Late afternoon walking

Over the past few days, we've had rather extreme weather, at least by our standards. On Friday morning, it started raining and didn't stop until Sunday afternoon. About 145 mm rain fell (about 6 inches) during this period; we're in what might be called a dry patch in Israel. Elsewhere the rainfall reached twice this level. Then on Monday, "the mercury fell out of the thermometer": when I got up at 5:30 am, the temperature outside was 2.8°C, very low for us. During the day, the temperature rose to maybe 10°C. Working from home, I turned the air conditioner on at about 6 am, so at least inside was fairly normal.

Tuesday was like Monday, albeit slightly warmer early in the morning, "only" 4.5°C. Again, during the day the temperature rose, reaching a peak of about 15°C by 3 pm, before a quick descent. Taking the dog for a walk was a fairly painful process at first as my legs didn't adjust to the cold very well. Despite this, we got in a few circuits of the area where we walk before night descended. There was a full moon that rose fairly early, as can be seen in the accompanying picture (somehow the picture has been reversed left to right, not that it matters very much; we don't normally walk down the road).

Today was "warm": 9.5°C at 5:30 am. But there was a little rain overnight, and it's raining now, not too heavily. Tonight there may be snow in Jerusalem. We are promised more rain next week. Walking the dog in the evening may be problematic.

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There was a brief on-off-on power cut on Sunday night (what is termed a "brown-out"); this is the worst kind of power cut as it has the potential to cause more problems with electrical equipment than a regular power cut. When I came to measure my blood pressure and record it early on Monday morning, I saw that the screen of my music/programming computer (that runs XP) was displaying the 'blue screen of death', with a message that strikes terror into the heart of any computer person: "Unmountable boot volume". In other words, something happened to the hard disk to make it unreadable.

In the evening, I took the computer to my repairman: he saw that capacitors on the motherboard had blown, probably as a result of old-age and the brown-out. By yesterday evening, he had the computer fixed; I brought it home in the cold and set it up. After waiting some time for the computer to boot, I discovered that the external soundcard wasn't working, but this was easy to fix. Now the computer is back on line.