a hard end to the week

[the jackals are at it again, it's become an all-night thing that starts really early in the evenings. i just caught a glimpse of one of them patrolling our building's garden.]

i'm in-between sleeps, and i can sum up today with a solid "ugh".

the morning was good. it was the first time in a long time that i didn't feel anything hanging over my head. i even played a little of one of the games i picked up yesterday while enjoying an early breakfast (i usually fast until noon), the path. so far, cool concept.

the work day wasn't easy. nobody had time for the PRs i worked on last night, although one guy made a very interesting suggestion which i'll probably look into over the weekend. lunch was delicious (green thai curry) but i ate too much, and the entire afternoon my stomache felt uncomfortable. i made some progress, but nothing that felt meaningful, and the most significant conversation i had (security posture and strategy) had good results, but some of it took place during happy hour when i was legit tipsy and some of it dragged and caused me leave the office late while i was deliberately trying to leave earlier.

and speaking of happy hour, one of our bosses was entertaining a colored-hair liberal and oh my god i'm praying that that's not a new hire. i really don't want to work with people who constantly feel the need to educate everyone on their political ideologies... i can't stop thinking how in the animal world, bright colors are a warning sign to others :/

...

coming home was flustering. i left the office in a rush - "escaped", more like - and immediately caught a bus that would take me home. the buses stop much closer to home than the light rail. but as i got on the bus, i realized that i'd left my computer on my desk. i got off at the next stop, and judged that it would be quicker to walk to the light rail than to an opposing bus stop, and i quickly returned to the office to pick up my laptop and awkwardly repeat my weekend wishes to my coworkers.

and that's when i made the mistake of trying to catch another bus home, because i waited forever (and even took two buses, hoping the stop further down would see a higher frequency), and by the time i eventually got home it was clear that walking the entire distance would have been faster. even though the light rail adds an extra ten minutes of walking, it's by far the fastest way to travel on average.

...

the evening went well, although we watched episode 17 of delicious in dungeon while eating and the level of violence was entirely unexpected. we actually had to check in with mr smear to see if he was okay, and have a talk about whether it was appropriate or not. i'm honestly not sure whether we should continue.

...

but at least he went to bed without drama, and when i was brushing my teeth i was amused to hear him singing himself to sleep :)

...

just as we were settling in for the night / weekend, my boss called me up, apologizing repeatedly for bothering me but informing me that we have a surprise installation. i don't think he was too pleased that i don't know more than he does about how to do the old installations (i've been working on the new ones), but i assured him that i'm happy to assist and then contacted my lead to make sure that he knows that i'm available if he needs anything.

i tried watching an episode of monk after that, but i fell asleep on the couch instead, woken occasionally by work messages though thankfully none of them needed any action.

...

my nose was still giving me trouble all day, this evening i wondered if sick didn't transition into hayfever... but i took antihistamines and it's been a couple of hours with no results so i don't think it's that.

...

i'm seeing antisemitic anti-israel propaganda being floated by members of our cape town congregation and it's distressing. and we're still reeling from the impact of the deceitful "documentary" winning an oscar. it's disgusting and demoralizing.

the good place

i think i slept okay last night, but i was a bit too warm under the duvet (spring is coming). my sinus situation seems a bit better, but it's still not great. i don't know what this means, but whatever it is it's been going on a ridiculously long time now and i'm quite over it.

i know mr smear can get himself to school now, but i quite enjoy walking with him. on my way home, i picked up some stuff from the grocery store. then i ran into one of the parents - i still don't know his name, but it's way too late to ask - and we had a quick chat during which i learned that he works in an adjacent field to mine, which was interesting.

[i've just spent about half an hour trying to find out his name on facebook and linkedin, and i've got nothing to show for it]

once i was back home and mr smear was at school, i discussed last night's shenanigans and gd and i are in sync about how it went down.

i saw that my coworkers were all busy for a lot of the night, and i made a point of enabling work notifications around the clock because i feel bad that i wasn't online for them. i fiddled around with my cibus card, and managed to write up some stuff for ze german, before leaving for the office. it felt good to get that off my to-do list.

the work day was busy, and pleasantly successful. my lead blew my mind describing how he worked around the bugs we'd been seeing - our code was fine, the tools we're using have some issues.

lunch was amazing (pasta via's "mythological vegan").

in addition to achieving another milestone on the project i'm working on, i've just (like, an hour ago) finished up two pieces of "side quest" work. it's fair to say that the lion's share of the work i did today was implemented by AI, and most of that was pretty good and only needed some minor tweaks.

mr smear's class went on a field trip today, and on the bus ride back he FA'd with his phone and FO'd when his teacher confiscated it. he was very, very upset - hopefully he'll learn from the experience :P

i came home "on time" today (for the first time this week, i believe) and helped mr smear with his homework. in general it was a great evening, and my absolute favorite part of it was during shower / toothbrushing time with the three of us singing along at the top of our lungs to kiss' i was made for lovin' you and queen's bohemian rhapsody.

mr smear went to bed without any drama, and then gd and i enjoyed another episode of monk before she went to bed and i got back to business.

relative

it's all relative. gd woke up at 4am freaking out about something and waited until i woke up to confront me with it. so our day began with a very intense talk about relationship stuff, some of which was very hard, but which ultimately ended up in a good place.

and then, on my way to work, i realized that i'd said something untrue. irrelevant, but still untrue. so when i finally got home, after a very long, very intense day, i told her and sparked a new round of freak out that also took a long and difficult argument to get through.

but we got through it, and we seem to be good, and the rest of the evening was fine.

...

well, it was fine until mr smear started being very aggressively scared of the dark. i'm grateful that gd went to bed and let me handle it, because although it took about an hour to get through, mr smear and i both went through some important steps together and he eventually turned in with a relatively calm vibe.

parenting is hard.

...

taking mr smear to school this morning was pleasant, gd and i had a good morning before i left for work. i stopped on the way to the office to pick up a bunch of meds at the pharmacy - half an hour of my life just waiting in a queue for the only pharmacist on duty - and taking those meds when i arrived but still struggling with being snotty all day :/

work today was, as i said, long and intense. i fixed an important typo that our AI copilot had propagated throughout our codebase, i participated in an important meeting and i feel like i contributed, i completed two important pieces of work, and at the very end of the day established that something we thought was working was, in fact, completely broken.

my lead was a bit distressed just before i left, we kind of agreed to figure everything out in the morning. and one of our coworkers was shocked when i couldn't help him with something in kubernetes, i wonder if i shouldn't take him aside tomorrow and explain that i'm still new to all this :P

i had stuff i wanted to do this evening but i've been... distracted. i think i'm going to go to bed soon.

the FO part

it's the middle of the night, i got up to transition from couch to bed and i just had to get this down first.

it's been a day.

...

i slept about half the night last night, which is half the night more than i expected to be able to sleep. around 6am i jumped out of bed in a combination of fear and rage, and the first thing i did as soon as i was able was to sit down with mr smear and review his report of what happened the previous day. i got him to demonstrate what he experienced, and i understood exactly what happened.

i sent an update to his teacher, and i wrote that i'm beginning to understand that they're listening more to the bullies than to the victims, and that mr smear isn't merely inventing things to be afraid of.

i was supposed to have a call with my doctor this morning about my sleep issues, but gd and i were in such a state that i missed it and had to reschedule. she had just raised a really good point - everything we're going through is precisely what everyone the world over is trying to call attention to: we all say "no bullying" and "no violence", but when it's right in front of us we want to believe that it's not happening right until it's too late and there's an injury or worse.

i called the anti-bullying org we spoke to a few weeks ago, and the councillor assured me that they would speak to the school, but also gave me advice about how to help mr smear directly. which was reassuring, because it's stuff that we're already doing as much as we can.

after trying to write (and arguing about) the right message in french to yesterday's bully's mother (because then gd and her could communicate in mother tongue) for a while, i took over and sent the following:

hi ___, i hope you're all well

we are aware that [your son] and [mr smear] are not getting along, but recently [your son] has been more focused on him and yesterday he threatened him with violence. we would really appreciate it if you could talk to him before things get out of hand 🙏

so... let me tell you that it was a very pleasant surprise when she responded in a way that made it clear that she would be dealing with this. 

i updated mr smear's therapist right before entering my office, and tried to focus on my work.

...

it was a really nice morning, weather-wise. i went to work without a sweater and i was comfortable. hello, march!

the new guy and i got a tour of the "warehouse" this morning. on exiting the warehouse, our guide let our a loud fart and i immediately responded with a "bless you", and i spent the next couple of minutes being amused that the other guys were being cool about it too 🤣

it was a productive morning, and i merged my first complete PR by lunchtime.

...

lunch began socially, but was immediately interrupted with full-scale drama. with everything else that's been going on, gd and i had forgotten that mr smear needed to leave school early today for a rescheduled appointment with his therapist, and so i needed to get the message to him even though he's not allowed to use his phone. at the same time, gd needed to drop her lunch and rush to the school because the security guard wouldn't let him out without a parent.

what happened next was a total clusterfuck.

mr smear got the message, but by the time gd arrived at the school he'd been let out without supervision and had disappeared. we use family link to keep track of him, and that was when we discovered that he'd left his phone at home this morning 🤦

gd was in pain (her legs are hurting a lot) and in a flat panic, and i sent her to check if he'd gone to his tutor by mistake while i packed up my lunch and got ready to rent a vehicle to go searching the streets for him.

i was putting on my shoes when she called to say she'd found him - he had indeed gone to his tutor's.

jesus fucking christ.

i was a shell of a man by the time i got back to the lunch table, trying to process what had just happened and follow the conversations and be sociable when demanded of me.

holy shit.

anyway.

...

follow-up drama: gd dropped him off at his therapist - on time - but then got lost trying to take a bus somewhere after i'd told her to take a taxi. at this point she was so upset that she didn't want to go to her therapist, but i convinced her that of all the times to skip a therapy appointment, this was NOT the time. i'm very glad she listened.

...

i picked mr smear up from his appointment and talked to him about what we'd all been through. i took him to my office, where one of my coworkers immediately jumped on the opportunity to show him some of our toys, which was really cool! right until he got into trouble for flying a drone in the office, but mr smear got a drone's eye view of our workstations before that happened and he definitely enjoyed it :)

overall, having him in the office was a positive experience even though we weren't prepared for it and he spent (in my opinion) way too much time on the phones (although i did get him to switch from games to reading by the end). and he even helped me a little with setting up one of the computers :)

the rest of my work day was setting up a computer that we'd thought was DOA, completing the first iteration of the scripts i've been working on and finally testing them out before handing over the remainder of the deployment to my lead. it was a real deployment that needs to be installed soon, and although it didn't go smoothly, i proved myself up to the challenge and i felt appreciated afterwards.

my lead and i drove each other crazy for a little bit, too, but it felt good-natured and we got everything working in the end.

i really do feel like i'm where i need to be.

...

mr smear and i had a pleasant time getting home, with him leading for the most part. we got home just in time for dinner and a delicious in dungeon episode, and a long chat with my mom while eating too much dessert* that i truly feel i deserved.

* not just salted oreos, but salted oreos with vegan marshmallows squished on top

...

between getting mr smear into bed and falling asleep watching another episode of monk, i had a long chat with mr smear's homeroom teacher and it was quite reassuring. when interrogated, the bully admitted to what he did and he received a very stern warning. additionally, it sounds like my message to the principal and contact from the org i spoke to have lit a fire under their asses, and it looks like the school's going to be taking additional measures to ensure the kids' safety.

we'll see, of course, but it's encouraging nonetheless.

...

it's been a day.

parents vs the school vs the bullies

 holy fuck. today was a mostly positive day, but it's been overshadowed by mr smear's bullying situation and i can't stop fretting and second-guessing how we're handling it (or how we've been handling it).

parenting is fucking hard.

so in today's entry in the bullying saga, one of the kids who was harrassing mr smear on friday tried to kick a football to his face. fortunately mr smear managed to dodge, but the fact that there was no staff around when they know there's a violence issue just blows my mind.

i wrote a letter to the new principal to warn her that from this point onwards, if any kid hurts my child physically we're going straight to the police. tomorrow morning we're going to send the same warning to the bully's mother (in french, because she's french so it's easier for gd to "connect").

*heavy sigh*

this is so fucked up. and i keep thinking of the kind of fuckery we saw in the series black space.

...

the above kinda takes the wind outta my sails, but i'll try to express how good today was anyway. i mean, it started shitty, with a fight with mr smear because he didn't understand that i didn't understand that his mouth was in pain from waiting for me to wash my hands when he hadn't finished brushing my teeth. we got through that, but it was unpleasant, and then on the way to school he started whining (as usual) that he was too sick to go (his cough has mostly gone, so i don't know if he was putting on a show or coughing for real at the time).

but it was the class party to say farewell to their homeroom teacher, so he couldn't miss it.

it also ended on a shitty note (separate from the bullying stuff) because he didn't want to do his homework, also as usual. but gd and i both threatened him, and yelled at him, and then yelled and threatened that if he doesn't learn how to learn and cooperate he not going to be able to do any of the crazy stuff he wants to do, and he eventually - sulkily - got through it.

brilliantly, i might add. learning math in a different language is hard, and when he stops fighting he's actually really good with the material. it would just be a lot easier for everyone if we didn't need to go through a shit ceremony every day.

parenting is fucking hard.

...

right, now i can finally talk about the good stuff. i've hit a kind of internal reset button, and i've got my mind around where i am and what i need to do. and what i need to do is work hard, and extra. that... that feels different.

lesson one: being amongst the earliest in the office in the morning means that the coffee machine doesn't coffee because it's not warmed up.

i had a meeting with my boss and lead, and both of them seemed happy with what i'm doing and how i'm doing it, which was very reassuring. i had a 1-on-1 with the woman who sits next to me, and aside from getting a handle on what she's about she was very appreciative of my approach to things, which was very reassuring.

over lunch i learned the ages of some of my coworkers, and one of them may have been slightly offended by me referring to them as "children"... but by the end of the day i was pretty sure we're cool. partially because i passed on the earworm for dumb ways to die which someone else had given me earlier.

i made really good progress, and i ended the day essentially having achieved my stated goal for the day. amongst other things. that felt really good. not least of which because the article i published two days ago proved crucial to understanding the problem i needed to solve 🤘

...

oh, and today i came up with a programming dad joke in hebrew that i'm particularly proud of:

אם אתה דופק את הקומפיילר, זה אומר שאתה מהדרפאקר?

...

i'm tired, but i've watched a fun episode of monk with gd and i'm going to try to make some script magic before going to bed. god knows if i'll be able to sleep tonight anyway.

...

while trying to publish this post, i received a message from mr smear's teacher, who claims that this is just another case of mr smear misinterpreting an "accident".

not today.

hacking

 last night i began a throat thing, possibly an infection, and i've been struggling since. i spent a lot of today resting, and i'm praying i'll be okay by tomorrow. and tomorrow morning is going to be early and complicated regardless of how i'm feeling.

it's bothering me that i've been sick pretty much every weekend for the last month.

otherwise, it was a day of inscryption (with mr smear on the ps4), and a heck of a lot of fiddling with powershell and devcontainers to get cdktf working on my windows machine. and gd and i rewatched yesterday's episode of monk after we finally got mr smear to go to sleep - he appears to be nursing a fever himself :(

everyone's going on about zelenskyy's brutal "talk" with trump and vance yesterday, but i'm just suspicious. nothing anyone is doing is making much sense these days...

dust in, dust out

the jackals are howling again - they've been a lot more brazen the past few days, and they've been going at it at all hours. also, very confrontational with dogs being walked even during daylight (O_o)

should we be worried about mr smear?

yesterday:

yesterday began with a fight - kind of the usual - between gd and mr smear about getting out of bed. and then mr smear stayed home again, i tried to take him to school but he threw up just outside the gate (ewww!) and so we turned around and walked back home, stopping on a bench for a good talk.

oh, yeah - and a handyman came in to clean up the underside of our kitchen sink, which entailed us clearing out, cleaning and repacking everything while simultaneously getting mr smear ready for school. the fun part was using sealant on a lifted edge of the sink :P

i started my word day cleaning the dust off everything after the workers were supposed to be done, but within a very short while it was clear that they were far from done, and all of our belongings and our lungs were coated with yet another layer of dust that i'm praying doesn't include asbestos.

it was a frustrating day of tweaking kubernetes installations and annoying the guy i'm reporting to, who was working remotely which made it feel worse. but i was also involved in some product discussions and i feel like i contributed.

eventually i hit partial success, just in time to interview another coworker and dig in to the all-hands / happy hour treats.

i didn't have another "nap attack" episode yesterday, but i did make an appointment to discuss them with my doctor.

as has become standard practice, i came home and sat with mr smear for his maths and reading. unfortunately, he got frustrated with how i explained a word to him and gd - who'd been holding on to the morning's grievance, amongst other things - completely lost it.

the day ended with a different kind of fight, or family meeting, or family meeting with lots of yelling, but it feels like we got through to mr smear and gd expressed some stuff that's obviously been hurting her for a long time. as she said - sometimes it's only when you start to heal from something that you really begin to realize the depths of the trauma.

anyway, it wasn't a fun experience for anyone but i feel like we all were in a better place by the time mr smear left the table to brush his teeth and climb into bed.

...

i passed out watching monk, dragged myself to bed when gd went, and slept fitfully through the night, dreaming a lot of very realistic dreams about returning to the army.

today:

this time mr smear actually went to school, and i went in after him to find someone to help me understand why it was so hard for him to get to his friday juggling classes. eventually i got some hints, and i sent them to mr smear on whatsapp, and i returned home.

gd went to her sewing class, and i spent much of my morning trying to do something constructive* while my stomache did flips for no apparent reason. or maybe it's related to the fact that i seem to be coming down with something - i don't think my sinuses and throat are going haywire just from the dust exposure.

* i surprised myself by actually succeeding, i published an article about apt-key being deprecated

until i received a phone call from mr smear, telling me that he'd been in a classroom by himself (he hadn't seen / had chosen not to see my messages) and was accosted by two of the bullies in his class. understanding the worst, i managed to get him to go to his juggling class in spite of how furious i was with him for giving anyone an opportunity to hurt him (not as furious as i was with the bullies, and not that i was blaming him, which i explained to him later), and on my way to the school to pick him up i consulted with my mom about whether it makes sense to go to the police when the school's clearly not willing or able to protect our children.

i think that's exactly what i'm going to do from now on.

fortunately, when i sat him down and got the details out of him it turned out that the bullying was only harassment, not assault, which was a huge relief. and aside from that incident it appears that he actually had a pretty good day.

we walked home, and the two bullies were walking across the road from us. i awkwardly gave them angry side-eye, which they noticed, with my tongue between my teeth. in retrospect, i handled that wrong and i should have been giving them an evil smile instead.

next time.

mr smear switched bags* and we caught a bus to azrieli to meet up with gd and buy underwear. and snacks. oh! on the way back from dropping mr smear off at school this morning i picked up a couple of things, one of which being pistachio-covered cashews. which seems ridiculous, but even more ridiculous is how much like cookies it tastes.

* one day, we pray, he's not going to need to carry an epipen around with him wherever he goes

the rest of the afternoon has been pretty quiet, only slightly interrupted by a call with ze german who i've been trying to help... it's not that i don't want to help him, but i'm completely out of bandwidth while he doesn't really have anyone else for what i'm assisting him with.

...

i've spent a lot of time these past couple of weeks trying to get my head around what i'm doing for work, who i'm working with, what the expectations are. it's been a difficult time personally, but i feel like i'm going to need to start opening the throttle and doing a lot more than my nine-to-five. it's also been made clear that i'm expected to go on-site occasionally, which i've assured gd won't be unsafe even though i'm not entirely confident that that's true.

...

politically it was a difficult week, or couple of weeks. between the stories (and eulogy) from the recently released hostages to the amount of disinformation online - specifically mastodon and vimeo, which make it impossible to report.

the dusting

 i feel like i managed to clear a lot off my plate the past couple of days, which has made me a lot less anxious. having said that, my morning plans were thoroughly disrupted when gd instructed me to go on an urgent pharmacy run right before my dentist appointment...

mr smear woke up still coughing his bad cough, so he stayed home again today. we're really hoping he'll be going back to school tomorrow, both because it's effectively his last day with his teacher before she goes on maternity leave, and because i really need to work from home and i don't really feel comfortable doing that when he's around.

on the way to the pharmacy, i crossed the same intersection that i'd had trouble with yesterday, and two cars - one a taxi - didn't stop. i think i need to make more noise about this.

fortunately, the wait for the pharmacy was unusually short. i made it home in time to pick up my bag and hop on a bus to the dentist.

while i was waiting, my number was called for a different room, so i launched myself across the offices thinking that they'd changed my room and that someone else was taking my turn. instead, it turned out that their system uses duplicate numbers, which i complained is confusing. the receptionists don't see anything wrong with that :/

i didn't really appreciate the dentist's sense of humor, nor did his assistant, but whatever. the experience overall wasn't unpleasant, he removed a mark on my reconstructed incisor and assured me that the nerve pain i occasionally experience isn't actually from the tooth's filling, but rather from the exposed root and gum.

great.

...

the bus to work got stuck in traffic and had to take a detour. i walked into the office that was practically empty because all the smart people were working from home. i worked really hard until i was finally able to take a late lunch - i found a good falafel place close by - and then returned late for a very important meeting that i hadn't realized was in my calendar.

my suspicion of narcolepsy yesterday was strengthened by another attack during that meeting. i need to get myself evaluated.

by the end of the afternoon, it was clear to me that we should have been strongly discouraged from coming to the office while the renovation is taking place, and that all of our desks should have been covered in plastic before they began. what an absolute shit-show. i hope i didn't ingest any asbestos. i'm always nervous about that because that's ultimately what killed my father, and i've been exposed a number of times.

...

i came home just after gd left for her acupuncturist, who's apparently excellent. i did a little work in between helping mr smear with a maths exercise he was struggling with, and while we had one of our usual arguments about him restarting it whenever he made a mistake, we both communicated much better than usual and he eventually heard me out and tried it my way. with a little twist of his own: it's an exercise that requires the child to have a good handle on multiplication tables, and when he made a mistake with a number he then practiced the multiplication table entries for its factors before trying again.

and it worked! he was clearly proud of himself for getting through it, and i told him he'd earned each and every star on that one ^_^

just before dinner arrived we did his hebrew reading, which wasn't as much of a struggle as usual but he still didn't want to do it before he eventually did it and felt good about doing it.

we never learn :P

...

dinner was great, very salad-y but delicious and enjoyed by all. and then it was bedtime, and me and gd watching monk time, some of which i passed out for. then she went to bed and i watched a bunch of stuff on youtube (mostly political these days, but some ai and inscryption strategies too), and now i'm posting this and considering my next move. bed? reading? gaming? probably nothing too practical.

narc-olepsy and hydra-tion 2

 [part 2 / 2 because of the label limitations]

over lunch i was asked about being vegan, and i made a conscious effort to not be preachy. it was hard :P

narcolepsy. i'm considering the possibility that my occasional mid-day sleep attacks are a symptom of narcolepsy. which, according to dr google, can present in my general sleep disturbances and rapid entry into a dream state. i wonder if i should get tested for this?

one of my coworkers was introducing me to a whole new set of things, speaking rapidly, for a long time, while i tried desperately not to fall asleep and out of my chair.

i spent a bit of time on the phone with my insurance broker dealing with pension arrangements and health coverage...

in spite of everything else i did manage to do a little work during my day at the office. in the late afternoon, contractors came in and began bashing down a wall, and i pretty quickly decided that i needed to get the hell out of there. i really hope i didn't inhale any asbestos...

gd and mr smear appear to have had a pretty good day, she tried a new arrangement with screen time between homework / chores and it seems to have worked out well.

i managed to get a bit of work done in the evening, and mr smear did a little bit of hebrew reading before dinner which went well.

i hesitated for a while before deciding not to go rollerblading tonight. instead, i played some inscryption, gd and i watched another episode of monk, and i did dishes. now that i'm done with my mind-dump, it's just struck midnight and i think i should probably go to bed.

narc-olepsy and hydra-tion 1

[part 1 / 2 because of the label limitations]

i spent longer on my cdktf repo last night than intended, but i hit the hay with a sense of accomplishment. i managed about two sentences of of mice and men before realizing that i was too tired to understand anything, and promptly went to sleep.

mr smear woke up coughing this morning, he was doing a bit better but definitely wasn't ready to return to school. instead, he pulled maus off the shelf and started reading it, and he appears to be really getting into it, both in content and in style.

i was sad to learn that art spiegelman has been turned by pro-palestinian propaganda, and - like gabor maté - i suspect their trauma has made them hypersensitive and vulnerable to our enemies' cries of "genocide".

while he read that, i read the first chapter of of mice and men. so far, highly enjoyable.

it was bitterly cold this morning, and i was dressed in a double layer with gloves and my hoodies up for my walk to the post office to pick up gd's new purse.

i asked mr smear to "fix" my water bottle that he did a number on the other day. i'm not sure he followed any of my requests / instructions, but the overall effect is cool so i took to it work anyway :)

i messaged mr smear's hebrew tutor and told her we were taking a break, he's doing well enough now and it's a huge amount of money that we can't really afford...

on the way to work i stopped by the clinic, almost getting run over again by a taxi at the same intersection. after yelling and chasing down the driver - who actually apologized - i decided that instead of filing another complaint about him personally, i need to take this up with the municipality. so now i'm being bounced between departments trying to get them to do something to make the intersection safer.

i had a good meeting with my boss today. he wants me to go on-site sometime soon, so i warned gd and tried to reassure her that i'll be safe...

static electricity and spontaneously bleeding hands: i actually had to run off to find hand lotion for the office, i've never experienced that before.

speaking of surprises, i spoke to our landlord who offered to send a handyman to help us with the flaky sink, which is quite something!

[continued...]