What I do on my summer vacation

I'm ending my first week of summer vacation. One more week to go and I want it to be more eventful than my first which was an unorganized mish-mash of things listed on my To Do list - most of which I never got to do.

I never did get to sleep in. On Thursday morning, before dawn, and on my day off I should not hear ANYTHING before dawn, it's a damn sin - I hear Hubby cursing and banging things in the kitchen with yells of "FUCK" "DAMN" and I heard brooms zooming across the floor and thought 'hey, he's playing a great game of floor hockey at 4:00 am, but with whom?' Finally, after the cussing and banging wouldn't stop, I got up from bed.

"What the hell is going on there?"

"DON'T COME OUT OF YOUR ROOM. I'M TRYING TO CATCH A BEE."

It must have been one giant muthafucka bee because I heard it buzzing beyond the door, and I didn't dare venture out of my safe room.

A few more minutes of broom swishing and then the front door banged shut. The bee had left the building. Thank God. Now that made me hate bees more than ever, having my vacation slumber disturbed by those annoying and scary and stinging pests.

I never got to Tel Aviv yet. I've never been inside Azrielli towers. I never got to go to the beach yet. I didn't get to go to Mini Israel yet. And there's a Bat Yam Beach festival next week. There's free movies on Banana Beach in Tel Aviv next week. There are soccer players that my son wants to meet during practice. There's a real Romanian band playing gypsy music at the Khan Theater on Wednesday night. There's even my living room floor that I want to take time to wax and make it shine so that Hubby believes I'm doing substantial stuff during my time off work.

But I did go on the double-decker tour bus of Jerusalem along with other fake tourists. My son thought they'd throw us off the bus if they'd realize we're not really tourists.

"No honey. That's not how the world works. It works on money. They'll charge you an absolute fortune to get on that bus. 10 times the price of a regular bus. Then you pay that fee and they'll never think of throwing you off the bus. Kapish?"

"Hey - even Nasrallah and his wife can go on this bus (if they pay, of course) - there's an Arabic translation among the 8 languages outfitted for earphones."

And today, we had a lovely organic breakfast over at Tavlin (spices) Restaurant in the pastoral moshav of Eshtaol overlooking the fields of planted spices and the country homes.