Snow, Sleet, Hail, and Many Random Thoughts on This Cold (Nearly) Spring Day

As Jen mentioned earlier, today is been a wacky weather day. It started with rain, turned into sleet, and then snow. Then it rained for a while, hailed (with impressive amounts of lightening), and now it's raining. Here are some photos...

At some points during the day, it was really coming down!

The view from my Hebrew class. I can now finally say that I walked twenty minutes uphill in the snow to Hebrew school! Once the snow began accumulating on the sidewalk, it became very slippery! When I arrived at class, I was the only one there until 20 minutes after class was supposed to start when a fellow student arrived and told me that yesterday, our teacher told the class that class would start an hour later this morning due to the anticipated bad weather. Unfortunately, I wasn't in class yesterday because we went on a fantastic tour of the Supreme Court here in Jerusalem. Thus, I didn't know about the change. Nonetheless, only eleven out of about 25 students showed up. It was a good day in class because each of us were able to participate a lot more. And, we watched a movie in Hebrew, which seems to be our Thursday (end of the week) tradition.

On Sunday, I will be giving my 5-minute presentation to my class in Hebrew. I'll be talking about my rapidly approaching trip to the Ukraine for Passover. I have a note card filled with essential vocabulary words for my talk that I'm sure I'll forget when I'm in front of the class.

Speaking of speaking, I did give my sermon at the synagogue last Sunday morning and it went over quite well. Only one person complained that I didn't talk loud enough; someone else told me that the person who complained would've complained if I used a bullhorn. I'm going to try to sign up to do one every other week or so. It is very good practice and I enjoyed the research and thinking that went into the development of my sermon.

The small hail collected on the windowsill. Hail does not make a good snowball.

Last night I went to a meeting about the Passover trip to the Ukraine and we were told many interesting things and given lots of great ideas for engaging youths as well as adults in the Passover events. But, the most interesting thing I heard was that in the Ukraine, those celebrating Passover absolutely love the song "Go Down Moses," which is not part of the liturgy at all, but they will all expect us to sing it so it has been added to my iPod for practice!

Now, as I finish this post, the precipitation has again turned to sleet. I'm glad I'm not going anywhere tonight. Poor Steve, Eve and Aviva, who have to shlep over here in the snow/rain/sleet/hail for movie night!