Swimming, Women's day and currencies

Spring is here and I renew my flirtation with the swimming pool. I did not step into it during our last, unusually cold winter: it's not that the pool is not heated, it is very well heated, but getting out of it, and running to the shower, I always shiver so badly that the short swim is hardly worth it. So no pool until now that spring is here. I sat a bit with our lifeguard. He is a big man, and wears his trunks and T-shirt all throughout the year, December as well as August. Incidentally, I have never seen him in the pool, I've never even seen him slightly wet. So we talked a bit.

"Listen, Yoram" I told him, "you know that I am really not a good swimmer. There was that swimming instructor who watched me once and said: Lady you can't sink - but you can't swim either!

So my question is what happens if I feel that I am drowning? Will you jump in and save me?"

Birthday wishes

A few years ago I decided that from then on I am going to ignore my birthdays! Who needs all those changes in figures every year? You hardly get used to two digits when suddenly one or two new ones come up! It's really disconcerting! Trouble is that children, family and friends won't let you forget! They exclaim enthusiastically: "It's your birthday today, how wonderful!" Big deal! What's so wonderful about it? 

Truth is that if they would forget, I would sit there in a corner completely miserable and say to myself: "So that's it, nobody remembers, no one loves me anymore!" But as it is now, everybody seems to celebrate that I am getting older! I get one party here at the Towers together with all those who were so lucky to be born in February, I get another party together with Hanni another fish, I get invited for dinners, lunches with complete disregard that this may cost me an additional 30 minutes on the treadmill, I get a whole flower field from my son and daughter-in-law in Germany, and my daughter sends me something from San Diego because of course I have nothing to wear!

Doughnuts and music

Sometimes a dream doesn't know which road to take and then I wake up.

Like last night. I dreamt that I sat alone at a small table and listened to an orchestra when the band leader stepped forward. He was a very young man whom I did not know. He looked at me and said: "The next song I am going to dedicate to you!"

And that's when I woke up. Darn it, now I would never know which song he wanted to dedicate to me, would it be a new one, an old one, romantic, sentimental, maybe Schubert's Serenade, or  even modern and so terrible hip-hop which I hate, or what? Why can't a dream finish itself and not leave me hanging? It's just as if the dream itself doesn't know where and how to continue, so it solves the problem by waking me up.

It's Hanukka week, our lovely holiday of the miracle, the lights and the doughnuts. I really don't mind the miracle and the lights, but I definitely mind the doughnuts. Wherever I go, whatever I look at ? it's doughnuts and again doughnuts. Is this God's way of challenging His chosen people's willpower?

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