weather being nasty

Keren is in Tel Aviv right now, having fun with family and friends and catching up on work. It was 85 F today (Sunday) in Chicago, maybe as warm as Tel Aviv! The first brave souls tiptoed out into the Lake, hoping to cool off, ever so careful to keep important waist-level cargo safely out of reach of the icy 45 F water. If you don't like heat, just wait a day...or if that's too long, then 6 hours...tonight!

So here I am with the scroogim and the camera, and some time on my hands. A northwest wind is picking up as a cold front is pushing through Chicago tonight, usually a good excuse for nature to make some fireworks, and this time for me, a chance to improve my non-existent photography skills, which are to Keren's picture-taking talents as Coors Light is to Guinness. Yuck (depending on how you look at it).

It's 10:00 pm, and I see fleeting flashes to the West and Northwest. In my giddiness, I randomly mash some buttons on the camera to slow the shutter speed (note to self: I flipped the dial to "M"). Looking out our West window down Bryn Mawr, I note that the sky is almost blue at this exposure time (upper right). I also congratulate myself for having discovered the shutter speed option, already known to even the most amateur of photographers.

Nothing interesting yet, but about 10:30 the fireworks begin. One of the first (unfortunately blurry - I had a few Coors Lights waiting for the storm to show up) signs of the storm front as it blew over the airport some 15 miles West can be seen at the right.

1.21 GIGAWATTS of flux capacitor juice! Somewhere, a high school kid is going to back to screw up his past. For those interested, here are instructions to build your own flux capacitor. Happy time travelling. For now, the self-induced pressure is on to take a few pretty pictures and make my wife proud. [In retrospect this wasn't too fun. It quickly became a competition between me and myself, a sure guarantee to crap on my parade.]

That's cloud-to-ground lightning (upper right): mistress of the unlucky, slayer of golfers, barbequer of cattle, probably striking out near the airport. After messing around with shutter speed some more (note to self: AUTO), and taking a break to distract the scroogim (and entertain myself) with the laser pointer, I meticulously experiment with minimizing my "shakes". I turn the camera at every angle, leaning against the window and the window frame, leaving greasy prints from my hands and sweaty forehead on the window that only make my short fuse this night burn quicker. I violently curse myself and the camera as the lightshow outside rages on, and my near misses pile up. My wife is an expert at putting out these self-ignited flames. I miss her.

Finally, by 11:00pm, I hit a couple of almost home runs. The storm has died down, and after a half hour of laughing at my expense, mother nature in her pity lets loose a few parting fireworks. By now I have tamed the camera and am ready:

Bingo! Cloud-to-cloud lightning. It only took 47 shots. I conclude that they must have made digital cameras for goons like me. Neighbors in the foreground building at the top reach for their phones to call the police on a peeping tom. To my frustration, the second bolt (bottom) looks like a parting shot from mother nature, almost like a taunting middle finger. I now realize it wasn't pity after all that prompted her to surrender this shot. It was jest. Very funny. Before some unnamed catastrophe befalls my camera, I upload the pictures to the computer. There. Done. Time to pet the scroogim and go to bed. (And also time for a few more huge nuclear lighting bolts, now that the camera is put away - nice try, Weather, I'm not going to sprint for the camera anymore).

The midwest is notorious for its severe weather (see Tornado Alley). Chicago is close enough that we should get some spectacular weather - spectacular at a distance, that is. I'm fascinated by lightning, and despite my impatience and clumsiness, I plan to out-do these pictures soon.

weather being nice

Don't you just love it when the weather is considerate?!? we noticed that the weather time scale is about one day, meaning - if you don't like the weather today, just wait a day and it will change. The weekend was just perfect. We spent Saturday afternoon->night with Cris, Sara, Herania, Doug and other friends from work, celebrating Chris's birthday. Starting outside at Sheffild's patio (they don't serve food, but they have a stinky binder with all the takeout joints in the neighborhood), moved from there to the Duke of Perth (their Belhaven Wee Heavy beer was very good, and so was the fish in the fish&chips). Ben enjoyed the Double Chocolate Stout. Oleg suggested to move on to Blues, a blues bar. We stayed there for a couple of hours, while some guy called Chico Banks was bluesing.

Sunday, noonish, we crossed the 100m seperating us from the park, and went rollerblading/jogging along with the rest of Chicago. What a perfect day. There's a sweet spot just on Montrose harbor, where you can see the entire skyline spread in front of you.
Next week i will be in TA - will probably miss this kind of perfect spring days. I already miss them - a day has passed, the weather changed, and reverted back to rain and fog. I heard it can't make up it's mind in TA either :)

Greengo

Things that are GREEN (in no particular order)

	Our blanket. It got summery here the last few days, if it stays like that for a while longer we may have to consider something lighter...
	Broccoli. people have been complaining about the quality of produce here, but i am pretty pleased with at least 2 things - broccoli and spinach. they make pretty good spinach pie, for instance.
	The blackboard at my office. it's not black.
	Mem sofit, of course. it's a part of the letter magnets that my mom got Ben for Rosh Hashana. he doesn't use his hebrew very often - only when we ride the train together and want to talk about people in the train without them knowing what we say... even then, the conversation is reduced to something like "this man fat" or "this woman not pretty". yesterday, we actually used out foreign language "against" kids -- when we discsuued what was in Mira's snack bag (cookies and water and pull-ups), and didn't want to draw her attention to it...
	Shrek. The new Shrek movie is about to come out on May 18th, Ben promised to wait for me and w ewill go see it after i'm back from TA. This particular Shrek picture is on the back of a cereal box, one of many that we got on sale a few days ago. the top of our refregerator is pretty impressive right now.
	Ben's pajama.
	Grass. I remember it when it was this small. i grew it for the scroogim, cats are known to be drawn to any kind of plants and eating grass is supposed to help them with hairballs or something. they never heard of it. they acually ignore it altogether. i hope they do the same thing with my little herb garden that i'm starting by the window. it's still in the form of seeds, but i am encouraged by the fast growth of the cat-grass, and i strongly believe that our apartment is the perfect greenhouse.
	John Deere mug. Gray scrooge particularly likes climbing into cupboards that we leave open, and his recent adventure cost us a coffee mug... fortunately he cose to knock down the cheapest one we had (a meijer's xmas cup), and spared this one :)
	April!! it sure is green out. the grass is absolutely awesome. there's green grass everywhere. i guess all you need for perfect grass is a few months of frost and then a lot of sunshine. it might explain why grass in israel has to struggle so hard...

Things that are NOT green:
THIS CARD :D

lake effect

[today, driving to the university]

what couldn't you live without?

the other day i read an article in Ynet about an organization that helps people get out of debt. the story focused on this one single mom, who learned how to buy less expensive stuff, including switch to a cheaper brand of cigarettes. one of the talk-backs at the end of the article (no. 35) did the explicit calculation, and showed that if she only quit smoking altogether, she would have saved 1000's of shekels a year, enough to buy a new washing machine or a computer... (i remember doing that experiment with my old commander at the army, who was (and probably still it) a chain-smoker. we figured that he could have saved enough money to send his 3 kids to college if he only stopped smoking!)

cigarettes are very expensive, partly due to heavy taxing. in some cases this taxing is supposed to make you consume less of a product that's bad for you. it sounds like a good idea: if it costs more, you buy less of it, you live longer. i can think of some examples where this clearly doesn't work, especially when strong addictive substances are involved.

but if you don't consider yourself an addict, is there anything in your life that you use on a daily basis, and would not give up, even if it became ridiculously expensive?
here are some examples:
beer becoming x3 more expensive. will you still buy beer?
tomatoes?
meat? if meat became very very pricey, will you become vegetarian?
where would YOU draw the line?

i think that there are a few things that we will not give up regardless of the price. i'll put them in the comment below, just so that whoever reads this post has a few seconds to think about it before reading the rest... ;)

Tail Bath

Gray scrooge had an accident that made the tip of his tail brown. It therefore needed to take a bath. Not the entire scrooge, just the tip of the tail. The crooge behaved nicely when i grabbed him by the back of the neck and dipped his tail in lukewarm water. He even earned several treats in the process. Hope this doesn't become a habit...

NY

[Feb 2002]

Foggy Chicago

We've spent a lot of time here and elsewhere talking about the City, mostly covering the downtown, which isn't entirely unknown to the rest of the world. As we get tired of talking about the downtown, we'll start to branch out; for example, we're going to White Sox game on April 26th. We've haven't yet become too jaded with the downtown (will we ever?), so here's yet another post: Chicago in the FOG!

My (Ben) parents were in town for the weekend (next to last weekend of March) from Cadillac, MI, and that gave us an excuse to go downtown. We had hoped for good weather, but it's spring, and as we say in the midwest, "you don't like the weather today, wait until tomorrow." Our reflection in the blob at Millenium Park tells the story. Sometime early Saturday morning, the fog rolled in as thick as pea soup, as they say. The four people in the middle (see above) are my mom, my dad, Keren, and me. We're facing north, with the Art Museum behind us (shrouded in fog) and Michigan Ave. to the left of the picture. The entire downtown was ghostly. The fog muffled the traffic and shortened visibility to a 100, making it seem as if we were on an island.

Over near the lake, the docks seemed to vanish in the mist. Ever read the The Mist by Stephen King? Spooky.

By far the coolest thing was the view from atop the Hancock Tower (below). Looking south from Hancock, you can see that
the fog stops at about the 70th or 80th floor of Sears Tower (right). The Aon building sticks up above the fog too, but other than that, you would never know the rest of downtown was there. It looks like two or three lone buildings on a pillowy landscape, something like the Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back.

Enough of the fog. After gawking at it all day Saturday, we decided to do some stuff on Sunday, since Sunday was much nicer. Sunny and 65 F. We visited the Lincoln Park Zoo and the Museum of Science and Industry. My only reference points for the zoo are the Detroit Zoo and the Toledo Zoo. Lincoln Park had better monkeys and was free, but those were the only two things it had on either of the other two. I'm told there's another zoo west of town, the Brookfield Zoo, that is supposed to be pretty awesome.

We didn't spend much time and the Museum of Science and Industry. I think their model railroad exhibit was my favorite, but we had to leave because of all the drinking that needed to be done. We took my parents to Hopleaf, one of our favorite watering holes, and ended the night arguing about politics at Charlie's Alehouse. I was too drunk to remember much about it. Someday we'll have to start a separate post about beer in Chicago.


the pictures we took that day are here

multiply lensed

Tree

do you think Black Scrooge likes climbing?
we thought so. maybe because of where we found him one evening... he stood on those boxes for a few seconds, with the deer-caught-in-headlights look on his face, trying to figure out whether he's in trouble or not. we thought he would be more comfortable on a specially designed cat-furniture.
"we need to build them some cat tree."
"yea, maybe we can do it over the weekend at my parents' house!"
..."here are some nice examples, what do you think?"
"i like the last one."
"i like the first one"
"hmm... we could look for branches, only that the ground is covered with all that snow... and plus, it will crumble and leave crap all over our carpet.."

here's the plan:


it didn't take much to "convince" DadK to take part in the project.
Mom&DadK's basement proved to be a great source of... anything!
We found some carpet scraps, 2-by-4s, ply wood, and a whole lot of tools.


this is ben, using the sander on the main post (he's so incredibly fast, and looks like a blur in the picture) and DadK supervising.


And here, they are producing some important parts (cleats???) that will eventually make the tree level and stable (they are really just small wooden triangles):


This is Roy, making sure we follow the plan. we actually used him for size, as an upper limit on any future size/weight the scroogim can get to ;)


After getting all the parts back home, we assembled them according to plan. Of course we had to try and err a bit, unscrew and rescrew, break a drill bit, and fight black scrooge off of Ben's back (he seemed to like ben's position, bending over like that while using the screw driver...). Gray scrooge was ready to jump on the top shelf before anything was even assembled, and we just had it standing there for size...

We had to eyeball a bunch, since we don't have a level, and rely on the triangle thingies to be perfectly angled, and the result is (according to the quality control committee, aka Black and Gray Scrooge) -- perfect.

We still need to work on stability (right now the heavy tool bag is standing on the base), but seems like we planned it just right. the center of weight is always above the base, preventing it from tipping over, and the extra long screws we got do the job of keeping it in one piece. We also still need to cover the post with scratching carpet and scratching rope... we were too tired to do that when we finally finished. The scroogeim immediately climbed up, and we are now left with zero places that they cannot reach. this was not part of the plan. we need to get a shelf now.

Looks like they like it up there!

Gefilte Fish

Gefilte Fish.
There's something very appalling in this culinary abnormality. a few shapeless fishcakes, resting in a pile of slimy jello, must be an invention of someone polish (or at least had a polish great-grandma on his mom's side).
Somehow, my beloved husband, who is not Polish nor Jewish, found out that he actually likes this thing. It reminds him of Canada. hmm. i wonder. I happened to be in one or two surf-N-turfs, led by genuine canadians, and there was NOTHING there that even remotely resembled this wobbly goo.
what shall i do now?!?

to understand the idea behind the gefilte, you must know something about jewish laws, and something about the jewish mind. it seems like for every law out there, the jewish mind found a bypass. here are a few examples.
starting with the gefilte, according to wikipedia, and i quote -

According to the traditions of Judaism, one reason that has been given for the eating of gefilte fish on Shabbat is to avoid the picking of bones when eating the fully prepared fish balls, thus avoiding borer ("selection/choosing"), one of the 39 categories of activity prohibited on Shabbat derived from the Torah as outlined in the Mishnah. Were fishbones to be present they would pose the problem of doing Borer.

so eat fish, not bones.

moving on.

pork.
it's a well known fact, that jews don't eat pork. well, that's somewhat incorrect. jews eat pork, KOSHER jews don't. it's against the jewish law to eat pork, and ridiculously, it's against the state law to grow pork on israeli land. why? well, a few years ago, an ultra religious party was a minority in the government, but someone needed their vote for passing some military related legislation, so in return they got to pass this no-pigs-on-holy-land legislation.
what does the jewish brain do?
bypass the law. we can't have a pig farm on the land of israel? we will have it ABOVE the land. there's nothing against that! (wish i could find a picture that demonstrates that... maybe it's an urban legend ?!?)


sabbatical.
just like men have the obligation (!!!) to rest one day every seven days, the land does too. so every seventh year is declared as "shnat shmita", or a sabbatical year. during "shnat shmita", it is forbidden to eat any fruit, vegetable, or plant product that grew on the holy soil.
and again, come the jewish farmers (who are probably not religious, only rely on religious people for their livelihood - they still control a large enough portion of the economy, with no correlation to their ratio in the population).
i recently read on ynet, that some farmers will grow their produce on special composite, made of coco-nut skins that are imported from Sri-Lanka, separated from the ground with a plastic sheet. genius. and it's even better for the environment, since the pesticides don't leak to the underground reservoirs.


there are many other examples of jewish inventions that go around the rules, but don't follow its spirit: like Shabbat elevators (that stop on every floor, so that you don't have to push a button and disobey the tora), kosher toilet paper, shabbat powder makeup, wigs, and kosher cellphones. and of course the ultimate exemption of being lawful to your wife as long as you cheat in another city.
but enough with that. i need to keep my strength for seder stories.


for dessert, here's a picture i particularly like -- this one is for you, Matt!

(and for those of you who need further explanations as to why this is funny, read here and then here about jesus fish in wikipedia.

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late addition, i jsut read this article, Yair Lapid explains his views of Jewdism in a most enlightened way. i agree with most of what he says.