breaking of the fast

i not only fasted this yom kippur, and not only did i fast about an hour longer than mandated, but it was a) an easy fast and b) a generally good day of services that ended on an inspirational note. in the rabbi's closing sermon yesterday he alluded to (or perhaps said so explicitly, i heard most but not all of it) the idea that yom kippur serves as a sort of annual near death experience, one wherein we're encouraged not only to be introspective about our behaviour but all to reevaluate who we are and what our priorities are.

as for the fasting being easy, gd and i have both picked up a little weight we're not proud of and i think my having a spare tire helped. (i think a lot of my spare tire blew up from around mr smear's birthday celebrations, we did eat a LOT of cake and donuts. also, living right near an amazing vegan donut shop is definitely a part of it.)

work-wise, thursday and friday were legitimately exciting and today was overall pretty great. the code changes i made amounted to a handful (okay, perhaps even a double-handful) of lines, but the amount of changes we've made peripherally to our testing and deployment process have put me in a much stronger position to take over from next week so we're both feeling pretty good about things.

i dragged mr smear out of bed and took him to school this morning, not realizing that the calendar changed due to the pandemic and he's still on school holiday until next week. if nothing else, we had a good time singing and dancing along to some good rock on the way :)

...

i've been wading through bureaucracy lately and seeming to claw my way up to breathe, which is a nice feeling. now that gd's eligible for permanent residence, we've looked into it and it turns out to be completely meaningless to apply - we'll be gone before the authorities grant it, and once we're outta here it's very unlikely that we'll be coming back any time soon even for a visit. my mother's admitted that she'll be following us to israel, and i'm really hoping that as many of our friends and family as can manage follow suit.

the only disturbing news of the day has come from gd's aliyah application, after a short back-and-forth via email i'm quite worried that the apostille has mislaid all our documents and those things are a) expensive and b) take forever to acquire and c) are preventing us from actually making real plans for our migration.

anyway, it's mr smear's bedtime and i'd like to finish the first season of the hunters AND get some sleep tonight.