more rollercoaster

 i think i slept well last night. i'm already beginning to nod off now, but i wanna post this and drink a cup of chamomile before hitting the hay.

...

the US election took up the majority of my brain-space this morning:

omg i never thought i'd feel so relieved to hear a US election result, and especially to see trump returning to the white house. america, you and the free world just dodged, not a bullet, but an RPG.

i expect all the UN ambassadors from their anti-west totalitarian regimes must be feeling deeply disappointed right now. i don't know how much trump will get done over the next four years, but at least this gives us a window to take down the ayatollahs and make peace in the middle east an actual possibility.

assuming *we* don't manage to screw this up, of course. best of luck to us all 🫡

i was a little distracted still by the election noise when i got to work, but i managed to find my groove. a couple of new companies have moved in to our floor, so it's much brighter and more welcoming.

...

everything was fine until lunch. on my way to joining my coworkers, i received a call from mr smear's class assistant - he was having a very scary asthma attack, and he'd apparently told her he didn't have his pump. in retrospect, i think he misunderstood the questions, but i told her it was in his bag and immediately alerted gd that she'd need to hurry to the school.

then another panicked call - she couldn't figure out which pump to use.

so i called gd, also panicking, and she told me, and i called back and told her. also, i told her it should take a few minutes to work.

more panic, because it didn't working. at this point i was sitting at the table, staring into the distance, praying for my son and thinking about a guy a couple of years ahead of me in school, one of my youth movement councillors, who just suddenly died in his sleep one night from an asthma attack.

fortunately, i got a call soon afterwards informing me that it did seem to be working, and that his coughing fit was calming down, and he was able to breathe between coughs.

holy shit, that was terrifying. truly terrifying.

...

i was still unsettled an hour later, when i went to go and make myself a cup of turkish coffee. i poured the boiling water into the glass, and heard a *crack*. some of the coffee was seeping onto the counter. nystire has a thing about cups cracking due to temperature differences, so, relieved that it hadn't been worse, i took a step back and pulled out my phone to take a photo for him

just as i did that, the glass exploded. i was fortunately just out of range, so aside from the shock i only had to worry about cleaning up the mess (how did the coffee get under the counter ledge??), find a safe way to dispose of all the shards, and then making myself a much safer mug of instant coffee.

...

i was - understandably, i think - restless for the remainder of the work day. at least i feel like i got a couple of important things done.

at some point in the afternoon i received another report from mr smear's teacher: apparently, he's understood the mission. today was a really good day for him, asthma attack notwithstanding, and he was cooperative and worked well!

i did some quick shopping on the way home, mainly for toilet paper but gd's really scared about her other fragile tooth cracking so i picked her up some soya yoghurts and desserts. puddings. or, in our family's parlance, pudignes.

anyhoo, i came home, hugeed my son tightly (to his chagrine, he was playing minecraft online), and overall the evening went smoothly. and gd made her delicious new cottage pie recipe (mushrooms and leaks and beans), and we watched some x-men, and then it was bedtime for mr smear.

i, on the other hand, spent the last couple of hours doing another run of kaycee's mod, and then working on using notebooklm and chatgpt to produce a useful summary booklet for anatomy of an epidemic and translate it into hebrew. i don't understand why the translation of the 12 pages would take hours, but that's what i was told so i'm hanging in. i also discovered that you can (now) prompt notebooklm when generating an audio discussion, and that's really powerful!

personal wars trump big wars

yesterday:

rollercoaster continued. mr smear stayed home because of his cough again, and a ridiculous amount of the day was dedicated to gd's private response to the rabbi she'd yelled at the evening before.

it's amazing how much more anxiety we've been experiencing from the open letter i wrote and its fallout, than that for the new round of iranian threats.

by the time she finally sent it, it was pretty powerful. the response she got back did an excellent job of not addressing it and playing off our feelings as "an ideological disagreement", but the important thing (in my opinion, at any rate) is that she said what needed to be said.

aside from that, i don't recall much. we took mr smear to the doctor and got him some extra medication, and in the evening i accompanied them to the eye doctor, which ultimately i didn't need to. he's got a new prescription, and apparently it makes quite the difference.

oh! i actually managed to get to the minimum requirements on the ticket i was working on, which considering everything else, and the fact that it wasn't trivial stuff at all, feels quite miraculous.

someone from gd's conversion class got whatsapp hacked, and their hacker tried to take me too. what a freaking nightmare! she was so grateful that we called to check on her, i hope she's got her account back by now.

today(-ish):

i took mr smear to school, and while he wasn't happy about something (i "distracted" him while he was trying to count) and he really didn't feel that he needed to go, by the time we arrived he was in better spirits and we were cool.

i continued on the post office, arriving just in time to pick up gd's heavy shoes in addition to the 3D glasses i ordered.

the work day started off alright, but then i received a call from gd and learned she'd just cracked a tooth (in a particularly nasty way) that her dentist had warned her about, but that we couldn't afford to do anything about.

well, i guess we're going to have to find a way to afford it now.

she went off to first aid, and i was very excited to hear afterwards that she'd managed to get sorted with an actual appointment with a receptionist who couldn't speak a word of english! that's pretty big, so we were both rather proud of her ^_^

...

during the morning i received a disheartening message from mr smear's teacher that he'd been completely uncooperative the entire morning.

after a big lunch, i walked to the school (i don't know why i didn't take a bus), picked up mr smear and walked through to the dental clinic. on the way, i told him about the art school that we want to register him for, and explained to him that if he doesn't "turn the ship around" and be on his best behavior for the next two months, then his current school's report may well prevent us from being able to move him to the next school.

i'm pretty sure that it's true, and i'm also pretty confident that if anything's going to motivate him, this will do it.

so that's the carrot. the stick is no screen time until i get a good report from his teacher.

...

we waited for gd for a while, and it turned out to be a really good thing that i'd taken my boss's advice and joined her - she needed imaging done, pronto. so we all caught a bus to ichilov, picked a floor (there're three imaging centers in the building), and were surprised by how quick and painless it was.

someone i was on the community council with reached out to me to thank me for the open letter, which she said cited the exact reasons she gave up on them. the responses have all been very validating, and i haven't got the expression "shul capture" out of my head since i heard it on sunday.

we walked home, picking up a couple of onion bagels along the way, and mr smear dived in to his homework (including hebrew reading, which we were informed today can't be comics) while i did a little more work.

mr smear and i put his duvet in the duvet cover this evening. after wishing him a good night, i spent some time doing nothing until i was ready to pass out early.

...

and then woke up a couple of hours ago, restless and with a sore neck and shoulder, and i eventually got up to write this and try to entertain myself until i'm sleepy again. i've been watching a lot of youtube videos - we're praying that trump takes the US election, and we're waiting for iran's "imminent" attack - but i haven't been able to get into any games lately (although i did play through act's ii and iii of inscryption again last week). and i guess my reading streak is broken. maybe i'll try to get that going again.

exploding feelings

 holy shit.

today has been non-stop drama.

at least getting mr smear to school wasn't dramatic, so that's good.

but everything else?

...

it's been a day full of conversations and complications, some collaborative and some antogonistic, with members of group a telling a completely different story to members of group b, with our friend "called before the council" in an emergency meeting for an hour and a half of being interrogated and "nailed". and then, just as i began eating dinner, the rabbi i'd "named and shamed" called.

it was a tough conversation, and he asked me questions that i couldn't answer on the spot, but that after the call i realized i do have the answers to. i understand him feeling betrayed, but i know he won't appreciate just how much he's betrayed us. i agreed to remove his name from my open letter, but he tried to get me to remove my post entirely and that i refused.

in the middle of the call, gd came in, furious, needing to get something off her chest. what happened next, in the midst of me trying to be diplomatic with someone i know has done what he's done, was utterly mortifying to me, and if i had been watching it happen to someone else on a tv show i would've been cringing super hard and also laughing my ass off: she *yelled* at him, and said exactly how she felt, and threatened to shut him down for pushing interfaith islamic relations into the community while the muslim community in cape town is militantly antisemitic. it was mortifying, but also thrilling and cathartic at the same time. it's the kinda thing that both upsets me and makes me fiercely proud of her, even as i'm trying to encourage her to play smart, not hard.

i really do feel bad for hurting them personally, but before and after the call i spoke to a couple of different people who've confirmed that the real stuff we talked about was me being gaslighted. i'm going to go with the strategy i laid out to gd: i'm going to assume that's he's being honest, and that he wants to fix things. if things gets fixed - which they're now under real external pressure to do - then good. and if they don't, then he's hoisting himself on his own petard.

as much as i've betrayed my personal relationships in this matter, i feel a greater obligation to the community at large. and, as i told him directly, the leaders of the community are not serving the community.

it still feels awful, though. my anxiety and my mind are all over the place trying to make sense of how things are playing out, what was legitimate and what wasn't, and how things need to proceed.

...

i barely got any work done today, both because the work itself was messy, and because i was perpetually on edge and distracted. at least i managed to pick up gd's repaired shoes on the way home.

not as planned

yesterday evening:

we took a cab to tahoma's, and were absolutely blown away by the quality and attention to detail of their halloween decorations. they turned their little apartment into a legitimate haunted house, and it was so effective that mr smear - who's obsessed with making creepy and gory things and tries really hard to be scary himself - refused to even look at the rooms because they scared the shit out of him.

smh.

some of the evening before the party actually got started was awkward, but mostly it was cool and we met some really nice people. one guy convinced me to explain the word "trolling" to him, and by the second sentence i began to suspect he was trolling me but he was so convincing i just carried right on, and i was quite impressed with myself for describing it as clearly as i did :P

there was a hilarious moment when a guy was translating mr smear's english for his five year-old, and asked mr smear what he was dressed as. "a killer clown!", mr smear said with pride. "a scary clown," the man translated for his child. mr smear was shocked. 

"i said a KILLER clown!"

"i know what you said."

"a KILLER clown!"

"i KNOW what you said!"

at that point we were all in hysterics, and i took mr smear aside to explain what was happening 🤣

as more grownups arrived, we caught a ride home, made kiddush and ate insanely delicious challah and broccoli schitznel sandwiches. by the time mr smear climbed into bed it was probably around 11.30pm.

today:

i think i slept pretty well, but i woke up very early with enough anxiety to realize that i needed to get up and start writing an open letter. i wrote and i wrote until my family got up - not too late, either - and after running through it a couple of times with gd, i pulled the trigger and posted it publicly on facebook with my email address attached. in it, i called out the pro-palestinian rabbi and his wife by name, and after a lot of introduction that includes both a summarized history of the conflict and a brief history of our experiences with the congregation, i made the following statements:

• Stop listening to people who rely on your political ignorance to propagate malicious disinformation that is designed to harm you.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that you don’t have the right to live in the only land you’ve ever been indigenous to, the land in which you have historically been its indigenous people for thousands of years.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that there’s an occupation, or that there are “disputed territories”.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you about the plight of the Palestinians in a way that suggests it’s anyone’s fault but the league of Arab nations and the UN.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that violence against Israel, or Jews in general, is justifiable.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that this is Netanyahu’s war.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that believing that Jews should live in the only land they’ve ever called home, the only land that promises them protection, the only land they’re free to be Jewish, is wrong.

my anxiety immediately switched from that of feeling frustrated and ashamed for not having said anything, to that of having said something so undiplomatic and confrontational that there's absolutely no going back. it was validating to receive messages of appreciation from members of the community, including gd's fellow graduates, and also from old schoolmates who've been involved in the battle but unable to affect change.

i don't know what's going to happen next - although i was disappointed that the executive blocked me on facebook and messaged me to make it clear that we could no longer talk - but i feel like i've discharged my duty, and if i have to have uncomfortable conversations i will do so. as much as we owe to the executive and the rabbis, and as grateful as we will always be for them helping gd with her conversion and us come home, our loyalties are first and foremost to the community as a whole.

we've put our own oxygen masks on, and played nice and diplomatic until they were secure. now it's time to help others.

...

while scrolling down my whatsapp messages i realized that swordschool had sent me an important message some time in june, and i hadn't responded 😱

so i called him up, and we synced for at least an hour. it's very comforting having someone like that in my corner. in addition to discussing his new dice mechanics and desolation jones, amongst a thousand other things, i was shocked and saddened to learn that before the tragic incidents he'd been through just prior to us reconnecting a few years back, he'd been through an even more tragic family disaster... i feel awful for him, and also exceedingly grateful for what i have.

...

in the afternoon i met up with sailor and we did a couple of rounds of coffees (well, first macha tea and then coffee) and a lunch (he ate, between my nerves and the confusing menu i was fine). he accompanied me home, and remained with gd while i took mr smear out for a walk. it was fine, at first, but he was in such a good mood that he vigorously skipped for a couple of blocks - with me skipping along right behind him - and ended up having a full-blown coughing fit / asthma attack. so i gave him his pump, and we slowly walked home around the circle.

aside from my reacting to a barista milk alternative (that i was told wasn't barista, but then later informed was) and the occasional open letter-related intrusion, we had a pretty good evening.

after all the anxiety and everything, i'm exhausted, and i feel like i skipped a day of weekend. i did a whole bunch of dishes, wrote all this, and now... i think i'm going to drink this new cup of tea and hit the hay.

...

oh! on-call. i forgot i was on-call today. and then i realized that the reason i was getting confusing alerts that made me forget what day it was is that with all the scheduling changes for the holidays, i've ended up with four days of on-call in a row :/

post-halloween halloween

 we're leaving soon for tahoma's, he and his husband are throwing a halloween party and their friends with kids are invited earlier while they're still setting up. mr smear's skeletal make-up is looking good in spite of gd's past fifteen minutes of cursing to the contrary, and i haven't figured out what i'm going as yet...

i just spent the late afternoon - after napping and playing through some of inscryption's act 3 again - bringing down the mountain of dishes that had accumulated, and for the last while i've been on the verge of an anxiety attack because i can't stop thinking about the propagandists who've infiltrated the community and the damage the more "progressive" rabbis have done over the course of many years.

lhearning

i slept well, but not nearly enough. and i had some weird dreams.

it was a super-slow wakeup, after dropping mr smear off at school i didn't even stop at home before accompanying gd to the cobbler to get some of her shoes repaired. we caught a bus to dizengoff center, missed our stop, and arrived at the music store with half an hour to kill before they opened.

we took a walk up to dizengoff "square", where got a fine cup of coffee. we could have done without witnessing a dog owner just letting their little yapper go off at a bigger dog with the bigger dog's owner having to work hard to keep him calm...

we talked to the woman who originally sold us the keyboard, and she told us to speak to the guy in the dj section. that guys was super helpful, and instead of selling us a midi controller he advised us to go home and do some research first. now that i have a better idea of how instruments (specifically midi instruments) work, i'm particularly grateful for his advice: we're going to learn cubase first, and then we're going to experiment with cheap controllers, and then we're going to buy a good one. maybe.

we picked up some makeup for this evening's halloween party at tahoma's, which took a lot longer than it should have, then returned home, getting off the bus a little early because gd couldn't bear sitting behind a guy cleaning his disgustingly long and dirty fingernails with his teeth. i was grossed out too, but i found gd's reaction absolutely hilarious 🤣

we stopped to pick up a bottle of wine for the evening on the way home, and then i went to the school to pick up mr smear. he was talking to a friend, and i overheard him "making an exception" and showing his friend the passcode for his phone 🤦‍♂️

so we had to have a "conversation" and change his passcode.

we searched through his locker for the book he's lost, and it looks like we're going to have to order a new copy.

fuck.

anyway, the afternoon's been pretty chill so far, not counting a long chat with the head of the jewish community council. most of the discussion was about the pro-palestinians who have infiltrated and taken over, and in spite of my sharply-increased anxiety at the thought of it i've agreed to meet with some of the community leaders to strategize, but also with the terrorist sympathizers directly.

i don't really want to, but i do feel obligated.

dum, dum dum dum, dum dum dum...

 i gave clickolding a try, and it crashed every time it hit dialog, so i uninstalled it and requested a refund. i was pleased to see that i'd received the refund before i went to bed.

today:

mr smear had pancakes for breakfast, so that he wouldn't have to eat walnuts.

i took him to school, then continued on to our pharmacy to pick up a couple of prescriptions. the pharmacy was completely empty, and there was no one ahead of me in the queue, so i only had to wait for ten minutes. they had one of the items i was looking for, but not the other.

i walked down to the mall pharmacy, where i waited another ten minutes or so (thankfully, i had my "kindle" with me for both waits), and picked up that prescription, although the pharmacist was concerned that the doc had prescribed it differently to what she's used to. that caused stress, but when i looked it up when i got home i discovered that there's a range of "configurations".

the work day started off pretty relaxed, and i was saying to a coworker that it's the first time in many years that i've been back from a ny sort of vacation for an entire week and i'm still feeling relaxed! at noon we all went off for a farewell feast at a nearby restaurant. sadly, i burned off some of my tastebuds on the delicious onion soup, but the pad thai was still exquisite.

i ate far too much.

the next few hours were hellish, because my tummy had decided it was time to move and it was relentless. in addition to that, gd and mr smear and i had a few dramatic phone calls because he'd had an incident at school, and it wasn't clear if he'd kicked the other kid back or not. i was relieved to hear that he had.

we also learned that some of the kids employ a nasty tactic of hitting mr smear and then claiming that they've just consumed dairy, and we've explained to him that aside from that not being likely, it's also not a big enough concern for him to not defend himself :/

eventually that calmed down, and i finished the week on a constructive note.

after dinner, mr smear wanted to show me something on the keyboard, and he did it really well. then i reminded him that we'd discussed him trying to figure out the tetris music on his own, and - holy shit - he got it! i can't describe how excited i am, and he was excited himself, that he figured out how to play the tune by ear and by feel ^_^

i was disappointed - and embarassed - to discover that the keyboard we bought can't connect to a computer. i'm going to speak to the store tomorrow and see if we can arrange a trade or something...

after we got him into bed, i had a quick chat with my sister, mostly about her status between jobs.

i've spent the past couple of hours doing lots of not much, and i'm considering heading to bed now and reading a bit. i'll be surprised if i last more than a minute or two :P

stuck in the middle with you

 it was a pretty good morning. mr smear spent some time impressing us with the keyboard before i walked him to school, gd and i had a chilled morning together, and then i caught the bus to the office.

the day began with an all-hands, and we learned that the company isn't quite where its board wants it to be. i asked how much runway we have, and i've been assured that we're good. the "higher ups" are going to try to figure out new markets we should target, and a few of us got into quite a heated debate about the possibilities we're seeing from the ground.

ironically, this situation has made it clear that our project manager's vision is out of touch, but it's anyone's guess as to how we're going to tweak our approach going forwards.

overall, it was a decent day in the office, although i was quite tired for a stretch of the day and i was snacky for most of it.

the walk home was intense and full of feelings, because the roads were gridlocked with people behaving badly. i'm wondering if we shouldn't be doing the london thing, and making it impossible for private cars to enter the city center...

i got home just in time for dinner, and we had a bit of a scene because mr smear hates walnuts. he finally relented and tried to eat them with gd's home-made pesto pasta, and that definitely helped, but what really helped was his own suggestion: "do we have chocolate sauce?"

we do have chocolate sauce, we were surprised to discover, and it apparently only expires in about a decade's time. i tested it, it was great, he put it on the walnuts, and he enjoyed them. hell, he even agreed to put it on some dried mango and he enjoyed that, at least until he'd had too much chewiness because a couple of his teeth are apparently loose.

winning!

after dinner, and getting mr smear (all of us, really) ready for bed, and both him and gd going to sleep (well, he's coughing a lot, he coughs a lot at night), i'm now trying to decide whether i'm going to spend the next little while studying the storage stuff from the other day, or giving clickolding a try.

i think i'll give clickolding a try.

pivot

yesterday:

mr smear's cough was better, and he went back to school. but he was having and sharing a remarkably shit morning. so that sucked.

i continued on to drop gd's shoes at the post office to be returned, then walked back home.

my neck and shoulder gave me trouble throughout the day.

it was a slow work-from-home day, and i was on-call, and most of the work i did was on-call stuff.

around noon i picked mr smear up from school to take him to his hebrew tutor, and he was in a much better mood. on the way back from the tutor we picked up a few bags of walnuts, because i only just learned that they're a viable source of omega3 and we haven't been eating gd's flax-seed pancakes for a long time...

...

during a conversation with our product manager in the afternoon, i saw something in our designs that bothered me and i asked him if i was reading it right, and if we were actually pivoting as a company.

"100%," he told me, "this is the direction we're going in."

i was disappointed, and i told him so, and after the call had a bit of a crisis because the new direction really doesn't interest me. i discussed it with gd, and came to the conclusion that i'm happy with my team, and i'm happy with my bosses, and i'm happy with my role and my employment conditions, so if i'm less happy with what the company is doing it's not the end of the world, but it will mean refocusing on my side projects for my source of meaning.

...

gd made vegan-shwarma tacos for dinner last night, and we really enjoyed them!

after everyone went to bed i started looking into rewriting my mobile app, and dived in to a rabbit hole around security issues with local browser storage. at about the point i started finding useful material to peruse, my eyes started shutting on me.

today:

last night was our first night sleeping with a duvet since spring, it was cozy and i slept pretty well.

we all had a much better morning, and after dropping mr smear at school i replaced the lightbulbs in his room and then spent some time reading about secure storage while gd left to have coffee with a friend.

i didn't make much progress then, and i'm starting to become drowsy now, so i don't know how long it's going to take me to get a handle on this stuff...

while i was trying to read, i got distracted by the fact that the "palm rest" of my very expensive dell XPS was - and has been for a while - feeling annoyingly sticky. i tried cleaning it in a number of different ways, and eventually ended up (unintentionally) removing some of the surface. it clearly wasn't meant to be removed, so later on i'd look it up and discover that it's a known problem.

i regret purchasing a dell computer.

i found a couple of recommendations to purchase stickers that are cut specifically for my model, so i found some on ali express and i'm hoping they'll do the trick.

...

it was a slow day in the office, and i wasn't the only one feeling the particularly relaxed vibes.

the day began with me learning about my new task, and syncing with the coworker who's leaving soon to understand how all the pieces of the puzzle are meant to fit together. at some point - because it was relevant to what we're working on - i mentioned the pivot, and his response stunned me: our project manager was describing his personal vision for the company, but he's already pitched it to the bosses and they've already explained to him that they're not interested in leaving the (awesome) core business they've built.

firstly, what a relief! secondly, what a shocking revelation, that i literally can't implicitly trust my project manager and that he actually caused harm with his delusion.

...

i started the task without a clear idea of what needed to be done, and it had been assigned six working days. i started making slow but steady progress, and then all of a sudden pieces of the puzzle - especially pieces that i'd put in place a few months ago - started coming together and by the end of the day i was effectively done!

it's a great feeling, but also rather unexpected.

i walked home, arriving just in time for dinner and some x-men. then my mom called, finally ready to try out the account i created for her a month and a half ago.

...

good grief.

it was impossible for her to log in without me signing in first, and it kept not sending us verification codes until i signed in, set up her phone number, and flagged her sign-in attempts as recognized. that got her into her account on her computer, so i wanted to set her up on her phone as well to make sure she's not dependent on me. but she's an iphone person, and apple makes it ridiculously difficult to configure new accounts and know if they've been configured correctly. so, after more than an hour and lots of feelings, we decided to leave it at a hope and a prayer and deal with any issues that may arise.

it could've been worse. we could've not succeeded.

...

as i said, i'm feeling drowsy - i think i'm going to go to bed now.