29 May

Another week came and went. The speed of the passage of time can be incredible. I'm not always sure where it goes. May has almost come and gone without my knowledge. It's getting very hot here and I know the worst is coming in September. That's nice.

I started to work in the conservation office on Friday. I plan to balance volunteering in the library with working in conservation - so far, the latter is more interesting, and because they revitalize library books with fresh binding and other treatments, I can be helping both departments at the same time. What the conservation office does is pretty amazing. They don't have any true conservators at the moment (for reasons unbeknownst to me), but they get along in terms of maintaining the artifacts (tablets, calligraphy, etc.) One of the workers in the office showed me a tablet that appeared to have a light brown background. Around the edges where the frame had been removed, it was a mossy green - so it was his job to restore the color in a facsimile. The writing on the tablet, though, he didn't dare mess with, because he can't read Arabic or Persian and so he would not know if he were blotting out a faded dot and thus changing the meaning, or something like that.

Anyway, it was my job to learn to do bookbinding. I liked it, though I made a minor mistake that ended up costing me an hour of labor - but it's ok, things happen. It's certainly painstaking, but once I know what I'm doing a little better, I think it'll be really fun. Eventually I'll have the skills and knowledge of the new tools I have available to bind my own books if I so choose, with my own materials, of course.

Outside of volunteering and inside my regular office, for the moment, I'm bored. I can tell that all members of my office are weary to varying degrees. I feel pretty tired and I know I don't have it the worst. We're all trying our best but maintaining enthusiasm over a desk-and-computer job, perhaps most of all in the hot spring/summer months, is not easy. It would be good to get out of Haifa for a while. However, this can be difficult because much of the country grinds to a halt from 2:00pm on Friday to Saturday evening. Even though I could leave Haifa on Friday afternoon and come back on Saturday evening every weekend, what would be the point if everything is closed? I don't know if I will ever get to know Tel Aviv (or most any other city) for this reason. To me, Tel Aviv (during the week) represents civilization as I know it - of course, Haifa is developed, but it has a penetrating dirty, old, and worn feel, unlike the relatively young country I grew up in.

Since I took over the brief visit desk, I've had a love-hate relationship with holy days. The last of holy day "season" (basically, the springtime) passed yesterday and I must say I'm not so unhappy that the next is in late August. Maybe I'll get some rest.

22 May

I wish I could accurately/adequately summarize the last three weeks, but I can't remember them. In my mind they are a blur of paperwork and unusual requests. Things have been really busy in the office lately as we are in transition - preparing to close out a position in the next couple of weeks. Finally I feel that we are beginning to adjust to it, and everything, as suspected and known, will be ok.

I've been trying to gather the individual initiative to work on a couple of art projects. One is a painting I mentioned a while ago. I have it sketched out and transferred the sketch to canvas paper, so it's all ready to print. My efforts at building up individual initiative have not succeeded thus far, so I tried group initiative. I called an artist friend and asked if she'd like to paint together. She agreed, but somehow we ended up going out to dinner with my flatmates and a visiting mother. Last night I tried again, and this time, I called two friends. Both agreed. All of us ended up going out for coffee with visitors instead. Back to individual initiative. If that doesn't work, back to the drawing board.

What I have been doing successfully is a great deal of reading. I'm devouring books as I haven't done since I was a little kid and reading was a new and awesome concept to me. As I practice reading in Spanish, it gets easier. And as I learn more about the Baha'i faith, I understand more of what I read about it.

Somehow the opportunities arose within the same week to start taking classes in Persian and a second level of Hebrew. I'm not going to pass up either opportunity though I do wonder how I'm going to get along studying two languages with different scripts (both different, of course, from English) three nights a week (2 Hebrew, 1 Persian). At least I know the alphabets of both scripts, though I can't sound them out fluidly quite yet because for heaven's sake, they're backwards.

I've been getting to know my new flatmates better and better over the past month and some odd days, and the situation is good. At this time I feel like my move up the mountain is a matter of having six of one and half a dozen of the other, but when I think of my new flatmates (and how nice it will be to have a five minute walk to work when it's 95 degrees Farenheit with 100% humidity), I'm happy, and it's all good.

One thing that really bothers me lately is being eight hours ahead of Wisconsin. This makes calling home near-impossible. I'm working on getting up early on Tuesday mornings, I promise.