passover 2026

we're approaching midnight, and for the first time since this afternoon i'm feeling a little better, after spending most of the day with a neck issue causing a massive headache, nausea and dizziness. now i've showered, i've made myself a lavendar/chamomile tea, and i'm hoping to get some rest tonight.

...

i was so relieved to be on holiday and turn my brain off. feeling extremely ill and sore is not relaxing.

yesterday:

we didn't do so well when it came to coming up with april fool's pranks, but i did have a fun idea inventing an elevator that detects smells; if someone farts in the elevator alone, it emergency stops until the extractor fans clear the air. if there are multiple people in the elevator, it immediately lets them off on the next floor.

it was erev chag, so of course we had last-minute shopping to do. gd sent me and mr smear off to find stuff i've never bought before, and we ended up on a serious mission, tired, and frustrated by all the other last-minute shoppers as well as the shops themselves for largely being disappointingly crap.

we did manage to get everything by the end of the mission, though.

aside from helping gd out a little bit here and there, mr smear and i spent the afternoon resting or reading or playing games. nothing intelligent. gd, on the other hand, had a very dramatic afternoon and evening cooking for the pesach seder for her very first time.

as unhappy and stressed as she was during the cooking - not helping by a long series of rocket attacks timed perfectly to mess with everyone - she was as happy as we were with the results and the seder with our upstair friends - which included reading and singing in their shelter - was great. the kids were generally well-behaved and involved, we got through to the meal in pretty good time, and dinner was delicious.

today:

the first part of the day was perfect. i finished reading crumb's kafka, which unfortunately has a few too many inappropriate things for me to be able to suggest that mr smear reads it, but is thoroughly brilliant and engaging. we all enjoyed a huge leftover breakfast. mr smear and i walked to the gas station to pick up the new playstation controller and charger; neither are amazing, but they'll do.

that got us into resuming our latest replay of rayman: legends, and it went really well with some exciting invasion runs!

and then my day fell apart. everyone else seems to be doing okay. i managed to eat some dinner while we watched another strip search elimination, and then lay down on the couch stretch my neck and watching random shit until just after mr smear (finally) went to bed.

i hope tomorrow's nicer.

lackluster

 today was a weird one. not a bad one, mind. lots of it was comfortable and comforting.

i got up tired. i read a bit more of mairowitz and crumb's kafka (it's amazing, with a very interesting perspective of ghetto life), i worked, with shenanigans around code ownership, and i eventually ended the work day in the middle of making some progress but also ready to put everything down because i'm officially on leave for the next couple of days.

i left the house around noon to get to a blood donation site, but for the first time in my life was rejected because my hemoglobin count was too low. so there's that to stress me out now.

mr smear tried desperately to get as much screen time as he could even though he was under punishment from calling me a jerk yesterday. he did music homework - garageband, he's making cool stuff - and later we sat down on yesterday's human resource machine problem and had a positive experience.

i'm not sure if his "performance" of being sick just as we started training was real or not, but whatever. he's the one concerned about his weight.

actually, that's not entirely true. mine's been climbing a bit, too.

but he did join me for a very serious mission hunting down matzah meal and healthy snacks, which proved surprisingly difficult to find.

either way, we watched strip search over a delicious dinner, spoke to my mom, and then got through the evening rituals and a bit of the colour of magic before calling it a day.

...

i've engaged in three or four different, toxic arguments on facebook over the course of the past day. people are fucked. i've now watched a whole lot of random youtube videos (some news, some not), and now i'm going to play some more balatro and have one last cup of tea and then climb into bed.

the needle

[currently battling a mosquito and losing]

 well, i did sleep last night. i had horrible dreams, though. involving really gross public toilets, amongst other things.

i gave up on reading dragon ball. it's like a pre-teen fever dream. combined with dragon ball: rick & morty i'm now pretty confident i never missed anything important.

our subwoofer situation: i was so excited the past couple of days, because it looked like the subwoofer was finally stable for the first time since we bought it. but today? garbage. i finally bit the bullet and ordered a new one, which will hopefully hook in to the shelf in the same way 🤞

work ownership mystery: i asked my manager to investigate, and he managed to get someone to approve my pull request. but then we learned that they didn't have the authorization to merge, either. a bunch of us (virtually) ran around trying to find out who's in charge, and so far the answer appears to be "nobody".

in the afternoon, my employer team had to sign in to a presentation that went on about an hour longer than it should have. i had to turn my camera off halfway through so nobody would have to keep seeing me rubbing my eyes and yawning.

mr smear had a regression today, and homework turned into a massive, unpleasant thing that got him punished. as part of the cooldown, i took him to the park to use the exercise equipment (i was too pissed off with him to train him, and i'm pretty sure he wasn't in the mood either), and then we continued on to do some sweet shopping.

i'm not doing to well with my weight situation lately. something about war and lockdown and yada yada yada.

dinner (we were forced to order in because my employer doesn't let me use my food allowance to buy vouchers) was much calmer, getting mr smear showered and toothbrushed and into bed proved stressful and stretched our patience completely, and that was on top of two attacks launched in that exact window. and i still had a little more work to do after he went to sleep, so i was even more annoyed.

now i'm playing catch-up and calm-down, as i type this i realize it's already past midnight :/

...

gd's friend (the glassblower who made us massage tools and gifted us with some bitcoin a couple of years ago) has been contemplating suicide for a very long time, and gd's finally reached a point where she can no longer bring herself to keep trying to talk him out of it. she's upset about this, and she wants to be a good friend, and i told her to just make her feelings crystal clear and deal with whatever may come.

you can't help everyone.

limitations

 today was messy. we slept alright - mostly - but i woke up with a skew neck. i managed to get mr smear out of bed and brushing his teeth, but by the time i'd brushed my teeth he'd curled up under a blanket on the couch, and i couldn't argue with that so i followed suit.

then we accompanied gd to the mall (with some nasty lingering feelings on the way out the door) to get her eyes retested and order new glasses; which she did that, mr smear and i milled around. the moment we finally sat down and i opened my laptop, and fortunately just before i ordered coffee, gd called to shock me with the amount they were asking her for - more than half a month's rent.

so we scrambled on over there, and managed to reduce the price by a thousand shekels. it still came out about half a month's rent, though :(

we caught a bus home, where we split up so that they could try to get vegan eggs for the seder and i could get started with work.

in spite of everything, i feel like i made a bit of progress today, but i couldn't check in with my team because it's their weekend so i've held my updates back until tomorrow.

in the meanwhile, mr smear's friend came over for a few hours and the two of them had a great time.

my company sent us a holiday care package, which was very sweet but also contained dairy, so fortunately his friend took that part home with him and i reminded our office manager (for the manyth time already) that we're vegan and have a dairy-allergic child... 🙄

the half hour zoom all-hands with my employer was a bit awkward, but sweet. i came stone last in the company quiz, in no small part because it took me so long to read the questions that i ran out of time on half of them :/

mr smear got through his human resource machine homework really well (i love seeing him excited when he finally *gets* it, even if can be a struggle to get him to focus), and his music "homework" was tooling around with garageband and he managed to put something together that sounded surprisingly good.

i tried to put in some (formal, for my employer) learning time while he helped gd with the kitchen, but i don't think i was working on the right stuff. also, my brain's been largely offline most of today.

we had a huge dinner and watched strip search, then had a good chat with my mom, and got mr smear showered and in bed. i was on my way to shower when gd caught me for a very serious talk, which ended up being a very serious fight, and it took a long time to get ourselves resolved and in agreement with each other about how we move forward.

and to get the office dry, after somebody got sprayed with a hose. with time that part will probably seem funnier, i'm sure.

varying degrees of intensity

 mr smear's friend was supposed to come over today, but later on we learned that he'd only gone to bed at 5am. so that didn't happen.

in the meanwhile, we had a very special day: my son has watched the terminator, so i guess now he is a man? it was a bit rough watching it in daylight, even with the brightness settings way up, and i only figured out that placing the subwoofer differently vastly improves the experience after we finished watching, but a good time was had by all.

gd and i did a lot of tidying up and moving things around this afternoon, which included a scary encounter with the spider from the other day. now that i've killed it and seen it up close, i think it was a black widow. and it moved a lot faster and less predictably than i expected. in retrospect, i think it was coming for me.

[a quick search later: it might have been a "false black widow". either way.]

mr smear and i went out on a snack mission, going past the gas station (so i could point out to him, and myself, where we'll pick up the playstation peripherals i ordered today), and then on for a while to one of the new candy stores. we didn't find anything we wanted - mr smear's very excited by all the sweets, but he doesn't want to get fat - but i did pick up a roll of proper bubblegum and by the time we got home he was very excited that i'd finally managed to teach him how to blow bubbles ^_^

between arriving home and sitting down for dinner, which was less than half an hour, i used sticklight again to put together logic flow to teach mr smear about logic gates and boolean algebra. i think the idea needs some fine-tuning, but it feels like a great start!

we watched strip search's elimination #7. we all got quite involved because as much as we like her, she really crossed all the lines in such an unhealthy way.

even with mr smear's holiday bedtime being pushed back to 10pm, i still ended up "reading" with him until 11pm (he didn't want to continue with the color of magic, so we compromised and ended up doing brainteasers). after that, i sat down to get something done on my telephony side project, which took much longer to complete than anticipated, and now i've written this up and it's almost 1am and oh-god-tomorrow's-a-work-day-already-and-i-don't-feel-like-i've-rested-this-weekend-at-all*.

* it doesn't matter if that isn't exactly true

the masses move through the tent city

 the nights have been relatively quiet the past few days, but i've been sleeping worse. physical nerve discomfort, primarily, but also mental disquiet.

we got up yesterday morning at 10am, which felt wrong somehow. it was only in the evening that we learned that it was wrong, because daylight savings time. it took us a remarkably long time to get out the house, by which stage the weather had turned to cold and wet.

we were nervous about traveling across the city and getting caught in an attack while outside, but fortunately we were caught once while at the mall, and the second time while waiting for the bus home, so we had time to get down into the parking lot.

man, the tent city is an experience.

between the mobs of mall people, and mr smear being generally disagreeable, and a siren catching us before i managed to get myself a second coffee when i was already feeling twitchy desperate, i had zero patience by the time we left. but we had managed to get the two things we needed the most: a kettle cord* and a smaller (and less permeable) shower curtain.

* how the hell did we end up with one less than we have appliances that need them?!

and gd's hair-care products, and also a large container of cholent, which mr smear finally tried and liked ^_^

once we got home, i spoke to two cousins, declining the still-open invitation to a pesach seder because there's no way we're traveling far with the war still on.

big data's been doing a lot of work on the building these days, and in the afternoon he came over with his tools to give me a hand with putting up a shelf to tidy up our modem / router situation. not only was he a great help with getting the shelf up easily and neatly, but he had a brilliant idea of attaching our sound bar underneath it, and we now have the solution we should have had for the past four years - it's awesome!

unfortunately, while we did get the projector set up "well enough" (using polystyrene from the electric hob's box that we hadn't tossed yet), it's clear that it's seen better days and that at some point we're going to need to upgrade it :(

i mean, it's served us well for a decade already...

a bit later we went upstairs to join them for dinner. good food and plenty of it, and aside from some issues with mr smear we all had a very pleasant evening. it was very late by the time we finally went to bed**, but between the achievements of the day, the company, and a fair amount of alcohol, i went to bed feeling quite relaxed.

** after watching the first episode of rick and morty with gd so that she could be reminded of why mr smear shouldn't have seen it

so it would have been nice if i'd been able to sleep better.

...

it's been a peaceful morning so far. i sorted out the playstation in preparation for mr smear's friend coming over, and i've watched some random things, and maybe i'll do something productive now or maybe i won't.

getting out the house

 it's almost 1am as i begin writing this, and i'm sitting here with my usual sore lower back  / bum, and indigestion. i guess this is the price to pay for trying to go to bed earlier. or just for being me.

...

we had a quiet night last night; the day was full of attacks, but it was a quiet night last night. i started the day sitting on our couch with a cup of coffee and the first volume of dragon ball. and arguing with gd over which side of the living room the couch or projector or future television need to be. my primary concern is not being able to look out a window from the couch, and my eyes have been strained and my vision blurry for the last couple of days so that's kinda front of mind (just like my eyes).

...

if there's something that set the tone of the day, though, it was putting together a whole lot of my old jokes and scripts ideas just before we had to shelter from a strike, and while we waited out the attack i used notebooklm and gemini to put together a two-panel comic that came out really well!

...

my client / boss invited a few of us to the office for lunch and beers, and i decided it was worth it. gd packed me a sandwich and some salad, which turned out to be a good idea as the guys ordered vietnamese with zero vegan options on the menu, and i managed to get to and from the office without any alerts (i was a bit nervous crossing the massive bridge over the highway).

it was nice to be in an office with my coworkers, it was a good vibe and in theory it was more comfortable to work than from my home "office". but in practice, the moment i left the apartment i felt weird, a bit dizzy and "off", and my stomach was uncomfortable the entire time i was there. by the time i left, i was nursing a pretty serious headache and i needed to lie down.

while i lay down, my sister sent us messages informing us that she's finally got permanent residence in the UK! this is great news; even though she's nervous about what a shit-hole britain has become, it's a much better class of shit-hole than south africa.

we spoke for a bit until there was another attack; i'm beginning to lose my mind, because the last week or so there's been a problem with our shelter wifi. then i saw a message about the state of our garbage bins, and realized that a large part of it was from the couch guys yesterday... so i headed downstairs and literally got my hands dirty, so much so that i needed to jump in the shower immediately after returning to our apartment.

i had a chat with my mother, and then gd ordered dinner and i sat down with mr smear to help him through another level of human resource machine.

getting him to think through problems out loud, and guiding him without giving him answers, is tough. but i'm extremely pleased to report that he's doing it!

over rainbow burger dinner, we watched another couple of episodes of strip search, then it was shower time for mr smear, after which there was some drama (gd called the shower "condemned").

and then suddenly it was 10pm, and we apparently agreed that that was a valid pesach holiday bedtime for mr smear, so i read some more of the colour of magic from my bed (his bed has been next to mine for the last while) and then we both fell asleep.

...

i'm listening to the latest tousi tv report, the news is completely insane. i played a bit of balatro last night before going to bed, perhaps i'll do something similarly braindead now.