Aaaaaaaaaaaalrighty then!

Ace: Ho ho ho Hooooooooooooo! Fiction can be fun, but I find the reference section a little more enlightening. For instance, if you were to look up the NFL's "All Time Bonehead Plays," you might read about a Miami Dolphin kicker named Ray Finkel who missed a 27-yeard field goal in the closing seconds of Super Bowl XVII. [takes deep breath] What you wouldn't read about was how Ray Finkel lost his mind was committed to a mental hospital only to escape and join the police force under the assumed identity of a missing hiker manipulating his way to the top in a diabolical scheme to get even with Dan Marino for whom he blamed the entire thing!

Ace: Why do you care about de dolphin? Do you know him? Does he call you at home? Do you have a dorsal fin? To train ze dolphin you must zink like ze dolphin! You must be getting inside ze dolphin's head und communicating. I am saying to Snowflake, "Kay kay kay kay?" und he is saying "Kay kay" und he is up on ze tail "Eeeeeeeeee!" und you can quote him!

Ace: If I'm not back in five minutes... just wait longer.

Yes, that is the immoral, sorry, immortal, "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective," which we watched last night. There is a rumbling about an Ace fan club, though the rumbling could be the echo of those potatoes we had for dinner. Seriously though (note: hard to make that kind of transition into "Ace Ventura"), Ace was phenomenal; my only regret is that I cannot recapture the facial expressions, gestures, and actions that are the other half of Jim Carrey's magnum opus.

I haven't written much for the last few days in terms of what I'm doing here, so here's some of the highlights:

We had that prayer service for rain I was talking about; before Ma'ariv on Tuesday, we said Psalms 63 and 76, and added other prayers as well. What we didn't read was the fine print: "Expect 3-5 days for delivery." On the "bright" side, it is getting colder, if that helps.

You can help too! Yes you, reader of the blog an ocean away, can aid the situation in rainless Ma'aleh Gilboa. How, you ask? Why, there are many ways! For instance, you can say the aforementioned Psalms while thinking about cucumbers (which, according to Tina Epstein, are 95% water). You can ship large buckets of water to Israel. Or, you can do as Choni HaMa'agal did. For those of you who don't remember, Choni lived in the time of a massive drought, so he drew a circle in the ground and stood inside of it, praying (and not leaving) until it finally rained. I don't know if you can pray for that long, or if you have the patience to stand for that long, or know how to draw a perfect circle (it's like a sea-bear circle; 3 points for naming an thing/action that annoys sea-bears). But you can place your finger on the screen, inside the circle, and pray for rain. Every prayer helps.

In other news, I missed my community service appointment on Wednesday. In an ironic twist, part of why I was late involves my creating an iTunes playlist on my computer for the busride to Gesher. Part of why I didn't make it is that the van left without me, which is in part because the only other Gesher kid, who usually calls me when the van leaves, didn't call me because he's in Jerusalem, which I didn't know at the time. No-one else on the bus seemed to notice either, because they left without me. I tried to call my family to tell them I wasn't going to make it, but the phone number by which I had contacted them before was "out of service." An hour later, I got an irate call from them, asking where I was. I tried to explain that their number was not in service, but they thought I was lying. So much for that.

Other small notes:
Last night, a cow was mooing. For the whole night. That's the first time I ever heard anything come out of the refet. Not tasted, nor smelled. Just heard.

I learned Rabin's other name. It is his last name, and I think it is Shushterry, or somthing like that. It's like learning Kramer's first name (Cosmo), just in reverse,

It's taken three and a half months, but I finally had a laundry mistake: I got an odd number of socks back. That's a-no good.

I apologize for writing that Norah Jones was a "black female jazz pianist." Though she is a female pianist, she only plays some jazz, and thus it is hard to classify her style. Plus, she isn't black. Sorry about that.

Finally,
Happy birthday to Leor M. Hackel, who just turned eighteen! Yes, he is the baby of the class, but what can you do? That beardlike thing is just so cute! So:
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to Leor,
Happy birthday to you!

Tomorrow, after nineteen long days, I get to get off this mountain! Out shabbat, here I come!