trick and treat

 there was no housekeeping done yesterday. i did break from the music extension work to watch three episodes of evangelion with mr smear, but i think i passed out for quite a significant amount of them :P

otherwise, i tried to coach him and encourage him to work on his rube goldberg machine (homework), which was rather demanding on my patience (but my patience prevailed).

and i learned something fascinating about calf muscles and exercising them that i think everyone should know.

i walked mr smear to his friend's place at around 4pm - it didn't occur to me that there might be a bus - with him dressed for trick-or-treating. some teenager on a scooter whizzed past and as he clocked mr smear we heard him loudly "what - the - fuck?!" which had us in hysterics 😂

it turned out 4pm was the time for the kids to meet up, 6pm to go trick-or-treating. so i caught a bus home, got some more stuff done while stuffing myself on leftovers, and then bussed back to accompany the three friends as mr smear's shadow pack-animal.

first, let me just say that the number of kids participating, the effort invested in their costumes and treat stations, was heartwarming. it was so much fun!

second, five minutes before arriving to accompany the kids, i was struck with sudden bloating and gas that lasted a little over an hour, rendering me decidedly uncomfortable during the hour-long mission.

on the one hand, following them was an interesting experience and generally positive, particularly because of all the other kids and parents and the general atmosphere was great. on the other, there were a couple of behaviors that made the hour drag considerably.

first and foremost, mr smear's wrong-side-of-the-tracks friend, whose constant swearing and use of combative language is jarring and embarrassing, even at a distance. then there were his greedy attempts (often successful) to grab all the candy, sometimes its containers as well. mr smear told him off a number of times, and even yelled "my friend's a thief" when he managed to grab an entire pumpkin-shaped candy container...

second, mr smear didn't understand the concept of me being a shadow, and he kept trying to make sure that i wasn't going to lose them... which was sweet, but really took him out of the experience and separated him from his friends on multiple occasions :(

when we returned to his friend's place, they wanted to watch a horror movie. the other two were asking for movies that are really inappropriate, and i took the opportunity to explain why watching great movies before you're ready for them is a mistake - that you can only ever watch a great movie for the first time once, and it's a shame if you're not old enough / experienced enough to fully appreciate what makes it great or shocking.

"you know we're going to forget this whole conversation in, like, five minutes, right?"

fuckin' A.

i also took my turn trying to teach his friend how to blow his nose. how the fuck does a kid grow up not knowing how to blow his fucking nose?

mr smear's friend's mom gave mr smear a full bowl of mushroom krupnik soup, which was delicious. it was also the last of their soup. his first few spoons were enthusiastic (he said it reminds him of fry's mushroom pies), but his next few were less so and then he did what he always does... "garbage bin dad?" 🤦‍♂️

to make it worse, he told him friend that "it started off tasting really good, and then it stopped tasting good". his friend told him he shouldn't insult his mom's cooking, and his response was "yeah, but..."

FML.

anyway, after a bit more awkwardness i managed to extricate us from the dinner and we caught a bus home, with him informing me along the way that he's not sure he wants to do this again because he's so self-conscious. i really don't understand this kid :(

while he showered, i caught gd up on the evening's shenanigans while sipping on the "drink me - penis reducer" parting gift from tahoma's (i don't know what was in it, but it was delicious). after putting mr smear to bed, i spent some more time tweaking the extension, and eventually went to bed.

i guess i slept pretty well. i'm trying to make the most of these two "recharge" days, which started with gd upset over our neighbor's treatment of their dog and now has her cancelling her physio appointment and sewing class because something just twinged in her neck and she's unable to leave the house :(

...

alright, one crisis at a time, one admin item at a time. i can do this.

into the looking glass

 well, it was less of a looking glass and more of a few shots of particularly interesting cocktails, plus a fair amount of freeze-dried passion fruit and strawberries mixed with good ol' fashioned fizzers. nystire's wife called it taffy, which i'd never considered before.

the one person i didn't expect to bump into was my team lead! turns out we served in the same unit :P

all-in-all, it was a fun gathering, gd had a good time without any incidents (in spite of herself, she insisted on trying things without checking ingredients 🙄), and the night sky on our way home was pretty spectacular.

...

it was after midnight when i called mr smear to check in on him, and he feigned shock that it was so late :P

when nyah nyah and her husband dropped us off at home (after 1am) he wasn't asleep yet, and we had a bit of a bad vibe because he'd turned on the air conditioner again without talking to me, and he did everything precisely against the mold prevention instructions 🤦‍♂️

...

i woke up with a bit of a hangover, but plenty of water and coffee and hellsing and a heavy challah-peño with peanut butter and vegan nutella breakfast seem to have settled it well. now to try and wrap up yesterday's efforts on my music player and then do a little housekeeping.

haphazard

 my tongue hurts, because i bit it. like, i managed to bite myself in the center of my tongue, somehow. it hurts.

i'm so tired, that i just crashed on the couch for ten / fifteen minutes. after having had a fourth cup of coffee earlier.

my wife - who's dressed up as a dark elf - just posted about how i called her the fairy fart-mother, i don't know whether to be proud or embarrassed.

mr smear and i played through a fair amount of day of the tentacle before dinner. good times.

i read through quite a bit of hellsing this morning. i'm enjoying it, but i kinda get why gd got bored.

sfs contacted me this morning, after our recent interactions he's finally started diving into game development and he's doing something so crazy that i don't have a clue what his descriptions mean... but it looks like he's about to embark on one heck of a journey and i'm really glad to have been able to get him to take the first steps ^_^

i let him play a bit of moon sweepers, after i gave it a try this morning. i can see the attraction (nystire gifted me a copy, i think he's trying to test my resolve on my side projects :P), but i wanna get stuff done. later i watched my son take it in a whole other direction by drawing in the moon sand instead of clearing it.

i spent a lot of time make improvements to my chrome extension, but went down a re-architecture rabbit-hole with codex's terra model that astra has spent the past 1.5+ hours digging me out of. i feel like we're all learning stuff together. at least, i hope that's what's happening.

i had a chat with my mom earlier (we weren't able to connect properly at kiddush time because she and krybabie's mother were out for a walk on the mouille point promenade), she broke down what happened at her apartment building's AGM last night after she's been working her ass off for the past half a year to a year to extricate herself from the board: the majority of apartment owners are idiots according to carlo cipolla’s behavioral matrix.

they voted off the three guys who've been doing good work because "they're too controlling", and between them and my mom's efforts over the years the apartments are currently valued pretty highly. i suggested to my mother that now seems like a good time to bail, and was both surprised and relieved to learn that she agreed.

if she sells, that's going to remove what is possibly the largest obstacle to her picking up sticks and joining us over here.

we're about to head off to tahoma's for their annual halloween party, for which i don't have anything to wear. we're leaving mr smear home alone, after having checked with our upstairs friends that they're okay with being leaned on in an emergency, and i think he's as excited for the home alone time as we are for the adults-only time :)

not-so-free will

i think i slept alright. the eczema seems to be calming down. i started my day reading a bit of hellsing on the balcony.

then i jumped into work, right after realizing that today was the last day i can use my monthly food allowance and we hadn't spent any of it yet.

i ran the test, it went well. i needed help from my buddy, and only understood - after being quite a nudnik - that i'd missed her message to the team earlier in the morning to say that her daughter was sick and she didn't have much bandwidth 🤦‍♂️

i felt awful, and i apologized profusely...

i spent the next few hours re-evaluating the work i'd planned... or that my AI agents had planned... by the time i'd figured out my next steps, it was time to do a grocery run with gd to use up as much of the allowance as we could, on stuff we actually need. i honestly felt a bit sick, and tired, about halfway through the shopping experience. it could have been worse, i guess, but i just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

i got home, had two carrots with some hummus, and was about to do the thing i'd told my team lead i was going to do when an upstairs neighbor began heavy drilling. i had less than an hour to go until my meeting with my mentor, and if i'd done the thing the team lead wanted i'd have been stuck at home with construction site noises, which left me no choice.

i sent a message to the neighbor group, explaining how some of us work from home and doing any kind of construction without prior warning is inconsiderate (how do people still not understand this?!), then packed my bags and rushed out to catch a bus to my employer's office.

i had a little bit of time to spare to Do The Thing, and my mentor ended up being five minutes late, so i managed to pull the trigger before our meeting got started. of course, i ran into yet another surprising bug...

the roadmap meeting with my mentor was very positive. the feedback from him, and from my current client, was the same as my self-diagnosis two weeks ago: ironically, he informed me that while it's critical to focus and effectively communicate how focused i am at work, he believes that my lack of focus is one of the reasons why i'm doing as well as i am in so many different ways.

can those two things be true at the same time?

when he got to the point of asking me which technologies i wanted to focus on, i immediately thought of what i need to get my number one main personal side project i'm now working on to succeed, networking and security, but even as i said the words i was nervous about biting off more than i can chew. which, if i think about it, is kind of the point of this whole roadmap exercise, so...

i had some time before my evening course class began to do some more investigating, report to the team lead and work on a solution, all the while talking to coworkers / async game jammers, and a dutch coworker, and two guys who are essentially using our offices as a coworking space.

the class was full of useful information, but it started so slowly and with such basic material that by the time the good stuff came up i'd already checked out. i spent most of the class evolving my agentic skills, understanding that i've been dealing with a wild array of conflicting guidance, and a lot of the skill cleanup was being done by conflicting skills that weren't aligned with what i'd just corrected... so i had to figure out a solution for that, too.

i walked out with sfs and another guy who seems interested in joining our asynchronous game jam, and then split from them to go to the supermarket and try to spend the remaining hundred shekels. i got to the self checkout with a heavy load that i'd estimated would just about reach the limit, only to discover, after passing everything through that there were a couple of significant discounts! fortunately, the place was practically empty so i rushed to the dried fruits area and picked up some healthy snacks, which did the trick.

i waited a few minutes at the bus stop, and there were a few of us frantically trying to wave the next bus down as he skipped our stop entirely. i reported the fucker. at least the second bus stopped, and in retrospect it was actually a better route for me :P

i got home to a delicious meal - gd has outdone herself with her salads, and whatever it is she's doing with the potatoes - and we had a chat with my mom before putting mr smear to bed. mr smear didn't have such a great school day today; nothing dramatic, but his behavior wasn't good enough to earn him screen time. we talked a little about it at bedtime, and then about the girls in his class doing tiktok videos 🙄, and then i said goodnight and hit the shower.

he'd already gone to bed, so i had to keep my anger over his gouging the soap and leaving me with practically nothing to myself :/

i sat down at my work machine and continued with the skill evolution, which took me until almost midnight to get through... but i think i'm happy with it, and i'm hoping it's going to make a real difference to both my work environments ✌️

i'm so fucking tired now. i can't believe it's the weekend. even less that it's a long weekend, because my client gives everyone a mandatory two days off every quarter. that's pretty cool.

unscheduled

 i just extricated myself from a 1.5 hour async game jam call with horseman, my coworker and his brother, and that's only because aside from the fact that i'm getting really tired (and the brother's online ninja game made me a little motion sick) but because i need to write this up before i hit the sack.

[yawns and makes one last cup of tea]

[ahhh, chamomile and honey]

i got up, sat outside on the balcony with my coffee, and couldn't figure out what i wanted to do with myself. mr smear, after having badgered me for a while (and a few days, really), was allowed to watch the youtube playlist i curated for him, which included an inappropriate ze frank video about cuttlefish procreation, and i went inside and watched with him until he left for school.

i did a little "desk" clearing, with my new playlist extension working so well that gd came and parked herself on a beanbag next to me, with both of us overjoyed and shocked by the songs we haven't heard in years! unfortunately, the desk clearing got a little rabbit-holey with overcomplicated government websites, and gd never having earned a payslip in israel...

eventually i managed to make some proper time to prepare for my work day, trying to understand what had gone wrong on monday evening and what needed to be done to fix it. when i finally felt ready to respond, i noticed that i'd kinda misread my team lead's last sentence and that it wasn't as heavy as i'd thought.

i walked to the office, discussed the solution with my buddy before our daily, and after our daily got into it. it - would - take - me - until - around - 4pm - to - be - ready - to - merge. gods, it was a long day. however! by the end of it, i believe i'd finally solved the real issue with my tests taking so long.

i mean, i hope 🤞

i had a couple of employer meetings this afternoon, one of them with my mentor, who seems to think i'm doing alright.

the most frustrating part of it all was that as soon as i was ready, the entire company's build system went offline.

...

during the time that it was offline, a crane broke in the construction site next door and i went to investigate the drama. i saw lots of emergency vehicles, and then a bunch of first responders around a body they were performing chest compressions on. it looks like the poor guy didn't make it, and i regretted my curiosity.

...

my buddy came into the office with veggie crisps, saying something about the taste. i love veggie crisps, so i took a handful and tried one, and it tasted somehow wrong. instinctively, i reached for the packet and looked at the allergen listing, and saw that it contains dairy. it's fucking veggie crisps, the packaging is almost identical to the vegan crisps, and it has no mention of dairy anywhere visible. and everyone in the office agreed that the milk powder didn't taste good.

WTAF is wrong with people?!

...

when i finally came back online, it took so long to get my PR green, merged, and the build completed that the company's no-deployments-past-5pm rule was in force. i literally clicked the button when the clock said 17:00. i secured special permission from the team lead for an emergency deployment, and we let it run.

i came home past suspiciously heavy traffic (though i didn't think much of it at the time), straight into an hour of monitoring and troubleshooting. eventually, my buddy agreed that something was wrong with the deployment pipeline, and that it wasn't my code (which had deployed successfully into a region we can't test with), and i sent off a kit-bag question / update to the team lead.

fortunately, by the time we finished dinner and i saw his response, it was to say that we're stopping for the night.

we finished watching evan almighty at dinner, then talked to my mom, then noticed for the first time that something big was going on in our intersection - some kind of roadworks - and traffic was gridlocked and emergency service vehicles were getting trapped. the honking and the sirens and the angry yelling went on until just a short while ago, it was pretty intense.

[a few more sirens and some honking]

after getting mr smear into bed, my evening turned into an unexpected combination of vibe coding (mr smear gave me a good idea for monetization!) and pitching game ideas and playtesting. now i've written this, i think i'm ready to crash.

waiting for the results

 it's late, and my focus is whizzing all about like a deflating balloon.

i guess the most important thing today was voting. so we voted. i'm sitting and listening to the interim election results and analysis and i think, i hope, that my optimism isn't misplaced. in my opinion, all we really need is to not have shas in the government if we want the ultra-orthodox to serve, and if they serve then a part of the army's mandate is to integrate them into society.

if we can get that right, a lot of our other serious issues begin falling away.

🤞🙏

...

of all the things i could have and should have been doing today, i've sunk hours into building an chrome extension that i'm extremely excited about, not least because i've finally got a real solution to a problem with music playlists that i've been bothered by and complaining about for many years.

it can be argued that i'm not using my time appropriately. it is being argued by a voice in the back of my mind 🙄

...

it was a bit of a mission getting to herzeliyah and back for the election day barbecue with ze germans, but we had a good time, and ate well.

i guess it's kind of comforting that we're not the only ones struggling these days, and it's certainly good to be able to have big conversations (and little conversations) with all these people and feel connected.

...

it's my doppelganger cousin's birthday today, but his nephew is gone. i couldn't exactly wish him a "happy birthday"... i ended up writing "i want to wish you a happy birthday, but also..."

jesus.

gd and i had a possibly-not-quite-age-appropriate talk with mr smear after dinner, before switching gears and watching some evan almighty before bedtime. i hope he understands what we said, i hope it lands, i hope he remembers when things get tough. may they never get quite that tough.

with what i have

 after watching bruce almighty this evening, now i just feel like god's taunting me.

first, today was pretty stressful - i'm behind on my project, which was particularly ambitious of them to assign to me from the get-go, and every step of the way i've encountered unpleasant surprises, obstacles, and it's a system that's remarkably complex by any measure. sprinkle on that a couple of misunderstandings - my team lead seems to think i'm investing time in things that aren't on the critical path, when i've literally done nothing but ask agents to take care of them on the side, but i've also been asked to do things that don't really make sense without more context and i only understood this evening (when it was already very late) that i could have done what he asked much earlier in the day... and then when i did finally do it, it was mostly good but buggy.

this is a really, really shit feeling. hopefully we'll be able to clear the air on wednesday.

...

otherwise, i began my day with coffee and kick-ass, and then sat down to spec out the first part of the networking system that i need to test if the game networking package i came across and the mental model i'm building in my head are actually viable. whatever happens, imma learn some shit.

i think i ate too much today. the rest of the leftover gnocci in particular.

gd and i had a follow-up conversation to what we discussed yesterday, and she's going back to sewing lessons. i really hope this works out✌️

...

in the middle of the workday crescendo - around 6pm - i rushed out and literally had to sprint to catch a bus to the pick-up point for the vacuum filters we ordered. i arrived at the place (a really impressive little-bit-of-everything store) pretty quickly, but found their service less than stellar. it took me a couple of tries to figure out where the postal pick-up area is, but nobody was there. i asked a worker close by if someone was there, and after a couple of non-responses he said yes. i went into the package area, i called around, no answer. then i went back to the unhelpful cashier at the front of the store, who assured me that someone was there, but under a lot of pressure.

up until that point i'd been the only one trying to pick up a parcel, but now there was a queue forming. i went behind the "obstacles" again, called out a few more times, and then, as i walked back out, the guy from before who'd said that someone was there showed up, and it turned out he was that someone.

asshole.

fortunately, i made it out of there with my package and got to the bus stop just in time to catch a ride back home.

...

that was went i engaged in the evening's finale, with spectacularly disappointing results. fortunately, my "buddy" was available to help me find and understand the logs, and i got a breakdown from claude that... seems confident. the last words from the team lead felt heavy, he wants me to explain the bug to him on wednesday.

i feel like a thunder cloud is over my head right now.

...

while i was out, i received a message from an ex-coworker, a wedding invitation. considering our financial situation, i wasn't sure that it was a good idea to go, but i discussed it with gd and then my mom, and we thought it'd be a good idea and a fun thing to do. then, just after we finished watching the movie and i said goodnight to mr smear, i sat down and opened the invitation, and discovered that it's limited to one person with no plus one.

that kinda sucks. but i'm also sure that none of the other coworkers' partners were invited either. so now i'm damned if i ask him to invite gd and damned if i don't :/

...

i'm so freaking tired of things not working out, or working out badly. and on top of everything else i'm not entirely convinced the cream for the eczema is working properly, which is just another layer of discomfort on top of everything else.

gratitude, right? i should be practicing gratitude.

proper gander

i didn't sleep well last night, i'm dealing with eczema again, it's off and on... i booked appointments with my doctor and a dermatologist, the earliest for the latter being in january :/

the time shifted in the night, giving us an extra hour of not sleeping... whatever. i started my day with reading kick-ass, which is legitimately good and absolutely not appropriate for mr smear. neither is hellsing, which gd just got bored with.

the work day was frustrating; my team lead wants me doing things that i don't have authorization to do, and nobody can tell me how to obtain the authorization, with IT and devops being bureaucratically obstructive. at the same time, i keep surfacing weird things, and today i understood that there's a team - much like my previous team at my previous client - who's supposed to be supporting my current team but is doing work they need in unexpected ways and without communicating and documenting as they go 🤦‍♂️

i'm also a little frustrated that the very sweet guy who was volunteered to test my tooling before the team lead allows me to pitch it to everyone else is... a bit slow? i don't know if it's a capability thing, or an attitude thing (i'm inclined towards believing the latter).

we're not supposed to talk politics in the office, but there were only three of us in and the team lead wasn't there so we ended up really getting into it. there was significant tension in the room, and anxiety, and i hope i didn't unmake friends (even though in general we're all politically aligned, some of the stuff i was saying about democracy, national identity and the judicial reform really didn't land well).

i caught the light rail to the other office, and the class went pretty well. i caught a ride to the train station afterwards, and got into the weeds of south african crime when i probably shouldn't have. it was just that sort of a day, i guess 🤷‍♂️

i got home to a huge platter of sushi, and i had shoveled a whole lot into my mouth (one after the other) before realizing that i had no reason to be eating it all so quickly, nor any real desire to, and that aside from being unhealthy i also wasn't really enjoying my food nearly as much as i could have.

i had a strange idea about our financial situation which i discussed with my mom on the way to the office, and by the time we put mr smear to bed i'd figured out how to approach gd with a strategy. we're already on the edge, so playing it safe isn't much of an option, and if she can pull in some money with her sewing skills that would definitely be something.

well, i managed to put together the comics that i generated for the preacher video, so i'm pleased about that. and i spent some time "cleaning up" large files on google drive, some of them videos i moved to youtube.

it's just turned midnight, i think i'm ready for bed.

a painful end to the weekend

 i don't think i did anything particularly constructive this afternoon, and for my sins i had to deal with a classic mr smear regression: getting him to come rollerblading became very unpleasant, and he refused to stop escalating, and he didn't climb down off the hill until we'd already made it to the port, and he'd already lost a few hours of screen time and three days of access to the youtube music app.

this was me being conservative with the punishments, and it was really hard to keep him moving forward and coerce him to stop being so damned obstructive.

once we got to the port, or to the main stretch of it, at least, we stopped for a moment outside the outdoors club which was playing some pretty solid beats... music soothes even the savage beast. the rest of the route (which was essentially the way home from there) was smooth sailing, with positive vibes and for the most part good conversation.

...

we got home, showered, and sat down to gd's vegan sushi. it was a good dinner. then we spoke to my mom, who dropped a bombshell - one of our american cousins' kids committed suicide yesterday. i don't have words.

we (myself and gd) tried to explain how disastrous the current situation is for teenagers, with social media and online bullying and AI chatbots assisting kids in offing themselves and malicious anti-west propaganda confusing them and making them ashamed to be normal, decent people.

we're fucked in general, and as family, devastated.

...

after that, it's been a weird evening. i read some more of the light fantastic to mr smear, lost myself in youtube and sudoku for a while, then did some research into online multiplayer game development. now it's almost midnight, though in a couple of hours it'll only have been almost 11pm (i can't believe the democrats in the US are so dumb as to fight trump on cancelling daylight savings time), and i'm going to bed a bit nervous about how i'm not feeling like i'm handling my missed deadline very well.

jackals and mechs

yesterday:

we got up early, with gd having had another (as usual) rough night and being too out of it to join us. i've had a week or two of reasonably good nights - the caffeine trouble on sunday night notwithstanding - and i'm honestly finding it a little disorientating.

i had an amazing idea for a game while drinking my coffee [which i really should have been working on today].

we left at 7.30, walked to the supermarket, and found what we needed for the class picnic on our first try, so we headed straight from there to the park. with most of an hour and a half to spare, we walked instead of taking the bus, so i got in most of my day's steps in by the time we arrived, half an hour early.

firstly, my body didn't take that well and i was tired and sore by the time we arrived.

but secondly, the walk gave us plenty of time to have a real conversation, which was a fun dive into evolution and epigenetics, triggered by the sudden enthusiasm for darwin awards, probably precipitated by dumb ways to die.

before we arrived, we passed a jackal just chilling by the side of the path, minding its own business and unconcerned about ours. after a little while we walked up to some fields to watch the sprinklers and marvel at the architecture of one of the tall buildings nearby, and another (i assume) jackal trotted past and flopped down in the shade of a tree.

as we walked off the large patch of grass we'd been standing on, the sprinklers turned on and we narrowly avoided getting soaked!

there was some awkwardness at the picnic. mr smear's lice friend is sporting a short haircut, which i assume is related. i chatted with some parents i have no relationship with about not much, but at least a few of the others and i had things in common to discuss so it wasn't all bad.

with one of mr smear's friends' parents, i gave a scary recommendation to watch rick & morty so that they know what kinds of talk to have with their son... on the other side, though, i told the dad about what i'm trying to do, and described the game idea i'd come up with earlier, and a bit later he caught me to say that (after giving it some thought) it really was a great idea ^_^

mr smear made himself two rolls, and we snuck a cup from another class table (because none of us had brought any) so we could have a little to drink, we did a round to see school activities (some of the kids were dancing, some were playing really good music), and then we crossed the road to catch a bus home.

i made myself an iced coffee, and then the three of us headed to our new favorite supermarket for the weekend groceries. i was sooooo tired...

[stops to make another coffee, just writing about this is exhausting]

during the remainder of the afternoon, mr smear and i watched three more episodes of evangelion, and then i put quite a lot of time into generating images for a video for my spoken word piece, preacher. preacher is a piece that i have a very powerful memory of from performing it - it was getting a decent response (this was at divan orange sometime in 2013) and i was very proud of it, but about halfway through something special happened: one of the audience members got so caught up in it they literally yelled "YEEEEAHH!!!" and that's one of those magical moments when you feel you've elicited the response you wanted, even if there's delicious irony in the part that got the response being something that the poem is essentially ridiculing.

[goddamn, the lemon pie soya yoghurt is delicious]

we then made kiddush and had dinner while video-chatting with my mom, gd made an amazing sauce for the gnocci and the challah-peño not only came out great, but complimented it really well. in addition to the kiddush wine, i'd had a cherry beer that's 8% alcohol, and i was tipsy. the rest of the evening was basically me briefly passing out on the couch, then getting up to do a half-assed job of wrapping the remaining challah and brushing my teeth and dragging myself into bed.

today:

i slept alright. i began my day with evangelion - honestly, the manga is better than the series, but it's a shame to experience them as an either/or - and then i dived back in to the preacher video. omg that took a lot of work, and after pouring quite a lot of energy into it i gave up trying to improve the audio quality. i used audacity, but really, all the non-professional tools with non-professional experience just suck.

once i was done, mr smear and i watched another three episodes, and now i'm getting this all down and potentially doing something constructive before taking mr smear outside.

apparently this is the last week of summery weather for a while?