Judaism

MilSpouse Friday Fill-In #24

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What do you see your life like in 10 years?

It’s hard for me to imagine what my life will be like in ten days, much less ten years.  I suspect we will have at least one small human underfoot and I hope I will be as accomplished a private pilot as my husband is a naval aviator.

What do you like most about your job?

I am not currently employed, but my volunteer time with Civil Air Patrol is incredibly satisfying.  I have the opportunity to work with talented people dedicated to service, whether in the air, in ground search and rescue, in working with motivated cadets, or in promoting aerospace education.  I am proud to be counted among them, and I am blessed to count them among my friends.

What are three things you do every day, no matter what day it is?

This is harder than one might think.  I can’t even say I brush my teeth every day, as there are certain fast days on the Jewish calendar where not even a toothbrush is supposed to pass our lips.  (I promise I brush my teeth on the vast majority of days, though.)  About the only things I can claim to do every single day are:

  1. Blink
  2. Breathe
  3. pump Blood through my Body

Sorry; got a little hung up on the letter ‘B’ for some reason.

What would you do with an extra five hours in your day today?

Pray forgive my hopeless dullness, but I’d probably sleep.  An extra five hours of sleep without worry that the phone is going to ring with some crisis that just couldn’t wait until morning is precisely what my husband and I need in the midst of this stupidly busy time.

What is your favorite Christmas (or whichever holiday  you celebrate) cookie recipe (please share!)?

Despite the increasingly widespread availability of kitschy cookie cutters in the shape of dreidels, stars of David, menorahs, etc., Chanukah is not traditionally a cookie-making holiday.  I wouldn’t turn down a Chanukah-themed cookie — hell, I might make them with our kids someday — but cookies just don’t scream Festival of Lights to me.  Chanukah treats tend to be fried in oil, a nod to the story of the miracle of one day’s worth of oil for the Temple’s lamp lasting eight days.

I stretched my Chanukah celebration out one more day to make latkes for my Civil Air Patrol squadron’s holiday party/change of command.  Everyone appeared to like the delightfully crisp potato-and-onion pancakes, but I was shocked to learn how many people had never heard of them until that very evening.  Where I grew up, even the non-Jews at least knew what a latke was.  Guess we really are in the South.  As my husband so succinctly put it, “We grew up a lot closer to New York than they did to Fort Lauderdale.”

Are you a military spouse/fiancée/fiancé/girlfriend/boyfriend? Hie thee to ENS Wifey’s blog, snag the questions, and add yourself to the Mr. Linky for this week’s MilSpouse Friday Fill-In!

Time Passed, Seasons Changed

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…and I went for over three months without updating my blog.  So, uh, howdy there, readers.  (Do I still have any readers?  It’s difficult to read what hasn’t been written.)  I continue to draw breath, and I find myself capable of putting fingers to keyboard, even if it has tended to be in 140-character spurts over in the Twitterverse of late.  I return from my unplanned blogging hiatus with hopes of more regularly filling this space with vignettes from this Navy wife’s daily attempts to make it from Point A to Point B without crashing into anything in between (although I’ll grant you that documenting close encounters of the obstacle kind would at least make for more interesting reading).

The current obstacles I’m trying to dodge have much to do with upcoming holiday leave — or rather, the leave we sincerely hope we will have.  Precise details as to start date, duration, and how it will be split are still up in the air, which aggravates me no end because we are unable to start hashing out how we’re going to see everyone we need to see when all of those people have busy schedules that will not necessarily clear themselves just because my husband and I will be bestowing the glory of our presence on the environs.  We are extremely lucky that our families live close enough together that we don’t have to make a decision as to our travel destination — I feel for those of you with families in far-flung locations — but it still isn’t ever easy to cram maximum togetherness into an all-too-finite number of days.  I want to have as much warning as possible to start working the logistics, but I’ll be happy if what we get is at least a day’s notice to let my folks know to ready the guest bed.

Chanukkiyah

Tonight will be the fifth night of Chanukah, but this picture is from some past year's eighth night.

I’m getting exhausted just thinking about all of it.  I think I’m glad that Chanukah is so early this year.  Though my husband has been working full days (and then some, including this whole weekend), we are still able to light candles and enjoy a low-key, relaxing little bit of holiday glow.  We made my much clamored-after sweet potato latkes with goat cheese the other night, eating standing up in the kitchen with the sizzle of the oil a pleasant backdrop to laughter and conversation about life, the universe, and being Jewish in it.  I’m a little sad that we don’t get to light candles with family this year, but I truly treasure the little traditions we have made in nearly four years of marriage, just the two of us.

And then I think of the little traditions that will go unmarked next year, the holidays that will come and go while my husband is deployed in a part of the world where it’s not a great idea to advertise that one is Jewish.  It breaks my heart.  It reinforces how very lucky I am that in this country, in this time, I am able to identify myself as Jewish — to talk about our Chanukah celebrations with other squadron wives, to discuss plans for Passover, to explain that I don’t eat bacon because of my religion — largely without fear of negative repercussions for it.  Antisemitism does still slither in through the cracks even in this relatively enlightened age, as evidenced by vandalism against area synagogues in recent memory, so I am not wholly without concern.  But ninety-nine percent of the time?  If it comes up in conversation, I have no problem mentioning that I’m Jewish.  It’s not that way everywhere, and I’m thankful for the tolerance of the United States.

And if you made it through this meandering return-to-blogging post, I thank you for your tolerance.  😉

Shabbat Shalom

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Thanks to the MilSpouse Blog Hop, I have been having fun all day bouncing from one fount of fascinating new reading material to the next.  If I owe the pleasure of your blog-reading company to Wife on the Roller Coaster’s kind introduction, welcome once again and thank you for sticking around past my blog hop bio.  To those who have been reading all along, you already know I’m fond of you!  Or if you didn’t, you do now.

Though I have tried doggedly to stay caught up, the list of eighty-eight (at the time of this writing) participants is more than even this avid online content connoisseur can handle in one day.  If I haven’t yet made my way over to your blog, I will endeavor to do so over the next week.  Tonight and tomorrow until sundown, however, I will be taking a break from the blogosphere for Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath.  Some weeks I’m more successful than others, but every Friday night and Saturday, I try to unplug from the online world that can seem all-consuming during the week.  It’s nice to put down the computer and breathe for a day, and it’s also lovely to reconnect with everyone after Shabbat’s conclusion.

I just wanted to let you know that if you leave a comment or send me an email or follow me on Twitter or what-have-you sometime between this evening and tomorrow night, I will not respond right away.  I promise I’m not ignoring you.  I’ll get back to my bloggish obligations real soon.

Challah!

Nothing makes the house smell better than fresh-baked bread. Nothing in the world.

Right now, though, it’s time to light some candles, drink some wine, and enjoy some fresh, homemade challah.  Shabbat Shalom, everyone.  May you have a peaceful, restful weekend.

Ten Happy Things

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Happy 101 Award

I may go into sugar shock just looking at the wee cupcakes (or maybe I’ll be inspired to give into temptation and walk to the doughnut shop for something with sprinkles), but I still want to thank fellow Navy wife Mrs. Somarriba (of The Somarribas fame) for thinking of me when bestowing this sugary award.

As with most sweet things in life, there are still some rules attached:

  1. Thank the person you received the award from.
  2. Name 10 things that make you happy.
  3. Pass it on and contact the lucky winners!

Ten things that make me happy, huh?  Various and sundry things bring a smile to my face, and I find that being easily amused is a trait that leads to a more pleasant stroll through life.  Selected at random and in no particular order, my ten happy-making things of the day are:

  1. Cracking open a new book, especially if it’s hardcover.
  2. Baking bread, particularly challah for Shabbat.
  3. Hanging out with my younger brother, who is a pretty cool guy.
  4. Yummy-smelling handmade bar soaps, such as those here.
  5. Seeing my cats curled up on the chair next to me; bonus points if they’re entwined such that I can’t tell whose paws/tails/what-have-you are whose.
  6. Doing crosswords with my husband.
  7. Tea.  All kinds: white, green, black, spiced, herbal (yes, I know herbal “teas” aren’t actually Camellia sinensis and should rather be termed tisanes), you name it.  It’s a sad day when I can’t brew myself a cuppa.
  8. General aviation.  I love flying in small airplanes, and I look forward to proving myself competent to take the controls myself.
  9. Taking pictures at the local botanical garden.  No matter the season, there is always something to see.
  10. Building LEGO sets.  Who says you have to wait ’til you have kids to play with the cool toys again?

The eleventh thing that makes me happy is getting to chatter cheerfully with fellow MilSpouseBloggers such as the ladies linked to here.  I love reading your blogs and chatting with you on Twitter, and if you’re inclined to share ten things that bring a smile to your face, consider yourself invited to snag a little sugar for your blog and list away.

Cobwebs

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It’s been so long since I posted here that I feel like I should do the Internet equivalent of shaking out the rugs and dusting the furniture.  (I’ll avoid the vacuum metaphor lest it reinforce how badly I have sucked at being a regular MilSpouseBlogger.)  So, uh… hello.  Nice to type at you again.  Hope you had a nice Halloween, Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, Sukkot, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, and any other holiday that has passed since I managed to throw up an entry here in Nth-land.  Ours were fairly nice, on the whole.  We even built our own sukkah for the first time this year, as this was the first year we were in town to enjoy having our own yard in which to build the temporary hut for the Feast of Booths.  Our actual “dwelling” in the sukkah for meals was severely curtailed by the bumper crop of mosquitoes; we discovered that being a festive meal is much less joyful than eating a festive meal.  Still, we felt pretty accomplished just for building and decorating the structure, and we did manage to partake of a few tasty beverages within before getting too chewed on by bugs.

On the Navy side of the coin, things are still slo-o-ow on this journey to the first fleet squadron, wherever that might end up being.  However, there is evidence that the pace will be picking up considerably with the arrival of 2010, in the form of a mad dash to get my husband prepared for carrier qualification sometime in March.  Keep in mind that we arrived here in early May… of 2008.  That puts us at nearly a year and a half of being told that things are going to get moving any week now, so stay ready to pick up and move at any time.  On paper it looks like we’ve had a lot of free time, but the fact that my husband has still had to check the flight schedule every evening on the off chance that he might have an event the next day has put a damper on any number of things we might have liked to accomplish.  There are several home improvement projects that we put off starting lest we have to drop them in the middle when the flight training finally picked up.  We could each be well on our way to completing a graduate program.  I could have put more serious effort into looking for a job if I’d known to laugh in the face of the predicted six-month FRS timeframe.  Hell, we could have gotten me knocked up as soon as we moved into our house, experienced the whole pregnancy together, and spent the first seven months of our child’s life with hardly anything to distract our focus from the nugget — er, baby.

On second thought, scratch that last one.  Murphy’s Law would have ensured that the moment we saw the little plus sign on the pregnancy test, my husband would have been rocketed through the syllabus at record speed, sent immediately on his first det, and left me to move to California by myself just before giving birth.  I’m glad we opted for cats instead.

Don’t get me wrong — I love having my husband around so much on a day-to-day basis, but I think we’re both going to be relieved when he is finally able to dive into flying again.  There is very little sadder than a Naval Aviator who is not flying, and I can tell it’s getting to him.  It’s more than mere lack of flight time, though.  He has many friends from his graduating class at the Naval Academy (not in aviation, obviously) who have already completed their first sea tours and several deployments.  My husband wants to get to the point where he is truly serving rather than only training to do so.  I’m proud of him for it, and I understand, but I do feel the need to point out that there is little need to worry that the Navy won’t get its fair return (and then some) on the investment.  I am certain we’ll be looking back wistfully on this relative freedom soon enough, but we ought not let ourselves forget that too much “free time” ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.