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.

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 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.

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 the following Friday morning, I took a break between my shifts at work to have breakfast with my friend Alex Margolin. Since I last saw him (almost a year ago), he had gotten engaged to a British comedienne, and I wanted to hear whatever I could about her. But I made the mistake of letting slip that I had my own news to share, so I only got the basic details before Alex's curiousity got the better of me. I keep expecting people to at least blink in surprise when I tell them that I'm gay, but I should know better than that when talking to someone who lived so may years in LA. Alex had plenty to ask me about the topic, though, having never been much involved with the issue in the Jewish world before. It was a good experience for me to explain in person the position at which I've arrived. The thorny question to debate was whether and how to tell our mutual friend, Dov, about me being gay. I was going to be eating Shabbos lunch at Dov's house the next day, and I wanted to figure what I was going to say, if anything. The big deal is that Dov is probably the most Charedi friend that I have. Unlike all the people I'd come out to so far (excepting my mother), he's not virtually guaranteed to accept my decision to seek my bashert from among the menfolk.

I just got back to Tzfat late last night. I've been busy all day working and arranging for work coverage for the next couple days, so it looks like I'll have to wait until after Rosh Hashana to finish writing about the rest of my recent adventures in the Jerusalem area. Until then, have a sweet and happy new year! G'mar chasima tova!