Friday, 28 October 2016

Last night brought quite a bit of excitement here in Eilat. Beginning sometime yesterday afternoon and continuing until sometime this morning, we had lightning, thunder, and rain. This was one time that I was rather glad NOT to have windows; I didn't get disturbed by the flashes of lightning, and the thunder was muffled enough that it didn't prevent me from sleeping well. In fact, I work up quite early, rested and ready to go out for a walk. Unfortunately, though, it was still raining, so I really couldn't. I didn't even go buy challah until after my last class. All told, in the course for about 15-20 hours, we got about 50% MORE rain here than we normally get IN AN ENTIRE YEAR!

I made a big mistake with my main Mac computer this morning. I decided to let it do an update, but while it was working on it, there was a brief power cut which, of course, interrupted it. The problem is that it was left in a state where it cannot finish starting up, and so I can't use it at all. I've lost the system DVD that came with it, so I can't start it that way, either. I'll either have to find a system disk somewhere or take it in for the Apple reps to do it. I'm hoping to avoid the latter since, although they have a store here in Eilat, I'm almost sure they'd have to send it to Tel Aviv for anything, and it would be gone for weeks. I still have my older Mac (which I'm using now), but it's slower and has a smaller hard drive. I don't think I could do my music very well on it at all, and I doubt that I could load the backup of the other computer (which I DO have, thank goodness!) onto the old machine. Anyway, I'm not very happy about the situation, but it is what it is, and it will eventually get solved one way or another.

I taught 5 units of Berlitz lessons today despite quite a few problems all day with internet connectivity: 9:00-9:45, 10:00-11:30, and 11:30-1:00.

After my teaching was finished, I walked up to the bakery to get challah. By then, there were hardly even any clouds left in the sky, it was quite warm out, and even the dirt on the median of our road was barely damp and not muddy at all. Luckily, the bakery still had a few of the challot that I like left.

I had a salad, quesadillas, and some cookies for lunch.

In the afternoon, I managed to make myself do the weekly chores, even though I didn't much feel like it. I'm glad was able to do that!

In the evening, I lit candles, drank a little sweet red wine, and ate a little challah to welcome Shabbat. Then I went out for a nice walk around the big loop. It was still quite warm, and there was very little breeze. Nearly everything was dried out, except for a few puddles here and there. In today's pic of the day, you can see that there was already no water at all running in Nakhal Shakhamon, only about 12 hours after the end of the huge storm:

I walked a total of 6.4 kilometers today.

I'll leave you today with Pascal's musings over the last week or so. Since he uses quite a bit of whitespace in his style, I'll enclose his whole portion in quotes:

"……….                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   7                                                                                                     [1                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

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