אי שם מעבר לים

Or: Who am I?

I've been driving Aviad, my brother, my parents, Aunt Judy, and lately my friend Mila, crazy with a question that’s been bothering for months: how should I complete the sentence - "Nice to meet you! My name is.." ???

The story is quite complicated, and I apologize to those of you who heard it a million times.

At birth I was given the name Avigal, after the 'Galim' (waves) in Bat Galim, Haifa, where my father grew up. My parents call me Avigal to this day.

For some reason, when we arrived in Israel in 1980, my name was written in all the formal papers as Avigail (my parents don't know how to explain this). So since kindergarden my friends/teachers etc. call me Avigail.

All my family in the States, including my brother, call me Abby. All my family in Israel, mostly from my father’s side, call me Avigal.

Now, since Avigail is an international name, when I first opened an email account in hotmail (..) years ago, I decided to put Abigail as my name on the address. That name went on with me to yahoo! and gmail.

So you tell me, how should I call myself here?!

 Please note:

(1) If I present myself from the start as Abigail or Abby, I might be taken for a 100% American, rachmana litslan.. 

(2) Avigail is hard to pronounce, as I found out when I visited here in March.

(3) Some of my best friends in Israel call me Avigal, the way my parents call me (incidentally, they are not native Hebrew speakers).

(4) I don't know with which name I feel most comfortable with. They're all me.

We just got today our mobile phones. By mail of course. In fact, we first went to an AT&T store but the guys there told us we should sign the contract with AT&T online and not at the store as you get a better deal that way…

So, the winning numbers are (drum rolls):

617-750-0496

617-750-0497

and as 496 is a perfect number, the perfect lady will get to use it. 497 is just one next to a perfect, which makes it perfectly me.

Above romantic mood is also due to a number - the perfect 3 years together we celebrated today. Well, not quite 'celeberated' but rather 'mentioned', as I'm still not feeling that good (cold went down from nose to throat…). So hopefully we'll celebrate that later this week. Maybe even with a visit to Boston (we haven't been to Boston yet!! Boston above ground that is.).

Also, note that it’s cheaper for you to call us than to call your Israeli friends, so no excuses there! (0.20+ NIS vs. 0.40+ NIS per min.)

Also, we have here our original Israeli home phone number. That’s 074-4141618. It’s totally an Israeli landline phone number, same costs, same everything. It’s the beta VoIP service of Bezeq Int. We still don't have it connected all the time, as we're guests right now at aunt Judy’s place, but we can use it to call Israel and you can leave us messages there. I get an email with your message right after you leave it.