Oof--Nighttime Lockdown

 I didn't even get to post about the first day of school before, BOOM, in-person school is canceled and the girls are back home with a pile of worksheets and some phone-in/video-in stuff....Well, here's the first day of school photo, anyway:

Seems that when boys' yeshivas started on Friday, August 21, there was a predictable surge in cases a week later. Which spread to the sisters and parents and teachers and and and. So our city (where there are about 450 active cases out of about 25,000 people) became one of 40 cities put on nighttime lockdown starting last night and lasting for a week. Public schools and those under any amount of guidance from the Ministry of Education are are also closed, but this means that there are a fair number of fully private religious schools still operating. I fail to see the logic, because I think these decrees need to come from the Ministry of Health and everyone should be required to follow them, but my input was not asked for at a governmental level. I also fail to see any logic in shutting a city's borders from 7 pm - 5 a.m. Is Covid only active at night?! (The thinking behind this is that large [or should I say "large"] events like weddings will be forced to be small since guests can't come from out of the area. I still think it's pretty dumb. But I think the desire to do SOMETHING is huge for governmental officials who are desperate to appear that they are at least trying). 

In other, more positive news, Penina did something highly-unlikely for teenagers here and passed her driving test on the first try! The Israeli driving system requires a minimum of 28 lessons before taking the test AND there's no driving outside of lessons. SO: we gave the driving school a chunk of money and they gave us back a kid who knows how to drive. Pretty good deal in my book (and, having done it the US way twice, I'll say that I vastly prefer the Israeli way. Definitely money well spent)

Sign says, "new driver" 

Another bit of happy news is that cousin Jillian just started medical school here, so we get a real live awesome relative here for the next FOUR YEARS! Wahoooo!!! This is us visiting her while she was in bidud:

It got better, though, as we were able to visit from across the hall

I've been back at work part-time and starting tomorrow things start getting busy in my schedule. For a depressing chuckle, you can take a look at the type of outfit I typically wore at work last year

and how I look at work this year. Thank you, Covid-19, for the wardrobe update (not)

And, finally, since this post has so many photos, here's one more: Percy in his favorite position for being carried around. I love how he hangs his head over our arms: