~3000 + 78 years old

our celebratory dinner was in order, with gd a little jealous of our desserts even though she usually doesn't participate, and the insanely good halva is naturally gluten-free anyway.

we learned this morning that the internet advises not to stop eating gluten until you have a diagnosis, to avoid a false negative. holy shit. so we've just had a talk, and agreed that *if* it matters to the medical establishment that she has a diagnosis on her record then she should put herself through it, and if not, then there's no point in getting scanned in the first place.

...

after dinner, and before leaving the house, mr smear turned our apartment into a dance floor with the bee gees' you should be dancing (followed by some kool & the gang), and then joined me an my mother for a bus ride to the museum to see what was happening. what was happening there - on the evening of a national day of celebration - was a gathering of sadness, all the woke lefties who are so bitterly opposed to our current government that they can't spare a moment to be grateful to be here and alive.

we quickly moved on from there, through throngs of tel aviv revelers going from party to party, to habima, where the concert's music was good, but not very upbeat. we walked about, marveled at the decorations and art installations, and continued walking until we got to a bus stop to come home.

the bus ride was very sweet, the bus driver and a bunch of guys behind us were all in great spirits, and we arrived home quickly and with more than 12000 steps on our watches.

after getting mr smear into bed and showering myself, i slayed the spire (i lie - the spire slayed me) for a while, then dragged myself to bed.

...

i didn't sleep particularly well, and was woken by my poor child at 6.10am (his groans indicated that he wasn't feeling well), and 8am was when i gave up trying to get back to sleep. i had coffee with my mom and mr smear while gd stayed in a bit longer, read a bit more of the day everything changed (which hits really hard), and am now relaxing while thinking about what we're going to do today.

...

from our saddest day to our happiest day, but both very, very strange days this year. to our fallen heroes, our terror victims, and to our persian counterparts: may this war bring us victory, and more than just independence: freedom from tyranny.

chag sameach, am yisrael chai 🇮🇱

frustration + anxiety

 it's been a very frustrating day. gd decided that mr smear was too sick to go to school - he really wasn't - so that gave me a bit of extra time to take care of some adulting admin. unfortunately, not only did i need that extra time, but i had a number of highly aggravating encounters and that really set a tone for the day.

then i dove into work. work sucked. four hours of highly frustrating work, and i'm confident using AI has ultimately made this whole project (so far) take considerably longer than it should have. i feel like i'm wading through a pool of raw sewage, being led by a broken compass that keeps swinging in a different direction any time i get close to an exit.

i've also been hungry / snacking all day, and my stomach's been unhappy.

while i'm going through whatever agitation i'm going through, gd's been having a really hard time. apparently a bit of wine last night has reset any of the healing that avoiding gluten was doing, and to add to that her shoulder's locked up. she's (understandably) pissed off now that my mother forgot some of her meds back in cape town that she really needs right now.

...

by the time 2pm rolled around, i decided i was done for the day. it's been an absolutely gorgeous day, so i took a walk with my mom and mr smear through the park to get some exercise before turning back, picking up coffee (decaf for me) and a malt beer for mr smear at our favorite dog-friendly coffee spot, then passed a supermarket and did some shopping on the way home.

and then took another short walk to the 24/7 for the stuff we couldn't find at the supermarket.

after mr smear and i had some chocolate weetabix (not bad for a "boring" additional iron source), i lay on the couch and finally started reading the day everything changed. then i got up, antsy as all hell, to post this.

it's independence day (shortly), i've no idea what we're doing tonight, and i've no idea what we're doing tomorrow. it's a very confusing time. the ceasefire is supposed to be over tomorrow night, but i'm more nervous about it being cut short than i've been since it started, and i haven't trusted it in the slightest.

sleep journal entry

 during two separate meetings yesterday i began to feel myself nodding off, one in my home office and one while sitting outside. definitely not lack-of-oxygen related, but also not the most severe cases.

otherwise, i was pretty comfortable when i climbed into bed last night, and my sleep was mostly uninterrupted.

mr smear's not feeling good, so he's staying home today. it's a half-day working from home because my client company's israeli office is closed for yom hazikaron, which seems a bit weird to me.

breaking points

 i accompanied mr smear to school this morning, and on my way back accompanied him through a video-call hunt through his locker and classroom to demonstrate that he's legitimately lost his math equipment 🤦‍♂️

the first part of the day can be summarized by the half a minute of me, exasperated, yelling furious and impotently at the sky trying and failing to navigate my mother's iphone while trying to set up her esim. what a fucking nightmare UX, steve jobs must be spinning in his grave.

i went to the office today; there were two friendly dogs, and i think i'm getting paranoid because the moment i petted either of them i developed a crawling sensation across my skin. all my skin :/

aside from a team lunch with the boss - good talk, delicious lunch, i only had half the meal which was still too much food - my day was extremely frustrating as i continued to get hit with code ownership problems.

i took a break to pick up mr smear from school, and joined another employer meeting (it's poor timing to say the least) about adding more work hours to my week to get AWS certified...

eventually mr smear and i got home, he took my mom to the comics library while i was brought to boil by the sheer idiocy of my client company's current state. to the point where i wrote an "angry letter" to my client and my manager in which i essentially let rip, though i did pull my punches (professionally) and tried to be constructive.

the response was... not exactly comforting, but not negative. and the thing that pushed me to breaking point - a team gatekeeping its contact channel by demanding anyone with questions do a small quiz first - did provide a couple of helpful responses to my auto-rejected queries.

it was a long afternoon and evening, with very little progress. at least i was provided with something positive when i called my mom to find out how they were and learned that the two of them were just sitting in the comics library and reading quietly together :)

it's yom hazikaron, so we watched the masa ceremony on the big screen after dinner, which was moving as usual. in spite of us fighting with mr smear throughout to get him showered and his teeth brushed and him into bed.

i can't believe it's so late already. i'm going to try going to sleep.

the nights are getting warmer.

sleep diary / politically asleep

 i've been using the consensus sleep diary for the past couple of days, and i've just gotten stuck on the fact that you can review your sleep stats dashboard, but not the comments you made - unless you're adept with the developer tools. so, for myself, i'm copying my comments here:

i'm not sure how long before 6.30am i woke up, i feel like it was a long time though. yesterday was my first time using both iron and magnesium supplements and i didn't suffer from the usual discomfort, just a bit of restlessness

on multiple occasions throughout the night i giggled at trump's absurd and acerbic humor.

...

then, first thing this morning, i woke up to respond to an instagram thread with a highly intelligent, educated man whose political extremism has been distressing me for years:

him: A blockade is an act of war. That's why during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis the US referred to it as a quarantine. Both the action, its intricacies and the specific wording were discussed and debated thoroughly. Oh well. Clip from Thirteen Days. I like it.

me: did you know that the irgc was blockading the straits up until a few days ago ? why didn't you post this then?

him: Of course I knew. I don't know of any historical analog, especially one with a dramatic Hollywood adaptation that includes the US principals discussing the blockade. Is there?

me: interesting - the timing of your post suggests that when the americans do it it's nefarious

him: nefarious means wicked or villainous. If you consider war as that, then yes. I don't. I think it's an act of war. Which requires approval from Congress.

me: ah, so it's okay that americans are using force to protect american interests, it's just an issue with protocol? cool, cool

...

[i'm] just perpetually curious how someone so intelligent and educated always seems to be pushing an anti-west agenda 🤷

him: Showing the lunacy and abhorrence that is the Trump administration is anti-West? Color me anti-West then.

me: if you can only see lunacy and abhorrence, then yes, you're anti-west. a pity.

him: I see much more. Terror. Abuse. Fascism. Sadness. Democratic decline. Mental decline, not to say dementia. Fear. Spinelessness. Systemic failure. At a glance.

...

what are you seeing that I don't? (I forgot grift and open corruption on an unprecedented scale, just came to mind as well)

me: a whole different side to the internet, and history. it begins before the end of the cold war, with the kgb inventing "active measures", and evolves into decades of unholy alliance between the russians, chinese, qataris and iranians to destabilize the west and create a massive, well-funded disinformation army that infiltrates western institutions and makes the media (traditional and social) push out propaganda at a terrifying scale. and that all rides on the back of social media algorithms that are financially incentivized to raise engagement by any means necessary, generating mass psychosis on all sides of the political spectrum as we learn that "folie à deux" scales. i recommend trying to balance out your media diet, the other side isn't all lies like you've been led to believe. also talking to your fellow israelis without assuming that everyone with a different understanding is either brainwashed or a bad actor (that's a general statement, i'm not accusing you of anything - it's possible you just don't happen to have people with different opinions in your circles).

smooth landing

 today's top stories: gd is rapidly evolving into gfd (gluten-free dragon), and my mother landed safely in tel aviv, and the mongoose is now a father of two!

i wouldn't say i slept well last night, but i did sleep for the most part and, after an initial struggle at alarm time, i was relatively rested and functional. so that was good.

after dropping mr smear off at school, i came home to take care of a bunch of stuff, including grocery shopping with gd* and scheduling a meeting regarding the impact investing from the other day. i'm a bit disappointed that my cousin hasn't responded :/

* an expensive, exploratory shopping for gluten-free products. it turns out that a few days without gluten have had a dramatic impact on her health, not just the debilitating stomach issues she's been suffering from the past few months. we've got to schedule a scan to confirm whether it's celiac or not, but at this point it's clear that it's meaningful. and meaningfully ironic that we've both been complaining about and laughing at non-celiac gluten-free fanatics for years.

i decided it made more sense to work from home until the last minute, so i did. a different coworker gave me a different direction, which i continued working on on the train to the airport, and while waiting for my mother to get through customs. later in the afternoon, we had a conversation that led me to understand that every moment i've spent on this aspect of the project was a complete waste of time as the whole thing's essentially deprecated...

it was an enormous relief to see the update that my mom's plane had landed, and obviously great to see her. we hopped on a train back to tel aviv, on the way booking a car to get the baggage home. something was misconfigured in the car which made it make an awful high-pitched alarm the entire ride home and back (which i dutifully - and angrily - reported), and we took a light rail from the train station to pick up mr smear who'd been hanging with his friend outside the school.

the bus ride back took forever...

after getting my mom settled, eating a late lunch, and getting mr smear onto some homework, i did enough work to figure out that i was wasting my time before heading out with my mom to pick up a few things. we ended up walking rather a lot - we picked up brussels sprouts, gin & tonic, and oat milk (neither of us can drink "barista" versions) - as well as sitting over a coffee (and tea), and then caught a bus back just in time for dinner.

full family dinner was really nice :)

we got the mattress inflated and mr smear into bed (eventually), handled two sets of groceries that arrived quite late, laughed at a bunch of different news items (most loudly over rogan losing it behind trump), and i'm now getting myself ready for bed.

downside up

 we were all relieved that mr smear made the sunset deadline yesterday!

it's day two of gd not consuming any gluten, and she's already starting to feel a bit better. we tried to make gluten free challah yesterday, it came out a bit like soggy rusks and i don't think we'll be doing that again. certainly not the same way.

we watched the second macgyver episode, which was a bit camp but mr smear was clearly into the experience :)

i don't recall too much after dinner last night, though it was definitely a late night.

what i do recall - because i'm now keeping a proper log - is that i went to bed just after midnight, took a long time to fall asleep, and then woke up about an hour later for about five hours of restlessness and discomfort.

i slept like shit.

in spite of that, i was kind of functional this morning. i started the day making an important firefly gif and sleep-journaling, then spent most of the morning playing slay the spire 2.

the afternoon involved finishing the first part (the colour of magic part) of the graphic novel, and sort-of napping for half an hour. it also involved finishing terminator 2, which was a much better experience due to the sound upgrade even though the projector  quality is garbage. after that, i sat down to learn how to make comics with kindle create, documenting each and every step along the way.

[stops to witness a large mosquito being zapped and going up in flames in the zapper behind me. and be dismayed to see what looks like a crispy flea.]

it's fun to see the guided view experience take shape, though!

between working on that and dinner, mr smear and i did some boxing training for the first time in weeks. not only should we be doing it consistently anyway, but today was another dust-stormy indoors-only day... i'm actually quite impressed with how well my post-workout stretching went.

we started watching dead poets society over dinner, not speaking to my mom because she was on a flight to ethiopia (she's staying there overnight), and tomorrow after dropping mr smear at school i'm going to go set myself up to work at the airport so i'll be there when she lands.

...

please lord let me sleep tonight 🙏

dust mouth

 firstly, omg i didn't realize it was my turn on crosswalk duty at the school this morning 🤦‍♂️

so that's a bit shit.

also a bit shit is our financial situation this month...

i dragged myself out of bed this morning, and immediately completed my first sleep journal entry. i found it a bit confusing at first, not just because of whether 12am and 12pm are midnight and noon or vice versa, but also because it's weird documenting the night's sleep and only afterwards documenting any naps from the rest of the day before the night's sleep. either way, it amuses me that the first night of sleep journaling and i actually slept pretty well.

it was a warm morning, first day of shorts and vests. i dropped mr smear off at school, returned home for an early breakfast, and then accompanied gd to the clinic. she got an appointment for our doctor, and so until then we burned our time waiting in line at the pharmacist. we picked up a coffee at "our" bakery, and then sat down with the doctor for a very unpleasant session.

gd was not happy, because the doctor doesn't agree with her assessment of something she's dealing with and so refused to prescribe medication for it. after much drama, gd's managed to get our old doctor in cape town to prescribe it in a way that my mother can pick it up... it's all very weird.

after that, we visited the nurses office to find out what happened to a sample gd delivered over a month ago, and learned that she'd never provided a "permission" (which nobody had told her about) so somebody had collected the sample and... made it disappear? so we'll be complaining about that on sunday, when she brings in a new sample.

jesus.

we returned home to drop off the groceries and then head out to the mall to pick up gd's new prescription specs, at which point we realized that we'd forgotten about mr smear and that school had come out already. i told him to meet us at the mall, which he dutifully did. he arrived just as gd's eyes were being re-tested because her very expensive specs were completely useless - she literally couldn't see anything - and entered the lego store which i chatted with my big sister.

during our chat, i learned that someone in a group i'm in is doing something related to the impact work i've been thinking a lot harder about since wednesday. i've just sent the guy an email, hopefully it'll lead to something.

after gd came out, we went downstairs and had a delicious hummus lunch, then gd failed to pick up another pharmacy prescription (part of the doctor drama) and we headed home, stepping outside into a massive, choking dust storm.

i read a little bit of the the colour of magic graphic novel while listening to tool before crashing into a semi-conscious nap for an hour, then made myself a coffee, used the massage tool on my neck, and then settled down at my computer to try and do something productive, even though my brain's offline, while i listen to mr smear humming to himself and appearing to make enough progress on his homework that he might actually be done before the sunset deadline.

i don't know if i'm going to get anything productive done.

hopping from one foot to the other

 i think i slept alright last night, or at least better than the preceding nights. i woke up mid-dream, so i needed a few minutes to shake it off, and the day began with some mixed emotions over riddles and mr smear's breakfast habits.

i accompanied mr smear to school - i'd still rather be foolish than sorry (better silly than sorry?) - and continued on to the sleep clinic at the hospital. my appointment started on time at 7.30, and i walked out of there an hour later feeling pretty confident that the doctor had performed a thorough investigation into every relevant aspect of my potential narcolepsy (and potential rls, and possible anemia) and i felt very well understood.

i left with a recommendation to take iron supplements, keep a sleep journal, and exercise more.

by the time i closed in on the clinic, it was too close to my daily so i picked up a cup of coffee from "our" bakery, and tried to find a quiet spot for my meeting. unfortunately, something was blocking traffic and i ended up hiding out in a random building's parking muting constantly because multiple directions of cars were all honking furiously.

and, of course, our usual ten-minute meeting took half an hour.

from there i crossed the road and entered the clinic, where i was informed that i could only make the appointment by phone, so i dutifully informed the lady that i'd spent half an hour on the phone yesterday to be told it was an in-person only thing. so she said that it was probably an in-hospital thing only and not an in-clinic thing only, but that in any event the referring doctor had already requested permission and she had a response in hand: denied.

floored, i read the response and learned that they won't let gd do the recommended examination unless she's done a course of iron supplements too. i booked her a repeat visit to the same doctor, and the earliest appointment i could get was for july.

i left the clinic quite demoralized.

bus routes from the clinic are lacking, so i fast-walked home and arrived five minutes late for my quarterly roadmap meeting with my mentor. it was interesting, and while i was disappointed with myself for not achieving my goals, he was disappointed with me for being unnecessarily hard on myself considering what i've been through these past few months.

so that was encouraging, i guess.

i scarfed down a quick break, anxious that i hadn't yet called the plumber and clueless as to when would be an appropriate time for him to come over, when he called and asked me to take a video for him to assess. a few minutes later, his brother called to say he was on the way. i couldn't have planned the timing any better!

within two minutes the smell trap was installed, which was completely anti-climactic. the idea that there wasn't a smell trap installed before was and is blowing my mind!

gd, who had been struggling all morning* somehow had the presence of mind to ask him to check our hot-water cylinder, and we did, and it looks alright. then he left, and was just out of the building when gd had another bright idea, and we called him back to check under the kitchen sink.

* she suffered so much this morning that she was finally willing to try avoiding gluten to see if it would help.

he obliged. within two minutes, he'd found the source of the leak, and it wasn't the sink. we realized that there was a long gap at the back of the countertop, and water was splashing down the back of the cabinet 🤦‍♂️

(apparently, he'd warned me about this when we moved in. i don't recall this at all.)

between him and gd, and the special silicon we'd already bought to fix up the shower, the gap was sealed quickly and cleanly and i was able to grab my bag and head to the office.

what a day, so far!

[plugs in and turns on the fan for the first time this summer]

i got some work done, and then had to head out (again) to pick mr smear up from school. i managed to get there much faster than before by walking to the light rail, and that made it clear to me that the way back needed to be the same after losing a ridiculous amount of time to the bus ride yesterday. i got there early enough to catch up on instagram messages, and he came out pretty quickly for once, and i took him straight back to the office with me.

my desk-neighbor's dog was in the office. on the one hand? awesome! mr smear and him got along great ^_^

on the other? i've been feeling things (or imagining feeling things) since we got in, and i'm super-paranoid about fleas since the other night.

gods help me.

i barely had five minutes to work before everyone had to join a meeting about formalizing AI management, and mr smear came in with me and sat quietly in the corner reading. after an hour we adjourned to the main kitchen for happy hour, and there was delicious vegan ice cream! so that went well (mr smear has a penchant for coming to my work for good happy hours!).

i grabbed a beer and got some work done while mr smear put together a cool animation using flipaclip, then realized how late it had become and we packed up and walked home. walking across the bridge over the train tracks i pointed out an oncoming train, and the train driver tooted the horn and waved to mr smear, which was pretty cool! or, it was a pretty cool sentiment, at least, because mr smear didn't notice at all 🤣

i put in some more work while mr smear did or pretended to do his homework - i don't know if it's going to be complete by the weekend, and his weekend screen time depends on it - and then (finally) forced myself to file some of the stacks of papers that have been piling up.

over dinner, we watched the pilot macgyver episode, which was thoroughly enjoyed by all ^_^

(except for the kissing bits, which we all felt were inappropriate. but i kept dropping recently-learned trivia that made it even better)

it's been a pretty peaceful evening, and i think i'm going to be ready for bed soon. just one more cup of tea.

...

trendslop and mediocrity.