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.

But, no, I haven't exhausted the entire jar full of pudding powder all at once. I used but a fifth of the mix this eve for three reasons. First, I had only a liter of milk in the fridge available for this endeavor. Second, I don't have a bowl big enough to contain all the pudding that would be possible. And finally, don't I think that even I am eccentric enough to consume such a quantity of pudding in the time period available before it would spoil.

Most of today was spent helping Becca look after Ashira. I played with Ashira around the house while Becca worked hard on winnowing and threshing the thousand-plus photographs she's taken since the baby was born, selecting and preparing a collection to be printed out to bring to the family in America. Later, I carried Ashira around while we went out for a walk and a pizza lunch and groceries.

Itai's been sick with the flu all week, and he's still not yet fully recovered, so we'll take it easy and spend this Shabbos apart. But sometime in the middle of next week I hope to swoop down into Tel Aviv and light Chanuka candles with him and subsequently take him as my date to the wedding of my friend Alex Margolin and his betrothed, Lisa Gold. Mazel tov!

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:

Like Phil!, I think tagging other people borders on obnoxious, but I'll encourage anyone who thinks this is cute to reciprocate. And also, I'd replace "lj" in the rules with "web log of your choice" to be a little less ethnocentric.

1. I prefer to sit in very unusual positions, such as with my legs folded right up against my body so that my knees are at my chin, or with my legs folded in any number of odd ways, really.
2. I write in a very non-linear fashion, jumping back and forth between the various components of a composition, concurrently growing them from initial stubs and skeletons, swapping sentences and paragraphs in and out and around. This applies both to writing in English and to writing in formal computer languages, though the habit may be considered less weird in the latter case.
3. When I type something like parentheses or HTML tags or anything else which has both an opening symbol and a closing symbol, I'll type out both the opening and the closing symbols before going back to type the content in the middle. I think this is mostly motivated by a strong drive to maintain correctness when the nesting gets deep.
4. I prefer text-based computer interfaces, as opposed to GUIs. By this I mean "verbal" interfaces in which I communicate with the computer with words strung together according to well-defined syntactical rules instead of by pointing at pictures. When I feel like being insulting, I'll refer to GUIs as "playing charades".
5. I'm mildly synaesthetic. Mostly with respect to music that occupies my attention, but potentially to anything.

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.