the rain

nationally, today was a very painful one: the bibas family's bodies were returned. i've said it before, and i'll say it again - every hostage taken is a tragedy. alive or dead, returned or not. every victim is a tragedy, and every hostage is a tragedy, and there is no outcome that will make anything that happened since october 7th a victory.

...

today began in the middle of the night, when gd caught mr smear on his phone. according to family link, he'd been playing with it for over an hour at that point... ignoring the angry disruption at the time, he was entirely uncooperative once his alarm went off so it was a double-bad morning.

in addition to waking up exhausted, i was also stressed about getting his art school application sorted out. i rushed out of the house to walk to the school with him, and managed to get past the security guard to pay the receptionist a visit.

first things first, she told me in a particularly sarcastic and condescening manner that i should've taken the lack of response to my email as a hint that i shouldn't have bothered sending the email in the first place. as much as that got under my skin, i recognized that she's the gatekeeper and managed to keep my mouth shut.

i can't tell you what my face was saying, though.

i completed the form - she did assist me, at least - and then learned that mr smear's homeroom teacher was needed to complete their one, but she had the day off. so that was a fuck-up, but she assured me that they would try to figure something out. i asked her if she could please let me know when the form was submitted to the municipality, and she told me that i'd just have to trust her to get the job done.

did i mention she's the gatekeeper, and that i knew that i needed to be polite and respectful? again, i don't know what my face was saying, but i thanked her profusely before leaving the office.

...

at that point, the skies opened, and i was caught in a thunderstorm with the rain pelting down, with no umbrella and no boots. i ran to the supermarket, getting thoroughly soaked along the way, but of course they don't sell umbrellas. i hung out there for a bit until the shower ended, then splashed home.

my toes are blue from the permanent marker washing off my sneakers. i put tea bags inside them, and i'm hoping they're okay. i guess i need to go shopping for new ones tomorrow...

...

i had a long zoom call with an insurance broker, which i pretended to be interested in even though i'm not leaving my current one. perhaps their quote will prove helpful somehow. then i left for work, this time with boots and brolly.

...

work: sweet doggo at work a plus. lots of back and forth on my task, definite learning happening. meeting a couple more coworkers, eating pad thai for a very late lunch (as part of the pastafarian prayer for mr smear's art school application), and ridiculously good vegan happy hour treats that i brought home to share with gd and mr smear.

let's call today a cheat day.

...

in the afternoon, i was relieved to receive an update from mr smear's homeroom teacher informing me that the application was delivered! in addition to giving us something to celebrate, that means that i can reframe my shoes being damaged as a reasonable cost of giving my son a chance to get into the school :P

the hebrew reading this evening wasn't great, and by that i mean that mr smear didn't cooperate, but the actual reading itself was pretty good when it happened. dinner was great, we talked about a bunch of things and one thing in particular stood out - mr smear's best friend's sister came to their class, and some of the girls in their class were really mean to her. mr smear was pleased to report that a teacher came and gave the mean girls hell, and he sent his friend a message asking if she was okay and he received a grateful one back.

so that's good.

...

post-bedtime and my own shave - toothbrush - shower time, i've played some inscryption and i'm now feeling rather tired and getting ready for bed. it's been a big day. it's been a huge week.

stickers and scribbles

 okay, i'm tired. but i'm also agitated and frustrated - mr smear's school has been utterly unresponsive for more than two days and tomorrow's the deadline to register him for the art school. so tomorrow's going to be started with angry phone calls but, at the end of the day, it's really not in my hands...

i eventually climbed into bed after 6am, and the morning was really hard. so hard, in fact, that i skipped on taking mr smear to school - on the one hand i'm really impressed that we're at the point where he can go to school by himself, but on the other i'm rather disappointed because i quite enjoy the opportunity to chat on the way to school.

the office was really quiet today - one of the bosses kept repeating that, until at one point i offered to put some heavy metal on and she quickly assured me it was fine :P

i asked lipgirl if we had any stickers (swag), and she enthusiastically introduced me to the office label printer. omg i hadn't realized that label printers have evolved so much!

i learned stuff today, very slowly but surely. it's all about a crash-course in kubernetes right now.

i was so desperate for lunch that - believing that the order would take a while to arrive - i scarfed down the previous day's leftovers for breakfast. which was more food than i'd thought, and then a few minutes later a massive burrito arrived for me... and i ate it :/

gd called me in an angry panic, the new vaccum cleaner arrived and she couldn't figure out how to work it, so she wanted to take it back immediately. i've convinced her to let me give it a go first...

in the afternoon i returned home to pick up mr smear and take him to his final psych evaluation session (i sneaked photos of the school's form, that'll make for interesting reading). inspired by the morning's sticker session, i thought it would be cool if he drew something with a sharpie on my fancy water bottle, but he didn't follow the (very simple) instructions and started scrawling something inappropriate. both gd and i were upset with him, and to his credit he did feel bad, but at bedtime i proposed that we turn it into a bit of a graffiti project in the morning and he seems into it.

while waiting for him, i went back to the office thinking i'd continue working, but i had an issue with the coffee machine and ended up in an interesting 1-on-1 with someone i hadn't met before; i'd spent all day thinking that i just couldn't remember him :P

i picked up mr smear (he apparently did well) and we returned home, and between his shower and dinner i managed to get him through two significantly advanced paragraphs of harry potter. *i'm* learning as we go, and he's building confidence, particularly with the stuff that's more his level. this was definitely a good idea.

i had a salad (because of the overeating) and we watched the simpsons, then called my mom to say goodnight. once i'd showered and brushed my teeth i joined mr smear for calvin & hobbes, and i've spent the past couple of hours taking care of random items, watching youtube and ignoring a bunch of stuff on my to-do list.

i suspect that i should go to bed very soon, but i feel like i can't get my head into or out of anything right now.

day three

mr smear: went on a field trip today, forgot his hat and it was really hot and sunny 🤦

but he got home safely by himself for the second time, which is big.

gd: seems to be recovering pretty well from her sunday evening procedure 🤞🙏

me: i was highly alert on sunday, but the past two days i've been pretty tired so i drank the strong coffee... and more of it than i should have.

1. i ended the day with what feels like a fairly good grasp of what i'm doing.

2. my boss called me in to consult with me about one of my previous teammates, which caught me off guard. i have some mixed feelings but i'd be happy to work with him again.

3. later my boss and i had a 1-on-1, and every single thing he told me about what we're aiming for was exciting! not least of which being that we might end up working with the guys i interviewed with a couple of years ago. and i'm feeling pretty confident about my role and what he expects from me.

...

i got up a couple of hours ago because my back was hurting and i was having trouble sleeping. i found yesterday's grocery order outside our door, with the stuff that was supposed to be cold not cold anymore :(

i tried to sleep on the couch, but that didn't help much, and now i've been messing around online for a while... and i'm not sure whether i should carry on, or whether i should try to get back into bed. i'm playing a lot of total minesweeper, lately i can't seem to get my head into anything other than that or inscryption...

day two

 i didn't sleep enough, but i think i slept relatively well when i did... although i might've needed to come sleep on the couch for a while, i don't really remember.

i don't recall much from the morning, either, really, but i did pick up mr smear's new coat from the post office, which led to minor encounters with "humanity" (i got a guy to move his massive bike from right outside the door without trouble, and i kept relatively cool about the woman who jumped the line by taking a number when nobody else had).

i initiated the process of registering mr smear for the art school, which i'm hoping was in time. 

after days of being messed around by the plumber our landlords put me in touch with, he admitted that he had no idea how to help us with the sink, but he also made it clear that it's an old sink that needs to be replaced, which was useful information to have.

i called the dentist to try to postpone my upcoming appointment that i've been waiting months for, and while i was on hold i fantasized about the moment someone picked up and putting them on hold. i got so in the mode - i was on hold for a while - that when a human being finally answered i found myself uncontrollably speaking like an automated message :P

between various chores / admin thingies, i left the apartment a bit later than i'd planned, but it's much quicker to get to the new office so it wasn't a big deal.

the work day was interesting, not easy but not difficult either. socially it was a bit awkward - i haven't got a handle on who's who yet - but there was a fun moment during a process meeting when the four of us in the room suddenly realized we all served in the same branch of the army and the language changed immediately :P

something very special happened today: it was the first time that mr smear came home all by himself.

i made a point of not drinking the "good" coffee, but i found myself dragging a bit in the first meeting and really struggling in the second.

i walked to the supermarket, picked up snacks for mr smear's field trip tomorrow, came home and did some hebrew reading with him, we had a good dinner (not easy, but good, as we had to coerce him into eating the green beans and asparagus) and watched the simpsons, said good night to my mom, and then entered bedtime...

... which was complicated, he had trouble getting to sleep for a long time.

i think i've caught up on all the stuff i needed to get done this evening, and i think i'm going to go to bed shortly.

the first day

 i managed to sleep alright last night, but i was pretty anxious this morning. i made sure that mr smear understood what the meeting was going to be about, and i'll be honest, by the time it was done i was quite relieved that i hadn't posted anything on social media.

after quite the interrogation - including a hilarious part for which i had to bite my tongue* - we ascertained that the social boycott we thought was happening isn't really happening. but we also established that the bullying and violence is very real, and that they need to make a move on dealing with it. additionally, they pretty much convinced me that moving mr smear out of the class right now isn't the best move (mainly because his current teacher and her incoming replacement are, to their minds, the most sympathetic / best suited to deal with mr smear) and that it's worth waiting for the recommendation from the evaluation (which should be concluding this week).

* mr smear was pretty insistent on how unfair it was that his bully was recognized for doing good schoolwork, even after we'd all explained that it was irrelevant :P

the meeting didn't produce an amazing feeling by any stretch, but i walked out feeling like things were relatively okay.

the meeting ended much later than i'd hoped, so i scrambled to get to my new office as soon as i could. the morning was spent meeting lots of interesting people, getting the tour, beginning to get my computer and office access set up, joining my first standup, followed by a very long but surprisingly intelligible presentation on our architectural overview.

it's been an extremely long time since i was introduced to a system that just makes sense. it's elegant, and i feel considerably more at ease about what i'm getting into.

i went with my (for now) manager to get breakfast / lunch (it was around 3pm already), and until i tucked in i hadn't actually realized just how hungry i was. and i managed to stop eating a little after hitting the "too much" point, even though it was absolutely delicious.

after we returned, i made myself a (really strong) coffee and resumed setting up my machine, at which point gd called to inform me that she couldn't find the authorization form for her nerve block... so i sighed loudly, and rushed home to grab it and my family and walk to the pain clinic.

the process was, from start to finish, more straightforward than usual and much quicker than anticipated.

...

the taxi home, though, was completely ridiculous. we were picked up by an old lady taxi driver, who immediately took offense that she could smell that gd had just smoked cannabis, complaining that it would damage her lungs. this turned into a very weird argument, at which point i pulled out my phone and she said "you think google's going to convince me?!"

once we'd established that it wasn't dangerous, she went on a tirade about some (probably fictitious) bride in her wedding dress who refused to get in her taxi once because she smelled... weed? cigarettes? who knows. so i asked if this had occurred once, or if it had occurred many times. to which she responded: "if i told you only once, what would that mean?"

"that she had issues."

ooooh, shit. the taxi driver began berating me for daring to judge a stranger i'd never met. eventually, still very heatedly, she asked "and what difference would it make if it was many passengers?"

"that their behavior was somewhat normal, and therefore somewhat reasonable."

at that point we were approaching our street, so she slowed down very dramatically to share a "tip for life" with me: that if you're arguing with someone and they're starting to show signs of losing interest, you should stop arguing. with that, she dropped us off, and i gave her the single-star rating she deserved.

holy shit, some people should not be working in the service industry.

we got gd upstairs, mr smear showered, dinner served, discussed marijuana usage with mr smear (who'd understood most of the argument, and was surprisingly completely on my side), who assured me that he would never smoke (cigarettes) "because i made a vow to my dad", and who paid attention when i explained the risks of consuming illicit drugs while one's brain is still forming...

anyway.

we had a good good-night chat with my mom, and had enough time between dinner and bedtime for me to shower and join mr smear for some calvin & hobbes. i am soooooo glad i managed to get hold of those comics!

after putting him to bed, i continued setting up my machine, and also started a fantastic run in kaycee's mod abusing the fair-hand mechanic:

unkillable hooved tribe totem FTW.

and now it's half-past-midnight and definitely past my bedtime.

big days

i went back to bed soon after posting, slept for a few hours, then got up and moved to the couch where mr smear assailed me with more calvin & hobbes, which i enjoyed, but only about the half of the time that i was conscious for it.

mr smear and i had a great morning, he played limbo until he was unsettled by the corpses, and ms splosion man which is gloriously unhinged. and then he got into ship design and setting up a game of galactic civilizations II.

in the meanwhile, i was still feeling emotionally raw about last night, which led to more discomfort...

it was an unseasonably beautiful day, and around lunchtime i took mr smear out for a bike and blade. we were planning on going anyway, but just before we got a message asking if we were up to giving back the current borrowed bike and taking our friends' newly acquired one (which they got free from someone in their neighborhood, but was too tall for their youngest).

so we headed there first, and mr smear was immediately incensed by the fact that the front brake was on the right handlebar ("i want to sue the manufacturer" 😂). this was on top of the fact that he does *not* take quickly to unfamiliar things, and it uses the pedals for the rear brake. so we had a bit of a scene, but i managed to get him to calm down and give it a try in spite of himself, and eventually (with some efficient handiwork by our friend) managed to leave on the new bike and go for a really nice ride.

which included messing about in the park's outdoor gym, chilling on the grass watching the parrots, getting a really nice lunch at a coffee shop, stopping for excellent ice cream (salted oreos - genius!), and finally getting home just before it got dark.

everything up until bedtime went smoothly, but then gd and i got into it again because things obviously weren't resolved yesterday... so that sucked, but it feels a little less shitty now.

...

mr smear and i are meeting with the school team tomorrow morning, and i think i'd be stupid if i didn't prepare him for it. and tomorrow's my first day in the new job, and gd has a nerve block in the afternoon, and i'll be damned if i know what i'm feeling about everything right now. it doesn't help that it's past 10pm and my mind's unsettled and i'm nervous about sleeping...

was that it?

 it's almost 3am as i begin typing this, i've just spent two or three hours watching random youtube videos and playing minesweeper (a really hard minesweeper - total minesweeper), after a really mixed friday after a rather awkward thursday.

thursday (yesterday?):

after dropping mr smear off at school, i called back the ministry of education representative who very clearly and urgently set things in motion. later, i received a phone call from the school counsillor inviting me and mr smear to an urgent meeting on sunday morning. when she reminded me what the plan for moving mr smear was, i reminded her how the plan was always to make sure that mr smear didn't disrupt anyone else after being neglected and left in a known bad situation for years.

i wrote up our experiences, and i feel like i should have posted them publicly but decided to wait on my mom's edits instead, which i sadly received yet. posting's potentially going to open us up to attack, though, which does make me a bit nervous.

thursday afternoon was shit. a lot of fighting with mr smear not doing his homework, it was a real drag and absolutely exhausting. in spite of that, whenever he did achieve or complete something he got really excited, and that was hugely rewarding.

gd had a dental appointment (i yelled at the second receptionist to try to cancel it at the last minute and then ignored me and tried to hang up when i told her to give me a moment so i could explain to gd what was going on), and i ended up having to order dinner, which worked out alright in spite of my reservations (we've been burning a lot more money these past couple of weeks than we should have).

friday (today?):

it started off well, we went to the open day at the art school and, aside from the dance demonstration, mr smear was very excited. and so were we. everything was great until we were on our way out and i was trying to summarize / translate the important bits for the two of them, which led to a simmering fight with gd that lasted the day until it became an all-out battle in the evening, which never got resolved. just ugly feelings all day.

while that was going on in the background, i went to pick up insoles for my rain boots and they seem to fit better. i'm now regretting asking the guy to order a better size for me because i really don't wear them enough to justify a whole other pair of boots...

... and then i spent the rest of the afternoon coaching mr smear through the remainder of his homework. it went much smoother than the previous days - although we did have one blowout incident in the middle - but we pushed through and rushed through together and a little after sundown we were done, with a good feeling all round.

after his shower (during which gd and i really got into it), and before dinner, we spent some quality game time together. dinner wasn't great from a vibe perspective, but it was encouraging to see mr smear being empathetic and trying to raise spirits (and not picking sides for once), and at bedtime he asked me to join him while he read calvin & hobbes out loud which was nice.

as soon as he was in bed, gd and i went to bed. i'm not sleeping well, and i'm feeling shit emotionally, and i feel like i neighbor's coughing and the jackals howling has been fitting accompaniment. i don't know what i'm up for right now, but it's not sleeping, it's not reading, and it's not playing anything.

fight or flight or both

what the hell happened today?

i've been on leave for two weeks, they're almost done, and all i've experienced is being sick and loads of unexpected and heavy adulting and parenting responsibilities. i'm not even tired right now - especially after today's drama - i'm just in shock.

...

it wasn't an easy night, mr smear woke up from a nightmare and it took a round or two of parenting to calm him down again.

otherwise, the cold, rainy day started well, and i got mr smear to school in good spirits.

i took care of some stuff (including informing ze german that i couldn't commit to anything), ate an early breakfast (i think i'm putting on weight again, but i'm struggling psychologically right now), and caught a bus to the shuk. on the way i spoke to a cousin who also wanted to start a joint venture, and had to explain to him too that i'm happy to advise but not available.

about halfway there, i was asked to please stop my conversation because i was bothering everyone on the small bus. i thought i'd been speaking in an unobtrusively low voice, but apparently i was wrong so i hurriedly ended the call and apologized to everyone...

we resumed the call when i arrived, and aside from my heart skipping a beat or two during the siren testing we had a good conversation. then i went through the shuk, and was ultimately unable to locate the bag of shirts we'd bought. so i picked up a coffee, bought another set (the guy felt sorry for me and gave me a bigger discount than before), and then walked up king george, picking up fingerless gloves for myself and mr smear and ordering inserts for my too-large rain boots.

i bussed home, relaxed for a bit watching mostly political videos on youtube with gd, then walked to the school to pick up mr smear.

on my way, a group of bigger kids went past with two of them literally in the middle of a fist fight, and it was only afterwards that i realized that i should have intervened. then i picked up mr smear, and learned that his bully had kicked him twice in his sprained foot and he hadn't been able to defend himself.

what followed was in two parts: part one, losing my cool and my "appropriate parenting language" and giving him hell for how he mishandled the situation (in particular, how he got into the situation in the first place by behaving precisely in the way his bully wanted). i wasn't communicating appropriately, but it appears (based on how he responded both immediately and later) that i was communicating effectively.

part two was me, after getting through part one, becoming absolutely enraged to the point of trembling and considering heading over to his bully's home (i have the address) to threaten his parents in person. or just beat the shit out of them. but i was also very aware of the potential consequences of doing that, and i know that if i start down that path that i'll almost certainly end up in jail, and i wouldn't do that to my family (or myself).

so the next hour or two were spent getting in touch with orgs who are now helping me file complaints against the school and move mr smear to a different one. 

all while trying (and failing) to help mr smear do his homework :/

then i rushed mr smear to his evaluation, which was apparently the second last session. the bus there got stuck in traffic, but we didn't notice because we were heavily engaged in a variety of topics - i got into the weeds of explaining what we're dealing with politically and historically, which he appeared to follow.

while he was there, i grabbed a coffee and wrote up the complaints for the two orgs. i had just enough time before being called back to pick up mr smear.

gd was at her second acupuncture session, so i decided to treat mr smear and take him somewhere in the sarona market. we ended up at mexicana, which may be fast food but it really got mr smear excited. we both loved the food, and he invested himself in experimenting with different combinations of foods and sauces which was very cool.

i was very proud of myself for stopping when i was full, and he continued on a loooong time before he was ready to pack up and go home. at that point we entered into a discussion about judaism vs christianity, which got surprisingly philosophical!

while mr smear got himself ready for bed (he's still into the hobbit ^_^) gd and i spoke to my mom, sharing the days trials and tribulations and hearing some things (specifically about my niece and her kid) that made us rather upset.

...

as i just said to gd: while mr smear's got issues that we need to work through, while he drives us crazy on all sorts of little things, if i think about the big stuff he's facing and how he's facing it his resilience is nothing short of miraculous. he's a good kid, and he's tough in ways i can't wrap my head around. his last few years have been immeasurably hard, and he deserves so much better.

i fucking love my boy. i'm fucking proud of my boy. and i'm fucking grateful that our relationship has improved so dramatically over the last year or two. he's learning to trust us, to let his guard down around us and let us in (including taking criticism well, and trying to incorporate it), and it's an amazing feeling.

...

anyway, mr smear went to bed without too much fuss, i've now finished this and am about to try help gd with her neck. for tonight, everything else is just whatever (including messages waiting for me that i'm deliberately ignoring).

fucking tuesday

 well... i was about to go to bed, i was falling asleep on my feet, when we realized that one of the key accomplishments of the day was for nothing - we lost a bag of t-shirts that we bought at the shuk this morning.

so now i've played some more inscryption, and i'm writing this up, and then hopefully i'll manage to get some actual sleep. last night i ended up playing final fantasy vi for about an hour after posting...

...

firstly, my cold / flu / whatever has been slightly better today, but still not great. it was rain weather, but fortunately not boot weather. after dropping mr smear off at school - with him having had a pretty good morning, and repeating his affirmation without hesitation, and being much more healthily social with his friends on the way to school than usual - gd and i headed to azrieli. we went through all the major clothing stores, and found nothing of interest, so we hopped on a bus to the shuk via dizengoff center (to pick up an emergency umbrella) and began the hunt.

we actually found what we were looking for pretty quickly. shirts for mr smear, shirts for me (now lost), and three pairs of decent, i-can-go-to-work-in-these cargo pants (that i had quite a time trying on in their open-air fitting room), and then we picked up a cauliflower meal from the frena place and sat down for coffee, enjoying a nice chat with an elderly couple that was in mixed hebrew and english, and which gd managed to follow and participate in quite nicely!

on the way to the bus i realized that my payment for the cauliflower hadn't gone through, so i returned to have my card declined a number of times before discovering that i had (rather unusually) some cash in my wallet. the ride home was consumed by me on the phone to my credit card company, learning that - once again - i blew straight past my limit by a lot and now i'm blocked for the next few days.

i really don't understand the point of the limit if they're only going to shut down my card way after i've spent too much money.

i mean, i kind of get it, but it's wrong and gross.

anyway.

i picked up mr smear from school, and on the way home we were treated to the sight of a jackal jumping out of the hedges at the park and racing right past us. which reminds me - one of the jackals by our apartment tried to start a howl in the middle of the night, and all the other jackals just ignored him so he dropped it 😂

we spent the next couple of hours doing his homework, which was at least a better experience than yesterday's attempt. slow going, though, and gd and i were horrified to discover that he doesn't know the order of the letters in the hebrew alphabet or the names of the months in the hebrew calendar.

WTAF.

after his "play therapist" arrived, i took a bus to the barber shop, chatting with one of ze germans about a project he wants me in on (which i can't be in on, officially). the haircut experience was pretty good, overall, although it had its awkward points: my "usual" barber had been the person i'd made the appointment with over the phone, so he knew that my first pick was someone else, the guy who did my hair did a pretty good job, though i ended up covered in hair and i had to ask him to fix something rather obvious, and my card was declined so i had to mission to find an ATM.

i waited so long for the bus home that i ended up walking instead, and i arrived home in time to shower and sit down to eat and watch the simpsons.

inspired by a chat with my mom, mr smear went to bed reading the hobbit graphic novel, which is very  exciting!

...

i started the day posting the following:

gaza-lighting: when you try to wipe out the jews in their own homeland, but after you've been defeated you occupy their territory and culturally appropriate their entire history in order to turn it against them, while raising your children as "martyrs" to complete your initial attempt to destroy them, claiming that *you're* indigenous and occupied and under threat of genocide.

("palestinians" are egyptians, jordanians and syrians who were abandoned in israel by their countries in order to use them as pawns in their long game of destroying israel. just to be clear, i'm very happy living with and alongside non-jewish israelis who accept our sovereignty and democratic rule of law. i don't feel the same about anyone who refuses that.)

what's happening with trump and netanyahu aligning to give hamas an ultimatum on returning the hostages on saturday is extremely exciting. this feels like what we should have been feeling the entire war - like america knows what's up and which side they're on - and while it may be too late to help most of the hostages it seems like it's on time to turn this whole ship around.

giving the daus a goat

"feed him a black goat so he gets the worthy sacrifice sigil. it's fantastic on the daus. you get 2 free unkillable worthy sacrifice cards every time you play the daus"

...

it's now 3am, and i'm struggling. peak sick was friday evening, but yesterday (monday) was the first day that i felt mostly alright in spite of still being snotty. but snotty i am, and post-nasal drippy i am, and it's now woken me up (a while ago) and i'm typing this while feeling very tired and sorry for myself.

it was another rain boots and umbrellas days, though it started off alright. i spent most of the morning resting, and in the early afternoon picked up mr smear to take him to his hebrew tutor. it was on my way to the school that i saw that his teacher had sent me a message earlier to the effect that he hadn't been cooperating.

i was pissed off - as usual - and it took a little while to get a story out of him that made sense.

while i waited for him, i found all the neighborhood coffee shops without any dry seating so i walked up to bukeh where i spent about ten minutes putting together a collection of midjourney images to put on t-shirts.

once i got him home, he got 45 minutes to play minecraft online with a friend before it was time to hit the books. what followed was about three psychologically draining hours, alternately helping him with catching up and fighting with him about doing the work (including trying to establish a reward system for each page).

that came to a head just before dinner, and dinner was essentially a family meeting / coaching session, ending with us giving him affirmations to do (i mean, at this point we've done pretty much everything else we can think of). i think what's most exhausting with all this is that feeling of getting through to him after a long, chaotic story and then expecting tomorrow to be filled with more of the same.

i'm on leave for another few days, but between being sick and having to parent a particularly uncompliant kid i don't feel like i'm getting much rest at all.

...

it doesn't help that mr smear's follow-up appointment for his sprained foot *could* have been this evening, but is now next week, and that gd missed her psychologist appointment i've been running around for weeks trying to secure because she forgot to put it in the calendar 🤦

down but out

 the coffee was good, but i left a bit later than i should have, couldn't find a good bus to get home with, and ended up walking the entire way (in my heavy rain boots), arriving *just* in time for the start of the meeting that was then delayed by about ten minutes...

anyway, it wasn't a waste of time after all because he sent me a form i needed, which i then sent on to my insurance broker, which set the ball in motion.

i spent some time trying to rest on the couch, but finding myself invested in apple cider vinegar which gd was watching (i jumped in in the middle of the second-to-last episode).

i was feeling like crap, still, but gd's been in trouble with her neck for a while so i went to pick mr smear up from school. him and his "granny cane", according to the bullies in his class - they teased him that he didn't need it, and in their defense, i really don't believe he did ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

as he told me what transpired and what was said to him, i offered him some suggestions for comebacks and he was both impressed and sad that he hadn't been able to come up with them on his own. i suggested he practice - briefly describing eminem's tactics from 8 mile - and i'm curious to see whether he actually does.

i took him to his therapist - again, feeling really awful - and sorted out my insurance stuff while i waited. then i picked him up, we returned home, and from that point until dinner i was responsible for overseeing his homework.

he actually did pretty well in both hebrew and math, and i was surprisingly quite pleased by his attitude. i feel like choosing a translation of harry potter for his reading is working out well, the language is sophisticated enough that i have to keep looking up words but he understands the story very well so he doesn't get lost.

[holy shit, the jackals have just started howling - they've been doing that a lot the past couple of nights, and it sounds like they're hanging out right around our building]

as for the maths, this evening was the first time i've managed to get him to check his answers before submitting, rather than (effectively) guessing, and once he got into a groove of doing that his performance was pretty solid.

after getting him into bed, gd and i settled in to watch the season finale, and it was perfectly cringy as anticipated. afterwards we watched two minutes of the 60 minutes interview with belle gibson before i decided i really didn't need to see any more. then we watched random shit on youtube for a while before gd decided it was time to go to bed, and i've just finished a run of kaycee's mod and i'm now ready for bed myself.

hopefully i'll be better in the morning.