As I write this, it is already the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, which really puts the confinements and restrictions of life during coronavirus into proportion.
Pesach has come and gone. I was successful in buying eggs and matzo - so much so that I gave a packet to M, who had run out (I was only able to buy a 1kg box, much more than we needed). We ate matzo brei (French toast made with matzo) on Wednesday morning, and said goodbye to it for another year. We had spaghetti aglio olio for supper, and over the weekend ADC made biscuits, moufletas and granola (also yoghurt, breakfast yesterday was fantastic). Moufletas are a kind of fried yeast dough, traditionally made by North African Jews to celebrate the end of Passover and eaten with butter and honey. This is definitely not our personal ethnic tradition - we're as Ashkenazi as they come - but ADC grew up eating those made by neighbours in Beersheba and has been wanting to try making them for a long time. They were very neutral tasting, and after breakfast (where some of us ate them with maple syrup; I'm sure there are moufletas eaten that way in Montreal every way), when we did not finish them, we had them with cheese and spring onions for a late lunch.
We had extra family Zoom meetings this week - not just on the evening of the last day of Pesach and on Friday/Saturday night, but also on Z's birthday. It got to be a bit much... there's not that much you can say, when you're not going anywhere. Happily, I finished a black and white striped scarf for Z, a Juventus fan, in time to show it to him on his birthday. I also finally finished a cardigan for myself, also striped, in various shades of purple, just in time for the first spring heatwave. (My cardigan is merino wool, whereas Z's scarf is acrylic from stash inherited from my late MIL.) I've now begun leggings with dragon's spikes for G, whose 4th birthday is on May 8, also using inherited stash - Z, who turned 9, at least is very appreciative of this. This also means that I do have something new for the ADC family Zoom talks every week! I'm still continuing LR's top, which is a lovely cotton/silk blend, but as her birthday was back in December, this is late anyway and has no deadline. Once I finish G's present I'll go back to that full time.
Of course, "full time" does not include the time spent doing actual work that I get paid for. Despite last week being officially semi-holiday, I actually got a lot done, editing the final (I hope) version of RE's book on affluence and collapse in pre-modern civilisations, including the footnotes. The bibliography still needs to be properly sorted out, but that will wait until he answers my questions. The book is very interesting, and timely, too - although the theme is the influence of short-term climate changes and their domino effects (famine, mass migration, intolerance and war), it's obvious that the current situation with the coronavirus is a wake-up call as to how fragile the veneer of affluence and civilisation is.
An exciting things that happened over the weekend was A's return to GH. It's not clear how's gap year volunteering will continue exactly, as most things there have closed - although the international high school's eleventh grade are still there, it's not clear that A and his group are needed. Meanwhile, he is stepping up to the plate and is regarded by the people in charge as the de facto leader of the group. The latest announcement was that he was trying to organise volunteer work in agriculture, so that they all had something useful to do (not clear to me how much enthusiasm there is on the part of the rest, but clearly A has his priorities straight). He makes me so proud! E is alone again, but since the second exciting thing was the announcement that many restrictions will be lifted from the 19th, hopefully she'll be able to go back to work and see other people a bit more now.
The lifted restrictions also mean that ADC is able to go back to the lab. There can only be up to 5 people in the lab at a time, wearing masks and observing 2 m distance, so he and his technician have organised shifts, and the students are coming in as much as they can (some of them have small children who have not gone back to their pre-corona frameworks yet). On Sunday ADC taught from A's room for the last time, and in the afternoon he packed everything up (including the milkweed bugs, who apparently did not enjoy their time there) and took it back to Givat Ram. I wonder when I will go back ... libraries will probably be the last places to re-open on campus.
Meanwhile, as the weather has warmed up, I'm making the most of our balcony and spending as much time as I can working there, in the fresh air. However, since I've been getting up relatively late, by the time I've exercised, showered and had breakfast, the chair there has always been in the shade. Yesterday there was a group meeting at 9 a..m, and I found myself sitting in direct sunlight. This had the unexpected result of my MacBook Air overheating and shutting down in the middle of a Zoom meeting! I informed the group of the situation and promised to be back asap. When I plugged the computer back into the electricity, and rejoined everyone, they turned out to have thought it was hilarious and asked me if I'd opened up the bonnet to pour water on the MacBook's engine, as people do on cars on the way up to Jerusalem every summer. I was actually quite worried at first, thinking that the computer might be seriously affected, but all's well that ends well.
No comments:
Post a Comment