Month: June 2024

Before And After

Or sometimes just “after” because I didn’t think about taking “before” pictures. 🙂

My pole beans have actually grown! Well 3 of the 5. I have NO idea what I’ll actually get but they are tall.
All that’s left to do in the bedroom now is to hang the art. But that requires THINKING. 🙂 But we LOVE our bedroom and the beautiful dressers Laura made for us, and our top-down/bottom-up blinds. Bliss
We had 2 little fluffy kittens. Now we have CATS. Look how BIG they have gotten. Still in quarantine because they refuse to shed that gut parasite. So since we don’t want BC getting sick, kittens are still in quarantine.
New refrigerator. Yes, it looks just like the old one but without magnets. 🙂 The old one began giving up last fall. Got repaired. Started failing again in February. Finally the service contract folk agreed – replacement refrigerator. Of course the replacement came AFTER Passover, so we had the old failing fridge packed with bags of ice and we bought the cutest little retro fridge for cat meds and cream for our coffee. Priorities.
2nd night seder. We had 3 generations of one family 2 of another, lots of good friends and good food and good family.
Okay, I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve done with the path. Despite very unhappy knees and back I spent several hours weeding that walk, then rearranging the slate and the stones. Dug up a bunch of the bugle weed, which was trying to take over the walk, and moved it to the other side of the house. But I’m really really pleased with how this looks. Yay me!!!
And here is our newest addition – our little shih tzu puppy. The before picture was taken in bright sunshine outside so we could see her face. The ‘after’ picture is her first vet appointment, after our most wonderful wonderful vet trimmed her facial hair. Now I know she looks black but the oddest thing is happening. She’s now 16 weeks old (she’s 10 weeks in these pics) and her under coat of fur is coming in brown/blonde. I think she’s going to end up being a brindle. That will be a different set of before/after.
I had to move the cherry tomatoes. (Not really surprised). They are now hanging in front of the railing from a shepherd’s hook, behind the deer netting.
We’re now on Ahuva Net 4.0. The netting wraps around the sides in 2 sections, but the top is totally open for flying critters. I tried using the shepherds’ hooks to widen the container, but they don’t really work any better than thin poles. Ahuva Net 5.0.
The front of the house is really the summer garden: dahlias, gladiolas, rose mallow, goldenrod, tithonia, cosmos, marigolds. But it’s cleared and the netting is done in smaller more manageable segments. It’s held in place with clips that I spray-painted to match the poles. I managed to re-use a lot of the netting from last year, which I consider a small victory. 🙂

Am Yisrael Chai!

Credit to i24 News for the screen shot.

Noa Argamani recounts : “There was a knock on the door. A voice said, ‘It’s the IDF. We’ve come to take you home.’”

Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, an officer of the elite Yamam counter-terrorism unit, was mortally wounded in the hostage rescue operation in the central Gaza Strip. A hero of Israel and the Jewish people. May his memory be for a blessing.

There are still 120 hostages. BRING THEM HOME NOW!!!

4 days later… A clarification. Apparently “good condition” is a very relative term. In this case it seems to indicate that the hostages had all their limbs, no obvious external marks from torture, and Noa was not pregnant. That’s a pretty low bar. 😦

“The abductees were regularly beaten by their “innocent” captors.
“It was a harsh, harsh experience, with a lot of abuse, almost every day. Every hour, both physical, mental and other types, and that is something that is beyond comprehension”.
“They had no protein, so their muscles are extremely wasted, there is damage to some other systems because of that”.
“There have been periods where they got almost no food whatsoever”
“As time passes, hope of being released kind of decreases and you start wondering if this would ever end… losing that faith is where you get to the breaking point”.

Hostages held by “innocent” civilians. You can’t justify this. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real Gazan grievances. But this has NO justification.