1st day without sirens

Just as the title says, there has been no sirens over Haifa today. I suspect this is not going to last much as there is no sign of a cease fire in the coming weeks despite the frenetic diplomatic activity by France (ok I didn't choose this article randomly).

Some friends told me that "charlie Hebdo"'s editorial from the 28th was a nice reading. I can't buy it, but if any of you could have a look for me I'd love it.

Besides that I read an interresting opinion from a Lebanese journalist (from the reading he's probably a christian close to Aoun's side). I can't post it as it isn't (yet ?) public domain but I'll forward it to the ones that spam my mailbox and want to have a look.

Leiffe

Look ! I didn't dream, there is an "i":

Chocolates

Today I recieved a phone call asking me when I would be home for a delivery of candies. A few hours later here is what I recieved :

Those were sent by my company to thank me for staying and keeping on working. They must have thought I had 10 hungry kids when I see the size of the basket, but I was pretty happy as it is a nice surprise.

Images of war

Here are a few pictures of Haifa under the katyushas. I didn't take them myself as I do not go much out, they are just among the large number I recieve in my mailbox.

As you can see schrapnel is not enough, Hezbollah adds metal balls to make their rockets more efficient at injuring a maximum of people.

This one shoked me when I saw it, I am not sure this is the way to educate your kids, but well it's there and I still prefer bad words to metal balls.

Elfefe blog V3.0

It's been 7 month since last time I changed the template of the blog. I did it then because I wanted to improve the readability and simplify the original blogger template I first used. I picked another blogger template and customized it, and actually never really liked the way it ended up, despite spending a lot of time on it.
Finaly I decided to remove it and put something simple. Don't hesitate to comment as I will update the styles and details that need to.

[Edit] A lot of bugs remain under IE: bold font on the left, banner border, banner height. I'll figure how to fix it, but at least now it displays correctly.

Haifa under the rockets

Things haven't really changed here, after 24 hours of no shooting on Haifa, the fire restarted, sunday was by far the worse day since the rocket fire started. The day opened in the beginning of the afternoon if I remember well, with 10 impacts in 20 seconds (I counted 12 but might have gotten echo echo). The rest of the day was on the same tempo.

The good thing about this situation is the people that stayed go to each other's houses to have company. So thursday I was in Atlit, saturday in Akko and Sunday night in Atlit. No pictures as I don't want to compromise the drunks I shared the evening with :).

A good tip, when you are at home bored as hell, unable to work because of lack of concentration, buy lots of fresh vegetables, meat, etc... and cook ! Cook difficult, complicated and long stuff. And in the evening share with your friends. Is has the double effect of keeping you busy and focused for hours and makes your friends happy.

PS: for those that might wonder Atlit is 10km south of Haifa and has remained unreached for now.

The dictionary of war clichés

While reading Haaretz journalist Shmuel Rosner's blog I found this interresting dictionnary. Cynical, realist, unfair, bad joke ? I'll let you make your own opinion, anyway it's worth reading: part 1 and part 2.
Sirens are still sounding today on Haifa, but I haven't heard any explosion and there is no report of rockets. It might be quieting down on this side of the border.

Why ?

am I staying in Haifa ? Many of you have been pressing me in the past days to leave the country for a safer place, so I'll try to explain you why I am still here and am not planning to leave unless the situation worsens significantly.
The geographical position of my house combined with my current lifestyle makes it very safe for me to stay here for now. I am in a non targetted area, a pretty hard to target area, spending most of my time in a safe room so I just cannot reasonably get hurt.
Still, life isn't fantastic in these conditions with the sirens the explosions, the deads in the news, the situation getting worse hourly on the other side of the border :(...
But I am solidar with all my friends and collegues that live here, I believe that me staying there is doing something to comfort and strengthen them. Add to that the fact that I would hate fleeing under Hezbollah fire, it would just give me the feeling that they are winning something while they are actually just unable to harm me.
I am not suicidal, and I do not want to have people concerned about my security, that is why I seriously thought about it before taking this decision and balancing various options like going to work abroad for some time. Believe me if the situation were to worsen and put my life at risk, I would leave the area by the minute. I do not intend to risk my health for Israel, and noone around me would expect me to do that to support them.

Maybe I am just behaving to proud, but I would have serious self confidence issues if I weren't doing that.

I had planned a trip to France for vacations somewhere by the beginning of August and I still intend to do it around that period and visit my family in the alps and the Narbonne-Plage little monkey.

WFAP

Today I am headed to work in another place, situated in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv, so I'll be safe.
To get informations on the situation you can look at http://www.haaretz.com , http://www.ynetnews.com , http://www.jpost.com . Most of them give news by the minute.

Stayin' alive

Hey, I am still here. The past 2 days have been regularly cut by sirens and explosions. I am currently discussing with my boss the various options for the coming days and weeks, and will decide pretty soon on what to do exactly. In the mean time I stay either in my shelter room or by friends. The Matam area (where I usually work) has been targetted for the first time. Here is a picture taken from there.

Sand sculptures II

The sand sculpture festival made it back to Haifa for the second year. I was there yesterday afternoon to take some sun, but the beach was mostly deserted as one would expect. This year there was much bigger and nicer sculptures but the access to these wasn't free anymore.

Besides that the situation in the area seems to worsen pretty fast but Haifa didn't got targetted afain and they deployed patriot anti-missiles batteries.

Hezbollah - Israel

Well, as some you might have noticed the northern border of Israel has been subject to violent military operation from both the Hezbollah and Israeli army. As usual each party is claiming that they are just answering to the other's actions, and obviously they try to make the answer big so it frightens the other.

From here it looked like Lebanese milicia came into Israel, killed a few soldiers and captured 2 others at a time where "Israel deterrence power" was already being question after a similar problem near Gaza. The answer has been extremly violent, basically Israel has set an air-sea blocus on whole Lebanon, mass-bombed Hezbollah areas, roads and other civilian service providing facilities (I suppose power plants...).
Hezbollah has been sending rockets towards northern israeli cities for the past 24h and has sent one as far as Haifa (where I live). There are civilians death and injuries on both sides, as usual in this area there are significantly less israelis.
The northern Israeli population is living in their shelters, and currently there are not many (even the most moderate) that are ready to keep taking hits without answering very strongly. Outside of strong external pressure either on Lebanon so they put their army at the border instead of Hezbollah or on Israel so they stop the fire (I don't see them recieving rockets and not shoot back though), I seriously doubt that the situation is not going to worsen fast.

Where I am I don't risk much, and the security services of my company are taking care of me so I'll be fine. I'll let you know how things evolve.

Mysterious picture

Guess what it is, and for who it is :).