herding cat

 it was a shitty morning to begin with, after a rough night, and we woke up to a cat (stray / our upstairs neighbors, it's anyone's guess) crying in the stairwell. gd opened the door to take a look, which was a big mistake as it launched itself past her and it took us a good five / ten minutes to get it out, but not without it clambering all over our couch and bed and leaving me with a nice red welt on my wrist.

gd's deathly allergic to cats, and she started breaking out with something even though it didn't touch her. i began getting chesty. so we both took antihystamines and i've called the municipality in the hopes they can make it possible for us to leave our apartment safely.

this sucks.

precipice

 i went to bed tired and full of shit feelings after a very long day, and then an impossible-to-reconfigure alarm woke me up and i've been having trouble calming down since. not to mention that i think i'm developing eczema again.

there're so many different sources of stress to choose from.

the biggest item of the day was me taking mr smear to his jiujitsu class in the afternoon, and mr smear flat-out refusing to participate. this led to a massive same-old-fight with gd that has nothing to do with mr smear's story.

as for mr smear, i've had a lot of insightful discussions with him since we left the gym, and it looks like we're going to have to find (a/some) alternatives to mma. which makes me sad, because mma really has been the perfect answer to a bunch of different requirements: self-defense, self-confidence, discipline physical exercise, affordability and the ability for gd (at least most of the time) to be able to take him.

fuck.

i'm so tired of things being relentlessly hard.

...

my work day was frustrating. i made extremely slow progress on my own tasks, although i have plenty on my plate. i did not finish the day with any sense of satisfaction, but i did shut my laptop with a solid sense of not having done enough hours due to distractions beyond my control.

seder

 we got to the car on time, but as we did so i began to feel like i might need to pee shortly, so after inspecting for damage and connecting my phone i stopped across the road from our apartment and made it to our bathroom just as it became an emergency.

i was worried that that was going to be a feature of our drive - an hour or so on the road - but fortunately that was it.

the evening was a bit surreal. it was wonderful and comforting to have most of the family together, even though kc's brother-n-law had been called up for reserve duty so we only saw him briefly via video chat. kc's two week-old and kc's sister's two month old were both there, and it was quite special to meet them. mr smear was being aggressively / unpleasantly shy and awkward, though he did participate in the singing of ma nishtanah and very enthusiastically joined his cousins on the hunt for the afikoman before it had even been hidden.

he was weird about the "prize" - he didn't want to take the twenty shekels from kc's dad - but yesterday he informed me that it was because he felt that it was unfair to him 😂

he also got angry with a little girl for "stealing", even though he had no real evidence that that's what had taken place.

the seder itself was mostly "the usual" for that side of the family, very loud and fun, but we made space both physically and emotionally for the hostages, even singing along to habayita (which triggered a fair amount of tears around the room).

the drive home was a bit mad, it was long, with heavy traffic and scary drivers on the road, but we made it to tel aviv safely and got home around 1.30am after dropping off the lady who'd helped in the kitchen.

yesterday:

i didn't sleep well, and i was exhausted and lazy for most of the day. i finally got mr smear's phone account sorted out in the morning, at least. in the afternoon, we went out for a walk to the park by the beach, which began with ice cream, ended with chips, and its middle was full of whining because mr smear wanted a sandwich and it's passover, where a) we don't do bread and b) passover bread is horrible.

anyway.

i bumped into an old friend at the park with some friends of his, and i was very awkward. or they were. maybe we all were. oh, well...

at dinner we watched more of the magic prank show, which is just amazing.

after putting mr smear to bed - after he very proudly called my mom from his own phone to say good night - gd and i watched another fallout episode.

today:

i slept much better, but started off the day all wrong. otherwise, it was a pretty good morning, but very hot; we're experiencing a heat wave right now, and it was an oven-like 37 degrees this afternoon with more of the same promised for tomrorow. the work day was good, but a bit weird. the thing i'm thinking about a lot is that a few of us had a particularly heated debate the other day, and after diving a bit deeper today i discovered that two of us were decidedly wrong - an apology is in order to the third, but he's on vacation for a week.

it was nigh impossible to find lunch today, it bothers me that the salad places are all closed down for passover. so i ended up getting hummus from an arab place, which turned out to be the best hummus in the area by far. after waiting twenty minutes in the line in the extreme heat, i ordered something that turned out to be with meat in it, and i was embarrassed and disappointed. i had planned to just take it out of my dish and give it to my teammates, but in the end we discovered that it wasn't meat after all, just really nicely-made fava beans :P

the wework management provided matzah and chocolate spreads, but nothing vegan, so one of them disappeared into their storeroom and returned with a whole slab of panda chocolate for me ^_^

at dinner we finished watching the magic prank show, and after getting mr smear into bed we watched the season finale of the fallout series. holy shit, they really did an amazing job and we both thoroughly enjoyed it! i'm really pleased that gd can now appreciate a world i've been so captivated by for over two decades ^_^

iran's cave

 this morning i made the mistake of opening instagram and scrolling down my feed. each post was more demoralizing than the last, and this is after filtering out so many accounts that are spewing antisemitism and blatant lies about us, the war, and our history.

i don't know which is worse: terrorist regimes trying to destroy us, or the useful idiots supporting them, or the cautious walking-on-egg-shells they're being met with. or maybe it's none of those three. maybe it's seeing clueless jews serving as mouthpieces for their enemies and speaking against their own people.

either way, i'm grateful to be here, the one place on earth where jews are allowed to be jews, and where as jews we are able to defend ourselves. where the answer to "should our hostages be freed" is obvious and unequivocal. where we don't have to defend singing a national anthem that calls for us being a free nation in our own country of origin.

we're pushing further and further into a future of fake news, and deepfakes, and twisted narratives and propaganda engines the likes of which even george orwell couldn't possibly have imagined back when he wrote 1984.

2 + 2 = 5

if this past six months has taught us nothing else, i hope we learn from it that western civilization is in terrible danger of losing its mind, and its heart. i hope that the world will collectively take steps to pull itself out of the endless sea of quicksand that our media and social media platforms have become.  i hope our children don't wake up in a dystopian future controlled by radical ideologies in which it's impossible to know what's real and what's not.

the sim

i'm tired, i'm sore, and we're leaving in an hour to drive for an hour or two to our cousins' seder. i've just had four cups of water after realizing that the only liquid i'd consumed today was black coffee. ugh.

firstly, today was a huge day for us and mr smear: i've bought him a sim card, and given him my huawei, and he now has his own phone. well, shit.

secondly, it was a big morning in the mall, and then when we finally got home my mom called to ask us to take some chocolates as well. i walked to the chocolatier (cardinal) on ibn gvirol, amazing vegan stuff but no hechsher. i walked back to leonidas, nothing gift-like that was vegan. i then walked all the way to max brenner, arrived before they closed and finding a couple of items that reasonably fit the criteria for a gift.

i returned home with sore legs and 10.5K steps on my watch. i tried resting, but found that hard to do with mr smear very noisily playing among us and gd struggling with our old iron that almost destroyed her shirt (fortunately our neighbors could help us out with theirs).

oh! she very successfully made potatoes in the oven today. she's now rather embarrassed that she's been ovening wrong all these years, but we're very glad we don't have to buy a new one just yet.

...

gd and i had a very difficult conversation this morning, one that lots of jews are having right now: how do we celebrate our freedom, when we have up to 129 hostages still trapped in gaza?

limbo

yesterday:

i didn't sleep very well. at all. then i got up and published an article on how ridiculous the facetime reactions are (well, that they're enabled automatically and affect all video call apps), which i only realized was a thing while chatting with my mom before dinner.

after hours of doing not much, i found a couple of interesting games available via our playstation plus subscription, and i didn't realize until we were on our way to the park that mr smear preferred walking because he believed that it would take longer than cycling, and he didn't want to come home before the downloads were complete.

wtaf.

then he made it weirder by getting upset with me for suggesting that next time we take the bikes we take a frisbee as well, because he thinks that's too complicated.

eh?!?

anyway, most of the walk was nice, and he very enthusiastically (ahem) dived in to dave the diver when we returned. and then minecraft legends when it was ready.

the generally good vibe was brought to a screeching halt in the evening when the oven tripped the board, and then we heard a small explosion when we tried again (and it tripped the board again). our landlords are garbage. they're refused to fix the plumbing until it bursts again. we're concerned we might have damp behind the kitchen cupboards.

...

my mom bought him an activity book (tricky puzzles) ages ago, i think for when we flew here, and he never showed much interest in it until now. now he's thoroughly enjoying it, and it reminds me of how much i enjoyed those things when i was a kid.

gd and i watched another episode of fallout, then hit the hay.

today:

i didn't sleep well, but i did sleep a bit better.

the last day of fight camp, getting out of bed went relatively smoothly but then we made the mistake of rewarding his cooperation by letting him play a game. and then he refused to stop playing without a fight.

goddamn.

by the time i got him into the gym, i felt like i deserved a medal. perhaps two.

anyway, i made sure he was fine (apparently it wasn't a great day, but whatever) and then returned home, did some work and waited for the oven repair guy. he was great, at least, and gd's going to test the oven tomorrow morning and we'll see if we need to buy a new one or not. if we don't, though, we've at least learned that the "turbo" setting she's been using for the past year is probably the reason the oven hasn't been cooking things properly.

we both went to azrieli and then i said goodbye and continued on to work. it was an interesting workday, both socially and work-wise, and overall i feel pretty good about it.

i came home, we had dinner, put mr smear to bed, and watched some more fallout. i should probably go to bed soon.

...

i'm very grateful we have the day off tomorrow.

ai gone wild

my favorite part of this is that these images will now be fed into the next generation of ai models... i was explaining the concept of a golem to mr smear earlier, a thing that follows your instructions but can't understand your intentions, and he responded "so chatgpt and dall-e are golems, then?"

abso-freaking-lutely.

speeding up before applying the brakes

 so... i didn't just feel that inspiration and go to bed... i ended up starting the original fallout game and realized about halfway through clearing out a cave full of radscorpions that it was 2am already...

whoops :$

the day started really well in spite of waking up from a bizarre and disturbing dream about cartoon depravity. i woke mr smear up, explained the expression "the carrot and the stick" (which already got him in a good space because that's how you ride pigs in minecraft), and informed him that the stick was no screen-time if he didn't participate in the fight camp and the carrot was a homework-free afternoon doing whatever he wants if he did.

he did. and not only did he, but gd quietly called me after picking him up at the end to tell me he'd said he had an amazing day! he wouldn't say anything other than "it was okay" when i eventually got home, but that's just how he rolls...

between dropping him off at fight camp and getting to the office, i spoke to dod who's not just interested in a project i've been cooking up for about a decade now, but who presented an interesting re-focus that makes it much more likely to get off the ground. he (digitally) introduced me to someone he knows who's in the industry i've been dreaming about disrupting, and i'm excited to see if we can push this forward ^_^

the work day itself was manic. by the time we'd safely tested my previous evening's fixes it was already thursday afternoon, which is a not-good time to deploy to production. the deployment was a bit tricky, though it went smoothly, but it took hours of general disarray to be confident that the patch had been deployed safely and successfully.

for our weekly end-of-week happy hour, i convinced my team to order from mr donuts. four vegan donuts and one not (i feel confident they got it on principle), and everyone agreed that a) they were great and b) the not-vegan option was the least successful :P

i ended up leaving the office late again because i wanted to finish up our first official runbook.

it was a pretty peaceful evening (arguments over what to watch during dinner notwithstanding, mr smear doesn't like giving us a turn to choose and we wanted to continue with baking impossible). i was soooo tired after putting mr smear to bed, but we started watching a little more fallout and then stopped when i passed out on the couch.

today:

i didn't sleep well, but i did sleep. i woke up with a sore neck and shoulder, which followed me around all morning. it's still not great but it's much better, at least.

i began the day trying to figure out what the attack on iran means - i still don't know, to be honest - and wondering if ze germans are going to get together or not while SxS is in town. after a quick breakfast, we took the bike - i mean, mr smear walked his bike alongside us - to be repaired, and i had a coffee while gd and mr smear enjoyed sandwiches at cafe eva. the woman i asked for a chair was extremely rude to me, in english - "take the chair and GO!" - and i think she thought we were tourists. what an asshole!

afterwards, we hopped on a bus to the ichilov mall, where i figured out our next steps in getting mr smear a cellphone and we did a grocery shopping. then we walked home, dropped gd and the groceries off, and mr smear and i walked back to the bike repair shop.

eighty shekels for a new tire, gears examined and a new rear brake. nice :)

we picked up a really nice wine for our cousins' seder on monday evening, and we came home for a lazy afternoon. mr smear's been human fall flat-ing, i've almost cleared my daily quests in bloons adventure time, and i even killed all those damned radscorpions before doing most of the dishes so that gd could bake a challah in time for shabbat.

so far, it's been a good day.

unusually me

yesterday:

a very positive start to the day, getting mr smear to his fight camp on time.

mostly meetings, with me forcing a retrospective that felt appreciated by most of the team. a good start to sorting out potential on-call rotation issues. very little time for my own work.

leaving the office early and coming home for an early meal with my family before heading south.

efrat gosh in levontin 7 with tahoma - an interesting catch-up, a very intimate performance that really blew me away, as i was simultaneously quite emotional about being in a show in levontin 7 for the first time in about twelve years.

getting home late, showering and snacking even later.

today:

3am mistakenly looking at facebook and seeing a post recommending that a tel aviv family consider relocating to cape town, finally going back to bed an hour and a half later

rough and rushed wakeup, but mr smear being pretty cool

a really good chat with his instructor when dropping him off

a surprising conversation with gd about spirituality.

meeting up with my cousin's kid for coffee to discuss career options, a sudden and dramatic plot twist into a romantic adventure story

arriving late for work, being dropped into an unfamiliar production issue for a customer. an emotional rollercoaster of an afternoon, with gd getting on the wrong bus and picking up mr smear late, and mr smear continuing his struggle to get out of the fight camp, and me getting lost trying to figure out all the pieces of the work puzzle, and then getting news that my nephew just received his british ancestral visa and is finally able to join his mother and sister in london, and then hours trying to decipher truly pathetic documentation (google's envoy) and figuring things out with trial and error (with the AI assistance being the opposite of helpful), finally being inspired to ask a different question and hitting the jackpot, then a loooooot of debugging implementing the solution and eventually leaving the office late, but in time to eat with my family, and feeling exquisitely exhultant.

the evening was great until bedtime, i tried to have a conversation with mr smear and it went south (for no obvious reason), and then gd and i watched the third episode of the new fallout series. it's full of fan service, even if i feel like the pacing's a bit slow it's really inspired me to get back into it.

power play

 so far, the fallout series doesn't suck, which is actually very high praise. having said that, i was too tired last night to watch much of it. we woke up in the morning, having prepared for the attack - eight hours knowing that rockets are coming your way is a very long time. but then it was morning, and we woke up to see videos of rockets being shot down.

and then read that iran was saying that was it. and everyone discouraging us from retaliating. wtaf is going on?!

anyway. mr smear's mma camp was still cancelled and we were all confused, so i ended up working from home while he spent most of his day playing valheim. it was a long, tough day, but i ultimately enjoyed some success. in the evening, mr smear and i accompanied gd to the clinc, then we did some grocery shopping.

it was a good evening.

gd had to leave early this morning for an emergency dentist appointment, and we were confident that there wasn't going to be an mma camp today.

we were wrong.

i'm feeling particularly proud of myself for - with gd's guidance over the phone - getting mr smear's gear ready, and for convincing mr smear to eat toast with peanut butter on it, and for getting him out the door in generally good spirits and good time. we only found out the camp was happening around 8pm, and i managed to get him in the door before 9.30, brief his jiujitsu instructor on using the epipen, and see him join the class.

leaving him there felt like a big deal. like his first day at school. 4-5 hours on his own dealing with a "new" framework.

and then i was off to the office.

i'm really, really glad i didn't work from home. the only other person in the office was the one person i needed to interface with, and between the two of us i made great progress on my tickets. i didn't finish them (and our sprint ended today), but i made great progress that i'm satisfied with. additionally, the CEO messaged me in the morning to ask for something else and i delivered it with a really good feeling. and our CTO, who's been missing in action for a couple of days, posted a photo of him and his wife with their newborn. that's two in a week, but the fourth in four months - it feels like we have a baby boom going on :)

all-in-all, it was a good day.

mr smear had a mostly-good first day on the fight camp, although the last few minutes didn't go so well (he apparently got kicked a few times after pairing up with someone he'd been advised not to). while that did suck, he handled his emotions much better than we would have expected and the rest of the day went smoother than either of us would have anticipated. in addition to that, it provided an opening for a really good bedtime conversation. at some point i described to him what i went through after being fired from my first job in montréal, and how mma helped me get through a very difficult period of my life, and he very sincerely wished that i hadn't gone to canada and experienced all those things. to which i replied: "but then i wouldn't have met your mother, and you wouldn't exist. and if i had to go through all that in order to get you, i'd do it again in a heartbeat."

...

i can't post it (i don't have permission), but gd sent me a picture that he drew called "israel killing hamas", in among us style and it's excellent ^_^