Tuesday, 16 April 2013 (Yom HaAtzma'ut)

I again slept well last night and also woke up somewhat less tired. I didn't get up very early, though, since we had gone to bed an hour late last night because we watched the ceremony at Har Herzl marking the start of יום העצמאות Yom HaAtzma'ut (Israeli Independence Day).

This morning, I evaluated the work of 5 of my classmates for week 6 in my Intro to Music Production class, and then I evaluated my own work, as well. Then I filled out the post-course survey, making sure to let them know how much I appreciated the professor's truly excellent presentations and, in general, the way he ran the class. So, I'm now completely finished with this class. The only remaining thing will be to see how my classmates evaluate my week 6 work, which I can't do until next Saturday since the deadline for those evaluations isn't until Friday night.

David and I decided to have a picnic today to celebrate Yom HaAtzma'ut. We packed some food, including cheese, potato salad, and hard-boiled eggs, into an insulated bag with a couple of ice packs in the top of it. Then we headed out of town, stopping to fill the car with gas and to pick up a couple of bottles of cold PepsiMax.

Our destination was Mitzpe Ramon. We stopped there to pick up fresh bottles of PepsiMax and then drove to the pull-out on the road just before its plunges into Makhtesh Ramon (Ramon Crater). From there, the view of the makhtesh is breathtaking. We parked so that we wouldn't be in the sun, rolled down the windows, and enjoyed our picnic. Afterwards, we bought more cold PepsiMax and headed for home.

It was really a beautiful day in the desert today. The sun was warm, but the air was cool enough that we didn't need to use the A/C at all -- we just rolled the windows down to varying degrees, according to how much cooling we needed at any particular time and according to how the wind was blowing. I drove mostly at about 90 km/h, and our average fuel consumption for the trip was over 20 km/l (over 47 mpg!).

This evening, I looked for more classes that might interest me, and I found a really good one. It's called Survey of Music Technology, and it will involve both music composition and some computer programming. It sounds very interesting, and it will start a week from Friday. I'm looking forward to it already!