I have gone back and fixed the typos in my last post which were not due to anything but tiredness last night but they were driving me crazy /o\

Today was much better than yesterday, after middle sis arrived and I could see she really was okay.

Last night there was one siren at 2AMish which I missed because I was sure it was only in Tel Aviv but ended up being in hometown as well, whoops, but everything was okay. Woke up at 6AMish for another stint of around 45 mins in the shelter, then back to bed, and overall started the (work from home) day very slowly and chill, knowing it would be a day of slowly easing back into things.

There were more alarms in Tel Aviv in the morning than here, and middle sis was just waiting for a long enough break between them to leave the city; she finally made her way out around noon, and it was really good seeing her in person when she got here, and seeing she really was okay.

(One takeaway from her story: she'd gone to the shelter in socks, so when the rescuers came she had to get them looking for her shoes and finally left there wearing one of her shoes and one of her bf's, but you can't really walk down a rubble and shards covered building in socks, so takeaway: make sure there are shoes in the shelter! Something we knew in theory but are now actually applying.)

We went to my aunt's again for a really nice lunch and some more time with cousins and their babies; thankfully my aunt and uncle are super into cooking and do not mind feeding a tribe, so there were salads and rice and arayes with tahini, with only one shelter break before and one later in the afternoon, overall much more downtime than yesterday. After lunch I managed to actually work for 2-3 hours, then went home for a quick dinner with sisters and then we watched In the Blink of an Eye on Disney+, the new Kate McKinnon and Rashida Jones film about the ~circle of live in three different time periods (past, present and future), and honestly it was kind of moving.

There was another alarm just as the movie ended, but not a very long one, and now I am ready to read a bit and go to sleeeep hopefully uninterrupted fingers crossed who knows.

Given the timing, there are way too many people making jokes about Purim, which I do not enjoy. I would rather we kept the past past if possible, thank you, and too many people are being way too smug about it all which I also do not enjoy.

But still - it's just all such a strange situation. A friend asked me how I was doing; she's the one who shleps her newborn down three flights of stairs to her communal building shelter every time there's a siren. Her parents are from Iran. Maybe one day she'll be able to take her son on a bar mitzvah trip to Iran, she jokes/hopes, to see where his grandparents are from.

Everything is just freaking weird and I hope it will be over soon /o\ But at least keep improving in the meantime.