Wii Dance Party from Ree Linker on Vimeo.

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Rivulets of water have been coursing through the streets and alley-ways of Jerusalem this week - water coming not from the sky, but from thousands of broken solar panels.

It’s the law in Israel that all buildings must be equipped with a solar hot water heater. For 9 months out of the year, these panels are more than sufficient to provide household hot water needs. There are various systems in place for the remaining 3 months (an electric element that can be turned on 30 minutes before shower time is the most common, and it’s what we use). It’s a very eco-friendly way of doing things, and I’m happy that it is part of my life. Usually.

It’s been unusually cold in Jerusalem this week. It’s been hovering around 0º Celsius during the day, and well below freezing at night. Freezing water in your solar panel would be a disaster, so the engineers who designed the system created a failsafe. They built a weakness into the design in the form of an unpretentious looking brass ring. If it gets cold, the ring cracks. If the ring cracks, water is prevented from entering the solar panel and is instead diverted onto the roof, down the drain, through the pipe, and onto the sidewalks and streets below.

Foolishly, we thought it couldn’t happen to us. We left the hot water tap dripping all night as instructed by our less fortunate neighbors who were struck early in the week. The cold spell is almost over, which is good because the entire city has been stripped of those little brass rings and even the plumbers are unable to get hold of them. You can imagine the sinking feeling when we awoke this morning to a parking lot full of water.

Franklin is on the roof now trying to figure out how to stop the water to the heater without cutting off all of our water. I’ve already put in a call to the neighbors asking if we can bum off their hot water tomorrow (I feel justified in doing this, as we offered them hot showers when they went through this two days ago). We’ll put a call in to the plumber soon - fingers crossed that he has at least one little brass ring left in his inventory.

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I am not a fan of new year’s resolutions. It’s no secret that they never work. But I do believe that we all need to take time every so often to look back on our lives and evaluate the things that we do and whether or not those things are moving us in the right direction. I stumbled onto a link for 101 questions to ask at the end of the year and picked out a few to discuss with Franklin. Here are some of the results.

Funniest moments of 2007:

• “Sumo” wrestling in Spain
• “Push ‘em back, push ‘em back, waaaay back!”
• Laura Gail’s surprise engagement

(I’m sure we missed some good ones - if you remember any, post them in the comments. Or, use the comments to share one of your funniest moments of the year.)

Franklin’s resolutions:

• Build a few guitars, at least one of his own design and at least one acoustic
• Make at least $1000/month with guitar repairs
• Do something concrete to advance himself musically (voice, piano, or guitar lessons, for example)

Ree’s resolutions:

• Write 300,000 words
• Learn to hand bind books
• Create website for linkerguitars

Things we want MORE of in 2008:

• Outings: camping, hiking, beaching, exploring. As a couple or with friends.
• Social opportunities: spending time with friends old and new - eating, playing games, watching movies, hanging out. We want to be instigators.
• Time with one another.
• Devotional time - together and individually. This is how we keep our focus.

One of the questions asked about our favorite movies of the year, and we realized that we couldn’t really remember any movies - only the ones we’d seen recently. Ditto with our favorite books. So this year I’m keeping a list of all the movies we see and all the books I read (Franklin will have to keep his own list of books, as we almost never read the same book). Again, if you’d like to share your favorite book or movie of 2007, feel free to do so in the comments.

Franklin has been keeping up with his songwriting for January. I’m going to try to convince him to let me post a few mp3s here. I didn’t do much editing over the break, so I think I’m just going to clean up the grammar on the NaNo Novellette and put it up. The longer I delay, the more you lot are going to expect something good.

Photos from November & December:

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