Hi everyone- I’m so sorry for the big gap since my last post! I can’t recall whether I mentioned it in a previous post, but beginning on the day of my last posts, I had a big covid scare happening. My sister is a barista and works with the public, and unfortunately, she tested positive on New Year’s Day. B”H, she is almost entirely recovered now and is back to her normal activities. This was very frightening for me, as I was having symptoms I didn’t know if were my normal ones from chronic illnesses or if I too was sick. I left for my apartment as soon as she tested positive, and isolated there for 10 days. Thankfully, my PCR test came back negative and I was able to return back to my parent’s house after the isolation period was over!

It was a hard 10 days, as I was in full isolation and very lonely. I had originally thought “oh, this will be a perfect opportunity for me to write a bunch of posts!”, but reality turned out a little bit different – with the first week of the winter quarter happening, the loneliness, and feeling so unwell, I spent most of the isolation in bed watching Youtube videos and perusing TikTok. I did manage to do some cleaning/organizing, and baked challah and a cake all for myself XD

Here we are now, nearly 3 weeks later, and things are starting to feel normal-ish once again! Shabbat services at my synagogue are currently all online, with the rising cases of Omicron everywhere, I’m grateful they’re being so careful (they actually haven’t stopped having a Zoom service that’s integrated into the in-person one, but it’s fully online for the foreseeable future). My sponsoring Rabbi wants to set up a recurring time for us to meet every 2 weeks, and he also invited me to a “Musical Midrash” program he runs which sounds super interesting.

I’m hoping the next few posts will be book reviews of some of the books I’ve read in my Jewish studies so far- I’m not sure how in-depth I’ll go with those, but I hope they will be helpful to people trying to figure out which books to read based on what they’re looking for!

I’ll see you soon with more posts!