hotness.

This is the thermometer outside, it's hung in the shade of an old stone fireplace in the backyard. I took three pictures of it just now, one after the other, and from the time I took the first one to the time I took the third one, the temperature went up one degree to 93°F. That's 34°C to you People Over There. And it's only noon. Yesterday it was a good bit hotter.

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Below: we're staying at a friend's house, which is a stone's throw from where Mara and I lived 14 years ago when we lived downtown, so we're surrounded by many of the places we used to go back in those historic times of our first "dating" experiments.

This morning I went across the street to pick up some breakfast and coffee from Alon's, which used to "only" make the best croissants and pastries in town. They've now blossomed into a full-service gourmet grocery with multiple branches, but luckily they still make my old favorite, the poppyseed-raisin danish.



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Yesterday was our first day down here, and we walked and walked and walked, and sweated and sweated and sweated.

As it got later in the day and passing motorists switched from air-conditioning to rolled-down windows, we were treated to a twilight Dopplerized medley of Michael Jackson's greatest hits: probably half the cars on the road were simultaneously listening to different extracts from the King of Pop's pre-HIStory catalog.