Hello everybody! I’m having a blast in Israel so far! After the Bar Mitzvah, my stress level has decreased by 52%(YYYYYEEEEESSSSS) and my family and I have a lot more flexibility with our schedule now that everything is out of our way. We went to a concert by a famous Israeli singer called Idan Raichel on Friday evening. When we got there, it was very crowded although we had a very good view from where we were sitting in the audience. The concert started shortly after we got there and spanned 2 hours with amazing songs, but it was worth it to listen to the variety and music that the concert had to offer. The next day after the concert, we went to lunch with my former sensory-prevision teacher, Catia, and her family. She is very sweet and when I lived in Israel, we worked together constantly and when I saw the room that we studied there, it filled me with memories of my past. We went to falafel place with very good falafel and it was nice to see friends from our past with us. That night, we also had dinner with our very good friends, Fionna and Nim. They are very good friends of us from Boulder, Colorado, and they travel a lot like us. I gave them a copy of my book that I mentioned in my previous post. They really loved it and they said that they will be in Japan at about the same time that we were.

On Sunday, we had the very important Jewish holiday Rosh-a-Shanah at our friend Tamara’s house. When we got there, everyone from Israel that we knew was there and we went on the porch of their apartment and found a very cute neighborhood cat called Spot. At the actual ceremony, we sat down and my uncle, Oved, read the prayers to wish us all a happy new year. After the prayers, we had a very big, fresh meal and I talked to people a lot. Yesterday, we went to my dad’s friend’s house, where there was a whole high-school reunion with guests. She was called Ravit and we met lots of other people we knew, 99% of them came to my Bar Mitzvah. We had lots of fun there and Troy even took a Hogwarts Placement test. He was put into Slytherin and his Patronus was a weasel!!! We had lots of fun there and I even played Harry Potter Trivia and I got 4 questions correct(Look, I’m not BAD).

Here is Chapter 1 of my book:

Chapter 1

“Oh great, Troy. Trixie and Bruno stole all of the dog and cat food again!” Ofer shouted to Troy in the kitchen. “Trixie! Bruno! Get in here you crazy pets. You can’t keep stealing and hoarding your food. You’ll get hungry later.”  Somewhere downstairs, Ofer heard some mischievous giggling that belonged to the dog, Trixie, and the cat, Bruno.

This was the kind of thing they did every week. The two were very mischievous and although they were rivals when they teamed up Bruno was the brains and Trixie was, well, the fat. Trixie was a really fat, orange dog that ate anything and had absolutely no idea of what anything was. She was very stupid, and while plotting their shenanigans Trixie sat around and looked cute while Bruno hijacked the fridge and stole all the food. Bruno was the opposite of Trixie. He was lean, smart, and very stealthy. He came up with the plots while Trixie kept saying “I want food. Food. FOOD! Etc.” It was no wonder they were natural rivals, but they teamed up when they had to.

“Pets! This is no joke! Bring the food back up here! Do you want to starve?!” Ofer said as his patience was thinning.

“Nuh-uh!” Bruno said from downstairs. “It’s your fault that it was weakly guarded. Now it will go swimming with the fishes!” Bruno was planning to toss the food into the fish pond because it was so gross compared to human food.

“I’m hungry! Where’s my food? HUNGRY! Wahhhh!” Trixie started to call out.

“Quiet you dog! You’re giving them what they want… showing our weakness!” Bruno said to her. Ofer knew that it was no use to try and get the food from them. They wouldn’t let it go. Ofer decided that he might as well buy some new, better food for the pets.

Once Ofer found the pet-food websites online, he scanned all of the companies and their products. All they had were cheap, unhealthy knock-offs which were disgusting to even look at. After scanning all of the sites, he found a food product that he had never seen before: A Legendary Sandwich. Apparently, it was filled with the most disgusting foods ever and it looked like a Dagwood sandwich from the Blondie comics. It was supposed to fill up the pets, and it would give Ofer enough time to snatch the old food from the downstairs. Plus, the price was only $20.00. “Well, it’s only one sandwich. It can’t hurt the pets that much,” Ofer thought to himself.  Ofer headed to the PETPLACETM store.

“Where is that slave, Ofer?” Bruno wondered, sitting on a giant jar of cat food while Trixie was slowly chewing a plastic jar filled with dog food, now covered with slobber. “He mysteriously disappeared. Did we miss a jar? Are these all fakes? Was this whole operation a scam?! Or worse?!” Bruno thought as he jumped up and unleashed his claws.

“Eh. I just want to eat this” Trixie said, not any closer to getting the food in the jar. “I’m tired. Can I just eat your food and then go to sleep?”

“No. Not until we figure out Ofer’s nefarious plan” Bruno said like a detective at a major crime scene.

Suddenly, the front door opened and Ofer walked into the house. Trixie and Bruno heard him come back and went upstairs to greet him. The pets smelled something beautiful in the bag he was holding. Ofer put the bag on the counter and took out the most spectacular thing the pets had ever seen. It was a sandwich, but not just any sandwich. This sandwich was 2 feet tall and made of absolutely every food that the pets loved, which was a LOT. It contained a raw fish, a steak, chicken, cheese, lettuce, tomato, bacon, and more. Ofer saw it as disgusting, but Trixie and Bruno saw so much more.

“It’s like it’s made out of light…” Trixie said, tearing up. “Did it fall down from paradise?”

“No, you dumb dog” Bruno stated. “It’s a gift from the tiger god for ME being so hardworking.”

“Asher. Ella. Watch the two pets while I get something from downstairs” Ofer said to his kids. Asher and Ella had just entered the kitchen and saw the Legendary Sandwich. They thought it was horrendous. After two minutes, Ofer restored all the missing food to the refrigerator. Although he succeeded at his original task, Ofer immediately realized that his plan was a mistake. The sandwich was too fatty, so he decided to take it back. But the second he lifted the sandwich one millimeter off the table, the pets looked at him and started to cry. They cried for five whole minutes until Ofer finally said, “Fine! You can have your sandwich!” The crying had been too intense for him to handle. The pets lunged for the sandwich, only for it to be taken away.

“But not now. There is a little something you have to do first. Asher, Ella, come to my office for a second. I have a plan about how this whole sandwich thing is going to work out”, Ofer said with a sinister grin on his face.