I'm grateful for: being able to be a vegetable today; a long thick book to read; very enjoyable Dr. Who.

I'm cranky and tired. It's only 9:10pm. Might I go to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight? I hardly dare to hope.

Today was a quiet day. I mostly stayed in my room, getting some work done, did another psalm - I don't know that I'm actually learning them very well, but they are really good for my attitude. John and Havva worked on the cottage. Dogs got walked, housecleaning happened, but not by me. I did get a load of laundry into the washing machine, but then Zechy and Havva, and possibly John took over with getting things hung out, dried, folded, &tc.

I did get a fair amount of Passage by Connie Willis read. Zechy got paid for his first week's work. He's rich! :-) Lucky guy.

I finished downloading a couple of Star Trek shows for us to watch, but for one reason and another the disk didn't finish burning in time, so we watched the last three Dr. Who episodes we have. They were lots of fun. I cried a lot, and wrote emails to someone I sponsor and to Neil. I don't know why, I can only assume it's what I was supposed to do. *Sigh*

One bit of excitement happened when we got a phone call from a five-year-old who lives on the moshav. With his family obviously. His family is his mother, and two brothers one of whom lives in a residential program. It turns out the 5yo had come home from gan (like kindergarten) and his mother and brother weren't home. So he called to see if Simcha could come over. Simcha has babysat for him before, so that made some sense. John drove Simcha and Hans over, couldn't leave the little guy alone like that you know.

Only, when Simcha came home it turned out he had already been home alone for 1.5 hours! He hadn't phoned as soon as he got home and found himself alone, the poor guy had been alone all that time until he remembered our phone number. If that wasn't bad enough, when he mom came home her attitude was to turn to the 5yo and say somewhat incredulously (at least that is how Simcha reported it) "You weren't Scared?!?!" As if it were ridiculous and unthinkable.

Simcha was quite put out. She ranted apparently at Hans all the way home. Ranted at me a little.

The worst thing of all perhaps is that the mom has all of our phone numbers (house and cell), and could quite easily have phoned to say she wouldn't be home on time and could someone be there to meet him. We certainly could and would have done that. We held something of a family pow-wow about it. We all agreed that approaching the mom directly didn't seem either helpful or even possible.

Ideally we would have talked to her, certainly before starting anything. But having agreed we just didn't feel we could do this (is it reprehensible or judicious? I suppose I may never know) we kicked around the idea of talking to the rabbi vs. calling the moshav social worker. We would certainly prefer to talk to the rabbi before starting possible trouble with the social worker, but the woman doesn't feel that she is part of this community and is unlikely to listen to the rabbi. I will say about the rabbi, and about this community in general, that when presented with problems (the creep that bothered Havva for instance) they seem to be very good at facing and taking care of them.

So I am going to ask John to talk to the rabbi briefly, tomorrow, just to make sure that we aren't overstepping any bounds, but our intention is to phone the social worker on Sunday (the first day of the workweek here). We agreed Havva should talk to her, her Hebrew being the best.

It's all icky. I would so much rather not be reporting someone, but I also feel that someone has to look out for those kids. If they were going to be living here we could certainly keep an eye out, but they are planning on moving away, further south in the Negev, where who knows if anyone would even see them? Scary as it is it seems like the best thing to do.

It's scary because then what happens to us here in the community? I would hope that we would be understood to be looking out for the kids, but if we are taken for nosey interfering busybodies it would be so unpleasant. I mean, we are interfering. But we certainly didn't stick our noses into this thing, the 5yo phoned here. *Sigh*

So that was our excitement. Zechy read aloud from the current Wodehouse to Simcha and myself, and now I am just resting. I am so exhausted.

And, I miss my uncle. Even if I don't.

I'm listening to Bran Van 3000: Everywhere

:: Yesterdays : Tomorrows ::

~~~Last Five Entries~~~
Hi and goodbye - 2010-10-15
I'll be moving on - 2010-10-10
Gold membership and stuff - 2010-10-10
Decisions, decisions - 2010-10-07
Days to go - 2010-10-06