Milestones

I got up late today. It didn’t really surprise me. The last couple days, have been a bit stressful and I was likely to need to crash, plus with my parents away, I woke up to an empty house, which always encourages me to sleep late and go slowly.

When I did get up, I felt like I had a million things to do: cooking, extra chores as my parents are away, shiur (religious class), wedding stuff, exercise, phoning the doctor about slightly abnormal results in my recent regular blood tests (I’m sure it’s fine or the doctor would have said something, but I feel they should have texted me to say it was fine), and novel writing. In the end I did some of these things, which I guess is good. I hope to do some more tomorrow. Then I have work on Thursday and my parents are home in the evening, which hopefully will make things easier.

The scariest thing in the near future is tomorrow, when I have to phone the United Synagogue Marriage Authorisation Department with some questions. Usually they would want to check documents that prove E and I Jewish before our marriage, but I need to ask (a) are copies (perhaps notarised ones) going to be OK, as we really can’t bring E’s uncle’s ketubah (marriage certificate) or her mother’s birth certificate to the UK? and (b) can they see E by Zoom, otherwise it is going to make everything very tight, as she won’t be allowed into the country until after her visa is approved, which hopefully won’t be too long before the wedding? I am nervous about this, more because of social phobia and autistic phone and communication issues than the wedding aspect per se, although I am a little worried that they might be very strict and make things difficult. I would have liked to have emailed, at least in the first instance, but their website only had a phone number (it also had a photo of a crowd at a Jewish wedding in which I recognised one of the people, maybe two. The Jewish community is very small). I’m sure they must have done international weddings before, though.

I skipped shiur. I’ll catch up on the recording, but I think this shiur was a mistake. First, as I said last week, my knowledge is really too advanced for the class and I’m not learning much (so far). Second, I’ve just got so much going on at the moment that committing to spending ninety minutes a week on this for eight weeks was not clever. I think I should stick to only one-off shiurim until E and I are married and leave the longer courses. That said, another thing on my to do list is to look into volunteering at the Jewish food bank again, as I’ve heard that they need volunteers later in the day than they did previously (previously getting up so early while still working led to burnout). I hope this might be a way of getting me to get up earlier on Tuesdays again so I can write in the afternoon.

Other than that, I did manage to cook dinner, water the garden, go for a walk and to write for nearly an hour. I wrote nearly 700 words, which was good, and reached two milestones on this project: 10,000 words and 50 pages written (well, I’m on page 50, I haven’t quite finished it yet).