Everything I mention above is due in a couple of days.

The National Insurance Institute (NII), which is Israel's version of the Welfare Department, Social Security, and National Health Scheme all rolled into one, will eventually cover my wife for her loss of pay through Israel's equivalent of Workmen's Compensation. After getting Dina's boss to fill in what I thought was her part of the forms and the doctor to fill in his part, I went down to the NII to submit the forms. A kind young thing doing data entry looked at the form and said I needed to fill in the blanks. Well, she looked over a whole load of portions of the form and marked little x's. Also she told me that I needed pay stubs to submit with the claim. This clerk also said that once I had all this information, I should submit the form and they would give us a call when it was ready to be acted upon. I was told that getting my wife's claim into the system might take "some time." I asked her what she meant. She looked down at her in-box, a cardboard box on the floor with a load of applications ensconced within, and said, "right now I'm working on March."

I smiled at her and told her "thank you," giving her my best "Minnesota Nice" manners.

There is more. First of all, there is still that electric bill for NIS 520 ($117). That can turn into a shutoff notice real fast. With no juice from the wall, finding work off the computer will mean a trip to the Internet café. Then there are Israel's banking laws. Bouncing checks is a major no-no here. There are only a few banks in Israel and they all share bounced check information. For a long time, I did not even have a checking account here for that specific reason. Then there is a water bill, NIS 366 ($81.50) that just arrived a few minutes ago. It's simple; you don't pay, you don't drink.

Then there are other points which all contribute to the stew. There is no equivalent of Kinko's or Sir Speedy here. Copies come out "sort of good" from Xerox machines and often are barely legible. So you need a printer connected to a computer to print up a decent CV - and you need your own computer to send the CV's by e-mail. With no juice in the wall, that gets to be a small problem. No juice in the wall also means you have no fridge, washer, oven, or dryer, and no recharge even for a cell-phone.