Practicing "Landslide" by Stevie Nicks While Skiing

   One of my students made me promise to sing her a song on her birthday next Tuesday.  She thinks that I look like Stevie Nicks, so I decided to practice Stevie's "Landslide," since my kids told me it was the song depicting my life after the divorce.

    To help this struggling math/engineering teacher and author, this book can be purchased at https://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=9781613464960.  Thank you!

My Book Displayed With Such Flair!

    At our staff 7th period at a local restaurant on the last day before December break I got to know our new librarian at our high school.  She and I just talked and talked about Christianity and Judaism.  It was a delightful sharing.
    During that sharing I mentioned that I'd written a book.  It was odd of course, to have the math/engineering teacher published in a nontechnical book, but, yes, I did venture out and publish that first memoir. She really wanted to read it, so I told her that I'd donate 3 books to the library anonymously.  I didn't want the students to know that they were reading about me!
    When we returned from break, my new friend the librarian jokingly said, "I'm still waiting for those books!"
    I asked, "Do you want paperback or hardcover?  I didn't know which to bring down from the attic."
    She didn't have a preference.
    After I got a new box of paperback books out of the attic, I signed 3,

    "Dear Rio Student,
            Always remember to reach for new heights and follow your dreams!
                      Climb High,
                                Isolde Ulrich"
    The librarian was so excited when I delivered them the next working day!  I told her that she had to cover the picture of me on the back of the book though.  I didn't want the students to know that this was my memoir.
    When I went to do my after school tutoring with my Algebra 1 addicts, there were my books proudly displayed upon entering the library!  I was so touched!!!  She even put the bar code over my picture, so no one would know that I was Isolde Ulrich.

     To help this struggling math/engineering teacher and author, this book can be purchased at https://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=9781613464960.  Thank you!

How I Became Jewish

    A great Torah scholar of our time just asked me how did his Christian best childhood's friend's little sister come to a Kabbalah class?  So I responded.
    How I became a Jew is a long story.  It started long before I knew, but I was only to realize the journey once I became an orthodox Jew.  My first realization was at my mother's funeral.  My uncle on my dad's side mentioned that my Grandma was probably Jewish.

    I was married to a devout Christian/Catholic/Baptist who was uncomfortable with Judaism at the time, so he would tell me, "You're not Jewish.  You've never even stepped in a synagogue in your life!"  So we explored Catholicism and the Baptist religion together.  I taught Catholicism for 6 years in my children's Sunday school, since I was honoring a promise to G_d---I couldn't get pregnant and once told G_d that I would raise my kids to love Him, if He let me get pregnant!  I got pregnant immediately.

    Then the ladies of the family started getting early onset breast cancer, and we found that we had the BRCA 1 gene.  Our particular gene came from our mother and is Ashkenazi Irish.  My mother died never knowing of her Jewish ancestry.

    My marriage failed and I moved home to Sacramento to be closer to my dad and clear my teaching credential in math/physics/engineering and I met an orthodox Jewish guy while kayaking on the lake after I prayed for my Adam.  I wasn't going to convert, because I felt that I couldn't deny Jesus, though I always went directly to G_d for help.

    When my boyfriend took me to Israel to meet his parents, I asked G_d to tell me what religion that I was supposed to worship, because I'd been attending at KITC for over a year by that time.  My boyfriend was in control of the itinerary and I'd long forgotten what day it was when I was praying in the Cathedral of Gethsemane right after posing in front of the marble carving of Jesus wanting to pass the cup---he didn't want to be the Moshiach, the Messiah.

    Then an understanding came over me, "Look at the date.  Look at the date!"  

    I reluctantly stopped praying and pulled my cell phone out and saw that it was July 9th and wondered where I was July 7th.  July 7 or 7/7 is the day that our tabernacles were rebuilt---my cousin and I had our double mastectomy surgeries on the exact same day a year apart without planning to combat her breast cancer and my inevitable breast cancer from the BRCA 1 gene.  7/7 on the Roman calendar is the day that G_d changes my life in a drastic way.

    I thought hard about what I was doing on 7/7.  It was the answer to what religion that I was to worship.  We were at Yad Vashem, and I was looking for my relatives that didn't get out of Germany or Slovenia.  I was also on the Western Tunnel Tour and was the closest to the Holy of Holies that you can get exactly 7 years after G_d gave me a sign of a fish that I was going to live after I asked for one while kayaking fishing on La Jolla Cove. I needed the sign, because right before my kayak trip I was told to collect my medical records for my family, because I was going to die.  So on July 7th, 7 years after I got a second chance, the only things that I did that day were Jewish, not Christian.

    Just to make sure that I caught that message, G_d made the first Parshat, Torah reading, when I returned to California Devarim/Deuteronomy Parashat Re'eh 13:2-5, "If there should stand up in your midst a prophet or a dreamer of a dream, and he will produce to you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes about, of which he spoke to you, saying, 'Let us follow gods of others that you did not know and we shall worship them!'---do not harken to the words of that prophet or to that dreamer of a dream, for Hashem, your G_d, is testing you to know whether you love Hashem, your G_d, with all your heart and with all your soul."  I knew from that direct Hebrew to English translation that I'd never seen before that G_d wanted me to become a Jew and started my conversion immediately.

    As a Jew I now know that my grandma's wig that everyone complained about was a sheitel.  She also always made latkes which my dad called potato pancakes.   The Levine family of Joliet, Illinois also renamed my grandma from Angela to Ruth, so that is not done unless she converted or was Jewish.  She was very persecuted for her Austrian/Slovenian accent in America during WWI, so I can imagine how scared she must have been about being Jewish during WWII.  She never mentioned it to her dying day, and I was one of the closest grandchildren to her.

    I also know that when I almost drowned in the American River at 12 years old and saw the tunnel of light that gave me hope that I was going to live that G_d kept me around for a reason.  It was my devout Christian brother who pulled me out of the river when I couldn't move anymore.  He put me on my back on a beach, and I looked up and saw that it was a cloudy day with no sun.  The light I saw was G_d.  Now I know that I had a personal Batmitzvah from G_d at 12 in the mikvah of the American River.

    It was exactly 40 years later after reading the Christian bible about 5 times through and having a lot of unanswered questions that I became an orthodox Jew.  Though my boyfriend insisted that I became orthodox so we could get married, he left me 2 months before I completed my 1.5 year conversion.  I guess G_d wanted to make sure that the conversion was understood to be His, G_d's, idea.  In retrospect, it all makes sense, though it was painful.

    So I attend Kabbalah classes to make my spiritual tools more understood and stronger for my next journey that He takes me on.  I have found my spiritual peace as a Jew in a not so peaceful world!
    
P.S.  To my blog readers:  If you want to support a struggling math/engineering teacher and author, please buy my first book, "The Romance of Kilimanjaro," soon to be followed by my second book at:  https://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=9781613464960         Thank You!

Happy Chanukah!

   Here's the Chanukah song that I sang on my first Chanukah in 2013.  Chanukah Sameach or Chag Urim Sameach (Happy Chanukah)! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOhtDOvDtUE



P.S.  To my blog readers:  If you want to support a struggling math/engineering teacher and author, please buy my first book, "The Romance of Kilimanjaro," soon to be followed by my second book at:  https://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=9781613464960         Thank You!

Funny How I Always Choose Wrong

     Way back a couple months ago a female friend with good intention gave me a card for praying for a Jewish spouse with the instructions that I pray this prayer every night after I say the Shma for 40 nights.  Well only after a few weeks of praying I got not one, but two matches on my See You At Sinai match making site.
     One match had seen me in a dream before my match come to him, and he knew without a doubt that I was his Bashert!  He was set to marry me in an instant.  When he looked at me for the first time on Skype, he just about cried in delight and told me that he loved me!
     He came out for a week during Succot.  He was not fit as he propounded throughout his match making page.  In fact he had a watermelon-sized belly.  I was shocked when he got off the plane, but I was trying to not judge him by his outsides, though he lied about his fitness.  He'd also given me his legal name by accident in an e-mail with his flight itinerary, so I had a friend do a background check while I drove to pick him up and to our surprise, he had been sued by the State of Washington for bad customer service!
     After a week of gently questioning him around this point about being sued by the whole state of Washington, he explained that he was sick with prostate cancer and under care in Texas while he was being sued in Washington.  When he returned to Washington, his wife had kicked him out and filed for divorce, so his last bit of money went to getting some custody of the children and not to defending himself from the State of Washington.  This made some sense.
     Over time he divulged that he was living off social security and that to afford for me to move to Seattle, he'd have to start a new business, so I wouldn't be supporting him.  His e-mails soon changed from love poetry about physics to ideas for starting businesses.  Soon I told him to stop e-mailing about businesses, because that was his issue.  I had a job, and it kept me too busy to help start a business.
     He still through business ideas by me, until one day he said, "Maybe I could get a CNC from that guy who owes my $50,000 for making a CNC for me, and I could make counterfeit collectible coins with counterfeit written on the side of the coin."
     "That's a federal offense!" I interjected.
      After that phone call I paid for a background check on him and then investigated his father to see if his father taught him how to criminally think and not realize it was criminal.  Sure enough his dad had been put in jail for 6 months by the State of Texas for melting feathers to put into pet food.  The smell was so horrible from their plant that the people of Waco, Texas filed a suit.
      Fortunately, G_d had a now expelled student torch a feather in my class to try to get me to evacuate it.  Since it didn't smell like burning plastic which is toxic, I didn't evacuate the class.  It did smell horrible and that was just one feather.  I could imagine how badly his father's plant had smelled.  I could imagine why a whole city filed suit against him and put him into jail.
     When I asked this suitor who desperately wanted to marry me about if his family has had any other legal issues while doing business.  He didn't admit to it.  Then I said, "So you didn't have any problems in Texas?"
     He blamed those problems on antisemitism.  Now I would have believed that, if G_d hadn't had that student torch a feather in my class.  G_d also had the poor suitor suffer from a very bloody bladder disease right after Yom Kippur, so G_d was really not happy about this guy pursuing me so strongly.
     I'd also found that he was using his deceased father's name to do business in Seattle.  He'd mentioned that his new business would also have to be under my name, not his.  This just made my skin crawl that he could put me into jail with some sketchy business deal, so I finally told him that he wasn't ready for this relationship and ended it.
     A few days later I went back to my other match that I'd previously told that I've found my Bashert, so I didn't want him to wait around for me.  For some reason I never ended our match formerly, so I explained that the guy that I thought was my Bashert was a criminal.  I was a corporate spy and did a background check and found that he had some criminal behaviors in business.  My other match was kind and liked the idea that I was a corporate spy and took me back, but said that he would dating others.
     Well, it's been well over a month since this other match actually communicated with me.  I was actually going to formerly end it with him.  Then, out of the blue, he called.  He talked on and on like we've been talking every week.  I did face exercises to rid me of my jowls in the reflection of my black window while I listened to him.  I finally asked him, "Why haven't you ever been married?"
      Then he started another soliloquy with exceptional detail and added at the end, "I'm on the autism spectrum."
      "Oh really," as if I hadn't figured that one out.  "What type of autism?"
       "I have Aspergers."
       "Well, so do I.  How does yours exhibit?"
        He doesn't have the tactile issues that I have, but he has little twitches like twirling his hair.
        I added, "I said it was OK for my matches to have Aspergers, but I didn't say that I had it, since I can pass as a neural typical."  I explained in detail how my daughter made me take the Aspie test, because she was so upset to be raised by an mother with Aspergers.  My son is half neural typical and half Aspie.
        "Aren't female Aspies rare?"  He asked.
        "Incredibly."
        We shared our wonderful soliloquies of our very interesting adventures for over an hour---being gracious and letting the other talk without interrupting.  We didn't have to worry about being misunderstood.  We didn't have to worry about boring the other.  We didn't have to try to be neural typical.  We just were ourselves.
         I ended the conversation, "So, you'll call in another month?"
         He laughed.
         "Could you make it sooner this time---like a week?" I added.
         And so G_d answered my prayer for a Jewish spouse, and I chose wrong.  At least G_d let us have another chance to figure out that we were each other's Bashert.


P.S.  To my blog readers:  If you want to support a struggling math/engineering teacher and author, please buy my first book, "The Romance of Kilimanjaro," soon to be followed by my second book at:  https://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=9781613464960         Thank You!

The Thanksgiving Blues

    Today as I kayaked on Lake Natoma where I met my ex-fiance tears were in my eyes, not for him, but for being without my children on Thanksgiving.  Perhaps that's why my ex broke up with me last year at this time.  My motherly instincts to have my children with me, when I'm thankful for all the G_d has given to me, always makes me sad when I'm without my precious children every year on Thanksgiving.
    Yet G_d gave me glassy water with a massive storm overhead, a storm heading to the Sierra Mountains to drop the snow which I prayed for to keep me busy skiing while I was alone.  G_d gave me a lake all to myself with the most beautiful reds popping out of deep greens.  G_d gives me so much when I cry to Him on the water....and just when I cry to Him.  I constantly blessed all the beauty and miracles that he gave to me as I paddled onward toward the mountains and back, and the glassy water and beauty lasted without a drop of rain upon me.
    Though the blues hit me later in the morning, earlier this morning I was too sleepy for the blues to hit me as I dropped my son off at the airport.  He's such a good man and lives with me again, so he can go back to college.  I spent all my college money on his sister while he was finding himself and developing his rock n roll band, Air Surgeon.  He's never stopped loving me over that.  His sister is much different.
    After his sister's college graduation and wedding, she wrote and told me to only write her if it had to do with money or a severe medical emergency.  My dad's stroke was not severe enough, and she wrote, "Your breaking the rules."
     When I told my son this for the first time yesterday, he said, "What a spoiled, bratty, princess!"  That's what most of her psychologists have told her in professional terms over the years, too.  I still have hope that one day whatever I did or didn't do is forgiven.  She's my daughter, and I love her.
     I know that, because I was severely physically and emotionally abused by my middle brother and sister as I grew up with undiagnosed Aspergers that no amount of work will obliterate the insensitivity that I have toward abusive behavior.  With all my training as a teacher, I know more and more what abusive behavior is.  I know what made me feel bad and never did it to my children.  I know that I moved my children far away from my siblings to keep them safe, but what did I unknowingly bring with me that hurt my daughter?
     She's explained it to me: I didn't listen to her enough.  I had Aspergers.  I wasn't strong enough during my surgical menopause, and she felt like a parent to me.  I fed her huge Paku fish, that looked like a piranha, to the cat when that fish ate all the other fish in the aquarium.  For some reason she felt like I always thought she was fat, though I purposefully stopped myself from doing that to her, since my mother did it to me.  At least I did better than most abused children do as parents, but that's not going to make my relationship with my daughter any better now.
    After finishing my mandatory reporters training for teachers last week, I remarked to my son, "They added something new into it this year.  They added, 'Interview the parents that are abusing their children, because they probably will tell you how they're abusing their children without even knowing it.  In their minds what they do is not abuse.  It's just what the family does.'"
    "Did I do something bad that I was unaware of to my children?"  I asked my son.  At least my son didn't think so, but what if my abuse was now his normal?  What an endless cycle of training and retraining myself to recognize abusive behavior.  What an endless cycle of removing myself from my siblings' and exhusband's abuse only to be abused by my daughter's rules of interaction.
     Anyway, I'm alone, so no one is abusing me on Thanksgiving, but I wish that I wasn't alone.  I wish that someday I'll find a life partner that will look into my eyes on Thanksgiving and make me focus on him and not on missing my children or the pain from my past, just as G_d keeps me focused on the beautiful glassy water and reds of the trees as I kayak toward the mountains and back beneath the storm clouds of life.


P.S.  To my blog readers:  If you want to support a struggling math/engineering teacher and author, please buy my first book, "The Romance of Kilimanjaro," soon to be followed by my second book at:  https://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=9781613464960         Thank You!

Getting Psyched for Skiing!

   Water conveys energy on so many levels.  This energy revives me while I'm kayaking on it, swimming in it, hiking through it, or skiing on top of it.  With our cold storms with heavy rains my students and I were excited for the snow, so I watched my skiing videos from 2014 and got psyched up for visiting my old haunts at Squaw Valley and Alpine.  I definitely need to train, so I don't get hurt this season!
   While exploring Alpine Meadows I just followed ski tracks and got a bit lost on this adventure!

    My GoPro can be a bit difficult to adjust for videos.  A few times it fell downward and took a video of my legs moguling.

This is a great mogul run which is way off the beaten path at Granite Chief at Squaw Valley.

I did have a nasty fall down this shoot when I hit some ice.  I belly flopped on my apple and severely bruised my ribs.  I learned to cut my apple into slices or just have soft fruit in my lunch, if I'm going to store my lunch in the front of my body suit.

Olympic Lady is my favorite run at Squaw Valley.  It's where I'd always find my expert skiing friends each year and catch up.  The lift isn't operated anymore, but you can still get to the East Bowl with a little work!

A random expert skier that had the same skill level as me joined me for the day, so I put him to work and had him take video of me!

I had to put a KT-22 video in.  This is Northface.  The Westface was solid ice that day and couldn't be skied by even experts.

This shows how tough it is to ski on ice and why I'm alone on Granite Chief!

P.S.  To my blog readers:  If you want to support a struggling math/engineering teacher and author, please buy my first book, "The Romance of Kilimanjaro," soon to be followed by my second book at:  https://www.tatepublishing.com/bookstore/book.php?w=9781613464960         Thank You!