So I am applying for a new job. If it works out, lots more fun and interesting updates will flow forth like milk and honey...if not, I'll be updating this when there is news that is actually worth telling people. Until then, I'll give you a couple tidbits that I meant to post, but never got around to...


This is a picture from the Bahai Gardens. I have already post a few pics from inside the grounds of the temple area, but I recently found myself being run all over Haifa on the instructions of ill-informed bureaucrats and found myself at the bottom of the gardens, and figured it might be a cool pic. I seriously have no idea how they afford the upkeep on those gardens -- they run about a mile right up the side of the Carmel Mountain, so imagine the water bill alone for that in the summer. We're talkin' six straight months without rain. Another interesting fact is that, if you look at the right part of the picture, you will see that there are a few houses that sit right on the fence of the gardens about half way up, so when they look out their windows they get a view of a half-mile long garden that is better taken care of than Howard Stern in a roomful of strippers.


Awhile back one of my flatmates ran into my room screaming that there was a rather large bug that she had never seen before in her room and she needed me to kill it. By her description of it, I was expecting it to be about the size of a small child -- While it was considerable smaller than that, I can tell you that it was still shockingly large, and I too had never seen anything like it. I thought I had seen something about a bug like that on the National Geographic Channel at some point, but wasn't sure. The only thing my flatmate was sure of was "it had to die." I argued that maybe we should trap it and just through it out a window, but she wasn't having any of that, so I took the bug spray and gave it a bath. It put up a valiant struggle and held on a frighteningly long time in the face of about half a can of whatever I was using. At one point I double checked just to make sure I wasn't just hittin' it with AquaNet or something, but finally the spray prevailed, and that was the end of the story for the large mystery-bug. If anyone has any idea what it was, I'd love to hear about it.