Michigan weather :(

We've had a very bad afternoon here. About 3:30 EDT I got home from some shopping and noticed that the sky looked very dark. I checked the radar online and there was a warning for a severe thundestorm north of us, heading further north. It was supposed to miss us, but within a few minutes it had developed right over us. First rain, then hail--lots of it. Much of the hail was about the size of an American dime in diameter. It shredded many of my outdoor plants and knocked many leaves off the trees. Meanwhile, it was raining like crazy.
As you can see in the first picture, there was actually steam rising off the hail. It was about 22C when the rain started, and 15 minutes later the temperature had dropped below15C. I'm kind of upset because most of my flowering plants, my hosta, and my ferns are now not much more than empty stalks. And I was just thinking how nice the yard was going to look for Kevin and Megan's wedding shower. :(
I shouldn't complain, I guess. There was no damage to the house and fortunately, I had parked my car inside the garage when I got home, or it would be peppered with dents right now. I talked to someone at Gary's office, which is about 5 miles from here, and they had not had any hail yet, I can hope that this was a very isolated storm that did not damage a lot of farmer's crops.
Don't worry, this is strictly a summer phenomenon in Michigan. In the winter we have snow, which is much nicer, and there are no plants to be destroyed.

Canadian Fishing Techniques

This past weekend Sandy & I celebrated the anniversary of our wedding by going north! It was another good weekend at the cabin.

We got up late Friday morning and drank coffee and watched the lake (it was raining) until 11 am.

At about 2 pm Sandy decided she was just dying to go fishing, so I put the boat in, and we went out for a couple of hours. Sadly, we caught no fish, but had a lot of good discussion about different fishing methodologies, i.e. Candadian, Russian (see earlier post regarding Russian vs. Canadian technique), trolling, jigging, and live vs. artificial baits, etc. Needless to say, after 33 years of marriage, we didn't agree on everything.

On Saturday, while Sandy and Brenda went for a long ride on the 4-wheelers (ATV's), I invited a true man of the bush (Dave's father) to go fishing, and perhaps introduce me to some of the finer points of Northern Pike fishing.

I was the student and he was the teacher. We caught lots of fish and threw the really big ones back.

We actually held a fishing derby that afternoon, with Jerry and me in one boat and Dave and Jennifer in another. Yes, Jennifer is trying to make me kiss her fish.




Nothing follows a great day fishing like a good fish fry. With the help of a couple of neighbors we cleaned and cooked the fish......

and ate them!

...and here's a little addendum to the trip. We have a signpost up in Canada pointing to various landmarks, cities, and Galactic places. The list of significant places has grown enough that they began a new signpost, including the cities of Tel Aviv, Israel and Aberdeen, Scotland. The latter made the list because Dave has a cousin (or is a niece?) that is marrying a guy from Scotland! Hopefully you can read some of the other places on it.

way to go safta!!

here is what our 78-year-young safta does on her free time... :)

Happy Birthdays

Happy birthdays to SAFTA, coming up on the 17th, and to ODDI, on the 13th.

MAZAL TOV!!

Pandora

Now's it time for me to procrastinate for a few mintues from writing, and write something different.

I've been meaning to do this for a few weeks, and I finally got around to it. There's this thing called Pandora, which is basically an internet radio station. Dikla and Omer spoke highly of it during our drive to Kinneret a few weeks ago, so I had to try it. On that site, you can make your own "radio stations" and fine tune them to play music very close to what you want, quite possibly by artists you've never heard of. You have to try it to get a feel for it. It's mostly useful for those of us that sit at a desk all day and like a little music in the background while we produce computer code or "science" or whatever. I think it's pretty cool.

Anyway, Pandora has some RSS feeds set up such that it monitors the stations and songs you've recently listened to a lot , say in the last week. It keeps track of them, ranks them, and automatically posts them to other websites (like this blog). So I had to try it out, just because I can. If you look in the right margin of the blog (scroll down a bit) there's a section called "Ben's Pandora Music", or something like that. It's set to monitor which songs and stations I listened to most in the last week. You can click on the songs or radio stations and listen to them if you want. Right now, mine is short because it's only been working for an hour or so. But it should pile up. Maybe it's interesting, maybe not, but it's there.

If anyone else wants to list radio stations in theat part of of blog, let me know, and we can post those there too. Have fun.

sprouts attack

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