It has happened a couple of times that I have gone without posting here for a number of months. Normally there is some cause from the real world (having a kid, moving, etc) that severely reduces any free time in front of the computer. And then when I have the chance to write something, I ask myself “is this post good enough to be the first post in X weeks?”, at which I normally answer myself “No” and proceed not to post. Thus a blog becomes semi-abandoned for an extended period of time. Sorry.

Anyway, to bring you (whomever you might be) up to speed, we moved to Yad Binyamin four weeks ago (here are some recent pics of the new digs). (And despite my dearth of posts in the past while, I was outed by a neighbor within two days of moving in). Though we are having our share of “new house issues” (like the very large lump of concrete that somehow managed to find its way into our toilet output pipe, causing some dirty water to come out of the adjacent shower drain) we have almost all of the furniture in place, boxes unpacked, are relatively clean, and are starting to really feel at home.

With that introduction out of the way, something happened this evening that I just had to write about. Adina needed to mail out a few pieces of correspondence for which email would not suffice. I had seen a collection of envelopes sitting in an unpacked box, and I was pretty sure that the stamps were nearby. I remembered where that had been located in the old apartment, and I remembered packing them. All I had to do was find them.

Easier said then done. I ended up going through the same few boxes where I was sure that the stamps were located. Then when I was about to give up, I thought of another likely location. And again. This went on for about twenty minutes, but still no stamps. So Adina asked me to bring up some envelopes to her so that she could at least put the things inside and bring them to the post office. I had a pile of about 30 envelopes. I split the pile roughly in half (so that I could keep some of them in my basement office), randomly chose one of the piles (you can see where this is headed, can’t you?), brought it upstairs and handed it to Adina. She brought the pile into the cheder mamad (secure room) to stuff the envelopes, took the first envelope off the top of the pile, and took it to the desk. I came into the room about 10 seconds later saw on top of the pile of remaining envelopes a sheet of stamps.

It turns out that I ever so smartly decided to pack our left over stamps with our envelopes, so that they wouldn’t get lost. I then completely forgot about this. The stamps ended up in the pile of envelopes that I brought up to Adina, underneath the top envelope so that when she took off the top one, the stamps magically appeared. It was very cool, and definitely fulfilled the gemara (Sanhedrin 100b) that identifies the act of finding a lost object as something that happens when you are not expecting it (the other two items in this grouping, interestingly enough, are a scorpion and mashiach). I guess that sometimes in order to find something, you just have to stop looking.