Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Aish Heroes of Israel/Zichron Yaakov

Aish.com has a 1 minute video series called Heroes of Israel. I highly recommend watching! These videos are beautiful and inspirational... and TRUE, which is always nice :)

Home again sick. Back to the blog and the internet...

It's been bothering me that I wasn't able to put together my dreams of living on a coast in a home with big windows in a place with good weather with my dream if living in Israel. I know this is a beautiful country, so it bothered me that when I wanted a visual home-in-ten-years fantasy, I always had to turn to American shorelines.

Thank you, Nefesh b'Nefesh. Their communities page helped me brainstorm and come up with a new home fantasy. Today I fell in love with Zichron Yaakov. It actually reminds me a lot of Sarasota, just in the right country. The houses are beautiful, and, because they're not in Jerusalem, not quite as expensive as I would have thought. It was exactly the boost I needed to re-focus on a long-term goal of coming back here to stay.

Some of the images I liked:


Monday, June 1, 2009

We can paint the walls!!!

This changes everything...
Our landlord sounds really nice. And she is easily accessible over email. What a nice change!

Rabbi Royale Schonbrun


By the way, check out this book! I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to proofread it and it is being gobbled up everywhere! It was so cool to be in Manny's yesterday (popular Jerusalem bookshop) and see it not just in the store, but displayed in three different parts of the store! Even cooler was seeing three of my friends buy a copy :)

One week to go...

One week (minus one day) left in Eretz Yisrael
Three weeks (minus one day) until my WEDDING!!!
And, of course, I wake up sick as a dog today.

Guess that means it's time to update my blog.

So. We have pictures of our apartment in Passaic, NJ. (See the new design? That picture up top is the Veterans Memorial Park in Passaic, a few blocks away from our apartment! I love it.) It's a nice apartment, but very very basic, and it's going to need some major decorating to suit us for a year. I really want this to be a nice place for us to live.

Here are the pictures we have so far:


The kitchen:





















The living room and front entryway...





















The bedroom (hard to tell apart from the living room in the pictures because they look exactly the same to me. I think the living room just has one window opposite the front entry but the bedroom has two.













And our bathroom (which I happen to think is pretty adorable already.)














Challenge #1 is going to be the catbox. First, we're just going to have to be cleaning it all the time because I refuse to have a gnarly smelling home. I'm also gonna have to vacuum a lot. (Oh, that reminds me, I should register for a vacuum!) I guess I should just accept that up front. But kitty is worth it. So here are the options...

A. Shove it in the bathroom. I'm not crazy about this idea because first, I'm not sure there's space and second, we only have one bathroom so that means guests tripping all over it.

Or B., put it in a cupboard with a secret entrance and it'll be disguised. I think I'd do this in the front entryway so that it's not near food or dining things.

Here's the idea that basically I want:


Gorgeous design, handmade... with shipping, over $400. Just not going to happen. But maybe I can get a cheap Ikea cupboard and just cut in a catdoor? It needs to be big enough for the catbox in the picture because that's the kind I have. The magical automatic catbox :)













Here's another of their products, about $100 cheaper:












Omri's been buying some second-hand furniture and is right now on his way to Rochester to get all our STUFF which is really exciting. Plus we're getting his futon from college and probably some other stuff I just don't remember...

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