What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

Originally blogged at Almost Eden on March 3, 2011

I’ve received a lot of great feedback from yesterday’s post (Are you Too Old to Make Aliyah?), thanks to all of you who wrote to me offline.

Since you’re already in that change state of mind (if you’re considering Aliyah, that is), another useful exercise to consider is that of carefully assessing your skills, hobbies and passions to determine if there is something else you’d rather be doing to make a living – something that could work here.

Go ahead and give it a try for maybe ten minutes, or a few hours – or a few days!

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………… Continue reading “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?”

Are You Too Old to Make Aliyah?

Originally blogged at Almost Eden on March 2, 2011

There has been a very popular discussion thread taking place on the Nefesh B’Nefesh LinkedIn group for more than 2 weeks regarding older olim, employment and living in the northern part of Israel.

There were more than 100 comments when I logged in tonight and I became concerned about an air of negativity that was rising.

Let’s put things in perspective shall we? How is the IT job market in the US for the over-50 crowd right now? Yeah, I thought so… we made Aliyah when I was 50 and my husband 52. During the 10 years prior to that in NY, WV, TN and OH he (a senior level DBA and Chemical Process Engineer) was unemployed for a sum total of approximately 3.5 years. My very secure Internet Content Editor position with Deloitte and Touche was moved to a different state at a time I wasn’t in a position to relocate and my Senior Technical Writer position with a mortgage bank went away when they fell on hard times.

Lesson learned: there is no such thing as job security. Senior level people can make a good living as Consultants. We learned that my husband could do trouble-shooting contracting to a variety of companies (thru outsourcing firms) and earn $50 to $75 per hour – this made up for the down-time. Continue reading “Are You Too Old to Make Aliyah?”

When all else fails – Reboot!

Originally blogged at Almost Eden on February 9, 2011

While reading a great post by my friend Rivkah, I was reminded of something that happened in our home on Sunday… Yisrael was frantic because the HOT (cable) box seemed to be malfunctioning and he was being deprived of an American cartoon he likes to watch (in Hebrew). I suggested that he might need to change the batteries in the remote. He snapped back “I’ve already done that, Mom!” (in that ‘what do you think I am, an idiot?’ tone).

Because I can already visualize the eyes of some friends back in the “old country” rolling and the judgments forming… we have cable TV in Israel to help us improve our “ear” for Hebrew and to gain a better understanding of the news and culture here (e.g., I love watching cooking shows in Hebrew). We are also able to block channels we feel are inappropriate. Continue reading “When all else fails – Reboot!”

Yichudim WordPress site

The Yichudim site was launched today. Their goal is to educate us on:

To join heaven and earth, spiritual and physical, refined and coarse, etc. infusing the “higher” into the “lower”. The site is meant to be a forum for those who contemplate and implement the drawing of G-dliness into the physical world to discuss, teach and learn the ways of “unification”.

My role in this project was complete end-to-end service from DNS change to site hosting, WordPress installation (on my HostGator server), design, and image optimization.

Yichudim