After the night's second missile alert, around 1:30 AM, a relative north of us writes on the family WhatsApp that shrapnel, or something like it, has fallen into the sea near her house. "Well," she posts, "some fish died tonight." Yup. That's a rather inefficient way to make sushi.

When I head downstairs for my afternoon blood sugar check, I'm surprised to find myself in the shelter rather than at the nurses' office. Apparently, my feet have reprogrammed where they go on autopilot. Probably not a bad thing.

The municipal English-language WhatsApp group forwards a message from Home Front Command: "If you receive an alert while driving, do not stop under a bridge, as this creates a double danger — a risk of collapse due to impact and returning blast pressure." If you're driving and there's an alert, you are told to pull over to the side of the road (not under a bridge), lie on the ground a distance away from the vehicle, cover your head with your hands, and wait for the all-clear.

At about 5 PM, we hear alarms without an alert and immediate big booms. I tell the neighbors who come out of their apartments that we're safer in the hallway this time.

The hallways themselves are constructed as shelters. They're safe enough for the smaller missiles that would come from Hezbollah, Gaza, or Yemen (who we haven't heard from in this phase of the war). However, they're said to be inadequate for the much bigger bombs that Iran throws at us.

Since we have gotten alarms without alerts, that means that the missiles are coming from nearer than Iran. (The news quickly informs us that they are indeed from Lebanon.) So staying in the hallway, rather than going through unprotected spaces on the way to the shelter while an attack is already in progress, is more sensible.

One neighbor comes out after the rest of us but insists on taking the elevator to the shelter. So be it. I've learned that, especially with our older population, you just can't change some people's minds.

On the way back up from the next alert (or was it the one after that?), the elevator suddenly lurches, blanks the destination display, and smoothly descends to the basement. Some of the people in the elevator are terrified. I explain to them, in my halting Hebrew, that it's OK. Sometimes the elevator gets confused, so it safely returns to its home position. In the basement, it opens its doors into a dank netherworld that residents rarely see. I press the button for our floor again. The doors close and it heads back up properly.

The early evening is fairly quiet, but then there's another alert at about 9:30 PM. I'm one of the first people to reach the shelter. The rest of the usual crowd eventually appear. The largest dog sniffs along the floor, apparently looking for something. The other dogs ignore each other.

The alert ends fairly quickly. I come upstairs and wonder whether to change into the sweatsuit that I sleep in. Not yet. I sit down to finish this, hopefully before the next alert.