Some updates

Spring quarter has begun and we're about 25% in it. Spring itself, however, seems to be a crazy season here. The weather has been oscillating from warm shiny days to damp, rainy and even snowy days. The period of the oscillation can be measured quite accurately to 3-4 days. When the weather is warm everything looks very nice and indeed spring is beautiful here. D has posted some photos in her Flickr album.
Last weekend we also had our first ever guest here in Cincinnati! We had a friend of mine from New York over for the weekend. She had to rid herself from Passover sticky Seders (there are two here in the US, because diaspora Jews apparently celebrate each holiday twice) and fled to our sanctuary. She spent three days with us, which allowed her to experience the entire cycle of weather. On gloomy Friday (originally, Good Friday) we went to the Cincinnati Art Museum, which surprisingly was more impressive than what I had expected. The museum showed an exhibition compiled by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on Surrealism and Dada works. This type of art is usually not my cup of tea, and indeed I could (and did) summarize some of the works as: hey, I can paint better than these blotches of paint on canvas. I did like the classic Alpha Romeo they put on exhibit in the museum: now this is art!
It cleared on Saturday and we went for a great walk in Ault Park, which is a lovely park minutes of walk from our house. Most of the photos in D's album were taken there (although a week earlier).

When it comes to observing the Passover tradition I'm glad to say that we didn't observe any of it. We didn't go to any Seder. We didn't eat any unleavened bread, on the contrary: we ate pizza. I think the only relation to the holiday's tradition was drinking wine on Seder. By the way, pizza and wine are our traditional way of celebrating this holiday, as we have done that in four of the last five years. Naturally, we also worked, studied and taught during the Passover week. So basically, we didn't feel any holidays spirit.

Today we made our first significant step into mutual recognition between us and the matrix, aka the State of Ohio: both of us took our driving test and passed. So now both of us hold a valid driver's license issued by the Bureau of Motor Vehicles of the grid. As stated in a previous post, we were required to pass all the driving tests administered, as if we haven't been driving for the past 17 years or so. At least now we hold a license that will - hopefully - enable us to be free of the passports we were carrying all the time: it is, after all, a valid ID. The driving test here is very short: about 15 minutes in total. The test has two parts: maneuverability test and actual driving. In the former one needs to drive from an original position through a rectangular area defined by 4 cones and then proceed either to the left or to the right of a fifth cone (called point), bringing the car to a stop with its rear at the line of the point, and parallel to the general direction of the area. Then, from this position one must reverse the car to its starting position (description of the test can be seen in this animation). The rules are that the motion forward and in reverse should be done without stopping and that the cones must not be driven over. Then, if one passes that part of the test, the second part of the test is a very short drive outside the testing center's parking lot. This proved to be very short and very easy. The funny thing, of course, that if we had failed the test, we would have simply get into our car, driving with our international license. Anyway, this is past us now, and thus, we have finally completed the work plan defined about a year ago for our relocation.