Various missiles

 All the years when there were rockets from Gaza we didn't go to the shelter. Fifty kilometers from Gaza seemed pretty far away and we just stood in the hallway of the house and hoped for the best.

Then the Houthis came from Yemen with the ballistic missiles and that already justified running to the shelter. They especially liked the small hours of the night and we managed to survive that too.

Now it's also the Iranians and Hezbollah from Lebanon and every now and then the Houthis signal to the Iranians that they are also in the game and send one missile or an unmanned aerial vehicle with explosives.                                                                                                                                                                              The missiles from Iran are missiles with a fragmentation warhead, which splits into thirty bombs that scatter and cause great destruction to houses and streets.

We are in the shelter several times a day and night when there is a warning of a missile launch from Iran. How good it is that we have systems that can detect the moment of a launch from Iran and warn us.

Yesterday, when leaving the shelter, the six-year-old boy who has been spending two years with us there asked me to continue watching the news. His parents are trying to spare him fear and do not watch the news. He trusts me and said that he wants to know what is happening. I promised him that I would continue watching the news and if there is anything he wants to know, he will know, with his parents' permission of course.

I am sorry that I do not comment on your blogs, I read everything but I cannot always comment.

And thank you to everyone who stopped by and asked about my well-being. You are wonderful people.

Fears

 By midnight I was already tired but I was debating whether to go to sleep. According to my calculations, which are not based on anything logical, only my feelings, an alarm was expected soon and I wanted to be ready. It didn't come and I went to sleep.

The phone alerted me almost every hour about alarms around me but not here.                                                           At 5:30 in the morning there was indeed an alert here. The missiles from Iran arrive only four minutes after the alarm, I had enough time to run to the shelter and meet the neighbors and the children who arrived asleep, carried in their parents' arms.                                                                                                          A missile from Lebanon arrives without warning, it lands and blows up everything in its vicinity. I was very surprised last week when one of these arrived, traveled 160 kilometers and exploded with a tremendous noise a kilometer from my house. It was precisely aimed at some strategic facility here in the area and hit it precisely.                                                                                                                                                                  How strange that I should be afraid to go to the hairdresser, the road is mountainous and narrow and there is nowhere to stop if there is an alarm. I have already made an appointment several times and cancelled because of fear, I made another appointment for Tuesday and I think it might be stupid to get injured or die because of hair dye. But there are things that are stronger than me sometimes.

                           I found a picture of my granddaughter a few years ago when I took her to the hairdresser before Purim. She wanted to dye her ends blue.                                                     

Another day

 It doesn't get any easier. You don't get used to it. But in real time the adrenaline is doing its thing and I always arrive at the shelter first. A six-year-old boy has already asked me how it is that I arrive first and since then he has been trying to beat me, sometimes I let him win and he is happy.

At six this morning there was an alarm without the advance warning and yet I managed to arrive even though the alarm woke me up from my sleep.

Then I drove my car around the house for fifteen minutes, it had not moved for a week and a half and it was time. Fifteen minutes later the alarm went off again and I ran to the shelter.                                                        Then I took my shopping cart and went with my fears to buy a few things in the little shop here.

I managed to cook zucchini and peppers stuffed with meat and rice, Persian rice with onions, dill and coriander and even took a quick shower before the next alarm came.                                                                        Now I just need to calm down from the great anger I have towards one of the bloggers here.                         In one of her posts yesterday, she wrote that she hopes Israel runs out of weapons soon. This eighty-year-old woman sitting in her room in Yorkshire has managed to upset me quite a few times in the last two years with her lack of knowledge, her inability to generate empathy for anything related to the victims here, and her superficial and distorted opinions that she insists on expressing, but this time it's really extreme. She actually wishes me and all of us here to die soon. That's your true face, T. I hope your wish doesn't come true soon.

Life here

 This is another experience and challenge that life has given me. It's only been three days and it seems like much longer..

You have to be glued to your iPhone because that's where the alerts come from that missiles have been launched from Iran. These are very, very deadly and destructive missiles. Running to the shelter and waiting for the alarm, and the sound of explosions outside.

Several times a day and several times during the night. A kind of Russian roulette when I go to the small supermarket ten minutes away from home, and the shower is also a kind of gamble. No one wants to be caught by an alarm in the middle of a shower.                                                                                                                 I'm fine and will continue to update. Thank you to all the wonderful people who say a kind word and care. You are true friends.

The silence before what?

 I'm scared. It's coming in waves. It's been a few weeks or more, and every headline is even scarier. We're like puppets on a string, dependent on the decisions of people whose minds no one understands.

It could happen tonight, or any of the following nights, maybe we'll die, maybe we'll live, maybe our house will just be destroyed, maybe we'll just get injured, maybe we'll just sit scared in our supposedly safe places. Maybe nothing will happen.

It's impossible to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it what it's really like.

In the meantime, I cooked meatballs in a sauce with onions, garlic, red pepper, and green olives. I added a spoonful of chicken broth and black pepper, and it turned out very tasty.

I also made Persian rice with lots of fried onions. I don't eat that kind of thing, but it was a wonderful distraction and there will be someone here who will eat it.                                                                                              My son, the one who will eat this food, asked this morning if we shouldn't move to Cyprus, for example. For a moment it was very tempting, but I don't think I will move, despite everything, unless I too become like those old Ukrainians I see in the Facebook videos, who people come to rescue from their rural homes that were once the center of their world.                                                                                                     

Thoughts

 I'm really debating whether to write this post. It's been written in my head for a few days now, and I'm still trying to quiet it down. My not-so-simple life here takes place on several levels, I could be the nice grandma who describes everyday life like anywhere else in the world, because there is life like that here too, but there's the extra spice that you know, the danger of life, the fear and the great sadness about what's happening to people like us in the world.

I also don't want to write from a victim's position, we're not like that.                                                                       We are people that the world loves to hate, for some reason, and throughout history they have tried to make us disappear, and here we are, miraculously surviving.                                                                                      But that's not what's been bothering me for a long time, and it's become much stronger in recent days when I read some comments here in Blogland about the terrible massacre that happened in Australia.            I saw it right after the October 7th, during the terrible massacre here, people can't stay for a moment with the terrible things that happened, they immediately seek balance, as if they share in the grief but immediately say "yes but", "yes but Gaza", "yes but Netanyahu", there is not a single moment of true and honest identification with the terrible thing that happened to innocent people, always part of the blame is immediately placed on the victim as well.                                                                                                              And here, in my opinion, is the root of the hypocrisy. Deep within these people sits a small anti-Semite who has not developed enough, fortunately, but that repressed inner being does not give that person the ability to truly identify with the pain of the innocent victim.                                                                                              And it doesn't matter if you had a Jewish grandfather, if you lived in a Jewish neighborhood and they were nice to you, or if you were an educator in the past, if you still can't relate to a hate crime against Jews without trying to create a seemingly balanced equation, it says something about you, and to me it says something bad.                                                  These are my thoughts. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm right, maybe not every inability to identify with human pain is anti-Semitism, maybe it's just some kind of mental disability, I don't know anything.                                                                                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Different types of dangers

 I discovered something strange. I'm more afraid of heavy rain and storms than rockets and missiles. Storm Byron is ending its short life here with us now. Greece, Cyprus and Israel have agreed on common names for storms. They start there and with us they are mainly public relations storms, lots of rain but not too bad, and I'm still scared.                                                                                                                                            A quick and superficial analysis of this phenomenon that I just did reveals to me that the adrenaline generated by the missile threat is the extra spice. An immediate life-threatening danger that requires immediate action doesn't allow much time for thought. Adrenaline wins.                                                   A long, heavy rain that continues for many hours and several days, raises many other thoughts and fears, but they continue for a long time, while I put another bucket over the couch to catch the drops falling from the ceiling.                                                                                                                                                 Of course the storm anxieties are a higher priority, but their duration is exhausting.

And I still sleep with my phone under my pillow and my comfortable shoes for a quick run out in the middle of the night with me every night. That's what happens when you get used to the dangers.