Soldiers, Spies, Goths and a Disgruntled Tuna Casserole

A few interesting tidbits from the last couple weeks:

- it seems we have some hostile readers. Now I don't generally print bad things about people, and aside from that, I had rather assumed the only people who really read this were my family, with the exception of maybe some close friends of mine. Why? Because I don't generally publicize that I have a blog.

Apparently, somebody discovered my blog, read, and felt the need to bring a scathing report back to Nadia, my boss last week. I'm going to make this unequivocally clear for whoever you are: NOT WELCOME. GO AWAY.

-Me and Nadia are cool about it - I explained to her that this is not a "publication", but a fairly low key blog, and that I did not mean to slight her group, but only to confer that they do in fact have a pretty lousy reputation, which is maybe something she wants to look into. She, in turn, promised me that the lands we were working on did indeed belong to the medina, albeit they didn't really want us working them, which was assumed in any event.

- there was no trouble on the job, all went off wonderfully, got paid, was gevaldig. well I mean, if you discount some terrible hand blisters which have still not fully disappeared. Israelis would appear to be, in general, incapable of directing one towards a place where work gloves may be purchased. If you want work gloves, you pretty much have to go to an arab. Israelis can tell you where to find hair gel, if you're into that sort of thing. Anyway, I had an amazing week and definitely count it as a worthwhile experience.

- I made 2 pans of tuna casserole to break fast on! And Lentil soup! and got fresh bakery whole-grain bread! and chumus! and cheerios and milk! and grapefruit! and a beer! for those who missed the memo. Best break-fast of all time. So proud. So worth the effort. For some reason the tuna casserole that I put in the oven didn't stay together nicely, as opposed to the one I microwaved before serving. Oh well. Regardless. I was in the corner curled up in a ball, moaning, for hours, reminiscent of a certain little brother of mine.

- So apparently me and my friend - I don't even needa make up a pseudonym for him, he goes by Maximum Mike - are writing a new-metal song. read new metal as breaking benjamin/linkin park/korn style. Not my usual, but then, that only makes it more exciting for me, as I love branching out. Mike runs a radio show around the Bar Ilan area for alternative rock. I sat down with him last week randomly at the misrad schar limud, we ended up sitting around schmoozing for an hour, I showed him a couple of my songs and now I'm helping him write what, at the time, I'd thought was just a song he personally wanted to produce. I'm helping him write the lyrics, and I'm taking care of the musical bit and production.

-The really interesting part? When I got started on it with him today, he revealed to me that it's not actually just for him - the song is intended (if it's good enough) to be played by the Israeli band Laid8. Don't be fooled by it being an Israeli band - they're anglo, or at least their singer is, and to be compared with Evanescence, except, from what I've heard from them, way better. They've only ever released 4 tracks, as a completed album, which they basically poured all their effort into - those are available for download for free, for whoever is interested, here. I've already started on a rough draft for the musical bit. Now, I'm no idiot - I can tell I'll probably never get credit for this. I don't have enough pull to really make a noise about it, but honestly, I've got enough of my own music in production that I'm not too concerned. If I don't end up getting dues for it, so be it. It'll still be cool to see it produced.

-Army next thursday! And last week I was so insanely productive that I have essentially taken care of everything I needed to before enlisting. All that's left for me to do is fill out a sublet contract for the apartment I'm starting to rent in september possibly, and even that I only need to do now because the guy I'm renting with is going overseas motzash (abbreviation for Motzei Shabbat).

-Have a great day!