Under Fire, part 16

It's gonna be a long day: All is quiet until around 10:00, when a rocket barrage hits the other side of town. One house takes a direct hit. My friend calls to say that she was caught in the shower. I call another friend to see if he and his wife (and three cats) are OK, and the sirens go off while we are talking. I've decided to keep score today; the sirens have already gone off three times within five minutes, but the rocket barrages have outnumbered the warnings.

I'm going stir crazy. At 7:00, I am tempted to go for a run, but realize that the risk is too great. Basically, my mother would never forgive me if I got creamed by a ketusha while doing my normal loop around the neighborhood. (It is this same knowledge that makes me trot back inside the meimad even if the previous siren was a false alarm.) So I have a dull workout inside and manage to finish my shower before the first barrage hits.

A smarmy little reporter (and I use the term loosely) on a British news channel refers to the various ketushot as firecrackers, thus implying that they make a loud popping noise but don't do any real damage. This is part of the myth that makes people talk about disproportional response. Here's the results of one of those little "firecrackers" in Haifa:

So, I'm back in the meimad and Nadine is under the bed. It's definitely going to be a long day.