Everywhere We Go, I Want to Live There

Everywhere we go, I want to live there. Especially Jerusalem. Especially New Orleans. Especially Austin. More or less I seem to be interested in living in the most holy and most decadent locations we've visited.

The reason I didn't have internet last week was because we were in Israel. Israel actually DOES have internet. I just didn't have any internet, personally.

I totally overwhelmed myself with the number of pictures I took so I'm starting with our arrival and the first half of our first day.

In Israel, even the airport is pretty:


A random burnt up bus. I don't know why.


The Western Wall:




The-Guy took these two, me and a running little girl:




The Western Wall from above:

AND from below! We took a tour in tunnels underneath. If you ever get to go to Jerusalem the underground tour is GREAT!

Up in the left hand corner the papers in the little square inset thing are people's prayers. That's my sweet pea holding up the camera. Of course!




The kids in the tunnel. They're still all happy with each other, because they haven't had to sleep together in a hotel room for a week yet:


Here's the part that the tour guide says is the very closest you can get to the holiest place on earth. She said that the women there aren't really supposed to be praying when there's a tour but that in Israel you can't tell people what to do.

The woman in the ponytail looks all pious, but notice the camera. She's actually on the tour with us:

More to come when I get my act together!

So Naturally My Only Choice Seems to be to Move to England

I have to move to England soon, because my taxes were an absolute nightmare.

DJ Kirkby said that she USED to file taxes in Canada, but now that she lives in England, she doens't have to. So England it is. Besides, my Sweet Pea wants to be surrounded by English accents, so it all works out for the best.

The complexity of my taxes wasn't helped any by the fact that when I opened up ANY and EVERY pdf, the only thing that would display was this picture of me sitting by the side of the road when my car broke down awhile back:

The Guy fixed adobe for me though (and my car). So now if I try and open up a pdf, it still shows this picture. But if I make a bunch of unhappy noises and then reload, it magically magically shows me the pdf.

I don't have too many more pictures this week, except this somewhat overzealous seeming ad:

If all goes as planned, you will be able to read this and I won't. I'd say why, but that would ruin the mystery and stuff. It mostly has to do with the not-having-internet-thing that I mentioned in my last post. I will read everything soon, when I am reunited with internet!

Happy Passover!

I don't really have internet right now, so I'm just republishing the Passover story as told by my Sweet Pea when she was three:

The king was very bad. He wanted to take away all the baby boys. But baby Moses’s mommy didn’t want him to be taken away. She put him in a basket and took him to an ocean and put him in. Another person found him.

Then the burning plant was God. God told Moses, “Here. Have a stick.”

Happy Passover - I will be making a real-ish post soon!

Gambling Losses is My Favorite Income Tax Question. If you can have a favorite income tax question.

I said last week that I didn't see any silly signs. But I forgot that I saw a guy wheeling a toilet down the road:



I don't know why.

I also saw three different toilets lining the street outside my kids' school, but My Sweet Pea asked me not to take a picture for fear of embarrassment. For whatever reason I heeded her pleas. This time.

This guy visited our back yard:



The-Guy's roses are going crazy. I actually took this picture last month, but for some reason I only got it as far as flickr and not this blog:



This weekend I've been trying to figure out the great mystery of income taxes. The main thing I've learned is that despite my fascination with trains, I'm really, really happy that I don't work on the railroad.

That's because there seem to be about five or six questions about railroad income on each form. So every time I see that question, I celebrate. Yay! Another question I KNOW I got right! I like the fishing tax form and the gambling income questions too. I always know for certain I don't have those.

So that's about my week - I've moved on from typing papers to trying to figure out taxes. Time's a ticking.

So What if It Smells like Dead Fish and the Sand is Brownish?

I don't have all that much to say except I spent an entire weekend without writing a paper or doing a project, and I'm incredibly happy about that. I didn't even take pictures of silly signs. But I did go to Galveston.

I know no one calls Galveston "beautiful." It doesn't have the bluest water or the pretty kind of sand. But when I close my eyes the waves sound just exactly the same.











And also, the mystery of starting with pee was solved in the comments of the last post. The martial arts place actually aksed the students to start with SPEED, but they made the mistake of starting with dry erase.

Have a good week everyone!