enter the wet season

what. a. day.

i dropped mr smear off at school with the usual pep talk, and it began raining just as soon as we said goodbye, as it almost always does when it rains. fortunately it was brief, and i had an umbrella, and i made it home pretty dry.

gd and i moved everything out the way for the delivery. the poor guy who wanted our old machine was upset that we couldn't wait, and i was upset that he couldn't make the arrangements in the (unreasonable) amount of time he'd been given. so that was a sad experience for all parties.

the delivery guys eventually arrived, and boy, did they charge us. but, to their credit, they handled everything from A to Z and left us with a combo washing machine/dryer ready for its first run. so far, so good 🤞

shortly after a bit of a breakthrough - i've been doing annoying work this sprint so far, and with all the distractions it's been harder to do the shitty things than usual - i picked mr smear up from school and took him to his math tutor. it began pouring down on our way there, and it was a joy to see him tooling around and enjoying the rain while we waited.

my usual coffee spot was washed out, so i went to a bakery and sat inside, warm and cozy, free wifi, nursing a really good latte that was significantly cheaper than the other place. i've think i've found my new place.

by the time i was ready to pick mr smear up, it had been bucketing down for a while and i struggled to get there without getting my feet wet.

it was wellington boot weather, and we were in our sneakers.

i made it just on time, mostly not soaked, but when crossing the next road with him we both stepped right into a deep puddle :(

the afternoon was a cross between me eating and snacking, trying to get work done, and being entertained by mr smear doing his keyboard practice.

and then his homeroom teacher called me.

...

it was such an emotional call that i had a hard time not crying on at least three occasions. it turns out the woman i wrote to yesterday wasn't the right address at all, but she did forward those messages to her and that saved a lot of time. it was a massively affirming to hear her confide that mr smear's class is a known problem case, and that the school's experience with the problem parents is the same as ours.

we don't have to prove anything to anyone.

it was also hugely affirming to hear that up until these past two weeks, during which mr smear has been making a concerted effort to improve his record, she'd been worried that he had an undiagnosed learning difficulty; but now, two weeks into him actively participating, it's clear to her as well that his only issue has ever been a motivational one.

i'm so freaking proud of my boy.

i asked her for her help in understanding the process of moving him to a different school, and while she's not happy that we want him / he wants to move to a different class in the interim, she's on the same page and is willing to do what she can. i think i made it pretty clear to her how appreciated she is personally, even while i expressed how little faith we have in the school as a whole.

...

i barely got any work done after that.

...

after dinner and most of the second men in black movie, but before mr smear went to sleep, my mom called to inform me that she's going to be hospitalized on thursday while they do some testing, it looks like the cholesterol problem she's been maintaining is starting to get worse.

her diet's been better than western standard, but still quite far from plant-based, and i really, really hope i can help her shift it further towards healthy. i sent her links to food choices and what the health, and i'm praying that she actually gives them a chance.

...

our conversation was interrupted by a rocket attack, which caught us out completely - mr smear and i only arrived at the shelter just as we heard the unusually loud explosions. we had a full shelter and it was raining, which was oddly cozy.

...

i'm tired, but overall i feel pretty good about how today went. tomorrow's the day gd's been afraid her - she has her dental appointment in the evening - so i'm praying that everything goes smoothly 🙏

eating (us up inside)

 yesterday:

after a night filled with anxiety and running through conversations and arguments in my head - i had to get up on multiple occasions to just try and calm the storm, but for the most part i couldn't sleep no matter how exhausted i was - i woke up yesterday morning and immediately got to work contacting his homeroom teacher and their "integration teacher" (whatever that title means).

i ended up writing a small wall of text during the day, both to the "integration teacher" and mr smear's therapist, because they didn't have time to actually talk, and i think i conveyed pretty much everything. i have a meeting scheduled with his homeroom teacher this afternoon, hopefully it'll be constructive.

at the same time, i spent a fair amount of time yesterday trying to arrange for someone to pick up our old washing machine, but it ultimately turned out to be too complicated. there really needs to be a service for this sort of thing.

work itself was a long day trying to understand the mysterious failures we saw on thursday, but which have presented themselves entirely differently. it's been driving us all nuts.

...

ultimately, when i got home and interrogated mr smear i learned that he'd had himself a pretty good day. that was a huge relief. and i believe it's in large part due to the idea of him working to get out of the school, and the conversations we've been having in which we've made it abundantly clear that we understand what he's going through and that we're on his side.

...

last night we finished re-watching spider-man: no way home, and we disconnected and wiped down the washing machine. i expect this morning is going to be complicated, i'm relieved that it's a monday and that i'm working from home for it.

...

in other anxiety news, gd's been diving down a despair spiral worrying about tomorrow's dental work. it's really hard to confront someone else's demons and *feel* supportive and not confrontational at the same time. i've made it clear that with all her hypnotherapy training, i expect her to *immediately* prioritize either finding a way to treat herself, or finding a therapist, to deal specifically with a stress response issue she's been suffering from since childhood that really messes with her - it's a big part of the reason she's been struggling to eat for the last couple of weeks and it's really scary.

...

speaking of unintentional weight loss, i'm still struggling with intentional weight loss, along with accumulated financial losses. it doesn't help that our friday evening plans were cancelled last-minute leading to us eating an expensive meal in a restaurant right after we just dropped a couple of thousands shekels on a new washer/dryer and before a day of car rental, and that left our freezer with three tubs of delicious vegan ice-cream in it. it doesn't help that mr smear left saturday's birthday party early after we bought two large bags of marshmallows and two slabs of dark chocolate,

we're being as careful as we can be to ration these desserts. as careful as we can be.

taxi driver

 i'm angry. as in, boiling over. like, raging.

mr smear went to a birthday party, and by his report things were awkward, but fine. i wasn't there because i was giving sailor a ride to the airport, but gd told me that a couple of other parents noticed that things weren't right; one of them told her that they'd ask their daughter for more information, the other that her son often comes home and reports that he tried to help mr smear, but couldn't.

so the "cherem", or "sanction", that his antagonist's bitch father threatened me about wasn't just a threat for a moment, but rather a long-term threat. which explains the laser tag incident, and why mr smear has been reluctant to go outside during breaks.

i get it now. and i'm furious. i really, really want to slap the shit out of both the parents and the child.

...

not only did i take sailor to the airport, but also mr smear's friend and her dad to the hospital - hairline fracture after falling off the monkey bars :(

otherwise, it's been a quiet afternoon and mr smear's been cool, both having accepted his punishment from earlierand in generally cooperating.

...

please god let us get mr smear into the art school 🙏

queues

thursday:

i've been meaning to post this since thursday evening, now i'm confident i've forgotten some interesting things... most of the day was spent managing a couple of rabbitmq queues, i really didn't get much done otherwise, and i was very happy to get out of the office and into the weekend.

of course, i'm on-call today :P

yesterday:

gd and i went looking for a tumbledryer. we were standing there on the showroom floor, struggling to figure out how we could make it work, both physically and financially, because there's no way to put it on top of our washing machine (which travels) and no space anywhere else in the apartment, when the floor manager asked if he couldn't interest us in a combo washer/dryer.

which costs the same as a dryer, and takes up the same amount of space. i don't know how we never encountered a combo machine before, but holy shit it would have saved us so much headache and money and apartment space if we had! so it's being delivered on monday, and hopefully we'll find someone to take our current machine off our hands before then.

we did some grocery shopping, and ran into my previous team lead / department head on the way, which was cool.

we came home to drop everything off, then went to pick up mr smear and his friend. the afternoon was them playing their games, me playing crying suns (i've been doing a lot of that, lately), and then downtime / naptime for everyone once his friend left.

we were supposed to go with sailor to friends for dinner, but they literally cancelled at the last minute. so we ended up going to a vegan restaurant in neve tzedek, and the experience was mostly great.

i say mostly, because mr smear choked on a kebab and gd had to perform the heimlich manoever on him. let's just say that it was an emotional, scary experience for everyone.

it was also somewhat corrective, for me. i was thinking about my parenting a lot over the course of the past week, and i had a chance to put what i've learned into practice, and it helped.

we came back home, sailor hung around for a while to chat, and then we all said goodnight.

today so far:

i had some trouble sleeping, and got up pretty early. then everyone else followed suit, and we began the day watching the tyson vs paul fights. i mean, we watched taylor vs serrano, which was an absolutely infuriating insult to everyone. then we watched tyson vs paul.

now, i know that it was extremely unlikely that tyson would win, but i hoped for it anyway. and the fact that he went all eight rounds? the man is 58, that in itself is amazing. i found the way they ended the fight quite heartwarming, and some of mike's post-fight interview was hilarious.

now i've taken care of a huge pile of dishes, and we just had an explosion with mr smear being uncooperative about logging off his game, and on that sour note, i'm off to take sailor to the airport.

flaming walnuts

missed from yesterday: the walnut story. mr smear *hates* walnuts, but if he hasn't had pancakes (with ground flaxseed) then it's the next best source of omega-3. the other day he had the bright idea of putting chocolate syrup on the walnut, which was wildly successful. yesterday, when i offered him walnuts with chocolate syrup, he said no, and asked me to put a single drop of the jalapeno hot sauce on one of them for him to try.

let me be clear: mr smear experimenting with food is new, and absolutely thrilling for me. so i carefully put a single drop on a walnut, and he loved it! so he asked me to pour the hot sauce on all the walnuts. liberally.

and he ate the shit out of it 🤯

today:

it was a pretty calm morning. i left for work early so that i could have a chat with astute and discuss the politics surrounding the war. it was supposed to be half an hour, but an additional hour flew past before i realized that i needed to go back to my office.

an electrician came to our apartment while i was on that call, and was unable to get mr smear's bedroom light to behave badly. of course. so he tightened things up and hopefully it'll be fine now. that cost a whole lot of money we didn't need to spend... i didn't even try to get our landlords to pay the bill (but i did make sure they knew about it).

it was an odd sort of workday, punctuated by a mission to tamir for falafel and salt 'n vinegar chips, and again for vegan bourekas.

i got home with barely enough time to shower before joining a webinar with bijan kian, which was very interesting.

i'm tired, and i'm probably going to bed shortly.

testing

 the biggest news of the day was my mother meeting with representatives of the jewish agency to go through her documents again. unfortunately, it wasn't the final meeting, but it does look like she's made good progress and i'm very pleased that she spoke some hard truths to the reps that needed to be said.

hopefully she'll be sorted within the next couple of months. that would be nice. her story's going on four years already.

...

today got an angry start, part of it gd and mr smear (he's still a slow starter), part of it gd and one of our frying pans. so, after accompanying mr smear to school, gd and i went shopping. we picked up two frying pans, and a couple more soft blankets for our couch because winter's coming, and a couple of organizers to try and sort out our living room nightmare of piles of books and drawn-on pages and documents all over the place.

no vegan marshmallows for the birthday party mr smear's going to on saturday.

...

on my way to work i was suddenly overcome by some heavy memories of me being too hard on a much younger mr smear. it doesn't help that i thought i was doing right by him, i know now how messed up my behavior was and i'm sure that's going to haunt me for the rest of my life.

...

work today was all about writing and running tests. it was mostly good, minus a rocket attack and needing to fart while we were all waiting in the stairwell, and a bit of a fight with my boss which i definitely could have handled better.

i'm not sure if it helped that i was proved right by the end of it :P

i headed to the supermarket on my way home to see if i could find vegan marshmallows, and i'm getting the feeling they're off the shelves everywhere all of a sudden. i hunted through the entire mall until i eventually got to a candy store that had, while not the marshmallows i was looking for, a pretty good alternative from haribo. i'm not 100% sure if it's vegan, but at least it doesn't have fish, dairy or eggs in it...

they also had a giant bag of katjes that says "vegan" on it. so i bought that as well ^_^

i picked up a few umbrellas on the way to the bus stop, and the rest of the evening's been pretty good so far. putting mr smear to bed was a little bumpy, but we didn't escalate and i'm feeling pretty good about how the day went.

doing, and not doing

 i slept pretty well last night, but not enough. after taking mr smear to school, i continued on to the post office to pick up the palm rest sticker for my dell laptop. it was a beautiful morning, and i would have appreciated it had gd and i not been fighting over whether mr smear had lice or not 😣

anyway, we got through it quickly, at least.

i applied some more spackle on a spot i'd missed yesterday, and made some good progress with the silicone tube in spite of the fact that it's designed for one of those gun thingies and now the skin on my hand's peeling as a consequence :P

i called the number of the organization that's supposed to take over gd's cannabis licensing, which was just like a canadian government organization: a whole bunch of telephone menus, only to be directed to their website instead. anyway, i uploaded everything and i hope it's good enough.

i discovered that the sticker i'd bought was the wrong one, the ali express format confused me and i ended up purchasing a similar-but-different product. fortunately, i managed to cut out what i needed and it fits pretty well, and i don't really care if it's incomplete - it does the job.

work-wise, i think it's safe to say that i got practically nothing of value done this morning. i was quite hungry and i snacked a lot. i did do quite a bit while waiting for mr smear's hebrew lesson - oh! he drew a pretty cool pixel art hand today, we're quite proud ^_^

we're also extremely proud, and literally amazed, that he figured out part of wolfmother - pyramid by himself on the keyboard, entirely from memory because we haven't heard any wolfmother in aaaaaages 🤯

i did a fair amount of work in the afternoon, kinda making up for the slow morning, and then received a suspicious-looking message that i had a package waiting for me at a postal point in dizengoff center that i'd never heard of. i tried calling, but the number wasn't connected, and the message had come with a warning that they'd only hold the package for two business days, so on the off-chance that it was real (no way i was clicking on the url-shortened link) i decided to head down and see what was going on.

it was raining. i noped the fuck back home and waited until things looked dryer, getting some more work done in the meanwhile.

when it was dark already, i tried again. i made it there without a hitch (although something in the bus made my skin crawl), and i found the postal store. i explained my issues to the woman at the desk, who promptly disappeared. i struggled to find my package, and ask for assistance. the only person working at that point was a sharp-faced woman who assured me she'd help me in just a minute. then two teenagers came in, and she turned to them.

i asked her why i wasn't being helped. she told me, "they're kids". i was utterly dumbstruck for a moment, then tried to get her to explain why they get priority, but zero fucks were given on her side and on mine, i had to keep it together to not lose my goddamned mind. it was a while after i left the store before i started to cool off.

jesus.

anyway, i picked up a new pixel art sketch book (just a nice sketch book with squares) for mr smear now that he understands what i was trying to achieve the last time (when gd tried to inspire him with some examples, and he decided her drawings were cooler than his so he refused to use it), so that's cool.

i tried to come home but it was raining again, i then spent twenty minutes or so hunting for an umbrella that didn't suck and also didn't cost too much money. i ended up leaving without finding one, and fortunately made it home during a break in the clouds.

we watched about half of pixels during dinner, some of which is awkward, but most of it is hilarious, especially for a nine year-old...

and now it's bedtime. i'm a bit disappointed that mr smear didn't want to continue reading the magic pudding tonight, and then gd wasn't interested in it either :/

norms

 why am i awake so late? i've been soooo tired lately...

getting mr smear to school was fine, and i actually put a layer of spackle over where i cleared the peeling crud off mr smear's walls, as well as put in the first line of polyfill around the cupboard in our passageway.

so that was good.

gd and i arrived a bit late for our parental guidance session because the bus we were waiting for disappeared. it felt like a good sessions.

getting gd onto a bus to get to the dentist for another first aid meeting - she's been so scared to crack her other tooth that she's lost 2kg in just a week, which is distressing - took so long that i ended up quite late for work.

it was a pretty productive day, i guess, and my cousin's kid has just moved into an office on our floor and that's both cool and awkward at the same time :P

i left late, and was really pressured for time because i had to go to a lecture at mr smear's school that i was dreading. mr smear informed me that he had not, in fact, had another perfect day, but in retrospect it doesn't seem like such a big deal. then again, i've only heard his side of the story...

the lecture was about setting norms for tech use across the school, and i initially presumed that the school would be interfering with parents' choices. this immediately put me on the defensive because i don't trust anyone with those sorts of intentions to also be operating in an evidence-based manner. by the end of it, though, i was convinced not only that this initiative is well-informed, but that they have an approach that really does make sense.

assuming the prinicipal doesn't screw it up.

gd and i watched some pantheon, which was brilliant, and i've played some crying suns, and i'm now pretty sure that i'm ready for bed.

...

i've been battling with a mosquito for the last hour or two, it's infuriating.

quiet

 it was a very quiet day, aside from gd and mr smear being visited by friends. oh, and a false alarm of a "hostile aircraft intrusion" that sent us all running to the shelter.

i guess it was nice to catch up with the neighbors.

the rollercoaster intensified

 thursday:

thursday started off well, and i'm pleased to say that mr smear received another glowing report in the afternoon about how well he behaved!

confirmed: it's not that he can't cooperate and get the job done. it's that he lacks the proper motivation. you don't need to medicate a child and potentially handicap them into order to get them to comply. speaking of which, i think chatgpt was lying to me when it said it would process the PDF i uploaded and get back to me, but in the meanwhile, i got it to translate chapter by chapter and compiled it myself.

so i just checked in with the PDF production:

omg, chatgpt is even worse than a real human! 🤣

work was alright, it was harder to implement my boss's feedback than i'd anticipated but i'd made good headway by the time i left. along the way, we had a frontend emergency in production and it was really nice to be able to figure it out and fix it quickly.

i was disappointed to learn that the art school we want to enroll mr smear in is in such high demand that it works on a lottery system, so even if he does everything perfectly he might still not be able to get in...

yesterday:

waking up to news of the pogrom in amsterdam. and the horrific online shit-show that followed. of course the jihadists can justify it. of course. of course the police didn't intervene. of course.

our enemies have always liked to compare us to vermin. we're the one "protected group" that the woke don't care to protect.

just a head's up though: when us "rats" start fleeing, it means your ship is sinking.

gd's been taking things really, really hard.

otherwise, it was a quiet day, continuously punctuated by that anxiety.

i woke up from the following dream: i left my bag on a train after a post-lecture lecture in which everyone around me couldn't see me, only gd in a swimsuit instead.

panicked about losing my computer, i tried to understand what to do while whoever had it easily unlocked it and was messing with my company. i got a call from a threatening encoded voice but it didn't say anything helpful, i called my boss, and he told me he'd been receiving the same calls. 

i tried to brush my teeth in an outside sink but this homeless-looking mime wanted toothpaste. he did something weird with the toothpaste and i got angry with him, as in a almost clocked him, and gd got between us to stop me from getting into trouble.

all of a sudden he stopped his performance and took me to show me that he'd somehow managed to retrieve my computer. i helplessly and humbly expressed my gratitude, and asked him, incredulously, "how?!"

he took me to a secret spot on the hill about the square, dug up and opened a container, introducing me to a giant flea that he appeared to regard as a pet.

we had some drama when picking up mr smear from school because we thought he'd lost his pencil case - that would be the second time in a few months, and it's a really expensive thing to replace - but it was a huge relief to discover that his teacher had found it and put it in his locker...

we did some cleaning in the afternoon. at some point, mr smear cut up a mango by himself for the very first time. also, i soaked some dried pineapple (unsweetend) in lemon juice and it was a surprisingly good experience.

sailor came over for dinner. it was an enjoyable evening, we ate too much and it was great, and we even had coffee afterwards, in part because i didn't want to fall asleep too early, again.

but i totally fell asleep too early, again. not even the caffeine could stop it.

today so far:

we all slept in this morning, and it's a beautiful, beautiful day so far. mr smear's still snotty and coughing, i think we're going to take it pretty easy on ourselves after such an insane week.

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, hugged 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!