Another slow day...

Decided to go jog this morning after breakfast.  Went out to the boardwalk, then turned south for a while and headed back, making a square of about two miles.  Which isn't much, but enough to get me pretty sweaty. Which felt good, in a perverse way. 
Something's eating me up--either mosquitoes or spiders, but they are big and slightly itchy bites on my arm, neck, and ankle.  Haven't been able to catch the culprit, so I have no clue what it is--or where it comes from.  Ugh.
I'm continuing to make progress, still slower than I'd like.  And I confess, I was a bit distracted by the goings-on with Women of the Wall, a group of progressive Jewish women who want to have all-women prayer services, including reading Torah and  wearing tallit at the Wall.  None of which would be remarkable in the US, but is very much weird here, even to the secular Jews (like my host).  I'm trying to make sense of it and not getting very far.  Five thousand Orthodox women, mostly young, but not all, showed up to fill the women's section and prevent WoW from entering.  They held signs that called the WoW clowns. Pretty awful, but true from their perspective--women reading Torah or leading prayers is so strange that of course it seems like a desecration--there is simply no way to explain why it's okay.  The response from WoW is frankly obnoxious. Yes, they are being treated badly, but the formal responses don't show much in the way of empathy.  And I don't care that they are right--or that I might stand with them in August.  There really is little in the way of understanding coming from either side.  Baseless hatred abounds...