March 26, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-25

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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The package of salmon salad that I get for lunch is marked "Kosher for Passover." Purim is over. The great spring-cleaning toward our next holiday has begun.

At least Purim is over in most places. It's still happening in our capital. For some reason, it happens a day later in walled cities. The fight supposedly went on for a day longer in the capital city of Persia, where the story took place. Except pretty much everyone agrees that the story is fiction.

In the capital, they're having an Adloyada parade for the first time in years, for sort of the same reasons that my city didn't.¹ Go figure.

It's quieter than the parades in other cities in other years. There's a focus on families of the hostages. And, of course, someone has protested the parade and tried to block it.

Things are back to normal at work. Almost everyone is in the office. We have enough men for the afternoon prayers. My boss wears the goofy headdress from his Purim costume. I manage to get some work done. Life goes on.

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Just about the only good news today is that train service will be expanding for the summer, with more frequent runs from here to and from the north.² Maybe I'll take some more rides, just for fun. I have no immediate urge to go anywhere that the trains go. I just like riding them.

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The local news site has crowdsourced the identification of a handsome bird spotted in our city park.³ It turns out that it's a white-breasted kingfisher.⁴ I had mentioned them before in these posts, trying to figure out why a military unit was named for them. They're small, but mighty hunters.

That reminds me that I need a good way to search the ongoing posts. I'm working on it.

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My family points me to a good page on the cost of living here.⁵ For comparison, figure that our unit of currency, the shekel, is worth about an American quarter. I have little idea what prices are like in the States anymore.

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The bitter orange that dropped onto the grate near my front door last week is rotting gracefully. White filigree is gradually masking the brighter peel. Yesterday, two slugs were crawling on it. Now, a community of them has gathered on and around it. I know snails like oranges. So might their unshelled brethren. Bon appétit.

I get an urgent WhatsApp message to come to a protest late in the evening. It's a few blocks from me. Apparently someone from the government will be near there. They want to surprise him. I'm not sure what this group is protesting anymore. I stay home.

I spend the evening trying to set up a home media server. The software supposedly runs beautifully on this hardware -- except for the one model that I have gotten. Fortunately, close to midnight, I find detailed instructions online by the software maker's top support person. For this, too, we give thanks.

Once it's set up, I watch the main page get populated with the items in my library. Movie posters and album covers shuttle back and forth on my screen. It should be done by morning. Watching it lulls me to sleep.

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Here’s an archive of past newsletters.

You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me at that Las Vegas address, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)

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L'hitraot.