Vanilla. And it's delicious. I was grocery shopping a few days ago and I just saw it sitting there on the shelf in a big plastic jar labeled "instant pudding" transliterated into big Hebrew letters. A whole kilogram of creamy yellowish-white powder just waiting for five liters of milk to mix with. I couldn't resist a dare like that.

Hooray! After a night of letting it cool down, the old hard drive responded well to the repair procedure on the vendor's diagnostic/recovery CD. This means that I've been able to grab all the data I care about from the old disk. Since this is the second time that this drive has decided to fail within the past few months, I no longer trust it and I bought a replacement for it this morning. Since the failing drive is still under warranty I'm going to get the vendor to send me a replacement also. It will be nice to have two hard disks because I will then be able to take all the tedium out of making backups through the magic of RAID 1 (which does disk mirroring).

Bah! My hard drive seems to have died as of a few hours ago. Fortunately, I'm well-prepared, so the computer is back online again with a small replacement drive that I've got handy for just such an emergency. My last data backup was made a month ago, so the loss is stinging, but not staggering. You'll notice that the diary entries in the past 30 days or so have disappeared, and that is why. If anyone happens to have copies of those old diary entries saved somewhere, I'd be happy to accept them. If I'm lucky, I might be able to pry some data off of the old drive, but it's not to be counted on. This sort of thing is still very annoying, no matter how prepared you are.

Yikes! I've been tagged by Steve, so now I must participate in this silly game. Apparently the rules are as follows:

After a couple weeks of warm sunniness and pink puffy clouds, I was getting more than a little bored with the weather, so last night I was happy to feel the humidity rise and the temperature drop, and see the fog roll in and the lightning flashes in the distance. The promise of rain was fulfilled very early this morning and it's been both pittering and pattering all day. There's something mystical about staring out your window and seeing nothing but the pearly mists swirling around. Itai is coming over for Shabbos again, and we're eating both meals out at the tables of different families I know in town. Now it's time for me to tramp through the puddles to the grocery store with my umbrella and coat, all the while counting the minutes till my dear-heart pierces the veil and arrives on my doorstep.

Yesterday afternoon, Chava called me up and asked me if I could change her Web site so that a sample song would start playing as soon as someone visited the site. I figured that the best and easiest way to do this would be to create a Flash applet, and it seems I was right.

Today marks two anniversaries for me. It was four years ago today that I boarded the plane that took me to my new home in Israel. And it was one month ago that I started dating Itai. This is a time for me to celebrate the two biggest steps in my life toward wholeness and happiness. This past Shabbos was spent with my dear Itai, and was filled with more than enough good memories to appropriately mark this auspicious occasion. I thank G-d for helping me find someone who enriches me so and who so stimulates me to open my heart to shower whatever goodness I possibly can upon him and upon all the world.

Last night I zipped over to Tel Aviv to take my Itai out to dinner. He had been working like the dickens for almost a week to prepare for a presentation he had to give in one of his history classes on a 550-page article written in French. The presentation, of course, had gone off as well as I'd predicted, despite Itai's doubts and nervousness about public speaking. But he sure was worn out and hungry and in need of some good old R&R.

That's right. This January, I'm going to be making my first visit back to the US in over three years. I'll be leaving with my sister and niece on the 4th, and we should be arriving in the Baltimore area late on the 5th, after a short layover in Paris. (It will be my first time in France, so I'm open for suggestions on interesting things that can be seen or done in just a few hours.) After getting to America, the first order of business will be visiting my grandparents in Connecticut to celebrate my Safta's 80th birthday. After that, my plans are pretty free-form. My only goal is to visit as many family members and friends as I can in the three weeks that I'll be there. So if you're in the States and you're reading this, then I hope we can get together.

Becca finally sent me the photographs she snapped two weeks ago when Itai came over for Shabbos. I've added them to this album, and the first one of these new pictures starts here. Enjoy!

It's been unseasonably warm this week, and that might have some relationship with the amazing sunsets we've had the past couple days. This Shabbos both started and ended with the western horizon set aflame with scarlet clouds.