shell shock

 i'm exhausted, highly stressed, partially relieved, generally confused.

1. my mom got covid last week - which is really sucky timing and is possibly my fault. i'd been over the symptoms for a couple of days before she arrived, but still... fortunately she managed to make the wedding on wednesday (she did an antigen test before we left), but we got her pcr result the next day and it was positive. also fortunate: that she just had a scratchy throat and was really tired for a few days, but nothing more serious.

2. the wedding was beautiful and great fun, but the friday night with the family after the wedding was particularly special: my cousin has barely spoken in his thirty years on this planet, and it seems like he was saving all his words for his speech. it was long, non-stop entertainment, hilarious and touching and brilliant.

3. on sunday gd and i stood for seven hours in misrad hapnim in an attempt to get her status updated. mrs professor quirrel demonstrated to me, in our first interaction of the day, that she's not malicious: she's literally too stupid to do her job or understand the consequences of her incompetence. fortunately, her manager took so long to get a response to her that she "had to leave", and we were passed on to her coworker who is competent and pleasant to deal with. gd now has extended permission to remain in the country and we have an appointment to update her status (and mr smear's, i was mistaken last week thinking that him getting an id number was sufficient) in about three weeks' time.

4. i'm really, really struggling with insurance and insurance brokers. in both countries. jesus. we have no medical insurance because... because the insurance people are making getting cover a lot more complicated than it should be (we started the process of getting insurance a week before the 12th, when my south african cover ended, and it's now two weeks later and they're asking us when we want the cover for).

5. we're really struggling with teachers' strikes and summer holiday planning. at least we've managed to get mr smear registered for summer school and aftercare, finally, but the rest is so damned confused and i'm outta bandwidth and gd doesn't understand hebrew.

6. my personal banker is a complete moron, and/or the banking system is broken.

7. our financial situation is a mess. we're really stretched thin.

8. work has been really intense, it's nice to earn a good salary but they're paying me to not have any kind of work/life balance (during "crunch" periods, at least) and of course, we have my first "crunch" in forever while my mother's visiting.

right, back to work.