pulling teeth

 the past twenty minutes have all been about gd losing her shit because her nonsensical dental plan's off the rails and she's scared she won't be able to eat solid food for the next month or two.

@$#!.

today's been a quiet, wintery, indoorsy day. we had another missile attack in the middle of the night, which struck in south tel aviv, and i wasn't able to get back to sleep after that. it was an awful night, and i spent a lot of the day on the couch napping.

i've finally uninstalled bloons: adventure time. after 500+ hours, most of which was grinding for zero payoff (the character resources mechanic is broken).

we watched the secret of NIMH, which has really held up well.

it took me most of the day to get through the dishes.

i've barely had the capacity to do anything interesting or functional. so it's been all about watching house and reading bits of mona lisa overdrive on the new kindle.

calm through the storm

 around 3.30am i was awoken by what sounded like combat aircraft flying overhead. it turned out to be very dramatic thunder, and the storm that ensued continued until noon. mr smear tried to weasle his way out of school again, but aside from it being friday (their electives day) i think he enjoyed splashing to school in his galoshes as much as i did.

i took care of the emergency shopping on the way home, gd and i finished watching the original beetlejuice in preparation for its sequel and i took care of some more of the dishes.

gd went to her dental appointment, which once again turned out to be different to what we expected. i picked mr smear up from school while it bucketed down (i got really irritated with the other parents jostling me with their umbrellas while i was waiting at the gate), then mr smear and i made it to the bus stop just in time.

we arrived at the dental clinic just as gd came out, and it took a little while and a lot of confusion to get an understanding of what the rest of the plan is. then we walked to the hummusia and gd watched while we ate an enormous, delicious breakfast. we then picked up hers to go, which she was able to eat by the time we got home.

aside from us finally cleaning the apartment, the rest of the afternoon was very chilled, shadowrun: hong kong and napping.

we had a great dinner (the simpsons stealing cable*), mr smear just went to bed, gd is on her way to bed, and i might very well be doing so myself soon.

* my son to me: i do honor you! just barely enough to satisfy the fifth commandment.

i'm feeling much more relaxed today than i have in a while.

the sufganya

 today was completely insane.

it began around 2.40am, where the missile alert sirens sounded, and we all struggled to get out and into the shelter, barely making it before the booms. i didn't realize until the afternoon that a school building near nystire was destroyed. mr smear couldn't get back to sleep after that, so i stayed with him... uncomfortably... for a couple of hours until i was reasonably sure he was actually going to sleep.

...

1. same wakeup pattern, but this time i was feeling completely broken, and no screen time for me either. i read desolation jones and we listened to music, and it was nice.

2. mr smear was complaining that he didn't feel well enough to go to school. he agreed to abide by the outcome determined by the thermometer. the thermometer suggested he was a bit warm, and so he stayed home. having reviewed his math homework dashboard, i'm satisfied that he's at or above his grade level, and apparently he did his other extra homework well, too.

3. on my way to the mall i received a call about a job. everything was sounding good, but before i agreed to come in to meet them i made sure that they could afford me. they can't, so... oh, well.

4. i'm glad i did a little research last night on kindles. i walked into the store, bought the right model (the basic 11th gen, the only one they had) at the right price (in ten instalments), and the experience was quick and painless. and then, for the cherry on top, i managed to pick up a bunch of soy yoghurts while they've been sold out everywhere for weeks.

5. my manager came in sick and coughing. again. it's really, really grating my cheese.

6. we had an all-hands today, which affirmed that the situation isn't dire. in honor of chanukah being next week, we had sufganyot. the ceo assumed that the one i got was vegan, and i took a chance - expecting it to maybe have egg, not dairy.

it was made with $#@!ing dairy butter.

that was around 11.30 this morning, and my stomache's only just started settling a couple of hours ago. for the first few hours after i had headaches and was really, really tired... so tired, in fact, that during an important conversation i fell asleep a couple of times and even dreamed. my coworkers found it hilarious that i tried to participate in the conversation when i woke up, even if i did have something to contribute :P

7. before the dairy took effect, i at least managed to finish my lunch. i'd walked past the hummusia on my way to work and just the memory of the smell made it a must.

8. in spite of everything, i managed to get the job i've been working on done by the end of the day.

9. i came home, just in time for a chat with an HR rep about another gig. it went well.

10. dinner was late, but we managed to squeeze in a simpsons episode before the new 8pm cut-off. dinner was ratatouille, gd's first attempt, and it was great. 

i can't explain why, but gd had informed me that a friend of hers wanted to lend us a hand financially, and i was inspired to do grace after the meal.

overall, the bedtime routine part of the evening went smoothly.

11. a two hour conversation with gd's friend, the conversation was all over the place but we graciously accepted the offer of help and he sent it to us in the form of some bitcoin. now i have to figure out how to withdraw that bitcoin into our bank account so that i can use it to pay off some debt...

12. that was just before midnight, when i realized that our sink was an absolute mess and in danger of triggering a blocked drain. i angrily un-jenga'ed everything and got the drain guard back in place, then sat down with my tea to post this.

i have a new kindle, and it's already set up. i think i'm going to read a bit before going to bed.

two steps

yesterday:

the work day was pretty bland.

i joined my boss for a walk for our one-on-one, and i asked some tough questions about where we're at. we're going to have an all-hands tomorrow so he didn't want to say too much, but he did a pretty good job of assuring me that we're not in a bad place.

the interview in the evening went pretty well, although signing off was really awkward so i've no idea if i made a good impression or not.

watching the simpsons as a family is therapeutic. it's also highly relevant, as we saw the results of marge getting itchy and scratchy declawed and then this morning i saw the real-life results of a 21-day cellphone ban.

today:

the morning started off alright - three mornings in a row with mr smear responsible for getting himself organized before panic time, and three mornings that were much calmer than usual - and after dropping him off at school i continued on to the post office to pick up socks and a beard trimmer.

then i accompanied gd to her dental appointment, and found a nice coffee shop (lebowski, which used to be movie-ing) to wait for her at. her appointment turned out to be quite different / less dramatic than we'd been told, they just took an imprint for the tooth that's due to be extracted so she'll be able to wear a retainer with a temporary replacement while they prepare for the real work.

i got some decent work done today, ran into another cousin working in the building on the way out to lunch with my coworkers, and by and large it was quite a relaxed one. having said that, by the time i left the office i was feeling wiped out and i still had a parents' screentime workshop at the school at 8pm.

ugh.

so we had a nice, early dinner together before i left. the evening was... well, some of it was interesting, and some of it was inspiring, but a lot of it was a slog and by 9.15 i just wanted to get the hell out of there. when she pulled out cards for a "last activity" at 9.35 i fuck-that'd and noped on out.

gd and i had a conversation about all the things that came up, and we're both going to make an effort to modify our screen habits, particularly around mr smear. this is going to be an interesting experiment, but i don't think it's going to be hard - i just need to pick up an e-ink ebook reader as quickly as possible.

...

jason pargin's review of deadpool & wolverine just blew my mind.

the slap

 well, shit.

it was a bit of an annoying work day, and i didn't get too much done. in the middle of it, i got a phone call from mr smear complaining that he'd been waiting at the gate for half an hour, which was entirely my fault because i told his teacher that his tutor session was cancelled but forgot to tell him 🤦‍♂️

to be fair, though, the reason it took him half an hour to call me was because he was playing games on his phone...

[source]

[source]

the interview went... not great. the experience was fine, but they weren't happy with my coding exercise and called it before the architecture section. i very much appreciated their directness and their not-wasting-anyone's-time-iness, but it does sting... especially considering that i felt i did pretty well.

not amazing, but well. which is obviously why they called it.

anyway, it's been a mixed emotion evening - mr smear's doing his usual, nothing extraordinary but annoying - and i'm just done with the day. i feel like watching the simpsons as a family is healthy.

i have another interview tomorrow. maybe it'll be better.

coasting

 i think i just slept about ten hours. my neck and shoulder were giving me a lot of trouble yesterday evening, with pain radiating into my left hand, and between than and being "regularly" tired i just crashed on the couch after wishing mr smear a good night, only waking up due to gd watching something loud and action-packed and slowly dragging myself to bed.

yesterday:

i learned that our devops guy is leaving too, we're down to three devs (and two chiefs). for the most part it was another unfulfilling day fiddling with dune analytics, and then trying to ascertain whether the data i was getting back was any good.

at least gd was well enough to take mr smear to his therapy session. and we finally secured her cannabis license! so it was a big day for her.

i had a chat with mr smear's "music teacher" at school, and he thinks that mr smear playing a piece from beethoven's ode to joy at the chanukah ceremony next week is a good idea. fine, whatevs. i've set mr smear up with simply piano on his phone and good luck to them 🫡

today:

another day of mr smear sleeping in, mostly calm. and today's a work-from-home day. i have a Very Serious Interview this afternoon and i'm not feeling as well-prepared as i probably should be. a part of me wants to cancel, i'm honestly not sure what would hurt my reputation more...

slowdown

 it's sunday morning and i'm about to leave for work, but i needed to get this down. i didn't really prep for tomorrow's interview, but i definitely and desperately needed to rest. gd and i are convinced that we've both had covid. she seems to finally be getting better.

friday:

i had a chat with swordschool in the morning, but i was still in recovery mode and my brain felt like it was melting into a puddle. but he had a great idea about gamifying something and i was happy to be able to contribute somehow.

we started watching the original beetlegeuse movie, then picked mr smear up from school and bussed to dizengoff center, where we ordered mr smear's new lens prescription (that we should've done more than a month ago) and picked up a new phone for him (an entry level samsung).

so not exactly a cheap day.

the hummusia was packed with a long line so we ended up at a franchise coffee shop eating mediocre vegan sandwiches, and the rest of the day was resting, snacking, and gaming.

i started getting into shadowrun: hong kong and it's really good so far. i'm liking a lot of the added mechanics, but i think they might have been a bit overwhelming if i hadn't recently played the first two games.

yesterday:

yesterday really felt like a recovery day. i didn't feel as ridiculously tired all day as i've been for the last week or so, although when i walked up the stairs after dropping mr smear off at his friend i almost fainted and had to lie on my back with my knees up for a few minutes in order to reset.

i was a bit irritable over the course of the day, part of it being because i decided to implement a feature with my phone control solution and it took ages to figure out something that should have been really trivial to understand, but it was overall a good, restful day.

the plan was to take mr smear out on his bike in the afternoon, but his friend called and it was a no-brainer for all of us that that was a better idea :P

i accompanied him on the walks there and back, but for the most part he was on his own and it seems like he handled himself and the afternoon really well.

...

i'm slowly reading through the honest truth about dishonesty, and the chapter on how effective lobbying and pharma rep manipulation is is simply appalling. this is stuff everyone should know.

the recovery

i didn't sleep particularly well last night, but i did sleep better than the night before.

this morning didn't get off to a great start, mr smear's been slowing down with waking up again and it gets under everyone's (specifically gd's) nerves. but the walk to school was good, at least. the walk back was a bit tense, though, because we had a traffic jam throughout our neighborhood and all the drivers were being assholes.

it was a slower morning compared to the rest of the week, i did a little bit of housekeeping and got gd started on stander while i did some work on my telephony project.

the office was remarkably quiet this morning. my two achievements before i returned home for lunch were taking a tiny step towards working with dune analytics (a hot mess of a platform in terms of UX and documentation - and possibly data - but with lots of potential), and coaching a coworker on the dos and don'ts of getting tattoos (along with some personal opinions thrown in for good measure).

i arrived home just in time to accompany gd to pick mr smear up from school, and i begrudgingly did so even though i was tired and just wanted to rest a few minutes :/

everything was going fine until we were almost home, when mr smear decided (again) that he didn't want to go to mma. unfortunately for him, that's not negotiable right now, and we double-teamed him pretty well. i had lunch while he calmed down with a book, then did some work while he practiced on the keyboard before we left for his jiujitsu class.

the way there was pleasant, i grabbed a coffee on the way, and we arrived on time for class. he gave me some shit about putting on his belt, but i handled it, and then i watched him bow out of the warmup and had to give him a "pep talk". from there he did well, things went smoothly for a while and he was even enjoying himself, until suddenly he was "injured".

in his defense, his ankle / heel / whatever might have legitimately been hurting, but i believe he was hamming it up. his foot looked fine to me, but his coach was concerned, so after getting him to "test it out" (he couldn't touch the floor without wincing... apparently...) we got our stuff together and he hopped out holding onto my arm on our way to the doctor.

i informed him, very clearly, that if he's legitimately injured he'll get all the care and sympathy he needs, but if the doctor doesn't find anything wrong with him there'll be hell to pay.

miraculously, his foot began healing within seconds, and by the time we got to the street he was perfectly fine 🤦

at least we didn't have to go through the emergency doctor routine, i guess 🤷

the rest of the evening went much better, i got a tiny bit more work done (although i'm not sure it's of much value) and after putting mr smear to bed early, gd and i settled in to watch the rest of stander, or at least get most of the way through before gd passed out.

at the same time, i'd managed to lock out mr smear's phone completely because a band in the middle of his touchscreen stopped working, and once that happens there's really nothing you can do. so i factory reset the phone, and after about an hour of google/android/huawei shenanigans finally managed to reinstall it and get it functioning well enough that he can use it to communicate and ride the bus until we get him a new phone.

i can't believe we're going to have to get him a new phone 🤦

anyway, it's been a long day, it's been an exceptionally long week, and i think i'm going to bed soon.

winning the battle

soon after posting, i fielded a call from a recruiter but shut him down immediately when i heard the name of the company he wanted to put me forward for. no gambling (including forex and crypto schemes), no marketing. it felt weirdly good to do that, and i wonder if he'll bring me anything good in the future :P

...

it was a rough morning, and i had a hard time getting anything productive done. i had a sync with my boss once i had a better idea of what i needed to be doing, only to discover that i didn't have a good idea at all. and our conversation went on longer than i'd expected, and i was getting stressed about being late for the school meeting...

... i made it on time for the school meeting. but, as usual, the principal was being disrespectful so i had to stand and wait outside for five minutes, even though i'd had to wait a month for the meeting and was taking off work for it. by the time i walked in, i was boiling - not just because of the waiting, mind, but because of everything mr smear's been through, and all the things i was planning on saying and expecting them to say back.

i was vibrating with the anticipation, but ready for war.

...

i walked out of there still vibrating, but with a sense of victory. there're things i said that made it very clear how indecent and negligent they've been, and how disgusting his bully's parent is, but i still managed to preserve a veneer of adult reasonableness and i was pleased to walk out of there with a feeling that everyone, even the principal, was on board with the plan to move mr smear to a different class. now it's just a matter of getting it done quickly but smoothly as possible.

i hope the amount i fought for him today makes up for the times i didn't (out of naivety and ignorance) fight for him before. i hope that wherever he ends up, he makes the most of the fresh start.

...

i came home, scarfed down a quick lunch, then caught the bus to work.

the afternoon was tough, and dreary, and it took a while before i understood precisely what my next steps need to be; not fun at all, but at least i have a direction now.

i did some quick shopping on the way home, we had a nice dinner (with more of the simpsons, mr smear's claim of "inappropriate" is now confusing me), and a smooth bedtime. now... i don't know. it would be nice to get a good night's sleep.

overtired

i now strongly suspect i'm sick, but most of the cause of my suspicion is that i've been so ridiculously tired that i've been dysfunctional, and additional coffee hasn't been helping at all.

yesterday:

the first order of business was fixing my phone control app's sms handling, which went smoothly. then i had a constructive chat with an HR person, and i say "constructive" because we discussed money and it was a heartfelt "nope" on the money.

i went to the office for a slow work morning, then rushed off to pick up mr smear after lunch because gd still wasn't handling with her coughing. i left the office three minutes before the bus was scheduled to arrive, which was good because the bus arrived three minutes early :/

as we got to the school stop and i was about to step off the bus, i heard a THUNK as a drunk old man collapsed face down on his way into it. i was nervous about touching him, but i helped another guy get him onto a seat and a doctor who happened to be on the bus attempting to check him out while someone else called for an ambulance.

i made a point of not using my hands for the five minutes it took to get to a coffee shop where i could OCD (surgeon-style) wash my hands, and thank them by buying a coffee.

i arrived just on time to the school gate, where i had an awkward conversation with the mother of the kid mr smear occasionally torments, but mr smear himself was nowhere to be found. after i'd waited long enough, i called him and learned that he'd had no intention of coming out because he was already on his way to his friend's place, and hadn't thought to inform us of his plans.

so... i was really happy he was going to spend time with his friend, but also pissed because i hadn't had to leave the office after all :/

on my way home, an old woman threw her cigarette out the car window and it almost struck me. her pitiful apology was not enough, and i fumed all the way home before realizing that what i should have done was thrown the cigarette back into her open window.

i made it home in time for an interesting demo, but at some point i found myself struggling to stay awake. i returned to work still desperately in need of a nap, had myself an extra coffee (the "slippery slope" coffee), but still was barely able to keep my eyes open. everything i was working on blended into a weird daydream until i realized that i wasn't achieving anything and decided it was time to go home.

i made it all the way out the building before realizing i'd left my sunglasses in my office, only to get back to my office and remember that i'd actually left them at home :(

i walked home in a weird state between wired and tired, then tried and failed* to nap a bit before dinner. we watched a couple more episodes of the simpsons over dinner, which mr smear has decided isn't so appropriate. then we all went to bed early.

* i did read a little bit of the honest truth about dishonesty, which is off to an excellent start.

i didn't sleep very well at all. i'm still tired. i'm working from home this morning because i have a meeting with the "school team" in a few hours... i hope i get this right.