That Time a Long Day Ended With a Wonderful Moment

Ever have one of those moments where everything is perfect? I had one of those moments today.

But prior to that moment, the day was quite unpleasant. Today we had our second mini-project, the Encoder. The kids were supposed to create a program to perform a Caesar shift on a user inputted message. The Test file was written for them (and took user input from the command line, no less), and the class was already written for them as well, they just needed to fill in one line in the constructor, and less than a dozen lines in the translate() method. We walked them through the algorithm they needed to use, and each step of the program was written in the instructions. A dozen lines of code, 4 hours.

This is a positive blog, so I won't say anything further about any of today. We'll just turn it all around next week. We hope. :-)


I went for a much-needed walk when I got home, and experienced the best moment in Jerusalem thusfar. I was walking through an Arab graveyard that is just east of the eastern wall of the Old City. As I entered, the call to prayer began, and several mosques began the mournful readings. The sounds reverberated back and forth between the hills as I slowly walked south along the path, surrounded by tombstones I could not read. The sun was setting, and the Mount of Olives, previously illuminated by sunlight, slowly grew dimmer. The lights of the city began to glow, lights that are neither incandescent nor flourescent, but purely gold. I found some stairs just north of the Golden Gate, and settled down to watch the hills fade into the evening. I sat amongst the graves of unknown peoples, looking across the valley to another hill with the graves of unknown peoples. The city is all stone: stone sidewalks, stone buildings, tombstones.

I've never seen a shooting star before. Sure, sure, when there's a big meteor shower, I've seen starry fragments. But I've never seen an unexpected shooting star. Tonight I did. And I watched other non-shooting stars slowly appear. First Venus, though that isn't a star of course, then a few other starry specks, then even more. I left both because it grew colder, and because spending nighttime near the Old City is just asking for trouble. But before I left, I waited for the Big Dipper and Orion to pierce through the darkening sky. (Ah, the sky. That's a whole topic for itself. The Jerusalem sky... it feels infinite.)

Back at the apartment, people began to watch "Fiddler on the Roof", but I kind of clung to my moments of peace in a graveyard. I'll be going to sleep very soon, as I'm sure we'll be having an interesting day tomorrow.

Quote of the day: "Maybe if we pay the laundry guys 112 shekels, they'll give us a sponge bath." -me

Next Post: That Time We Finally Got to Know Jerusalem.