More great things about America that we have been able to experience: free refills, sitting anywhere you want in the movie theatre, rootbeer, autumn foliage, wide, tree-lined roads, dipping french fries in a Wendy’s frosty, and live bluegrass.

Annoying things about America that we have experienced: top 40 radio, drizzly cold winter weather, white, flavorless cucumbers (yech!), rigid drivers, and live bluegrass.

We’re gearing up now for Turkey day in the mountains - we’ll soon be in a blissful, tryptophan induced stupor.

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The US is a very strange place. I’ve been here 2 whole days and haven’t yet heard anyone honk their horn at anyone else. Every restaurant has low carb options on their menu. Random people we don’t know keep smiling at us and making small talk.

Despite all the weirdness, we are having a great time. Yesterday I saw my first squirrel in 2 and a half years, and I swear I’ve had at least 3 gallons of sweet tea (yum yum). Still on the list: real mexican food, Christian bookstores, Walmart, college football, and, of course, Thanksgiving turkey (and stuffing, and cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie, etc.).

It is wonderful to be with our families again. Yesterday we got to meet Erin, my brother’s one year old baby girl. She is absolutely adorable - and a genius too, of course. Now we are in Columbia, SC visiting with Franklin’s parents. We expect his sister and neice to show up any minute. Life is good.

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Amos
May 1989 - November 2004I hope we never have to go through anything like this again. After my last post about Amos (our centenarian dog), his health really began to deteriorate. The pain pills were no longer helping him, and he was obviously in a great deal of pain. After much discussion with our vetrinarian, we brought him in tonight to be put to sleep. I thought that knowing that we were making the right decision would make the process easier, but I was wrong. Since few of you knew Amos as well as we did, let me tell you about him.

We adopted Amos 10 years ago from Greyhound Friends of North Carolina - an organization that takes greyhounds coming off the racing tracks and finds new homes for them. He was 5 when he came off the tracks, which is extremely old. Most dogs peak at around 2 years old.

I remember the day we went to pick him up. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we stepped into Petsmart - beautiful greyhounds everywhere - and one of them was ours! Passing through all the greyhounds to get to the people in charge, we saw one greyhound that was significantly less attractive than the others. He was scrawny, his ears didn’t point in the same direction, his tail was broken, he lacked the elegance of the others, and he looked completely freaked out. You guessed it: Amos. Well, whatever - we’ll take him. Turns out he was completely freaked out, and we couldn’t even get him to look at us. We finally got him back to Mom’s house, where he won her heart by immediately having diarrhea on her carpet.

We were living in Tel Aviv at the time, so one of the first things Amos had to do was get on a plane for a 12 hour flight to Israel. Knowing that he was somewhere on the plane without access to a restroom, Franklin and I also “held it” until we landed. When we got Amos home, we discovered that he was literally afraid of everything. Cars, children, rooms in our house, even (I’m not making this up) wind. Not only that, but Israeli dog food made him seriously flatulent. And for some reason, male dogs seemed to frequently mistake him for a femal dog in heat. We couldn’t take him to the park on the weekends because every dog within a 3 mile radius would come out to harass him.

Looking back, I suppose that Amos had a mild case of separation anxiety early on in our relationship. When we were gone during the day, he would often select some frequently handled household item and consume it. Once he ate most of a deck of cards. On another occasion, he ate a CD. Usually though he would just eat one of my hair scrunchies - then throw it back up in the middle of the livingroom, of course.

As you can see, early life with Amos was difficult, but he made up for it by being such a sweet dog. When things were tough for us, we would say to eachother, “Well, at least Amos will be happy to see us.” And he would be - prancing around like a pony when we walked in the door.

Over the years, Amos lost many of his fears. Though he never developed a desire for adventure, it’s hard now to remember the dog that used to hide in the other room when we had friends over. Instead Amos turned into a wonderful house dog - happy to just be at home with his people. And a social butterfly, prefering to be in the center of any large gathering.

Though his eyesight diminished a bit over the past decade, Amos remained extremely healthy until a little over a year ago. He began to develop back problems, and eventually lost control of his bowels. He went from being an inside dog to being an outside dog. Although he seemed to enjoy the garden (in fact, we caught him out there running around like a pup on more than one occasion), it was obvious that he’d rather be inside with his people. Over the past 6 months, things went from being usually OK, and occasionally bad to being usually bad and occasionally OK. Then this past month it seemed that things were never OK.

I hope that wherever Amos is now, he’s free of pain, and running like the wind.

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There is nothing quite so liberating as blogging. At what other point in history has there been such an opportunity to make all your thoughts and feelings instantly public? Before, if you wanted to rant or babble, you had to find someone who would finance and publish your writing. This meant that it had to have some kind of appeal: entertaining subject matter, good writing style, scientific breakthrough - something. Those days are over my friend.

We at the Linker household are clearly intoxicated by the idea of self-expression unbridled by the need to have something worthwhile to say. If this isn’t already plainly evident to you, witness our new blog: Inside the Sleeping Linker Brain. Franklin and I will now be posting our nocturnal ramblings for the whole world to see. Although our dreams are often vivid and entertaining, I really can’t imagine that this new blog will have any appeal for 99.9999999999999999999999999999% of the world. But, for that 0.0000000000000000000000000001% of you who are either close enough to us to care, or who are just really interested in dreams, we are proud to have you onboard (if you actually counted to make sure that the the previous 2 figures actually add up to 100%, shame on you. This means you, brother Tom.).

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This weekend we decided that our two Syrian olive trees were finally ready to have their produce harvested. Some olive-loving friends from the neighborhood came down Saturday morning, and together we began gathering olives. Even though we’ve all lived in the Middle East for a long time, none of us really knew what we were doing. First we tried just picking off the trees the olives which were withing reach, then we tried climbing on chairs and ladders, then climbing the tree and shaking the branches, then opening the window of the second-floor guest room and picking from there, and finally using a broom handle to whack any likely looking branches with all our might. I’d say that after much straining, tree climbing, branch whacking, being hit in the head with falling olives, and crawling around on the ground on all fours for hours choking on dust and avoiding all the spiders (where did they all come from?), we probably managed to harvest about 40% of the olives on the trees. In the end, we stood in the yard and looked up at the top branches on the trees, bent absolutely double with the weight of the perfect, fat olives that we just couldn’t reach. *sigh* Well, despite our inability to pull in the best part of our harvest, we did manage to gather plenty of olives for our collective personal needs (two baskets, 3 glass jars, and one 5 liter bucket).

So, here is what we are going to do with them. First, we let them soak for two nights in plain water to help clean them (who knew a tree could get so dusty?). Then we’ll rinse them, and crack them. We are cracking them because if you don’t, curing them can take up to two years. Cracked, it takes about 2 months. We haven’t decided yet if we’ll take them to the shuk to have them cracked by a professional (this takes about 5 minutes), or if we’ll just crack them ourselves one by one at home (this will take hours). Then we’ll brine them in salt water (1 part salt to 12 parts water) for about 8 weeks. After that time, we’ll add in whatever spices we like (lemon and garlic, or chili peppers, or whatever comes to us). So in two months or so, those of us who participated in the harvest are going to get together and compare our yeilds. I’m sure looking forward to it.

Life in Israel | Comments Off