Do you know what this week is?  Update week!  That means that every day between now and Friday will find an update on this site.  Cool eh?  You probably weren’t even aware of this Deptonia based holiday.  It is the one claim to fame of the Deptonian people.

Today will merely bring us back to the incredible travels of the past few weeks.  I’ve been across the pond and back twice so far this month visiting the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Israel.  I have to say that every time I fly into Ben Gurion airport, I feel like I’m coming home.  There’s something about that country that feels like home to me.  Coming in over Tel Jaffa and seeing the lights below made me wish that we were back there.  Although it was 3:00am local time, my first call was to Heidi to ask if she wasn’t sure about not moving there.  She assured me that while she loved being there … it was a little far from home.  And here I thought we lived in a connected world.

Solemnity and gaiety!

The first morning I was there, I was giving a three hour presentation from 9am to 12pm.  I didn’t realize that May 1st happens to be the Holocaust Memorial day for the nation of Israel.  At 10am, in the middle of my presentation, the air raid sirens went off over the entire country.  For one minute, everyone, and I mean everyone, stops and stands for one minute of silence.  And here I thought I remember the "minute of silence" for Remembrance Day in Canada being somber.

Thankfully I had some prior warning.  At 3:30am in the morning, between myself and the taxi driver on the way to the hotel, we went back and forth over the various Israeli wars, the last war in Lebanon and the "solutions" to the conflict.  Of course, there can’t be, nor will there ever be resolutions to the problems in the Middle East.  Peace in our time?  Anyway, through the course of this, he told me to be prepared to stop everything at 10am so it wasn’t a complete surprise.  (You might think our conversation strange, but everyone from the taxi drivers to the store keepers, want to talk about religion, politics and war.  There is no such thing as a PC society.)

The gaiety was derived from the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel only one week later – May 8th.  The Star of David was draped everywhere.  You think you see a lot of Senators flags in Ottawa over playoff season?  Every vehicle and most houses were flying the national flag.  It was blue and white everywhere you looked.  I would have loved to have been there.  Still, there was a sense of impending … something … Not that numbers equate to anything, but something about 6 x 10 made me wonder if I wouldn’t hear a shout that week.

Now that would be reason to smile.  🙂