Sukkos (featuring the first appearance of "car, car, c-a-r"!)

It's been a very pleasant Sukkot holiday here.  It is delightfully easy to have our sukkah on our mirpesset, as this porch is right off our living room and near our kitchen.  No stairs, and no (potentially-muddy) backyard to walk through.  Since our entrance is a flight above street level, we also don't have to worry about having animals walking near our sukkah, like the time a skunk walked by when Shalom Shachne was sleeping in the sukkkah ;).  It's also lovely to be in a place with nice weather pretty much guaranteed--I took dining rooms chairs out because I didn't have to worry about them getting rained on.  On the other hand, it's still quite warm here and we had to get a fan (wow!) for our sukkah.

We've been in overdrive going places during chol hamoed.  That's literal because we bought a CAR!  I struggled with this decision ("It's like Woody Allen says--our feet will never touch pavement again"), but faced the reality that, with five of us now living at home, we can't all fit in one taxi to go anywhere.  Suddenly "let's go out to dinner Sunday night" became a whole balagan.  So we've added "Jazzy", a 2013 Honda Jazz Hybrid, to the family, and we've been racking up the kilometers on it since we bought her six days ago.

She sure was excited to drive down our street

We went on the Nefesh b'Nefesh trip which was to a nature reserve that had over twenty different types of sukkahs on display.  Some were halachically permitted, like the sukkah on a boat, or this one on top of a camel:

Others were not okay to use, but were interesting to see what they looked like in reality, like this "too tall" one:

And, best of all, we would have had to be at the community center at 8 a.m. to catch the NBN chartered bus, but, thanks to Jazzy, we were in no rush to get out of the house.

We managed to do relatively few things with all of us together, but *some* of us did things like: go to the Kotel, go bowling, go to the mall, visit our former neighbors Lori and Andy Shlomo, and, what every holiday needs: a visit to Ikea where I continue to be delighted in all the Jewish things in the store:

I couldn't figure out if it was just the frame for 49nis or if it included the bircas habaiyit home blessing

tables were set for Rosh Hashanah meals, including having a "machzor" out on each table (we checked inside and it was really a children's sports book written in Swedish with just a fake cover to look like a Rosh Hashanah prayer book)

the cool thing here is that there are two sinks in the model kitchen and they are labelled "meat" and "dairy"

Ilana and I went to the big free concert that our city put on: Chanan ben Ari--awesome to see tons of people singing along to "HaChaim Shelanu Tutim" (although I'm not sure why our lives are like strawberries), and teen sensation Uziah Tzadok, although we left before the headliner, Yaakov Shwekey!).  Only about two weeks ago, it was unclear that the concert was even going to happen, and it was incredibly professional and well done.  It was also a really beautiful example of the types of people who live here--from extremely secular to extremely religious, all getting along together.  Plus they sold the largest cotton candy I've ever seen:

Israel gives up all pretense of fancy names like "candy floss" and just calls it "sugar" :) (and, no, she didn't eat it all but it definitely made for a good photo op while we were waiting between performers)