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.

The rest of that Shabbos was pretty chill. Since Seth and Rachel were both out of town for Shabbos, I was responsible for taking care of Meeko, Rachel's month-old kitten over Shabbos. Since he's so young, he had to bottle-fed rather frequently. I managed to acquire a nastly back-ache while sleeping in Rachel's apartment, possibly because I was unconsciously stiff with caution against rolling over and squooshing little Meeko.

On Friday night, I went to Kol Rina in Nachlaot for davening and caught up with quite a few old faces there. Rabbi Leibowitz even roped me into being the shliach tzibbur for mincha, "for old time's sake". I had Friday night dinner with my friend Justin and his new wife, Orna, and I got to see their new home. They had tried to collect more guests for the meal, but since they had arranged the meal as a bit of a last-minute thing, everyone they'd invited wound up declining, so it was just the three of us and the cat wailing at the window because Orna had made the mistake of giving it food once.

The following week wasn't incredibly eventful. I got in touch with a few more friends here and there, and just generally attended to my normal work schedule and hung out around Seth's apartment and around town. I went out a few times with various combinations of Seth and Rachel.

On Tuesday night, Seth and I went to a soup bar with a very homey atmosphere that was hosting live jazz music that night. I got garlic soup and Seth got an omelet. The music was nice; mostly just instrumental performances with a guitar, drum, string bass, and a little saxophone. There was also a short set that featured a female singer who had a striking voice and obvious talent. Her Israeli accent was barely detectable as she sung lyrics in English. The notable flaw in her performance, though, was with her volume control, since her voice would frequently and unexpectedly drop to a level where it wasn't clearly audible over the instrumental accompaniment. Of course, it's difficult to compete with the loudness of drums and a sax in such a small space, and rationing your breath is one of the most difficult aspects of singing.

The most festive event of the week was on the bris on Wednesday morning for the new baby boy of Seth's good friends, Moshe and Tamar. Moshe and Tamar live in a tiny settlement on a hilltop in the West Bank, a bit less than an hour outside of Jerusalem. There were about thirty guests coming from the city, and we all travelled together in three hired taxi vans. The bris itself was a simple, homey affair that took place outside, under a tarp teeteringly tented up for shade, next to the tiny trailers that form the settlement. The rocky desert views from the hilltop were wonderful. The curvaceous shapes of the landscape in that area have always struck me as exceedingly sensuous.

For most of the week, I kept waiting for the night when Seth would have the opportunity to make the special dessert that he'd been planning for a while, but the restaurant never seemed to be able to acquire the necessary ginger ice cream. So on Thursday night, I decided to quit waiting and go have a real dinner at Seth's restaurant, special dessert or not. I persuaded Rachel to join me, and she brought along Adelia, whom I've mentioned before, and Sarah, whom I hadn't previously met. I got chicken livers in wine sauce, Rachel got grilled chicken, and the others got sweet potato soup. The bread on the side was really especially excellent, and we had to keep ourselves from filling up on it before the main courses arrived. I gathered that there was a dinner party scheduled later that night, but it was still pretty slow while we were dining, so Seth had opportunity to get out of the kitchen and hang with us a little. And even though Seth's new dessert creation couldn't make its debut, the ultra-gooey chocolate cake-in-a-cup was a more than welcome encore.

For the last Shabbos of my little two-week vacation, I went to the Schechtman family whom I knew from Nachlaot and who are now living in a tiny settlement just outside the small town of Kochav Hashachar in Judah. Their two sons, about 3 and 1 respectively, are just adorable. I had planned to catch the free bus back to Jerusalem after Shabbos, but since I managed to miss it, I stayed one more night and we watched the relatively recent movie production of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and I appropriately hitchhiked back to Jerusalem the next morning. The following Sunday was just spent working and packing up to return to Tzfat in the evening. After wishing warm good-bye to Seth, I took a very crowded bus back north and got back to home sweet home just in time for Rosh Hashanna.