For Shabbos, I'd invited my friends Avicom and Yael to dinner to welcome them to town. They just moved in this past week or so to do a few semesters of school at Tzfat's little branch of Bar Ilan University. I wouldn't have even known they were in town except that I'd bumped into them on Tuesday night on the way to the bus station. The early onset of Shabbos was again highly unappreciated as I rushed on Friday to get all the shopping and cooking and cleaning done. Fortunately, the spaghetti and meat sauce were finished just in the nick of time. Avicom and Yael also brought along Amir, who was staying with them for Shabbos, and whom I'd first met when Avicom spirited Justin away to Tzfat for the weekend before Justin's wedding. The honey-flavored distilled wine they contributed to the meal was fully appreciated. I wanted to see Avicom and Yael's new apartment, so I walked them home after dinner. I knew they lived way on the other side of town, but I hadn't even realized that Tzfat extended quite so far east. This neighborhood was obviously not built more than a few years ago, and it's got some very nice houses in a variety of styles along its suburban streets. As I'd been warned, the apartment's bathroom is bigger than my bedroom, and the spacious living room has a nice shiny marble floor on which you are not allowed to wear your shoes. After Yael plied me with tea and an invitation to spend the night, I couldn't find any pressing reason to walk home. So I stayed at their house for the rest of Shabbos. Yael gave me a biography on Albert Einstein to give me some needed practice with reading Hebrew, and I promised to tutor her in statistics. After Shabbos, Amir and Avicom and I took Amir's car down for a quick jaunt to Rosh Pina to see if there would be anything interesting to do. There wasn't, aside from a little window shopping and the decidedly mediocre cigars that Avicom and Amir bought and smoked.

I got back to Tzfat very late Wednesday night, but not too late to say good night to Seth and Rachel, who were still at my house but were leaving the next morning. On Thursday morning, I met up with the Laderman family and started them on a highly accelerated tour of the town before taking them to hike down in the wadi. I walked them through the Artists' Colony, past Becca and Avraham's house, and through the alley in the Old City that's filled with vendors of multifarious art objects. Sara Malka's eye was caught by the promise of weaving at the Canaan Gallery located just a little before my house, and so we stopped in to check out the looms. The kids, Efraim and Shoshanna, occupied themselves with ogling the nifty collection of elegant metalwork in the gallery while Jacob and Sara Malka talked shop with the weavers. I practiced my highly inept flirting skills on Uri (the sweet Israeli I'd gotten to know on Rosh Hashanna) who was working there.

Eventually, we got ourselves past the town and onto the hiking part of the visit. As we trooped down the hill, Jacob was impressed by the prodigious amount of fennel growing wild among the thorny brush. As we got toward the bottom of the hill and beginning of the descent into the wadi, we encountered some rocky terrain that was moderately difficult for Sara Malka to climb down, but she pressed on valiantly. I knew exactly what to expect, but it's difficult for me to remember that most people can't carelessly bounce down stony slopes the way I do. It didn't take long for me to be compared to a goat again. We passed a couple groups of chassidim hiking the trail from Meron to Tzfat before reaching the creek at which the wadi terminates, where we cooled our heels for a bit before turning back to return the way we came. But halfway up the wadi we realized that the parking permit the Ladermans had bought for the lot where they'd parked their rental car was expiring and so they were in danger of a fine or worse. To spare them such a fate, I volunteered to rush over there by way of the shortcuts I knew and renew their parking permit. The main shortcut consisted of scaling straight up the side of the ravine instead of following the gentler slope that the official trail followed. I foolishly wasted a lot of energy sprinting my way up out of the wadi, so I was quite overheated and out of breath by the time I made it to the car, but I was lucky enough to be able to buy a pouch of chocolate milk from a nearby grocery to refresh myself.

A cell phone call revealed that the family was still going to be a while before they got back to town, so I headed home and met them a little later at the Caanan Gallery where Sara Malka and Jacob were getting treated to a demonstration of how the looms were threaded with warps. As I had to get to work, I took made my farewells and let them enjoy the rest of the day on their own.

The night after the festival ended, I zipped away on a short trip to Jerusalem for Justin Alexander's surprise birthday party on Wednesday. Ironically enough, Seth was coming to Tzfat the same night with Rachel and the rest of her family, so we wound up trading apartments for the night. The birthday party was a success. There are even a few pictures, in which I look like a total dweeb. The original plan was to go to the paintball place at 3 o'clock, but they totally screwed us out of our reservation, so we got bumped to 5:30. We took advantage of the extra time to have a late lunch of hamburgers and gawking over each other's electronical gadgets. The paintball itself was okay despite several problems. When we first got there, we had to wait about a half hour for reasons that are still unclear to me. After we finally got our short training session and were suited up, we went out to play with big group of forty or fifty high school students. And that was when the problems really manifested.

The first drag on the fun was the lighting conditions. Night had fully fallen by the time we started playing, and the light on the paintball field consisted primarily of a huge lamp in the center which blinded you more than it illuminated anything for you, especially when viewed through the scratched up and fog-prone lens of the protective mask. The more serious obstacle was the group of high-school kids. They made a habit of snatching guns that didn't belong to the right person and of not acknowledging when they'd been hit. So many rounds of play had to be aborted because of their shenanigans they were finally kicked out completely by the referees, leaving our small birthday party group to play by ourselves, resulting in a great improvement.

Guy and Orna were the stars of the show. Guy apparently had a lot of experience paintballing back home in South Africa about ten years ago, and his skill hasn't quite faded as much as he professed. Orna did stunningly well for her first time ever at paintball, and she capped off the night by winning an elimination game by catching the wily Guy with her very last paintball just as he was about to close in on her. I didn't exhibit such spectacular skill, and I only came away with a single kill and a bright purple bruise on my left shoulder.

I eagerly look forward to trying paintball again, but at a different establishment and in the daylight. There are supposed to be paintball fields in Haifa and Kfar Saba that are worth checking out.

The festivity-filled month of Elul is just about over and the I'm happy to return to the normal, quiet routine. For the final holiday of Simchas Torah/Shmini Atzeres, I played host to Rachel's brother Daniel (visiting Israel with Rachel's parents for Sukkos) and his friend Aaron. After hours of gratuitous dancing in shul, we had dinner at Becca and Avraham's, where I got to catch up with Chana Golda, an old neighbor from Nachlaot. Lunch the next day was a quiet affair in my sukkah, just me and my houseguests. The earliness with which sunset had descended on Monday evening had me in a tizzy trying to get everything prepared and still squeeze in work, and in the frenzy I'd neglected to flip on the timer for the oven, so it was stuck on all night and all day, which meant that the chicken I'd made for lunch got quite overcooked. Thankfully, it managed to remain quite edible anyway. Lucky save. After spending most of the afternoon napping, I left my guests behind for a while to visit with Becca, and she let me borrow The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, which is an explanation of superstring theory for the layperson. I'll wait till I finish it before writing much more about it, but I'm enjoying it so far.

The holidays have felt like such a whirlwind, there seems to be so little time to write. I spent a very nice Rosh Hashanna at Becca and Avraham's, the highlight of which for me (besides playing with Ashira) was getting to know their friend Uri a bit better. Uri seems like a quiet, sensitive type to me, which is what I find absolutely lovable in a man. But while he's unmarried, I haven't much idea how to tell if he plays for my team (if you'll excuse my Sienfeld-ism). I've never been expert at subtle social maneuvers, and striking up a date with someone when you aren't certain whether their sexual orientation is compatible is one of the most tricky tasks I can think of. Perhaps it's just as well, since my limited Hebrew coupled with Uri's limited English would make for rather limited conversation.

Not much to say about Yom Kippur: mostly just spending all day in shul. The short time between Yom Kippur and Sukkos was a bit worrisome since I came down with some sort of 24-hour flu a couple days before the holiday. I was able to purchase a nifty sukkah kit at the hardware store before Yom Kippur and it was easy enough to assemble it after, but I could feel the illness encroaching beforehand and didn't feel up to any but the most basic Sukkos preparations. Fortunately, I was all better by the time the holiday arrived, and I spent the meals quietly studying a book on Aramaic grammar in my sukkah.

This past Shabbos, I had Friday-night dinner with Yoseph and Chava Saban, who had their customary assortment of random young men around the table. I was impressed by some of Yoseph's new art work. He does Hebrew calligraphy, and he has a habit of making little laminated cards with various mystical meditations printed on them. The stuff that was new to me tended to include an increased use of graphical elements other than letters, which I appreciated, and it also demonstrated his relatively recent use of the computer to assist in production, the effects of which I thought were pretty slick.

I spent Shabbos lunch with another couple I know, Shani and Sheva Chaya (whose last name I seem to have forgotten if I ever knew it: the circles I seem to run in can be very lackadaisical about keeping track of last names). Besides me, they hosted some old friends of theirs, a couple visiting from New York named Jamie and Rachel. I took the opportunity to pick Sheva Chaya's brain about glass-blowing, since I was impressed with the various glass pieces she had made which were lying about the house. After lunch, we left Shani at home with the kids and went for a walk around town. We found our way to the Metsuda, which is the old ruined fort at the peak of the mountain on which the town is built. It's been converted into a lovely park and provides a really expansive view of most of the Galilee area, especially lake Kinneret. The air was unusually clear today, so we could see really far. Quite fun.

Next week promises to be busy. There's of course the final holiday of the season, Simchas Torah, on Tuesday. And the day immediately afterward, I'm invited to celebrate a friend's birthday in the Jerusalem area with a rousing round of paintball. And the day immediately after that, I'm scheduled back in Tzfat for a date to welcome the Laderman family to Israel with a small hiking trip. Yes indeed, this is the same Ladermans that are famous all throughout Randallstown for their Biblical Animal Farm, which demonstrated first-hand all sorts of relevant ways that our common (and not-so-common) domesticated fauna friends apply to Torah practice.

And I guess that officially catches y'all up on the latest. Till next time.