to israel tossing everything into a tailspin as far as the eating/sleeping/exercising routine goes. if this keeps up, i may need to ask santa for an espresso machine and shade grown coffee plantation for xmas.

how excited are we all for tuesday? somehow, someway, we've managed to be lost in the Bush for 8 years. while i do appreciate the elevation of status french fries received when they were re-branded freedom fries, that is the single solitary one and only accomplishment of the bush administration that merits applause in my book. i have high expectations for tuesday and may be irreversibly disenfranchised if something with a '-D' fails to land at the white house. so much so that come thanksgiving we'll be munching our tofurky north of the border if need be.

on a quasi-related political topic, i've been catching up on the scandal with massachusetts state senator dianne wilkerson and find it all very sad. she defied some serious odds to get where she was (woman, single mom, african american etc), only to find herself at a rather classy boston restaurant, stuffing a wad of bribedollars into her bra:



oopsies.

and again:



but wait, there's more:



and to think she didn't think she needed to pay any attention to the resounding call for her resignation?

moving right along....

so my trip to israel was definitely an experience. it was jam-packed with mostly work stuff, but i did get to trek around and see some of the essentials. i didn't really know what to expect- and in a lot of ways, i think i'm still kinda mulling over what i saw and what it was like. it's the first place i've been that has proven really hard to describe in any kind of succinct way. from the moment you arrive, politics and religion are front and center. guns, fences, walls, and barbed wire seem to be everywhere. but equally present were normal people, living normal lives... especially in tel aviv. i guess it's probably best to let the pics do the talking:

jerusalem, near the old city:


guess we're not going that way:


the wailing (western) wall:


tel aviv:


our armed guide:


akko:


masada- kind of looks like something out of 6 feet under, huh?


me floating in the dead sea:


and covering up in dead sea mud:


here are the rest of the pics...