days when the alarm bells toll 2

Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays

The other three days of the Israeli workweek, I wake up at 6:20am and leave the house around 7am heading on a shared taxi from Tel Aviv to Yakum about 45 minutes away. Yakum is a former Kibbutz just south of Netanya. I pick up the taxi from right around the corner from my apartment in Tel Aviv which is very convenient and then get dropped off on the main road outside of Yakum.

I've discovered a nice path that takes me through the agricultural fields and by the small communal graveyard into the Kibbutz and through the residential paths to the office. My job has a three story converted children's dorm on the eastern edge of Yakum. Across from the office there's a nice open field/meadow, it's small but serene and next to it as an organic avocado grove I only discovered last week. Most people that come visit the office comment on how nice it is, and I have to agree with them.

I get to work around 8am. There's some weird groundhog trick with the taxis that always gets me here around the same time. I can leave the house at 6:45am or at 7:15am and still get here at 8am. Sometimes it's freaky how it's usually true.

I set up my laptop, in the winter I put the kettle on for some tea, and I settle in for the workday. Around 11am I usually head out for a walk to the local grocery store. Yakum is a small little community and by this point all of the workers at the post office and at the grocery store know me and we chit chat. I like feeling like a small part of the community, in my own outsider way.
I've earned the chitchat and smile, they used to ignore me before they got to know me.

Those of us that don't have a meeting off-site or aren't working from home eat lunch together, and the 11am visit to the grocery store is my chance to pick up fresh vegetables, bread, hummus, cheeses, etc. for our daily lunch. We eat the same thing everyday and don't seem to have a problem with it.

The office manager usually takes charge on the salad making and she and I conspire together to make sure lunch is ready no earlier than 1:30pm. It's always harder for us to work after lunch and so we try to make the time between lunch and when we go home as short as possible. On an average day we eat around 1:30pm - 2:00pm and then continue working till 4pm.

Some of us come 9am-5pm, I prefer 8am-4pm because it saves me from going home in rush-hour traffic on the way home and makes the commute back from Yakum to Tel Aviv about an hour instead of an hour and a half or more. I also prefer to have more free time in the evening than in the morning.

In high school, I used to wake up at 5:55am and hated it. Now I wake up around 6am most days and I can tell you, I am still not a big fan. It's easier than it used to be, I worked my butt off in high school and was generally exhausted for four years, but still not a fan of the tolling 6am alarm bells.

I get home at around 5pm. I'll tell you about a typical evening after work in the future... we're focusing on the daily routine this time.