the disappointment

 as tired as i was last night, i dived back in to a refactor for one of my side projects that i'd begun yesterday morning (that's where my token budget went) and finally published the new package around 1.30am.

i slept alright, if not enough.

just after mr smear left the apartment this morning, i received a message from his best friend's mother. during yesterday's incident, he attacked him as well. the gentlest kid you can imagine. during our conversation, i learned more about how messed up my child is than from anyone else, and we're fucking distraught.

not according to plan

 so! i have an explanation for yesterday evening, last night, and this morning. also, today, and still now to a degree.

i didn't mention that when i took mr smear out yesterday, my belly was doing a bit of aching. i didn't really think much on it, but in retrospect that was the warning sign. then last night's feeling horrible, and this morning still feeling horrible, primarily with a low-intensity headache and an unusual dizziness.

i was still in post-rollerblade "recovery" mode, and i grabbed a petit beurre from the jar on my way to my desk. i'd had a few yesterday; they don't always have them, but every now and again i help myself to a couple when they do. but yesterday, and today, it tasted a bit different... richer... and while i managed to put that aside yesterday, the way i was feeling today made me suddenly paranoid. enough to go back and look again, more carefully, and realize that unlike the standard petit beurre in israel (osem), this was a different brand. so i looked up the brand's ingredients.

dairy.

in the "vegan"-labelled cookie jar, looking almost identical to the osem one which is legitimately vegan.

so i had my answer - the tale of last night, in its entirety, was me eating a handful of dairy biscuits yesterday afternoon, and then feeling extremely heavy effects all through the night and most of the morning. then there was an hour or so's reprieve, before this morning's biscuit kicked in and set off a pounding headache.

a coworker gave me a couple of headache tablets, which eventually took the edge off but never quite managed to lift the fog.

...

with that all happening, i had some important project work to do today. it took me a while to get into it properly - i had to deal with a few bureaucratic distractions, and i wasn't exactly operating at peak performance - and by the time i got started i was fortunate to realize that some else had overwritten my work yesterday before i triggered a mistake i might not have been able to take back.

i got in touch, and coached him through merge my changes into his (it's quite frustrating to have to guide experienced, intelligent developers through basic git manipulations because they refuse to use graph visualizations), and eventually we managed to get everything in sync.

but by that stage, i'd already been dragged into an investigation for an incident that had begun the night before and hadn't rung any alarm bells. suddenly, me the contractor who's working on a high-pressured over-deadline damage control project, had to take charge of the situation and lead the team through hours of resolution and troubleshooting.

so much for wednesday.

it looks like we did it in the end, and relatively well (i argued for combining mitigation with some elementary protections for the next set of surprises), and while monitoring the fixes not only fixed up the dashboards, but exported them to a versioned repo and demonstrated the advantage (apparently convincingly) to the others.

...

i left the office really late, stopped at the shops to pick up a couple of things, including soy milk for gd. you see, we found out months ago that she's probably celiac, and had some amazing success with her going gluten-free, but recently some of the symptoms have been creeping back. turns out, she's been drinking oat milk this whole time, thinking that it was gluten-free 🙄

...

dinner was excellent - gd made another large round of sushi and we ate the lot - and we watched some more of cool runnings. the evening was feeling like it was going great, so it was a rather undigestible surprise when the mother of one of mr smear's "friends" called to discuss him getting violent with her boy.

gd had suspected something had happened when he'd come home this afternoon, and he'd brushed her off, and it took a lot for us to extract even a little bit of the story from him. when i called the mother back to talk about it, it turned out that there was more to the story, but mr smear swears blind that that was everything. gd and i are extremely concerned, and we're both having trouble dealing with this.

...

oh, yeah - and this morning's AI usage, which was really basic, blew through more than half of my monthly budget. well, i've been complaining about the AI providers putting on the squeeze for a while now...

so all-in-all it's been a bit of a shit day, with only the slightest sprinkling of glitter over the incident resolution and the few minutes where i got to enjoy dinner with my family before everything fell apart for real.

i'm - fucking - tired.

sleep journal entry

i was somewhat uncomfortable and restless all night, possibly a combination of feeling faint from the rollerblading and still having some caffeine in me.

i have stuff to do before heading to work, so of course, here i am doing a complete overhaul of my encryption tool in response to some security alerts... it's in *these* moments that i'm grateful for the AI assist :P

revolving

 i ended up getting to bed pretty late, which i largely attribute to slay the spire 2.

mr smear's early alarm woke me up, and i had difficulty getting back to sleep. i woke up feeling zombified.

my day began with stranger in a strange land. i really wasn't into it at the beginning, and some of it feels really dated, but i pushed through that to discover that it's by design - as in it's at least somewhat satirical - and that considering the decade it was published in it shows such remarkable cleverness, both in its imagination and in its incredible ability to rewrite human experience from an outsider's point of view. it's also got a really dark feel to it. slow, ponderous, heavy, like watching a film through tv snow.

i had to force myself to put the book down and start my day.

adulting is stressful, especially unnecessary adulting. if i'm paying for additional medical insurance, i shouldn't have to work harder than them to get back money that's supposedly guaranteed.

[my previous ingrowing toenail from ages back is hurting again, suddenly]

i got to work, and found myself blocked waiting for the data team. during the four hours or so that i waited for them to get back to me, i continued to suffer in an infinite AI failure loop, which i tried to utilize as a test for my skill evolution. but when one of the data guys finally got around to me, he didn't agree with my approach and demoralization struck when i realized i might have gone through all that suffering for nothing (i mean, aside from the skill improvement).

...

at this point i received a call from the paybox retention team, who wanted to know why i ditched them and what they could do to make things right. i stood on the balcony, angrily describing their lies and how they've burned any trust i might have had in them, and by the time he heard me out he miserably acknowledged that he couldn't really make things right. then i hung up and went back inside, wondering if the people working near the balcony door had heard me... because i know that they heard me talking to mr smear earlier about why i'm not getting him a spotify subscription, as somebody came up and closed the door and i was quite embarrassed...

...

as we worked through the problem, though, we ended up hitting a wall that could only be resolved with the approach i'd been taking. so that was a relief. and then we ran into another wall, and the two of us split up to investigate alternate options.

i learned something today about connecting databricks to github, i figured out an undocumented way to use both APIs in way they didn't design for and it felt VERY good to see it actually work! it took a while to explain to the data guy how it worked, at which point he agreed that it's clearly the simplest and most correct solution for our use case, and that felt especially good after thursday's talks when i was so out of my depth that i could barely understand their questions, let alone answer them.

...

i came home in fantastic spirits. mr smear argued with me about discussing summer day camp because he already knew what he wanted, at least until he saw what the make camp is offering. we were sad to hear that he and his friend who's going aren't getting along so well - apparently his friend isn't friending much better than before they made up after their fight...

i slugged a 4th coffee in preparation for the night blade, then mr smear and i put on our rollerblades and went to the park and back. firstly, he's getting the hang of tying his laces intellectually, though his fingers are struggling. secondly, it was back to square one, he was very nervous at first, but we got there eventually and the way back was fine.

we came back to find gd with a sharp knife (always scary, and she was right nervous as well) and a delicious sushi dinner, which we ended by dipping unripe apricots into wasabi soy sauce with astoundingly positive results 🤯

i said goodnight to mr smear, then headed out to join the rollerblading group. just before leaving the apartment my neck twinged, and it caused me trouble the whole time i was out. i was already sore halfway to the meetup point, which was kinda sad, and i had to split halfway because i'd been feeling faint for a while.

most of my ride was fun, though it would have been more fun if i hadn't let myself get sucked into a really ugly political argument.

i came home almost in pieces, watched a crazy update from farzad about the coming robotic revolution while eating a second dinner, showered, and now i'm just trying to settle before climbing into bed.

mental

i just stopped working (11pm), after 30-50 minutes of going around in circles with the AI, in continuation of what the rest of the past two workdays have all been about.

...

for all my vibe-coding friends: a rare moment of AI honesty. this was after a good half hour trying to upgrade my agentic skills so that it could get to the solution without me doing any manual edits of the code.

babysitting AI agents is exhausting.

...

 what a fucking day. i went to the office, chatting with dod about an ambitious new project of his (and trading some wild family stories). the next few hours were me chasing after code reviews and, of course, discovering after they'd been merged that their respective CI pipelines had been broken for a long time and nobody else noticed or cared.

i also spent about an hour doing one of the teams a favor by cleaning up the permissions in their repo, which entailed removing a whole lot of names of people who were retrenched last year. leaving some projects with exactly zero people receiving alerts or able to manually intervene. the irony, that they thought they'd be saving themselves money by firing all those poor people when what they really needed to do was invest in training them better.

between the lack of tea varieties and decaf coffee, and the appalling state of the bathrooms, and the fact that i had an employer team meeting in the afternoon, i packed up around lunchtime and came home to eat. after lunch, i realized that i still hadn't gotten any response from the water company's whatsapp, so i gave them a call.

what i discovered was as follows: there *was* a personal warning sent to us, because we used more water these past couple of months than the previous tenants used last year. even the support agent acknowledged that that's obviously irrelevant and not an indication of a leak. there was *also* a warning sent to each and every apartment in the building, warning us about higher usage because big data refilled the shared reservoir last week. but there's nothing in the email to suggest that it's referring to the shared property.

assholes.

the meeting was long and difficult to get through - precisely the kind of experience that makes me think i might be suffering from some kind of narcolepsy. it's boredom, for sure. i've developed a sensitivity to meetings, and to boring meetings in particular.

while i was having my brain melted, gd discovered where i'd temporarily put some of our pictures a while ago. with her toenail. now that she's had both of her big toenails fucked up, i'm grateful that it's not the one that's still recovering from surgery but my gods, she really lost it. it's was almost her "broken shoelace", after an insane combination of hard things she's (and we've) been going through for the last very long time :(

work-wise, today was long hours, making progress but slowly and painfully. dinner was a nice break - we started watching cool runnings, and i decided that if there ever was an israeli bobsled team it would need to be called slalom aleichem, and then i found out that this year there was an israeli bobsled team, and they gave themselves the amazing name of shul runnings, but then they totally humiliated us by trying to cheat and getting disqualified 😭

after saying good night to my mom, my sister called for a quick sync (she and her son are experiencing moving troubles), and then it was time to put mr smear to bed, and then... AI sisyphus time.

it's late, i think i need to turn my brain off now.

rolling two rocks uphill simultaneously

after a night of being wired and getting very little sleep, yesterday was a bit rough. the first thing i did, after mr smear went to school and i'd already done a little more AI harness work, was head across the road to the supermarket to buy some more containers.

i'm still feeling stupid for having bought one that was clearly broken, and removing the stickers before i noticed.

but the walk itself was nice. the weather was pleasant, and there was a certain... tel avivi something... in the air.

i did another hour or so on the harness, then finally - and unwillingly - sat down to work. i spent the rest of the day doing the dual sisyphean tasks of babysitting PR review / fix loops, each pass trying to update my agentic skills to avoid the next, and each time failing more spectacularly than before. my first omgihavetotakeabreak was spent washing the containers, the second vacuuming the entire apartment*, and the end of the day i was so antsy that i did something i haven't done in years - i got dressed and went for a long walk.

* i asked gd if she knew why i was vacuuming the apartment. "to help me?" she innocently responded. "hell, no!"

i walked up to the park, crossed the river, and stopped to try and get a photo of a really weird, interesting-looking bird that might have been a white-throated kingfisher. then i passed a pond, and noticed a crow and an egyptian goose parked on the side, with another crow sitting on a sign behind them. i walked up a little distance away to join them, as we all watched the pond in the bright sun on its way to setting behind the trees. moments later, what appears to have been a little egret landed right between us, and we all shared a lovely moment together.

i got home feeling a bit better, but still frazzled. we finished watching spaceballs over dinner, mr smear had been really cool all day (he did his chores without complaining, even though it took him a long time), and bedtime was pretty smooth.

gd and i coordinated and i took a photo of the water meter at 9.45pm, and we stopped using any water until i got up at 5.45am to take another photo, and i'm relieved to see that we don't have a leak. unfortunately, though, it made the night a little more stressed than it needed to be and i couldn't get back to sleep after waking up, so 🤷‍♂️

i began my day with a coffee and stranger in a strange land on our balcony, and it's a beautiful day. mr smear gave star birds a try after making the case that he'd gotten up at 6am and taken care of all the things he needed to, so the one-hour-after-brushing-teeth rule applied, and it seems like he's enjoying it.

i've paid our rent, and i've typed all this up, and now i'm going to sit down for breakfast before heading off to pretend to be a professional adult.

sleep journal entry

i eventually went to bed around 1am, but most of the night i was restless for no identifiable reason.

i did get some very constructive AI harness time in, though.

firsts

 this morning got better. mr smear woke up, we had a really good chat (starting with my telling him about my dream, then discussing industrialization's effect on work and sleep hours, then rhetoric and gamification), and then he sat down to draw up a birthday card for my mom.

that ended up taking a while, and a few retries, but we ended up with something nice in the end.

i spent a couple of hours working on my AI harness, and then we all began the pest-control mission on the other half of the kitchen. this took a *long* time, and a lot of it was tense and unpleasant, but we got through it in the end, and pretty much everything is put away safely, minus a couple of things that we need to buy containers for tomorrow.

mr smear negotiated for an hour of minecraft before we headed out for rollerblading training day.

on our way out: big emotions. mr smear's ten, and he's never had to learn to tie shoelaces before. jesus fuck. anyway, we got through it, and he kind of got the idea, and i'm sure he'll get better at it quickly.

the way to the park - which is only a few blocks from our apartment - took a long time, but it consisted of consistent, incremental improvements and i was already pleased from the get-go as the first skill he's begun to grok has been the t-stop. by the time we got to the park, he'd already developed a sensitivity to different brick textures, and once we hit the bicycle path to the ice lolly shack he was already skating, albeit slowly, pretty confidently.

the way back, in spite of one backward upset, was smooth and quick, and then he blew my mind by just walking up the steps without holding on to anything, just like i tried to show him last week 🤯

and the entire time was fun, positive, and entertaining. i'm so damned proud of him, and feeling so damned grateful!

he showered quickly, and then it was dinner time. gd had had a rough day physically, so she skipped dinner to lie down and we watched his youtube playlist, which resulted in me just picking up a copy of star birds. i hope it meets his expectations, but either way i'm happy to send a little money kurzgesagt's way.

i was literally falling asleep before we called my mom, and as soon as i'd said good night to mr smear i hit the bed. and then got up fifteen minutes later, unable to sleep. tomorrow's a big day, so i wonder if i'm going to get anything productive done after posting this, or just de-brain myself quietly...

wake up

 i just woke up both furious and ashamed and sad. i had a series of three nightmares: the first, i couldn't get on an international flight because i was unable to fill out a form through an ever-enlarging cluster of technological failures. the second i don't quite recall, but it also had to do with systems failing. the third, i was riding a tandem bike with mr smear and he refused to get out of the road when it got dangerous, and defiantly kept both of us in the lane until i braked hard and dragged him and the bike off to the sidewalk. i was so mad and feeling so incapable of getting through to him without violence that i slapped him so hard that i broke his glasses.

it also doesn't help that i woke up much earlier to go to the toilet, and ended up doing exactly what i keep trying to avoid - doomscrolling. learning that the UN has continued their filthy campaign against us by adding israel to he sexual violence list when we're the victims of it (see the silenced no more report), and then learning that there's another global round of layoffs happening and that israel is likely to be particularly badly affected because of the strengthening of the shekel.

gods help us.

his first (bought) wheels

 ye gods, it's been a long and busy day. i woke up tired as usual this morning - though i never napped, even though it was a friday - and i read some more of stranger in a strange land. look, it gets off on the wrong foot, but it becomes apparent (apparently) at some point that the author's writing is about a fictional society with extreme attitudes, as opposed to him simply sharing his opinions. and while it starts off a bit simple, his postmodern understanding and its delivery mechanism become far more interesting.

i spent an hour or so doing another agentic skills evolution (cleaning up the leftovers from yesterday's romp in AI frustration park), finally managed to give away mr smear's old jiujitsu gi's, then let myself be dragged out for a shopping run with gd. it was a fairly successful run, although by the time we got to the last shop i was already over it and feeling decidedly claustrophobic in a store with heavy friday morning traffic and very narrow aisles.

we came home, gd rushed something to eat, and then we bussed to the mall. mr smear was nervous (panicky) about meeting us there, and then ended up in the bizarre situation of being blocked "by nuns" (we think they were muslim women) at his stop and unable to get off, and then laughed at by a shitty bus driver who refused to open the doors again so he had to get off at the next stop and find his way back.

anyway, he made it eventually and in one piece, and by that stage gd and i had had a coffee and enjoyed quite a while watching a guy with his tiny puppy unable to take more than a few steps at a time before being crowded by women who simply couldn't resist the adorableness (not to worry, we encountered them later and couldn't resist either 🤣), and found the two stores we needed.

we began with the sports store, and although it wasn't a simple process, we managed to find mr smear a decent pair of rollerblades and a set of pads that should last him a year or two and the price was considerably less than i'd been worried about.

then we hit the shoe store, and for the first time ever gd had a very smooth process finding and fitting sandals that he didn't fight about. of course, they turned out to cost considerably more than the rollerblades 🤦‍♂️

in any event, great success!

we came home and i made him take his brake off first thing (no arguments, and it was awesome helping him doing it with his own two allen keys). we had a delicious leftover meal, with mr smear and i discovering a) that chrain works really well with shuwarma and rice, and b) that mr smear likes creme soda just as much as i do (i suddenly realized he'd never tasted any before).

things were calm and quiet for a while, i played some slay the spire 2 and watched some stuff, and read some articles, and then it was time for all of us to sort out the kitchen, which involved a hell of a lot of dishwasher unloading and loading, and washing the big stuff, and then washing All The Containers that i've purchased over the past few days. some of it was fine, but mr smear wasn't cooperating very well (his idea of helping and ours...) and at some point i properly lost my temper.

for a while after that, i was angry with him, and embarrassed for losing my temper, and frustrated that i'd yelled so loudly that i hurt my throat :/

anyway, things calmed down eventually and we got through it, and the challah-peño is in the oven and smells great even though it was hard to work with, and mr smear and i have showered, and i've had a generous shot of rum, and i think the world is kind of okay right now.

reset: for better and for worse

 i didn't sleep well last night, but that's psychologically speaking. gd and i are feeling horrible about her toe, and praying that it doesn't cause complications down the line. it's demoralizing for us both.

i was enthusiastically writing up my article this morning when i overheard mr smear's phone call to gd - he'd been playing with a stray cat (a well-known one) at school, and got scratched :(

i arrived at the office just in time for my team daily, but once again it was only two of us. i hadn't yet updated my manager, so i sent him a message to avoid surprising him in our evening one-on-one.

most of the day was heavily invested in struggling to get the AI to help me plan the data migration work, and then put together an actual good prompt for doing it. it was tough. it was ridiculous. i went around in circles for ages on even the clearest prompts and requirements.

it was about ten minutes before my one-on-one that i was able to push what i believe are the right code changes to origin, and then i nervously joined the meeting.

i explained my position, my sentiments regarding the project itself, and how i've essentially just spent two days completely resetting the project to what it should have been from the very beginning: a migration of close-to-identical data to a new data store, wiring it up, and being able to verify that the customer experience hasn't changed significantly. and that we could ask questions about whether the customer experience is ideal at a later stage.

i was relieved to receive encouraging feedback; he's happy with my approach, he's been on top of things in general, and it's clear to him that i'm not doing anything that doesn't make sense considering the awful and ever devolving constraints. we then reopened a previous conversation we had about ownership, and he was intrigued by some of my suggestions, and the meeting ended on such a positive note that, in spite of gd's toe bringing us down, we're celebrating the end of the week with g&t and wine.