Dangers avoided

Today, I'm writing about 3 complete unrelated things. Unrelated, that is, except by the fact that, in each case, something dangerous ended up causing no one any harm at all.

First story

The first is about an anniversary. Five years ago this past week (on August 2, 2006, to be precise), two Katyusha rockets fell in our immediate neighborhood. This was, of course, during the Second Lebanon War. For those of you who haven't heard or don't remember the story, this is a very brief synopsis. It was about mid-morning, and David and I had just finished taking a shower. He was on the side of the bed right next to the north-facing window, and I was still in the bathroom (on the south side of the bedroom), drying myself. There were no sirens, but, suddenly, there were two very load BOOMS and we knew that we had been hit. Something (we later discovered it was a ball bearing) had come through 4 panes of glass (the window was open because of the lovely summer breezes), also damaging the frames as it came. It had to have flown less than a meter from David's head. It then bounced off the ceiling of the bedroom nearly on the opposite side and then hit the A/C unit located right above the door to the bathroom. I heard the coolant hissing as it leaked out.

As it turned out, one Katyusha had hit just across the street (which was where the ball bearing had come from) and another had hit very close to our neighbor's house. The first Katyusha did some minor damage to the north side of our house (including the above-mentioned broken windows), and the second broke the outer pane (but NOT the inner one!) of the upper half of our large stairwell window (which faces south). All the south facing windows on our neighbor's house were broken, and there were pock marks on the walls and ceilings of nearly every room of his house. The other 3 houses in our complex also suffered varying degrees of damage. But no one was injured at all.

The emergency services people showed up within only a few minutes and quickly determined, of course, that no one was hurt. Later that same day, someone from the government insurance agency came out and assessed the situation. Within a week, all the damage to our house was repaired, and by the end of August, the money from the government was in my account.

Second story

Last night, we were at Kabbalat Shabbat prayers at our synagogue, Emet V'Shalom (EVS), in Nahariya as usual. This week, there was a bar mitzvah. The boy is a descendant (great grandson, at least, if not more generations) of a founder of the synagogue (it was founded by German Jews before WW II, as was the city itself) who was also its rabbi at one time.

The service was nearly finished, and Rabbi Horovitz had just begun to talk about the bar mitzvah boy, as he usually does, when a policeman burst in the door and told us we must all get out immediately. Although I don't think he said why, we all pretty much knew, and we proceeded very calmly to exit. Of course, the reason was a suspicious package. David actually saw it as we went out. At first, they just sent us to the other side of the street, but then they pushed us back even further, around the corner. There was no panic at all, and, in fact, we all just hung around talking and socializing. I don't know exactly what the bomb squad (at least I assume they were called) did, but after some time, we were allowed to go back in. As soon as we all got back in, Rabbi just picked right up where he had left off.

As you can imagine, unattended packages are always considered suspicious here, especially if they are located near any significant group of people.

Third story

After we got home last night, David got to bed a little before I did. When I was about to get into bed, I noticed that Pascal (our BIG black white with a white bib and some white paws) was playing with something over on David's side of the bed. I went over to check it out. When I got there, I saw that there was a good-sized black scorpion, right on one of David's thongs by the bed! Very quickly, I could see that it was dead. I'm sure the cats had killed it, since, as you may remember, they are experienced scorpion hunters. Anyway, I just picked up the thong, took it into the bathroom, dumped it into the toilet, and flushed. If I hadn't have found it, though, David would have had a possibly nasty surprise when he got up in the night and put his thongs on.