Of friendships and salad

I have to admit, being without a community here, and with Jonathan being gone most of the day, I’ve felt a bit lonely and out of sorts. But two wonderful things happened tonight that I want to share.

One, I got a phone call from Rebecca, my co-rabbinic student from Jerusalem who’s studying in LA. She was at a Temple Israel event! I talked to her, Rabbi Moskowitz, my mom, Chana, and felt SOOO much better afterwards, I can’t even tell you.

Two, Jonathan and I went to dinner tonight with one of his coworkers and his wife. They took us to a quaint little area with shops and restaurants, and then we browsed around. I feel like I got to know the city a bit more, as well as making new friends.

In other news, this week I met with the educator at the temple I’ll be working at, and I’m now sufficiently intimidated. I’ll be teaching 3rd grade on Sundays, about the 10 Commandments and prophets. On Tuesdays I’ll teach 4th/5th grade Hebrew. She wants regular lesson plans a week ahead of time, for both classes… yikes! I’m going to have to get a bit more organized.

Our duplex is now fully set up, and this past Friday was the first time in the history of my and Jonathan’s marriage that we got to have a full-on Shabbat with all the Jewish trappings. As in, I pulled out the white tablecloth we got at our wedding, covered the challah with the challah cover, laid out the kiddish cup and candlesticks, and actually made dinner. I’m sure all of you are just as shocked as Jonathan was.

(Okay, so to be totally completely honest, I prepared a salad for myself, and heated up frozen samosas with some rice and curry/chicken tikka masala leftovers for him, but it still worked.)

As you know I’m a big Israeli salad fan, but I went out on a limb and managed to recreate my favorite one that I ate in Greece:

It's a bed of lettuce with cucumber, yellow pepper, green onions, garlic cloves, kalamata olives, feta cheese, oregano, oil and balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. I was out of tomato, but added some cold chicken for protein.

I was able to make it so easily because of my new joy of a cutting board. It has this wire mesh basket on one end, so you can scrape cuttings to the basket and they don’t fall in the sink. It’s also a great space saver, because you chop over the sink itself and still have room on the counters to do other things.



Oh yes, and one more thing. Perhaps one of the contributing factors to my depression was the overwhelming heat. It is so hot and muggy here, worse than anything I've ever experienced at home. Our air conditioner broke, and only got fixed yesterday. But yesterday morning before the guy came was awful - it hit a muggy 90s. Both cats gave up laying on the rugs and wood floor in favor of the bathroom tile:


Osher got IN the bathtub later on… and meowed pitifully when I kicked him out to take a shower. He and Simcha kept poking their noses in past the curtain, and didn't seem to mind at all when they got wet. Apparently even cats have their heat limit!