Week 8 - May 4-10, 2020
If I'm writing this late, it means that things are going back to a semblance of normality, right? Quite honestly, here in Israel this is in fact the case - on Monday, my cleaner returned. ADC was on campus, and S and I kept out of his way - he was wearing a mask all the time, which he did even before, due to his preference for non-eco cleaning materials - and we stayed at least 2 m away. He came on a different day from his usual, at last minute notice, because on Sunday morning A announced that he was being allowed home for a brief break before the boarding school reopened - so he would be home from whenever ADC could pick him up on Monday until Friday. I really wanted A to come home to a clean room, so the cleaner very kindly agreed to change his day.
Amazingly, my paranoid mother went on a day trip to the Sea of Galilee with my father. We have had a very long and wet winter (including a few unseasonable showers in late April and even now in May). After several years of drought, for the second year running we have had more than average rainfall, and the pictures my parents sent showed them wearing masks on a backdrop of drowned treetops. We are hoping that our planned ADC's family get-together on the Sea of Galilee in three weeks time will indeed take place - although I have a feeling that curfews will be in place for all public holidays for some time.
A was home, as I said, for most of the week. I did a lot of laundry, he caught up on sleep, and we had a good time just all of us hanging out. We made all his favourite foods, some of which were enabled by the fact that on Thursday I had no less than three food deliveries - one from the supermarket (mainly staples, not fruit and veg), one from our greengrocer in the market (arrived slightly warm, but with minimal packing) and one from an organic direct seller (arrived in lots of un-recyclable black polystyrene trays and clingfilm. Not going to order from them again - in any case, the market has reopened since then). It was so great to eat good peaches and nectarines at a reasonable price for the first time! It feels like winter has been especially long this year, due to the lockdown.
This week was very productive and interesting work wise. I heard two seminars, one on Tuesday with the group, with a public health specialist-cum-historian of medicine, who is involved in formulating Israel's response to COVID-19, and one on Wednesday, at the National Library, about the catalogue of the Avraham Shalom Yahuda collection, that I was involved in translating some years ago. Also, I finally got hold of my co-editor on the Mamilla project, and we had a three-hour long phone meeting. He's disappeared again since then, but at least we did talk, and go over one chapter ...
Friday was a weird day: on the one hand, I finally had a haircut. Both the hairdresser and I wore masks, he applied alcogel between every stage, and sanitised the chairs between customers. On the other hand, on my way back I went to the neighbourhood seamstress and bought five cloth masks. Yes, in theory I could make my own, but I don't really have time for it, and I'd rather get it done by a professional - who probably needs the money more than I do. I've worn one so far, and it is actually quite a bit more comfortable than the disposable surgical masks. ADC bought another lot when A took the last of the ones we'd received right at the beginning of concerns from my father, and they are not as good, according to him.
On Saturday we went down to Omer to visit E. It was the first time we'd seen her in the flesh over two months, and it was very nice to sit outside under the pergola and admire the lilies and ice flowers - to say nothing of the newly painted bedrooms. She is moving into M and D's bedroom now, with an en suite. While A was there over Pesach, they started unpacking some of the boxes she brought back from the US around a decade ago. She found some really nice stuff of hers, and gave me some more unwanted sheets and table cloths to make clothes from.
We also spent part of the weekend watching the National Theatre At Home production of Antony and Cleopatra on YouTube. S was keen to watch it because of Ralph Fiennes, and quite enjoyed it. However, he wondered why Shakespeare is so often done in modern dress (as in the other National Theatre At Home production we saw, King Lear with Ian McKellen at the Jerusalem Cinematheque) rather than in the clothes of Shakespeare's day.
Speaking of S, on Sunday morning we received his report for the second term (not including the lockdown period, which for him is still very much ongoing. It remains unclear when 10th-graders will return to school). He is doing very well, including in his new main subject of literature (to which he transferred from biology), although "could do better if he spent less time talking to his friends" was a repeated motif throughout. That's really what he's missing the most - talking to his friends, to the extent that he has joined Fortnite in order to talk to them. On Sunday evening, we had a parent-teacher meeting via Zoom. We sat in our usual constellation of ADC and me on either side of S, on the couch in front of the desktop, and his class teacher was amused at how protective we looked. AR, the teacher, is a very nice guy, although he seems absurdly young at times - turns out that he is a friend of one of ADC's graduate students! He mainly asked about how S was coping, and asked him to be more present (i.e., with video on) at the class meetings. These are usually first thing in the morning, and S is not a morning person. I wake him up several times - when I get up, after I exercise, after I shower - and I'm not surprised to hear that he is not very responsive during the first class of the day! I wish he would get out and see his friends, but he is still resistant to that. We've been sending him on errands instead - going to pick up parcels from the post office, taking down trash and so on.
That's it for this week. Stay safe, healthy and serene!
Amazingly, my paranoid mother went on a day trip to the Sea of Galilee with my father. We have had a very long and wet winter (including a few unseasonable showers in late April and even now in May). After several years of drought, for the second year running we have had more than average rainfall, and the pictures my parents sent showed them wearing masks on a backdrop of drowned treetops. We are hoping that our planned ADC's family get-together on the Sea of Galilee in three weeks time will indeed take place - although I have a feeling that curfews will be in place for all public holidays for some time.
A was home, as I said, for most of the week. I did a lot of laundry, he caught up on sleep, and we had a good time just all of us hanging out. We made all his favourite foods, some of which were enabled by the fact that on Thursday I had no less than three food deliveries - one from the supermarket (mainly staples, not fruit and veg), one from our greengrocer in the market (arrived slightly warm, but with minimal packing) and one from an organic direct seller (arrived in lots of un-recyclable black polystyrene trays and clingfilm. Not going to order from them again - in any case, the market has reopened since then). It was so great to eat good peaches and nectarines at a reasonable price for the first time! It feels like winter has been especially long this year, due to the lockdown.
This week was very productive and interesting work wise. I heard two seminars, one on Tuesday with the group, with a public health specialist-cum-historian of medicine, who is involved in formulating Israel's response to COVID-19, and one on Wednesday, at the National Library, about the catalogue of the Avraham Shalom Yahuda collection, that I was involved in translating some years ago. Also, I finally got hold of my co-editor on the Mamilla project, and we had a three-hour long phone meeting. He's disappeared again since then, but at least we did talk, and go over one chapter ...
Friday was a weird day: on the one hand, I finally had a haircut. Both the hairdresser and I wore masks, he applied alcogel between every stage, and sanitised the chairs between customers. On the other hand, on my way back I went to the neighbourhood seamstress and bought five cloth masks. Yes, in theory I could make my own, but I don't really have time for it, and I'd rather get it done by a professional - who probably needs the money more than I do. I've worn one so far, and it is actually quite a bit more comfortable than the disposable surgical masks. ADC bought another lot when A took the last of the ones we'd received right at the beginning of concerns from my father, and they are not as good, according to him.
On Saturday we went down to Omer to visit E. It was the first time we'd seen her in the flesh over two months, and it was very nice to sit outside under the pergola and admire the lilies and ice flowers - to say nothing of the newly painted bedrooms. She is moving into M and D's bedroom now, with an en suite. While A was there over Pesach, they started unpacking some of the boxes she brought back from the US around a decade ago. She found some really nice stuff of hers, and gave me some more unwanted sheets and table cloths to make clothes from.
We also spent part of the weekend watching the National Theatre At Home production of Antony and Cleopatra on YouTube. S was keen to watch it because of Ralph Fiennes, and quite enjoyed it. However, he wondered why Shakespeare is so often done in modern dress (as in the other National Theatre At Home production we saw, King Lear with Ian McKellen at the Jerusalem Cinematheque) rather than in the clothes of Shakespeare's day.
Speaking of S, on Sunday morning we received his report for the second term (not including the lockdown period, which for him is still very much ongoing. It remains unclear when 10th-graders will return to school). He is doing very well, including in his new main subject of literature (to which he transferred from biology), although "could do better if he spent less time talking to his friends" was a repeated motif throughout. That's really what he's missing the most - talking to his friends, to the extent that he has joined Fortnite in order to talk to them. On Sunday evening, we had a parent-teacher meeting via Zoom. We sat in our usual constellation of ADC and me on either side of S, on the couch in front of the desktop, and his class teacher was amused at how protective we looked. AR, the teacher, is a very nice guy, although he seems absurdly young at times - turns out that he is a friend of one of ADC's graduate students! He mainly asked about how S was coping, and asked him to be more present (i.e., with video on) at the class meetings. These are usually first thing in the morning, and S is not a morning person. I wake him up several times - when I get up, after I exercise, after I shower - and I'm not surprised to hear that he is not very responsive during the first class of the day! I wish he would get out and see his friends, but he is still resistant to that. We've been sending him on errands instead - going to pick up parcels from the post office, taking down trash and so on.
That's it for this week. Stay safe, healthy and serene!