azalea progression

Spring 2005

Spring 2007

Spring 2009



Spring 2010

Couldn't pick my favorite so I uploaded them both.

Comment on which you like better...

precious moments soda commercial

Thanksgiving - Nov 2009

Not naming names

It's an inherent part of my personality that I've come to accept and not overly judge or try to remedy. I know that I like to know secrets and keep things vague.


Hubby and I have a friend who is in the midst of a mid-life crisis or some other major life altering conundrum. They even described this point in their life as "being at a cross-road both professionally and personally" - their words. We are a lot alike in some ways and then there are very stark differences that I can comprehend from a friend point of view, but not agree with for other reasons.



Parallels in our existences include major upheavals in all the stress causing areas - and all at once. In the past few months there have been major job changes, major home renovations and general chaos in financial stability - spending more than is coming in the door. This is something I am familiar with as I had a baby, quit my job and moved to America all within a short time period causing untold amounts of stress. I figured if there was one major area of change then it would be a good time to make other changes as well. Hindsight being what it is, I don't necessarily agree with that now.
Also there is the fact that they are also a 2-income family with one parent having a more supporting than starring role in the finacial arena. And they are supporting young children in an expensive school system with many years of this ahead. Money is always a big stressor!


However, I had my partner by my side for most of my tribulations.
He couldn't stand the idea of being in Israel away from me and the baby (even though that was our original plan - for him to stay in Israel, tie up loose ends and meet me in America when I had found a place to live and a source of income) So he quickly got rid of our worldy possessions and got out of our lease agreement (all in one fell swoop - by making the deal of a lifetime for a blind Ethiopian student he worked with: namely he sold all of our furnishings along with the lease to the apt for a song, mainly because he just wanted OUT!)
Then he rejoined me and we slogged through the relocation process together (as it probably should have been from the start)



In any case, this person has seemingly made the opposite choice. There have recently been extended business trips and now a vacation with the children sans one parent which has been extremely difficult on the parent who could not attend. [I would not call that a family vacation although there are family members involved]



Then there is the case of infidelity. That is one of the poor choices that I think led to the eventual downfall of my former VP. Bad choices that snowballed into other, more serious bad choices.

My friend has also started down that road. I am blissfully unaware of the full extent of those choices and I want to keep it that way. It has all the earmarks of a terrible situation now and further down this road.

I know there have been peiods of lonliness and boredom in that marriage and the breakdown of communication is evident by some of the more public displays that have occured. I suppose out of deference to the children the fighting has not been LOUD displays (as my husband and I are sometimes guilty of - even in front of our children), but there is such a ring of truth to the adage that actions speak louder than words.



I think there are many parts of the problem including: stagnation (life can get into a rut sometimes) and intellectual boredom (concentrating on building a business is intellectually draining) and all the upheaval that has been in their living/renovation situation. Theirs is obviously a house divided - the outcome for now is two home offices and two individual bathrooms.



Now how do I support them both (they are both individuals going through this situation) knowing what I know, and being ethically torn. Plus wanting the situation to be the best for all involved?

And to make matters worse, my husband and I are not 100% on the same page - if we were taking sides in this matter which we are not cause it's not our concern. But it did make for interesting adult conversation (imagine that!).
Maybe it's because I am still torn about how I feel and who is being wronged in the situation.
But I try to remind myself that I cannot judge because I have not walked a mile in their shoes.
I only know what they choose to presentto me [or withhold] (and maybe just a little more because I have some empathy and life experience under my belt)

What a week

Drama, Drama and more drama - just the way we like it!

and if we can get through this sefirat haomer without killing each other or fighting daily it would be a miracle.

April 15 - other wise known in America as Tax Day. We had all kinds of issues surrounding this - namely that after more than a year of cajoling, or nagging as it is called in the vernacular, we still got hit with the wrong kind of tax form and actually owed uncle sam $$$ this year - which is an unfortunate variation from our previous years.

(sorry to my kids' uncle sam-I didn't mean you-we're square!)

The day my dad and I were set to crunch the numbers, we almost burned the house down.

I won't name names, but a male member of my immediate family was kicking a soccer ball around in the back yard at Bubbe and Purpaw's house. Purpaw had already finished relaxing at the picnic table with his "stinky stick" (cigar for those not in the know and bigger than 3 years old) and brought in is computer and headphones for the evening. All of a sudden, the lights dimmed, there was a loud crashing sound outside, sparking ensued and there was also the sound of buzzing electricity.

The soccer ball had been launched precisely at the corner of the patio and the house where the drop-feed from the electricity pole fed the electricity into the house. Granted the wires were old and droopy lately - meaning they were low enough that my dad could reach them easily to disengage the sparking with a broomstick - which I don't ever recall being the case, even in recent memory. And this is a particularly vulnerable area since we remember a lightning strike happened exactly in the same spot, causing even more damage since there was a blue glow in the kitchen for awhile after that and the microwave was deemed the only casualty.

At least our electricity situation doesn't look like this :)

I went stumbling through the laundry room in all my largess to trip all the circuit breakers, to really stop the electricity from causing any further damage. Good thing I made my dad check it out because I had missed a few in the dark ;)

This incident was exciting enough to scare my usually unflappable daughter into hysterics and spooked my son pretty bad. Though they didn't relate the incredulous story to friends or teachers at school like I thought they might.
We did sit them down to explain everything in terms they could understand This after Puraw had called the city hotline to get the number for the electric company [my idea since all his bills were online with no way to access them] and generally calmed the ensuing hysteria down. and we had to make sure we didn't lay blame - because accidents happen, and all turned out fine (other than a few hours waiting on the elec comp to remedy the situation-which they did relatively speedily)

Then of course, the whole stress of the taxes made my husband crazy. He got the wrong kind of form - not his fault - even though I nagged him for over a year to make sure he had the right one. Then we found out that he wanted to have my dad crunch his numbers NOW (with no though as to what Purpaw was doing that night) so as to get the figure that he owed - as a result of getting the wrong form - back to his boss to prove why he wanted the other form. Then in yet another mistake that'll cost me, he took it upon himself to break it down for the boss, rather than just let the numbers speak for themselves.


The following day, I got an earful from my dad, at work, while all my co-workers could hear me, fighting over this with him (I didn't have a chance to shut my door, not that it would have helped much anyway)




It didn't matter to my dad that I wasn't the one to create any part of this problem, nor was the anger I got the brunt of directed at me for that matter, but it did raise my blood pressure and generally piss me off. And I made sure to tell that to my dad in no uncertain terms, as well as to make sure he was to take up the matter with the one he actually had an issue with. I think me telling him that this fight was accomplishing nothing other than to raise both his and my blood pressure is the part that finally got through to him and got him off the phone with me, hopefully to make the subsequent call to my husband (who later told me that my dad was nothing but nice to him that day. Yeah, sure - he had already got out all his yelling out of his system - at me!)


In fact, it raised MY blood pressure so much so that a full two hours later when I had a headache (which I didn't have at the time) and decided to check my pressure (in the Safety Director's office on my floor, after just about everyone else had already left) my pressure was still elevated to 171/96 [don't tell my dr, she'll put me on bed rest for sure]

Gas Mask Distribution

Looks like it's that time again:
IDF expands distribution of gas masks
Does the IDF know something we don't know?

The very next article I read was this:
Gas mask distribution unrelated to security situation

And truthfully, I think I agree with one of the commenters who noted that the gas mask is more of a PR ploy - into convincing J.Q. Public that they have some concrete action they can take to protect themselves in an otherwise pretty hopeless situation.

Staggering Dreams

That should be the title to a song!
But for me - it is just my reaction to my over active and over taxed mind, trying to sort out the difficulties and experiences I am having in the waking world.

Work issues AGAIN!
But this time they pervaded my subconscious mind. I woke up unsettled from my dream world for many reasons not least of which - I acted strangely out of character from my awake-self personality in more than one part of the dream.
Here’s the back story:
My current boss’s boss [I’ll refer to him as G] got himself arrested and in a heap of trouble by making poor choices in his personal life. Which I have mentioned previously on this blog. My current boss [R] – loyal perhaps to a fault, helped out this guy on the down-low: no one was really supposed to know that he spent hours at the bail bondsman and trying to spring G from the pokey.

This week R springs the news that he is resigning from his current position and taking a new job, much closer to home, with some of his dad’s cronies. It may or may not be relevant to the issue that he got our company through a very low spot when we were surely facing bankruptcy, and he managed to keep all our creditors at bay, although that was WAY outside the scope of his job description. It was possibly more along the lines of what his boss G should have been doing, instead of making poor choices in his personal life that bled over into his professional life and dramatically led to his eventual demise.
I’ll admit R wasn’t perfect [his Jew jokes were wearing thin and starting to irritate me for one thing], but he was fun to work for and flexible about most things, including letting me learn some new skills when the need arose.

Having gotten used to the idea that R was leaving, I went in to visit with his contemporary [wB] about some other work related issue. Over the course of this week we got to talking and he revealed that it is almost certain that he will be moving up the ladder – not to R’s previous level, but in a way that includes that I will be reporting to him and that we will be adding another girl to our dept to learn the ropes for when all our babies are hatched this summer. We also got chatting about all the people that have left our ranks (voluntarily or not) and what has become of them. He cited his dismay at one of our colleagues [B] that was one of the casualties of our “slow down” and has the distinction of being "the one that was sacrificially let go" from our dept. But in the next breath wB reminded me that B “landed well” as he "kinda keeps tabs on him" through a salesman that makes calls on both companies.

And in a different vein altogether, my past musician lifetime came back for a visit. It wasn’t entirely bad - it reminded me that I used to have a hobby [I think I always knew I wouldn’t make a grand living at it, I only had a lukewarm passion for it even at the peak of my “career” – sorry daddy] – and that it is sometimes a definite missing aspect from my life.
The younger brother of a friend of mine that was in the same grade as me and went to all of the schools I did, was recently in a contest through Crate and Barrel for an Ultimate Wedding Giveaway. He is a very talented musician out of Portland or Seattle and his fiancé was diagnosed with a rare cancer recently. With their wedding plans on hold, they signed up as a lark to take some of the pressure off. I was bombarded with reminders sometimes 2 and 3 times a day to visit the site and vote for them. And at one point I even felt compelled to publicize their story on my personal newsfeed.

Just a little reminder to those still reading: Happy Passover. I debated calling my learning partner to see how she is doing with all her family in for the holiday and thought that I might do better to leave her alone until they all leave.


So now onto the dream:
The setting is a one-room school house. I am clearly agitated but don’t know about what.
Then arrives a moustached man (whom I later identified as wB while discussing the dream with a close friend at work) There is no one else around but I begin physically beating this man up. He is obviously taller and larger than me, but he stands there and takes the pounding I am giving him without flinching or really holding me off. He does not cover any of the areas I am attacking or attempt to defend himself in any discernible way.
Once I have used up all my energy on this attack, "classmates" start to appear and "the teacher" - my learning partner - keeps them away from me. The moustached man has gone to tend to his bruises - I never really saw any blood and he was still standing and walking after my beating. Another gentleman swoops in to console me for what I did. He does not speak at all, only lets me collapse against him and shelters the rest of the "classmates" from seeing my shame and agitation. Never mind that "the moustached one" let me get away with it and that the "teacher" went on to sheperd the other students to a different place in the building and tried to get on with things as if nothing happened - giving the impression that things were well handled by "consoling man" and that she would check on things when she was more able to do so.

(I identified the consoling one as B at the same time I realized the moustached man was wB and also that this was my subconscious attempt to come to terms with the work-related "adjustments". One of the topics wB and I discussed that day was the fate of some of our former colleagues and specifically B which is why he was on my mind)

Same day, Act II:
The dream continues in a different setting altogether.
I am on stage in an orchestra setting and still upset over letting myself lose control and physically attack another person. (The other players are really irrelevant other than that there were there. I was aware that the red-headed boy, who I was always in school with-and not his younger brother, the afore-mentioned contestant with his fiancé in the wedding contest- was at the front of the viola section and I was somewhere in middle to the back of the section)
Towards the end of the rehearsal, or the movement, or the piece, I hurriedly walk off stage and am distraught, but not inconsolable, crying in the wings of the backstage area. It was not completely clear if it was a performance or a rehearsal. And the other musicians follow me offstage very soon after, but I could not get off the stage fast enough and even caused a bit of a ruckus in my leaving. It was VERY unlike me in any performance or rehearsal situation I can remember during my actual time as a musician. So that whole bit about me losing my composure in a different kind of "professional" [although a lifetime ago, as a professional-quality student musician] setting in itself was a bit disconcerting as well.

So there you have it - outside influences again pervade my subconscious self.
And my husband and kids who are so much a part of my waking and home life, but completely removed from my work persona are noticeably absent from these dreams.
Do I deliberately compartmentalize all the pieces of my life and is it so blatantly apparent to everyone else too? I wonder...
Thoughts and comments are appreciated but I won't claim to agree with them all outright.