Of Blossoms and Bovines

Signs of spring: Driving back from Haifa, I zip past cows grazing in a small field near Tsomet Ahihud. A calf frisks up to an egret and tries to nudge it. All around, the fields are green, the flowers are in full bloom, and the air has that special softness that only happens for a few weeks out of the year. On our street, the flowering trees are slightly past the prime of their bloom. Their shed blossoms form shallow drifts of pink around the trunks.

Can I get some salsa with those chips? I'm back for another round of training at Yet Another High-tech Company That Makes Chips. It's a different group of engineers, and I don't know what they've heard about the course, but they all show up on time and giggle at my most shameless jokes. They also argue a lot and insist that English punctuation is illogical. I love engineers.

You know you're not a movie buff when... I complain to a friend about a bad stomach ache. "Oh, maybe it's an alien that is about to burst through your chest," she jokes, "like in that movie Cocoon." Uh-huh. Ron Howard, Ridley Scott—same diff.

It's project time: Students scramble to turn in their final projects for the course. A few hand-deliver the goods, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ever-elusive Miss Nadine. Nadine likes to "help" me correct projects by squatting on them. I'm not sure what she gets out of it, but perhaps she soaks up some useful information through osmosis.