weekend vibes

 i eventually got to sleep after posting, and was rudely (and bitterly) awoken to a rocket alert. it was my mom's first time in the shelter, and we encountered some new neighbors for the first time.

getting back to sleep for an hour or two was hard, not least because mr smear decided this was a great opportunity to brush his teeth so he could get screen time earlier 🤦

i had a meeting with my insurance broker which was supposed to take ten minutes, but by the time we were done a full hour had passed and i needed to join our daily meeting from home. the first few minutes turned into a private sync between me and the new devops guy, who's giving me weird vibes. he seems really antisocial and i'm feeling like i can't get him to focus. he told me he was also coming in to the office, but he didn't :/

on my way to the office i was presented with an opportunity to speak to the guy who'd called the evening before and who i thought i'd offended, so we cleared the air before i got to work.

the work day was... interesting. it turned out the drama the night before was due to something i did that we all agreed should have worked, so i had to write a script to reset my change. most of my focus for the rest was on developer methodology, and i was pleased to be a part of a whole bunch of things coming together, as well as feeling like an authority in our organization.

there are days (like the day before) that i have to deal with a sense of imposter syndrome, so it's nice to have some balance to that.

the last couple of hours were busy, but not too intense, and included an interesting theological discussion with a religious contractor.

i came home to a full house - mr smear's friend was over for dinner. we all had a good experience, some interesting conversations in english and hebrew, and then we all took a walk to get him home and chat with his mother. on the way home gd expressed frustration with me sometimes speaking to her in hebrew, which i'm conflicted about.

the evening went smoothly, minus me discovering a problem with one of my toes that definitely needs a doctor (i hope it's just an ingrown nail).

while trying to help my mother with her iphone (i detest iphones now), i was convinced to finally - after three and a half years - update my country of residence in steam. i did so by purchasing minutescape, the testing of which cost me a pleasantly entertaining hour of my life.

and (pretty much) then i went to bed.

today so far:

i slept surprisingly well, dreamed long weird dreams, and this morning so far has been good. in addition to visiting our kibbutz cousin tomorrow, we're making a stop by a cousin i spoke to a couple of weeks ago (the one with lots of kids) and we're collectively supportively shocked to learn that she's finally left her husband.

right: shabbat!

a hard day's night

 i'm really struggling tonight, though i guess there's an upside in that i've spent the past hour or two working on the language project and the frontend is starting to take shape.

i walked to the pick-up location, which was about 200m from where google maps said it was. the detour was fascinating because i didn't realize how much residential development has been done on the other side of the train station from us, and the guys at the store were grateful to be notified about the map issue and for me updating it. i walked to the closest light rail station and headed to work.

i arrived, sweaty, to a birthday celebration followed by a day that was predominantly me trying hard to balance letting the new guy do his thing and me (micro)managing him into making his thing actually help us. and trying to do it in a way that didn't feel shitty.

for the most part, though, the level of stress was so much less than the previous days that i found myself with a long list of things to do but a weird sense of being lost.

at 5.30pm, i decided to put my outside shoes on and go home.

precisely at that moment, one of the new guys arrived in desperate need of help. i had no idea how to help him, so i left, but i felt really shitty about it.

i arrived home, handed mr smear his new roald dahl books and enjoyed him reading me a story, then we had dinner, which was interrupted by someone calling to ask me for help. i literally didn't understand who he was or what was going on, and then suddenly i felt myself crashing and i rushed to brush my teeth and climb into bed.

where i spent a good few hours not sleeping due to a combination of dark thoughts and lower back pain.

chicken

 yesterday was intense.

i made it just in time for the yoga class, which was tough but fluid. the instructor asked me for my favorite bird, catching me off guard, and after taking some time to give it some thought i responded with "chicken". hilarity ensued. towards the end, he demonstrated a movement (balancing on hands with knees tucked into the backs of arms) and i just couldn't figure it out; at one point i was convinced that i just had the wrong body shape. when he eventually found a way to explain it to me and i got it right, i was surprised by how little strain it was on my spine and was treated to applause by my coworkers :P

the morning could be best described as a series of surprise events - it took me more than half an hour before i was able to sneak off for a quick shower between meetings.

during the meeting before my big presentation, i kept trying and failing to build an image that was being delivered to me, and eventually tried restarting docker, only to see an update pending. it looks like docker may have finally fixed whatever they broke a couple of versions ago.

from there i rushed into my presentation. i joked about it being prophetic that i'd inserted a quote slide at the beginning that said "everything is broken", because between microsoft's rug-pull with vscode extensions and our mitigations for docker's bugs made an absolute mess of everything. in spite of that, though, we got through an hour and ten minutes and there seemed to be a lot of interest, surprise and appreciation 🤷

lipgirl's lunch idea worked out really well. "i helped" (i just squeezed lemon juice), but she and another coworker put together a huge plate of really good salad; it wasn't just a good idea for us, but it looks like we might have some more people joining in on this.

soon after lunch, i headed to the warehouse to help our tech support staff on their first installation. while there, i received a call from someone i once served with who's interviewing with us, and by the time we were done i think he was convinced that joining us is a pretty good idea. i also ended up on a diatribe with my coworkers, describing some of my tokyo takeaways.

it was around 4pm when we collectively realized that we had three deployments scheduled for the next morning and they had no idea how to do them. i should mention that on a day full of pressure, our new star devops was nowhere to be found - he was preoccupied with the farewell from his previous employer. after scrambling to make space on the desks, and beginning to get the installations going (the tech support kid hadn't yet learned not to skip steps, so we had a restart at one point), we then began the process of preparing the deployments and preparing his machine to perform them.

it - took - six - hours.

there was lots of complaining, lots of joking around, and a ridiculous incident where we detected a leak in the warehouse that almost took out some of our expensive and sensitive equipment. i could have just done everything myself and bailed early, but i'm no longer the only person who can do this stuff, we learned a lot, and the celebratory vibe before we shut everything down was very real.

i came home super late, did a mind-dump with my wife and mom, and then entered into a very difficult, tiring, but ultimately rewarding fight/discussion with gd.

today:

i eventually fell into bed around 2am, with a sore back and a mind all over the place. and then something happened shortly after i fell asleep that woke me up, and i don't know if i managed to get back to sleep after that.

it's been a relaxed morning so far, i'm about to go pick up a package on the way to work and hopefully it'll be a good day.

backwards

yesterday:

i got the vscode copilot to help me with i18n. it saved me a huge amount of effort, but got stuck on the translation json formatting...

we had a good parental guidance session.

on the way to the office i picked up the asterix omnibus and another of the french originals ^_^

we interviewed a devops who's currently stuck in thailand, and ended with such a great feeling that it put yesterday's interview in stark contrast and i've submitted my concerns to the boss.

lipgirl planned to do a build-your-own-salad thing, but the supplier said the food would only arrive between 3 and 6pm. a couple of us left for sumsum, everyone else ordered lunch, and by the time we returned the salad stuff had arrived :P

my boss tried and failed to help us set up workshop equipment, and later on, just as my team and i had decided to call it a day, one of our aussie madmen arrived and dragged us into a couple of hours of installations with beers. and boogie sabbath, which (aside from iron man) is becoming a thing for me.

apparently mr smear was a lot more compliant about homework yesterday than the day before.

i finally prepared my presentation after putting mr smear to bed.

i went to bed shortly after an unpleasant argument with a coworker about meeting scheduling...

today so far:

i didn't sleep very well, and i'm very nervous about my neck, especially as i want to join the yoga class this morning. i woke up to a quote for the dell repair and a failed attempt to do something with my health insurance that's led me to realize that i need to have a serious talk with my broker.

while brushing my teeth this morning i realized that the israeli mantra/prayer for resilience is "it'll be okay", and that my mother uses it just fine in south africa but has trouble applying it here.

her aliyah officer (or whatever) sent her an email denying that she'd demanded the documentation she'd demanded.

gotta go.

in the in-between moments

 the ice-cream mission went well, we met up with mongoose and his daughter and aside from a moment where i rescued her ice-cream cone from a tumble to the floor (we think she thought i was taking it from her) and a few "the usual" moments of mr smear crossing lines, we had a pretty good afternoon.

today:

i got a pretty good night's sleep, but woke up earlier than my early alarm to take the dell in for evaluation / repair. the trip to herzeliya and back was pretty quick, but finding the place once i was off the bus was a bit of a mission.

both ways i didn't use my phone, and having that time to process my thoughts felt good.

the half hour or so between getting back home and leaving for work were stressful as i tried to set up my macbook for mr smear to use during the day. everything went wrong until i figured out that i didn't need to do what apple wasn't letting me do (their UX really can stink sometimes), after which i still had quite a lot of configuration to do...

work was full of meetings and interviews, some more pleasant than others, but mostly alright. and overall it feels like the day was successful. taking friday's cholent for lunch was a jolly good idea. learning that thurday's conversation with the new product expert inspired her to consider game dev a real resource for our product was exciting ^_^

i was a bit irritable this evening, but it was generally a good evening nonetheless. after watching why everyone is cancelling their duolingo right now i made an effort to get back into the alternative i've been putting together, and moving to a different PC has taught me that there was some funky stuff going on with my windows copy.

much frustration later, i've fixed and patched and i'm pretty much ready to move forward again. and developing on a macbook is much more comfortable, even while i'm irritated at microsoft's enshittification of vscode (using the extension marketplace).

but now it's much later than i expected to go to bed.

doing the right things

 thursday:

on the way to work i realized that what i needed to do was defer the presentation and actually prepare it, so i did that. the work day was packed, but not particularly interesting; mostly grind on my part.

our second monthly game hacking session started off quite constructively, with conversations about what gaming can do and why it's relevant as a teaching tool. one of those conversations inspired me to pick up a copy of war made new on kindle and read the preface to my wife and mom, who found it just as fascinating as i did.

we made an effort to put together a version of tetris that i'd come up with, but after a couple of hours (disrupted by an intense twenty minutes of debugging a server undergoing testing) we were all yawning in turns and called it a night.

yesterday:

i slept pretty well, i think, but i woke up tired. like, really tired. but it was gd and my ten year anniversary! i booked us a table at meshek barzilay.

we began the day a bit late, with a mission to dizengoff to order mr smear's new prescription lenses and pick up vegan cholent and lunch (i wasn't hungry, but mr smear didn't like his pad thai), and then walk a bit to the nature store, and then come on home so i could rest for a few minutes and drink two coffees because i was completely broken and had to go to the memorial service for my late coworker.

i met up with lipgirl at the office and made myself yet another coffee, and we headed out to netanya, which turned out to be an insane two hour trip because the highways around herzliya were shut down for invisible construction. we were so late that we ended up having to skip the cemetary and head straight to the memorial lunch, where i ended up being the only person to speak on behalf of the company.

i'm nervous about public speaking in english on a good day, so getting up in front of a large gathering of strangers to stumble over what i hope gave a good impression of our experience of him.

lipgirl drove back, and we had an argument over the impact of demanding coalition governments, and i think (i hope) that i managed to win her over by the end of it.

either way, post extra-coffee/eulogy/argument i arrived home buzzing, at gd's behest managed to update our booking, and we pretty soon ordered a taxi and headed south for dinner. we arrived a bit early and took a short walk, and just as we were about to turn around ran into botchman! it was great seeing him, and particularly great seeing him looking well! (he's been dealing with some health issues over the past few years)

dinner was fantastic. the service was great, the atmosphere was great, and the food was amazing. we all had a really good time - really celebrating our anniversary - we enjoyed every mouthful, and by the time the bill came around i felt that it was absolutely justified. we walked a good way home, then ordered a cab and were treated to a really entertaining cabbie who's big into 70s and 80s music.

it was an absolutely wonderful way to mark ten (eleven) years.

today:

i got up early, but spent most of the day alternating between napping on the couch and reading a few pages of death note. at one point i tried to get up and found myself feeling faint, but i'm feeling better now. in addition to all the resting, gd and mr smear and i played a fair amount of rayman: legends, and right now we're making very serious plans to walk to the beach to find ice cream.

mom's home

 i didn't sleep very well at all. i got up before my alarm, prepared coffee in a takeaway cup, and even chatted to mr smear, who wasn't interested in coming with to the airport but did make a point of calling excitedly every half hour to find out where she was :)

my timing would have been great had the north entrance to the train station been open. and it was almost great even for the south entrance, but i arrived just as everyone was getting off the train and pouring up the stairs in a way that prevented anyone from going down, and i ended up missing it by seconds.

fortunately the next train was only a few minutes later 🙏

picking up my mom and getting home was straightforward, and it was nice to start the day altogether.

then i went to work, where most of the day was spent setting up in the warehouse, preparing an installation and then executing. it went well, but took a long time.

i arrived home pretty late, we ordered very serious salads and sandwiches for dinner, and i didn't last long after getting mr smear into bed (the air mattress on the floor).

it was nice playing rayman: legends with mr smear before we sat down to eat - he had an eye exam in the afternoon and his vision was apparently too blurry for anything else :P

i slept relatively well last night, although my sleep was disrupted a number of times because my mother wasn't sleeping so much :P

i'm a bit nervous going into today: i have a presentation to give to a bunch of new employees and i've got literally nothing but an empty template right now.