Last weekend in Jerusalem

No real work stuff to report today. Amy and I went into the lab yesterday and had a mellow half-day working on prepping Maltese experiment design, in order to be ahead of any potential problems once we get to Malta next week. And last night was an extravagant and fun dinner at Ram's house - we made sushi all from scratch, and it turned out amazingly well. I am particularly proud that I managed to cook the sushi rice perfectly (in a regular pot, no rice cooker!). And Amy cooked up several stunningly good Chinese dishes.

I just came across an interesting article/commentary on Modern Hebrew (known to some as "Israeli"):

http://southjerusalem.com/2008/12/hebrew-as-she-is-spoke/

It's not by a linguist, but it's about a book by a linguist, and definitely is worth reading, even if the non-linguists express some scarily naive and prescriptivist views.

Since today is Friday, it's the weekend (in Israel, the weekend is Friday-Saturday, rather than Saturday-Sunday). I'm spending the morning drinking coffee and bumming around the internet with my laptop in a lively cafe, which is a really nice break from things like item selection and rogue sound files. Tonight, we're getting together with some good friends of my family for dinner, and tomorrow, if the weather cooperates, we'll spend the day at the dead sea. It's been decidedly wintry here - after two or so weeks of uncomfortably dry, sunny, warm weather, this week brought much colder temperatures and a fair amount of rain to Jerusalem. It's apparently rained significantly more in the rest of the country, causing flooding in places like Tel-Aviv. I had hoped for some snow in Jerusalem, but it just hasn't been cold enough. I think we'll get our fair share of real winter, though, when we head to Paris next week for the new year.

Wishing everyone a happy holiday!