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]