day 5

 i managed to make myself a cup of coffee to take into the shelter with me this morning.

i made a mistake and pulled a coworker into what i thought would be a quick win, but dragged into three hours. it was important work, but it wasn't nearly as urgent as what either of us were supposed to be doing :(

mr smear had some hiccups, but he was mostly cooperative and had another good day. his attitude is slowly but clearly changing and his approach is becoming more and more positive, and it's really exciting to witness!

he's also been reading voraciously, and i've just place an order for a bunch more roald dahl books. which i hope will actually arrive, because gd's latest clothing order was cancelled due to our closed airspace...

i didn't get much work done today, but i am feeling a bit better (less brain-fog, the hours in the shelter have been stressful but are getting shorter and less frequent. hopefully we're already seeing the end of this part of the story...

my wound seems to be healing nicely.

...

someone posited that the american sniffer plane has been deployed because iran might actually have nukes already and might fire them in a last-ditch attempt to hurt us. i have a different theory: i think they're looking to take out fordow, and i think the americans are moving on iran for two reasons: the first, to have boots on the ground and make "deals" with the iranian people (revolution assistance and reconstruction for oil). the second, to prevent russia or china from swarming in.

i - like a lot of israelis - are a bit offended by his claim today that americans have air superiority and that american tech is responsible. it's our people who've put themselves on the line and done the most insanely literally-fantastic things to take down the IRGC in a matter of days. and it's not just american tech that's achieved that; sure, a lot of it is, but there's a lot of joint development we've done and there're some very special things that only we have.

but whatever. trump is trump, and it looks like we're writing a new story for our descendants to celebrate by eating too much to.

"they tried to kill us. we survived. let's eat." - famous jewish saying

like a dream

 in the middle of the night, the pre-pre-alarms went off, and i jumped out of bed still in a dream-state and automatically woke everyone up before realizing that there was no point. three or four hours later, anothe pre-pre-alarm, only that one turned into a pre-alarm and we spent the next while in the shelter with no internet hearing lots of loud explosions.

mr smear did some fantastic drawing while i tried to stop one of the neighbors from enthusiastically pointing out all the flaws in the shelter and dreaming up awful ways we might die.

i don't know when the right time is to discuss urgent safety issues with the bomb shelter is, but i am  pretty confident it's not when you're all stuck in the bomb shelter in the middle of a massive wave of rocket attacks...

we did all get back to sleep, but when the 7am alarm went off along with a reminder that mr smear had a hygienist appointment, we painfully dragged ourselves out of our beds (i was the slowest and the groggiest) to get ready to go. i did try to find out if the appointment had been cancelled, but all avenues pointed to "go", and mr smear and i scrambled out the door and just made it to the bus stop on time and i just finished my take-away cup of coffee in time to get to the dental clinic on time to find it closed.

on the plus side, it was an easy, quiet ride there and back and mr smear and i both enjoyed the conversation immensely (kerbal space program has inspired him to want to be an astronaut).

...

when we returned home, i called the dental service to complain, and the woman who answered was disagreeable right from the get-go, which pissed me off, and although i continued to try to explain to her that the clinics should be cancelling appointments if they're not going to honor them, by the time i got through her gaslighting and dismissing i totally lost my shit and i yelled and swore at her.

then i spent a furious little while navigating making a complaint, the process of which honestly made me even madder.

someone called me back a while later, and i explained what happened and told her to listen to the recording. i was satisfied when she took me off hold to agree to handle the complaint with that asshole's manager.

...

we had an interesting all-hands today, our company's in massive demand and things are heating up. this is good. but it's also exhausting right now specifically :P

...

my cheek seems to be healing alright, but it's still very fresh and i'm nervous about it. i'm grateful i didn't bleed on my pillow.

...

while i managed to get some work done today, i'm not satisfied and in spite of my current desperation to return to bed there's a chance i might try to dig in some more.

mr smear was pretty good about doing his homework, with only one emotional outburst that he turned around on so quickly that i'm still feeling really proud of him. he also helped me do the dishes this afternoon, and we actually had a good time of it. he's definitely growing up.

...

both of the people i communicated with yesterday regarding my mother's aliyah got back to me positively. i hope they can help me. i just wrote myself a reminder to contact whoever i contacted last year.

...

there's so much news happening right now. i was actually in a media briefing earlier, though i didn't hear anything new i was pleased that the people involved aren't missing the point of what's happening. and from the looks of things...

holy fuck, it looks like our forces are doing what they're now used to - going from suburb to suburb cleaning up, but there's no actual army to fight. just lots of terrorist cells with missile launchers (my thoughts after watching this tousi tv video about khamenei trying to flee to russia. what remains of the IRGC is absolutely psychotic)

... holy shit. this was only day four. in october last year, i wrote:

i've been fantasizing about us going all out against tehran for months, i keep thinking about how the US went into iraq in 2003 and how everyone was expecting it to be a serious war, and then the americans walked right through them. i have a feeling that if we hit tehran directly, we could be looking at a post-ayatollah iran which would immediately change the face of the entire region... so that's what i'm praying for.

 just sayin'.

history unfolding

 not gonna lie, it's hard trying to figure out what all this means, but a lot of it seems amazing and is almost too good to be true! at the same time, i'm not not to think of the casualties so far, a few residential buildings brought down and while relatively low numbers of dead and wounded so far, still a whole lot more than we're okay with :(

spending lots of time in the shelter hasn't been too terrible, though gd seems to be developing an allergy to something down there :/ and there's a really loud autistic kid. but for the most part, we're just doing our thing, singing along when the kids sing and mr smear has taken to pulling out his sketchbook and doing cool stuff.

...

it wasn't clear whether our pharmacies would be open this morning, so it was a relief when we got to both of them. i was a bit pressured for time, and ended up taking a taxi and then running to get to my neurologist appointment (for the insomnia), which turned out to be the appointment that i'd moved to the end of july 🤦‍♂️

anyway, getting there early worked out well. the procedure (removing something from my cheek) was quick and only incredibly painful for a moment, but it didn't stop bleeding for a long while (they wanted to avoid using stitches) and my hand went numb from pressing onto the wound.

anyway.

mr smear apparently behaved well during his zoom class, and aside from one dramatic homework moment (which really wasn't as bad as the previous times) he was cooperative and did what he had to do.

for me, it was a difficult work day to get into, but i did put in a few hours and by the end of the day did get the main job done.

...

i also had a productive conversation about my mother's aliyah with an ex-saffer who works in the absorption ministry, as well as sending off a request for assistance from yad l'olim. the more i think about my closing paragraph, the more pleased with myself i become:

Any assistance you're able to provide will be greatly appreciated, we have been deeply distressed for years now that she is unable to come home. As someone who is financially secure, I am happy to provide any guarantees she may require to satisfy the authorities that her aliyah will be successful. As an officer of the IDF and who is currently working in our defense industry, I am happy to provide any guarantees she may require that she is not an undesirable immigrant.

...

i'm now very tired (i mean, i haven't stopped being tired since friday), and i'm a little nervous about sleeping with the wound not yet healed, and i'm a lot nervous about being woken in the middle of the night by more rocket attacks... but on the whole, our army and intelligence are doing us proud to an unimaginable degree and it looks like the future i've been fantasizing about since last year may actually be coming to pass right before our eyes.

it's very hard not to get stuck into the news loop. i'm trying and failing to tear my eyes away, but we're literally watching history unfold.

the nap

 i resumed my re-read of danny the champion of the world, which i just saw we stopped reading the day hyperviper died :(

mr smear surprised me by reporting that he'd finished reading it by himself and absolutely loved it, so now i'm giving it another go. and tonight we watched the "lisa the vegetarian" episode of the simpsons so that's all tied in nicely.

...

it was a quiet day (tfu tfu) and i think we're all still in shock from last night, not to mention the shock of the dead and wounded and the level of destruction in rishon le'zion and ramat gan.

[phones buzz, we're on high alert again]

this is exhausting. thank god we had a relatively quiet day, and mr smear is super excited by kerbal space program (even if i was disappointed that he didn't enjoy another case solved), and hopefully tonight won't be too bad. it looks like our forces are doing really well so far and the iranians are beginning to take to the streets 🤞🙏

escalation

thursday:

a full work day, busy and pressured. highlight: talking to my boss about the language side-project and then about my vision for educational games in general, and he and a couple of others were very supportive which was exciting.

the evening was fine, right until we spoke to my mom and i learned that her aliyah process is being interfered with again. i lost it, and posted for help in a number of places. the assholes in charge are making it stupidly difficult for jews in south africa to make aliyah and there has to be a way out of it.

i spent a couple of hours trying to work with a new release and eventually gave up before going to bed.

yesterday:

well played to all our politicians and our allies, we had no idea that things were already underway and the attack yesterday morning is something we're all amazed by and proud of. in my opinion we should have done this half a year ago after taking out the iranian's air defenses, but fine, this is good too.

...

the attack began with alarms and sirens going off all around the country, so we all woke our kids up and scrambled into our bomb shelters only to discover that there was no incoming after all, just a warning to be alert.

as if, after more than a year and a half of regular rocket attacks, we weren't alert enough.

half an hour later a different alarm went off, which scared and confused everyone, only it was basically saying what the first alert should have said 🤦‍♂️

...

so anyway, that fucked everyone up. in the morning, i realized that my late coworker's memorial service would either be cancelled or minimized, and after i'd put a lot of effort into booking a company car and making arrangements the evening before i messaged our boss (his cousin) to say that i (obviously) wouldn't be able to make it. which prompted him to inform everyone that everything was stopped on account of the (the?) war.

i spent most of the day responding to responses to my aliyah posts and writing letters. it's been a rollercoaster, and that's on a background of the iranian story unfolding. it was an insane day.

having said that, mr smear began getting into working with blender, and combined with my own issues with the "old" dell computer i'm becoming more and more convinced that i need to purchase a gaming machine that can handle game dev.

in addition to that, we spent a little time on there is no game and he started getting into kerbal space program. i tried to play fx fighter with him, but the online versions are all broken and the downloadable one is suspicious as fuck. at least he enjoyed the idea of it, when we watched some gameplay videos on youtube...

around 9pm all hell broke loose, as iranian drones and missiles rained down on us. it was really scary, there's no reception in our shelter and we were down there for a long time. after we eventually were able to return to our apartments, we saw the extent of the damage and were horrified by how many israelis posted videos in spite of the warnings that the iranians are using those posts to calibrate their weapons.

a few hours later, having slept through an army briefing i'd signed up for, there was another attack, even more intense than the first. and then a few hours later, another one.

my family's handling this well. mr smear's doing fine, gd's terrified but she's holding on.

i managed to fall asleep after the last attack and got up around 10am, but mr smear has been up since 5am (he's been reading roald dahl books on repeat, and he's gotten through a bunch of them over the past few days) and he's still going strong. we started our day together playing exploding kittens, then finishing (!) there is no game, and now he's learning about building rockets in kerbal space program while i post this and figure out whether i'm going to rest some more, or maybe try to get some work done; even though it's shabbat, we're at war and there's a chance we might need to push things out fast...

doing the thing (overeating)

mr smear helped me clean the window poop this morning. i sorted out a phone bill this morning. i booked mr smear for a dairy allergy challenge in september, and gd for a pain clinic consultation next week. i listened to some more of american gods.

i complained about the company breakfast, which was anti-vegan for the second time this week. then i ate four slices of bread, right before being reminded that we were being taken to an expensive lunch before they pitched us their services*. i ate a lot of really good food.

* we were pleasantly surprised and impressed by the expert recommending a competitor's solutions when he realized theirs wouldn't cut it

overall, it was a successful work day, but it included us making a decision that might well see us losing quite a bit of sleep in the coming week.

i got home in time to listen to mr smear practice on the keyboard, and do a good hebrew reading, and verify that he knew where to look in the book for his upcoming open-book science test.

it looks like we're dealing with dust mites :( gd and i have both gone over a lot of surfaces, hopefully we've gotten through the worst of it.

after shower / bedtime / lots of talk about mr smear's new/renewed interest in 3d modelling and game design (and me installing ableton live because the cubase trial is already over), i settled down to work on the language project and have been jumping between that (making good progress) and youtube/minesweeper since.

now it's after midnight, it's probably a good idea for me to head to bed soon.

catching up

 i've been complaining about being really sleepy in the mornings, but the plus side is that i have actually been sleeping. i hope writing this doesn't affect anything :P

i wrote up yesterday's experience this morning after mr smear left for school, and then rushed to get the dishes done, forgetting that i also needed to clean poop from outside our windows. on my way to work, i checked in with our neighbors and learned that we're not the only ones.

i've been listening to the american gods tenth anniversary audiobook on and off, and although the narration's not 100% i am enjoying it.

most of the day was all over the place, with the majority of it being dedicated to catching up with scr and introducing him to what we're all about. the late afternoon was all about preparing a release, and although i abandoned my coworker with a proper mystery in order to get home in time for dinner, we did manage to get through a lot of the process with significant successes.

another houthi attack. just me and mr smear and a couple of neighbors with their little kids, and one of them was being so cute that even mr smear was amused.

after getting mr smear into bed (with only one time returning to remind him that he's got to handle his fears with his imagination), i spent about an hour diving in to AWS account management, finally hitting a wall that i need our office manager to help me break through in the morning.

not broken!

 everything is broken, and ai isn't helping. i'm now spending an enormous amount of time fiddling with eslint and typescript configurations that are all designed to be as non-interoperable as possible, and this is what i'm doing on *my* time.

...

i struggled to get out of bed this morning (again).

we had a parental guidance session this morning that went well.

i managed to register mr smear for summer camp. it's ridiculously expensive, but it seems amazing and they even have a shuttle to our area, which may be expensive but not as expensive as me or gd having to pick him up here and there. and the timing is fantastic, because he starts going the day after my mother returns to SA. and, also, we're out of debt and we can (kind of) afford it.

i think i may have done something useful at work today, although i'm not confident.

i mean, aside from bringing home the black salt (kala namak) which has been offending some of my coworkers every time i use it. meanwhile, i'm not complaining about them microwaving fish in the communal kitchen. i did, however, complain about breakfast being all dairy except for lots of delicious bread, i'm not losing any weight...

and getting a recommendation for an interesting-sounding book (tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow), and convinced myself that a replay of the (three primary) daniel mullins games is in order.

there was a bullying incident at school today, it's still not clear what happened but it sounds like the english teacher just shrugged her shoulders and gave up on taking any action.

i had a long chat with mr smear's art therapy teacher, who scared the shit of me (as she does every year) by calling mid-morning out of the blue and making me worry that there'd been an incident.

i don't know if i've just got really dry skin or if i'm being attacked by something, so i had a vinegar bath and i'm using moisturizer and hoping for the best.

i asked gd to prepare a "go bag" in case of iranian attack, it looks like things may be heating up. i'm praying we get on with it and attack them for real and shut the IRGC shit down. also, making greta thunberg watch hamas atrocities is a stroke of genius.

[OMFG i finally figured out the configurations and things are working 🥳]

retro-parenting and all the things

 this morning was a bit of a struggle (i did sleep at least, but not nearly enough), i needed to request a tami water filter technician again, have it out with a cannabis license representative (she told me which documents i need to provide and agreed that that should be clearly stated on the application forms). i ordered a bunch of asterix books in english and french and we did an online grocery shopping. and i worked a bit on the language project. then i accompanied gd to the clinic to request said documents on the way to work.

but then i realized, while at the clinic, that i'd forgotten to disconnect the tami so i had to come back home again 🤦‍♂️

anyway, work: i had a feeling that i wasn't going to get to work on my primary tasks today, and i was right. it was a bunch of distractions, not least of which being that gd needed me to go home, pick up mr smear, take him to his therapist, and then have him come to work afterwards.

at least he managed to find his way to the office by himself!

he did most of the homework there - with a little skiving off now and again - and we left the office in good spirits (although we ended up going in the traditional loops of him going to far with the trolling, which reminded me of josh wolf's big fight* and then suddenly i was transported back to the brawl with my father), and arrived home in time for dinner.

* omg there's actually a follow-up with his son.

with no screens, because he hadn't finished his homework. it was pleasant enough, though. and then we told him he'd need to finish the homework before bed. this started off alright, but we had two final questions to get through and he shut down. and we lost patience.

...

i think one of the hardest pills to swallow has been that we never set clear enough boundaries with him, and that not having a strong sense of them is literally hurting him both at home and at school, and is causing him to behave in ways that are potentially damaging to his future. so now we're scrambling to make up for it, but he's already pretty big and it's really hard to force him to face the world and do what needs to be done without things becoming... intense.

i don't know (and mostly don't care) what the neighbors think of the yelling and screaming, but i actually had to make my son properly afraid of me for what i believe is the first time in his life. he's often been angry and upset by me, sure, but not openly afraid.

strangely, once i finally got through to him and got him to accept his fate and finish the job, his mood rapidly settled and he became cooperative, and by the time he'd gotten through it he was clearly happy with himself. i talked to him (sternly) about not making us have to go through this sort of thing again, he calmly agreed and went off to shower and brush his teeth, singing to himself the whole time.

and bedtime was pleasant, too 👀

...

also strangely, i expected to be thoroughly worn out by all of that drama but i felt strangely okay. i spent a lot of the evening watching youtube videos (i really shouldn't) and playing a lot of minesweeper (i probably shouldn't), and fiddling with my computer settings (it keeps restarting randomly) and installing driver updates (which then mysteriously uninstalled themselves), and somewhere in there managed to fix the language project issue i'd been experiencing in the morning.

and now... i don't know. i should probably go to bed soon.