Colours of the Sun

Speaking from the privileged point of having advanced alerts and a bomb shelter and not living up North where tanks drive in the streets, the worst part about the Intermittent Missile Attacks is the boredom. Seriously. I'm tired, the sirens are down-wearying, and Outside is mostly shut down because having more than 50 persons in a space is forbidden in case of IMA.

I have a job that keeps going and I don't have small children (school is out, because nobody wants to try and herd a school's worth of kids into a bomb shelter several times a day) so seriously, I'm Very Very Lucky.

I'm also bored.

Making oolong in a paper cup is frankly a waste, but I'm downstairs in rhe bomb shelter for the fourth time in two hours, and I need to get up in 1.5hr from now to take my SO for the second rabies shot. So I made appricot oolong in a paper cup, because this is what got me out of bed.

I'm alive, everything's fine. I mean, everything's clearly not fine, but.

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.

(Diameter of the bomb, Yehuda Amichai)

Well the Lebanese front hasn't blown up yet. And not because Hizbullah aren't trying.

Be'eri had 1 Hamas combatants for every 10 civilians. A lot of those civilians were children and babies. The division CO who was there says that they found ( No gore but it's gonna hit you. )

There are at least 15 UAVs that just crossed from Lebanon to Israel. I sincerely hope that the bored 19yo jealous that their buddies down south are having all the action will have a nice target practice.

Right now, the photos from both sides of the Gaza fence are very similar: grey dust that was someone's home, pools of dried blood, children without parents, parents without children.

I'm very tired of this.

We don't actually know how many are dead. Upwards of 500 600 - but no one actually knows how many, yet. From the directions given to people looking for the missing, it seems that there are many yet-unidentified bodies. And, well; there are a lot of people kidnapped into Gaza, among them children and the elderly. I suspect that when we finally manage to take the tally, there's going to be several hundreds of those, too.

Alive and unharmed. The rocket sirens went off in my time only once.

Personally, I think Hamas were really fucking stupid, because with Hamas incursion into undisputed Israeli territory, ~40 dead already (most or all of which aren't military), over ten times that in injured, we have enough credit to wreak pretty good havoc in Gaza before someone pulls the breaks. Particulary considering that our current government may be delicately described as "geopolitical pyromaniacs".

So I just bitched to two friends who know way more about baking-in-general than I do about a recipe not behaving twice the same way. Their response was, more or less, "You're veganizing and putting less sugar in, what do you expect??" And like, on the one hand, they're not wrong! On the other, I don't expect it to behave like in the book, I expect it to be consistent between identical tries.

The cookies are very tasty, by the way, but I'm not sharing the recipe until I'm done uneffing it; apparently, in matters of vegan baking, I'm on my own.

And like, at this point I'm veganizing blind - without having tried the unaltered recipe first - but I've been doing it right and left and no other recipe is giving me this bullshit. Clearly, the misbehaving one has to be the easy, tasty crowd-pleaser. Because of course.

(I have a professional forum on Sunday that I'm hosting this time around, and we're 20% vegan, so I'll be damned if there aren't homemade vegan cookies.)

(And, uh, yes, I'm like 90% vegan now. I've been slowly going vegeterian over years, but the veganism thing happened pretty suddenly. As I've been saying to people for the past month or two, it's a professional risk of practicing a lot of qigong.)