I can’t believe it, but Lake Dubnov is back. Yep. That’s what we call the “lake” that forms in the park below our apartment. Built over a parking garage for the Arts Center (hosting the Performing Arts Center, Library, Tel Aviv Art Museum, and other social avenues), drainage wasn’t taken much into consideration in this lovely tree garden turned dog park. It really is a lovely park and the flowering trees turn the most incredible colors through the year. Unfortunately, dog owners think it is the prime place for their mutts to dig and shit and the skate boarders consider the sloped and twisting walkways to be prime boarding terrain, and the caretakers and parents don’t seem to have much of a problem allowing their baby children to crawl through the grass and dirt littered with dog shit. The planners didn’t take the 10 minute torrents that fall from the sky repeatedly every winter into consideration and forgot about drainage. So the two giant sand boxes for the children and neighborhood feral cats fills up with soupy sand and all dog worn low spots flood, creating Lake Dubnov in Dubnov Garden.
It’s nice having waterfront property, even if it is short-lived.
At least winter has arrived. Arrived with a vengeance. The storm came in last night with lightning and thunder crashing around us and shaking the windows. We turned off our computer equipment for the night as the storm raged around USA, blasting great flashes of light into our windows. The wind was really fierce so we had to close the windows, limiting the sound of rain, a sound we long to hear. The storms kept up on and off throughout today, and I’m loving the view of the trees twisting and twitching out my window. Ah, winter is here!
It arrived so suddenly, as is typical here. It just doesn’t cool down slowly and then sneak up on you. Three days ago I was sweating in the sun and getting sunburned. Today, the sunburn is peeling a little and I’m actually wearing socks! We’re going to pull the fluffy duvet down, a giant quilt found commonly in Europe and the Middle East, and try snuggling under it tonight. It will probably be too warm, but I want to try – fake it until it really does get cold.
I ran these pages through massive validations and cleaned up a lot of the loose stuff. I’m sure there will be more details to find here and there, but the bulk is done and it’s ready for massive testing out in the real world. I uploaded the whole thing over the weekend, only to find out that I had misspelled the same word in a title on just about every page. Ah, the devil is in the details. So I decided to leave the misspelling up while I validated and now I have to start reloading. I’ve changed FTP programs, hoping to make the process easier. The first try of the program dumped everything into my root directory instead of into the specific directories, so that was four hours of waste while I went through and deleted everything and started over. Hope it works this time.
Tel Aviv, Israel