Blackie finally caught!

A quick update to my last post. Last Monday, we finally caught the black cat that had been stealing our cats' food and molesting the kittens. We put the cage with him in it in the trunk (well, actually the small hatch) of our car. Then, with our neighbors, Shimon and Hava, in the back seat, we took off for the Golan, releasing "Blackie" in the same area where we had released Spot several years earlier.

We've decided to coin new verbs in both Hebrew and English to describe this action. Both mean "to catch a misbehaving cat and relocate him/her to the Golan". In English, the verb is, of course, "to golan". In Hebrew, it's לגוולן l'gavlen, a verb in the פיעל Pi'el binyan (conjugation) where nearly all new modern verbs are created. It's based on the root ג-ו-ל-נ gimel-vav-lamed-nun, the letters of the word גולן Golan in Hebrew.

Kitten scratches

There's a male cat in our neighborhood who comes around nearly every day and tries to steal some of the food we put out for our outdoor cats. In fact, there actually are SEVERAL cats that try to do this, but one, a medium-haired black male, whom we have nicknamed Blackie, is the most frequent visitor, and he often does manage to get some food when we're not watching closely. Of course, this only serves to reinforce his behavior.

Stealing food is bad enough, but lately we've caught him trying to molest the kittens, too, and this is just beyond the pale for us. So, we went down to our favorite builder's supply store in Khatzor and bought a cat trap.

Here, I'll insert a little story that the lady there who sold us the trap told us. She said she's caught a dozen cats using a similar trap. One of them was actually very clever. He would open an unlocked window, come into her house, steal a schnitzel she had laid out, go back out through the window, and then, most remarkably of all, CLOSE the window behind himself! They couldn't figure out what was happening to the schnitzels until someone actually saw him doing this! By the way, she spoke almost no English, but I was able to understand her story in Hebrew.

So back to the trap we bought. Of course, one of the problems is trying to catch the bad black cat but NOT catch any of our own outdoor cats. Our first plan was to try to put the 3 kittens into the cat carrier so they wouldn't be able to go into the trap. Of course, they were NOT enthusiastic about this idea! :-)

Let's just say that this plan didn't work. Here's a picture, taken today (2 days later) of what one 3-month-old kitten can to when he or she REALLY wants to get away. This is my right arm:

Despite the pain, I was NOT angry at any of the kittens, but we did give up trying to put them into the cat carrier.

And what happened later, you may ask? Well, one kitten DID get trapped and was quite frantic about it. Later, Mr B, one of our adult outdoor cats also got stuck in there. So far, Blackie, the one we're TRYING to catch, has NOT gone in. He will eventually, though, I'm sure, and then we'll "golan" him. We invented this new verb, "to golan", which means "to take a cat to the Golan and release him there". Blackie should be the 2nd intended object of this unpleasant verb. Some of you may recall the first object, Spot.

I can't resist adding one more comment here. As many of you know, we had snakes for about 10 years and bred them during most of that time. Some years, we produced more than 100 babies in a single year. But the sum of all the snake bites I received during that entire time (not really that many, actually) was less than the damage done by one kitten in only a few seconds. And yet, people somehow think that snakes are dangerous!

Argentine Independence Day 2011

July 9 is Argentine Independence Day, a fact we were not aware of until some of our South American friends from our congregation invited us to a celebration of the event this year.

The celebration was held in the same room at the מתנ"ס Matnas (a common Hebrew word that is actually an acronym of מרכז תרבות נוער וספורט Mercaz Tarbut No'ar v'Sport, which means "Center of Culture, Youth, and Sports") where our congregation holds Friday night prayers.

Since July 9 fell on Saturday this year, the celebration was on Saturday night. The room was PACKED. Almost everyone there was from South America, of course, but at least one couple we know was from Uruguay rather than Argentina. Probably others were, as well. Anyway, I think we may well have been the only ones there who were NOT South Americans. But, for the evening, we were honorary Argentinians, which we loved!

The theme for the evening was clearly the tango. Of course, everything was in Spanish except the Nahariya mayor's short welcome speech (which was in Hebrew), meaning that I caught very little of it. David caught quite a bit more since he knows more Spanish than I. But we both really enjoyed the evening. There was singing, music, poetry readings, and, of course, some tango dancers!

Here are a couple of pictures I took from my spot in the middle of the audience using my iPhone 3G. The quality is not the best, but it will give you a little idea of the atmosphere. The first picture shows our good friend and fellow member of Congregation Emet v'Shalom, Julio, reading a poem about the tango:

This second picture shows a couple doing the tango. It was particularly hard to get a picture of dancers that was not blurred due to their motion. Even this one is a little blurry, but it will give you a bit of an idea of the dance: