I say goodbye

This will be my last post in this format. I need to think thoroughly what i want to focus my writing upon and to decide on some sort of message to deliver. the recent format of just telling small stories about my life seems very boring, at least in the way i currently write it. i know that i am my worst critic but if i don't like something that i do, i have to stop doing it. I'll try to figure out what i do want to write about and how. this is time consuming and requires a creative energy that for now i need to invest in my work and family. I'm not happy with the design of my blog as well so i will play with it for a while to see what suits me best.
so thanks my devoted readers and supporting followers. i hope to come back, maybe somewhere in October after the Jewish holidays.
Farewell and Bye-Bye

Happy Earth Day Everybody.

We celebrated Earth Day in Israel mostly in the dark, but I'll begin in the beginning. As a family we're trying to make our little efforts in help keeping this planet a pretty and hospitable place to us humans. Are efforts in green living are completely non-heroic and not dramatic I'm afraid, but we think that these are reasonable things that we can do. We recycle our plastics containers, glass bottles and paper. We changed many lamps in our house to fluorescent lights that are more economical, we planted trees in our back yard and on all our porches, and we try to sustain our back yard with the minimum possible amount of water and without chemicals. I'm afraid that I still use regular detergents when I wash the kids clothes, the environmental friendly washing powder is no match to the stains children under the age of 12 inflict on their clothes.
On the last week of April it was announced that Israel will celebrate Earth Hour, and some 15 cities will ask their citizens to turn off the lights for an hour, between 8 to 9PM, in order to reduce the amount of fossil fuel based energy consumed. We decided that we will make a nice family event of the occasion. At 8 PM of that evening, we turned off all the electricity in the house, including all the appliances that are usually in Stand-By mode. We lighted candles and the kids ate dinner by candle light.

When they finished eating, we sat on the sofa in the living room, with a head flash-light and read stories. It was very funny. The ambiance actually was very peaceful and quiet, as if turning off the power reduced the background noise, although we left the fridge turned on and humming the whole Earth hour. In our neighbourhood there were several other houses who turned off the lights but the majority of the people couldn't care less.

Of course we know that the effect of cutting our power for only an hour is ridiculous. We still use huge amounts of fossil fuel based energy every day. But it was fun to spend an hour with the kids in the magical light of candles and show them that once people lived like that, with no electricity. To me this hour demonstrated how very dependant we are in technology. After an hour and a half by candle light and a LED flash-light, I was happy to turn on the lights and computer.

Shutting mouths in the internet age?

Here is a link to a site that reveals all about the "National Security Threat" , hope the censorship won't block my site. Here in the media and papers they are not allowed to publish any word about it. this is infuriating. Does the military censorship thinks this is really a matter of national security? After it was published all over the world? Someone is there is power drunk.
read the link and judge:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07israel.html 

Back to blogging: My little organic garden

suprisingly i got busy. once i got back home from the course in Vienna, suddenly work begun piling up and there i was once again working, being a mom and going to sleep at 22:00 every night. so not much time was left for blogging. this left all my thousands of fans in tears, but now I'm back with this little post. i have much to say about the Jewish holiday of Passover (Pesach) and the Seder night that is a fertile ground for family drama or comedy (depends on your view of life). But since i have so much to say its totally incoherent, so i gave it up for now.
i want to write about my little project. My vegetable garden. this was part of our holiday activities since during the Pesach holidays we don't get out of the house. during this holiday every piece of national park, sea side or shopping mall in Israel is packed with families on vacation. since standing in lines and sitting in traffic jams with 3 impatient kids is not my cup of tea, Pesach is time for the indoors or rather for the backyard. this holiday we recruited the kids to work in the backyard and recover the lawn from the winter damages. The kids helped us to uproot weeds, scatter compost and plant  flowers beds. we have a very small backyard but we try to keep it nurtured. in our attempt to turn our home to an autarkic farm in the future we grow vines, olives and pomegranates. we try to make it our haven with lots of hammocks and rocking chairs and little places to hide and be surrounded by vegetation.

our house has also a huge porch that is connected to our bedroom. i know, it sounds great, and we had great plans for the place but somehow they always dissolved to neglect. the only thing that survived a year of not opening the door to the porch were our pear trees.

but i decided that this holiday we'll turn this unused plot to my own organic (no pesticides or herbicides) vegetable garden. working with mud and soil is great fun, (my two year old adores it) and i found that physical work in uprooting weeds and grooming trees is more relaxing then Yoga. the establishing of the "bedroom porch organic vegetable garden" was lots of fun to kids as well, we planted in 4 planters tomatoes, pumpkin, coriander, and eggplant.

 i think it's good to show the kids that food grows and comes from soil and mud and not from sterile supermarkets. the inspiration to my little project came from a book i recommend: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Now I'll need to be dedicated and hope that in a few months I'll eat my own grown tomatoes in the sandwich I'm taking to work. 

Fishing in Vienna (part I)

Well, it has been a while since I posted anything and my 2 whole followers are probably anxious to read about my new adventures. I went to Vienna for a lab workshop on fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) techniques in microbial ecology. The workshop was held in the University of Vienna and began early Monday morning, which meant that  i had to fly in the day before. i tried to minimize my stay because I didn't want to leave my kids for too long. So very early morning, on the last Sunday in February, i got on a plane to take me to Austria and my new adventures. The flight turned out to be quite interesting, I sat next to a real life model. She asked me to hold her hand during take-off because she's afraid of flights. she was really beautiful and skinny and wore no make-up which made it quite apparent that the perfect polished look we see in magazines is the result of heavy use of technology. Anyway, since i got to Vienna early Sunday morning  the hotel room wasn't ready yet, and i went to explore the city.

I actually got lost a bit although i had a map. i was a bit sleepy, as the flight was early morning. but i discovered the imperial part of Vienna with all the old palaces and museums.

Here is the Museum of Natural History. i will come back to it later.

And here is the entrance to the Hofburg Palace complex with the main square with all the statues.

The day i landed in Vienna the sun came out after a week of snow and all was covered with white, it was very pretty. The image of a winter in Europe i had in my mind. Coming from a hot and sweaty place like Israel the change in the weather was a blessed one. So i wondered around the city admiring the scenery and couldn't quite decide what i want to do. First i just wanted to have a look around and walk a while in the great sunny but frosty weather. Since it was Sunday, shops were closed but the cafes and restaurants were open. I'm embarrassed to admit that i went to eat a toast and coffee in Starbucks but i was a bit flight shocked and wanted to be on familiar grounds with access to free Internet.

This is the the part of the palace close to Starbucks.

During my haphazard walking i stumbled upon the site that impressed me the most: the archaeological remains of ancient Vienna, from as early as the  Roman period. This is a hole in the middle of the city, that shows what lies beneath modern day Vienna. How many layers the city has. Even though i come from Jerusalem, a city that has a history of 3000 years and an archaeological site in every corner, this hole in the ground that is a window to ancient times, was very impressive.

After my gourmet lunch i continued in the direction of the Albertina. on the way i encountered a bizarre site: camels in the centre of the city!

It turned out there was a filming crew in the place. There were cameras and lights and policemen that stopped traffic, quite cool actually, too bad it wasn't a film with any actor i know....

This is the palm house or green house of the Hofburg gardens, they now serve beer. I finally decided that i wanted to see the imperial quarters and the Sissi Museum. I've always liked lovely princesses stories and nice palaces. I took some pictures of the huge china collection the Royal family had. God, no wonder they built such grand palaces, they needed somewhere to store all this china...

After the royal tour, i went to see if my hotel room was ready. i went by foot and discovered very nice sites on the way back, like the city hall "Ratthouse" just a 5 minutes walk from the hotel.

The hotel room wasn't very big, but its was clean and warm and i had plenty of hot water in the shower.

I ended my first day in Vienna in a restaurant recommended by the hotel receptionist: "Selena". it was a 2 minutes walk from the hotel, which suited me very well because i was tired and all alone in a foreign city. it was quite an expensive restaurant but the food was great and i didn't feel mortified sitting and dining there by myself.

The chocolate cake i had for desert with a real edible gold leaf on top.

The rest of my adventures in my next post: Fishing in Vienna - the sequel.

"This means nothing to me, oh Vienna" or Pizza night!

I'm flying this morning to Vienna for a course in a specific method in molecular biology. The course is held in the University of Vienna and is 5 days long. Because it starts Monday morning, I'm arriving Sunday noon. So I'll be a week (!!!) away from home. I've never left the kids for such a long time. I'm really pleased that I was accepted to this workshop and that my boss agreed to fund the whole week, but I'm so apprehensive of leaving my kids for so long. Of course they are left with their dad, and grandparents, which will provide the best possible care.
Well, I'd like to confess: I am a control freak, and a perfectionist. Now if I was in a CFA (control freaks anonymous) meeting, all would have declared:" we love you Yael!" It's hard for me to let go and believe they'll manage without me, (although they will, and brilliantly). On top of that there is the guilt that always accompanies me because I'm a working mom. There's always this little voice of the guiltiness demon:" you don't spend enough time with the kids", "they'll grow up to be miserable sods", "and you don't deserve to have fun, ever" etc. I know that its complete rubbish, I work very hard in both my full time jobs but it's always there.

In order to reduce the guilt trip and feel more like a good mom and a domestic goddess I decided to bake the family a homemade pizza. In my personal explorations these past months I've been to a baking class with my best friend Sarah and we learned to bake pizza among other types of bread. I even got a pizza stone for Valentine from my dear husband.

So, Friday morning began with shopping for cheeses, flour and toppings for the pizza like mushrooms. I cooked the tomatoes' sauce myself! It took 1kg of fresh tomatoes with sautéed onion and garlic. After almost 2 hours of cooking I mashed the sauce and passed it through a sieve to get rid of all the seeds. It tastes great.

Then I moved to the dough. According to the recipe we got in the course, I used my lovely Kitchen Aid and eventually before I put it to leaven, I pinched a piece and stretch it in order to see the gluten network so necessary for good dough. We bought ready-made gluten-free pizza base for my celiac afflicted daughter.

After the first leavening I cut the dough in 8 pieces for pizzas and focaccias, and left it for a few more hours during which we roasted bell peppers in the oven, cut mushrooms and sliced mozzarella cheese.
When all was ready, we just assembled the pizzas, with the home made sauce and each one putting on top his favourite foodstuff.

It was a great family fun, and I'm leaving the gang with some good and tasteful memories. Now I'll finish packing and hope I'll have some great time in spite of the guilt demon. i'll try to keep a Viennese blog and add my lousy pictures of the tourist attraction in the city and maybe some photos of food.

I saying goodnight with that song by Ultravox, oh Vienna…

Science project

Sometimes I think I'm doing a good job. Most of the time I have a horrible sense of incompetence: not a good enough scientist, not a good mom, a lousy housewife, etc. BUT there are good days that I feel on top of the world, and wonder where the hell the truck with the medals is?
Yesterday was one of these days. Not only was I efficient at work but I got home before 4 o'clock and all the kids were home early. I managed to help my middle daughter with the homework, have fun with my son and his new fire engine and even get the girls to play the piano, without threats or shouts. I felt like Gandhi. Then my friend Shiri called. There was a science project from school and our daughters were teamed together for it. I met Shiri 2 months after my eldest daughter was born, when I was on verge of complete collapse and post-natal depression. Meeting her in the neighborhood supermarket with her own 3 months old baby was the start of a long friendship where I give and get a lot of help and support. Our daughters are best friends since the cradle. Shiri is a creative person, that’s what she does for a living she's an interior decorator and it renders her as responsible for all sorts of school projects where I am the loyal side kick. Yesterday she bought 3 meters of pipe for the school science project: "the digestive tract". Of course the girls were supposed to do the project, but as I say, Shiri is a creative person. I was called in as the science expert (it's my unofficial role even though Shiri's dad is senior doctor). So Shiri drew this figure on a huge cardboard and using nylon stockings we created the liver, stomach and Shiri's masterpiece, the colon! Using a hot glue gun without any of us getting serious burns, we glued it all. Two women and six kids, all of them under twelve and we managed to create this marvelous model of the human digestive system. Isn't that being superwomen or what?
Here is the photo of the masterpiece, anatomically accurate people! Including the pancreas! It will be presented in the girls' school from Wednesday.

We got home, had dinner, showers, bed time story for the little guy and when my husband arrived at around 10pm, the house was asleep.