stopped

 we joined our upstairs friends for dinner last night (pot luck), and it was a lovely evening. my second drink of the day, and their couch was soooo... couch. we haven't had a couch in weeks, and i was - as the quebecois say - bean grease.

we all came downstairs and crashed hard.

...

i woke up late this morning, after a pretty full night's sleep. then i did random stuff - beginning with a painful attempt to upgrade the comics i made two weeks ago (needs a paid gemini subscription, and i couldn't find any easily-installable plugins for gimp to use AI), and then mr smear and i watched an episode of solo leveling on crunchyroll, and then i passed out for another hour and a half.

in the afternoon - aside from eating a lot - i began trying to set up paybox young for mr smear, which meant me signing up for an additional credit card of my own which i'm not happy about. but after doing the math, i discovered that just in terms of pocket money alone (plus doubling any unused for savings) he's already unwittingly earned enough money that the bank fees are covered by the compound interest, so it's worth it.

only... he has to install a different paybox app, and it can only be installed from the israeli app store, and our family account is still canadian and it's not possible to sign in to a different account on a managed phone.

*sigh*

after much digging - again - i learned that the only way to resolve this problem is to create a new family account from a different email, then migrate everyone on our family account. which isn't a huge problem, because we closed our canadian bank accounts last year so we don't really need to be on the canadian store any more, but it's really annoying because child accounts can only be transferred after a one-week waiting period. because reasons.

so i've done half the migration, and i guess we'll see how things go next week.

mr smear and i took a pleasant walk around our "backyard" park - park hayarkon - and after eventually extricating mr smear from the exercise machines we stumbled across what appeared to be a juggling school, which was quite fun to watch.

then we returned home, and i jumped on a call with protoplasm for our first catch-up in forever, and then it was dinner time, and getting mr smear into bed a half an hour late time, and then shower time, and now... i dunno, i'll probably go to bed soon.

the ex-coworker at the wedding

 my beard's just hit itchy phase. i'm tired. after sending mr smear off to school this morning, and making a tech support call for an issue with the new electric hob, i caught a bus to ace and traded in the thing gd didn't want after she assured me she wanted it for a perfectly-sized laundry basket, two more small trash cans and a welcome mat.

gd suggested that we leave one of the toilet brushes that come free with the bins behind the concrete block for whoever keeps pooping there.

i had just enough time for a coffee before leaving to pick up the car and drive north to the wedding.

there was a lot of traffic. i needed to pee pretty badly for the last twenty minutes.

the place was right next to kfar ha'ro'eh, where the yeshiva i lived in for four and a half months in 1996 is.

the wedding was really nice, the ceremony itself very sweet. while there were two *yecch* unavoidable hugs with people i don't like (the HR woman and one of the team leads that didn't want me on her team), and my relationship with my old boss is freaking weird, it was great seeing everyone and i'm glad i went.

the food was good, too, and i made an effort to drink responsibly (one drink, which i put down halfway through because i wasn't able to get out of a shot), and i'm pretty sure i was fine for the drive home.

i have since snacked too much.

aside from helping gd with the challah-peño, i've done very little of value. i think this is good.

what a day, what a week

 biphasic sleep ftw. i woke up feeling much better than i have in weeks.

the day began with big drama - a couple of weeks ago my mother's aliyah application was again complicated by a new document requirement she's never heard of. she managed to get everything done, and submitted all her documents, and they've just done it again.

i've sent another email to yad l'olim, posted more online, and i'm once again hunting for someone to platform this insane story...

from that drama, to seeing gd off to her blood tests, to a fourth day at work dealing with an overly-complicated data migration.

in addition to generally feeling better about the world (a bit of sleep will do that, i primarily occupied myself with my favorite thing - making things better.i also seem to be doing a decent job of convincing everyone to look at the giant turd we've all inherited as a fascinating adventure in black box land.

it was a long, long day, but with lots of positive stuff. our weekly status with my director went alright. i pitched a wild idea, and two people appreciated their versions of what they thought i was proposing (one of them fully understood), and both options are viable so 🤷‍♂️

i finished up a big piece of work just in time to have a drink with my client team, and then i came home to re-arrange mr smear's bedroom (now he can enjoy the best view in the house), have a great dinner, get mr smear into bed, and now, after writing a letter to a south african jewish publication and catching up on random stuff (windrose looks amazing), and now this post...

i'm just about ready for bed. i almost forgot i'm driving north for a wedding tomorrow (and taking mr smear to his friend in south tel aviv on shabbat) and i was prematurely celebrating my first properly calm weekend in what feels like months.

costume shopping rescue

did i sleep well? not really. but i definitely slept better. i'll take it.

today started with dubstep, setting up gd's sewing station / mr smear's keyboard station. i don't know where the power adapter for the synthesizer is 🤦

i had a positive service experience with the municipality regarding mr smear's school fees, and then an awful one with the car rental service - i still don't know if i was talking to an AI chatbot, or a really dumb human.

work today was difficult, in a different way. an entire workday spent shut up in a phone booth on a really, really boring call that i only occasionally had anything to contribute to. i would say my biggest contributions for the day included writing up a review of my previous explorer on glassdoor, and reading reviews on my current employer, and using AI to dig up some really worrying stuff in the codebase i'm working on.

i mean, in addition to the really worrying stuff that my team was finding along the way.

i feel bad for not joining the team at the farewell lunch for the guy whose last day today was - though my vegan presence would probably have complicated things for them - and i feel bad that the new guy who joined today seeing my help-i'm-trapped-in-a-cage face that i was incapable of taking off my face all day.

there was some stuff that i should have paid more attention to in our never-ending meeting, though, i regret not being present for the random gems.

i left early, and came home to pick up mr smear and head to dizengoff center to look for purim costume stuff. he wants to be harry potter - in addition to our love for the franchise, apparently some of the kids in his class call him that, between his glasses and his hair - and we were disappointed by what we found. i mean, mr smear was disappointed, because we found a proper set of robes but he didn't like that the gryffindor symbol didn't match the movie.

at least we both enjoyed onigiri on the way. and there's a new "retro gaming" store with a very expensive arcade cabinet with three thousand classic games...

he insisted that we go to azrieli to the harry potter pop-up store, so we hopped on a bus (and took a short walk) and arrived to discover that the store's been closed :/

but in any event i'd warned him that i wasn't going to spend stupid amounts of money on a purim costume.

fortunately, the shitty costume pop-up store at the center of the mall had a harry potter set! just a tie and fake round glasses (and a wand), but i took a dracula-style cape and mr smear was happy, so who cares?

(gd cares. she's not the one wearing the costume, but she's upset by the red collar and wants to cut it off. gods help me)

we then took a stupidly packed bus back to dizengoff, getting off a stop early because mr smear was suffering so much.

on a whim, i took him into "the fairy forest" and asked if they had any harry potter merch - they did. the young woman working in the "magic" store who hasn't read or watched any harry potter (!) unlocked a disorganized cabinet and we managed to find a "proper" gryffindor brooch, and we were done!

we went down to the vegan market (i'd intentionally gone with mr smear on a wednesday for this), and mr smear selected a bowl with surprisingly healthy home-cooked foods, along with two giant kubeh. the kubeh really weren't nice - too hard, and not very tasty - but we both tucked into the healthy stuff and enjoyed it immensely, even though it contained a few things mr smear usually despises :P

we did a little home center shopping, took a look at another new "game" store (gambling and claw machines), and then picked up a chocolate from vegantino. again (i picked up an egg last time, which was amazing). long story short: the chocolate is beyond decadent, it's expensive but absolutely worth every agurah, and omg mr smear and i were in dessert heaven and dessert hell at the same time, both trying desperately to make the exquisite experience last as long as possible.

our old landlords sent transfer confirmation of our deposit! ^_^

after all that, it was time to catch a bus home, shower, and get into bed. big data came downstairs to pick up something of his, and informed us that everyone's preparing to take shelter... we prepared our bedroom (shutting the steel window, readying our go-bag and a bottle of water), and then i crashed soon afterwards.

i woke up a couple of hours ago, and after watching some random videos and writing all this down, i think i'm almost ready to go back to bed.

feedback

 alright, let's see what i can remember from today:

i did rest a bit after finally returning to bed, but obviously not enough.

i finished mr smear's pancakes this morning, surprised that they had vegan goat cheese inside. i still feel a little bit betrayed.

mr smear's been begging me to let him use google during his art classes for inspiration. i don't know why it took so long, but i connected all our calendars and set up his schedule so that i could set alerts before and after his art classes accordingly. and evening alarms to go through his browser history with him...

that was significant effort.

once again, i arrived at the office *just* in time for my team's daily. there were issues with yesterday's deployment, and i was briefed on them, and i met a new teammate. one of my client team brought his beautiful two year old giant puppy lab. most of my day was a mix of wasting time trying to get java tooling working for one of the projects, advising one of my teammates (apparently finding the root cause of the issue), tweaking monitoring dashboards, and mentoring a junior in the client team.

then there was the "family day" present. i was very confused when i learned i'd been registered for "fondue" (that doesn't sound vegan), then there was a whole story about whether the dark chocolate was actually vegan or not. and then i had to carry the basket home, which was awkward and heavy (oh, poor me).

i came home early after dealing with a discipline issue with mr smear over the phone - he'd been messing around with homework and gd was getting upset - and spent the next hour gearing up for the call with my client.

the call went surprisingly well. he thanked me for the direct and open feedback, explained the context for the craziness, assured me that we're aligned in where things should be, and informed me that i appear to be having a positive effect on my bulgarian teammates, which i take as high praise.

so that's good, and i feel grateful to be in a position where i have a team (my employer) behind me.

i immediately caught a bus to the mattress store - pausing only to report to the municipality what appeared to be a massive human poop about 50m away that was causing an eye-watering smell all the way to our apartment building - on which there was almost an incident as some big guy with a shit attitude got in someone's face, allegedly for staring at him.

i got to the store just in time, and lay down on the mattress. it seemed less aggressively anti-me, so i confirmed that i was willing to give it a try. the delivery guy arrived, and making arrangements for tomorrow got complicated, but i was pleased when he called me back from my way to the bus stop to ask if he could give me and the mattress a ride home right then and there.

i enthusiastically agreed, and we stopped at a gas station so i could draw the extortion money for the mattress and the delivery, and then we made the switch, and then a worker from the municipality called to inform me that the poop had been taken care of - he sounded traumatized, and sending me photographic evidence that it was cleaned seemed important to him - and mr smear completed his homework with much pride and joy, and then it was shower time [remembers to turn off the boiler because we had cool showers], and then dinner, and reading time / admin time, and a short attempt to rest, and now this, and then who knows?

three for three

 we're in week three of our new apartment, and i'm starting this post in hour three of trying to sleep but tossing and turning in pain and discomfort. my two-week-plus old mattress is causing me suffering, and my lack of sleep is interfering with everything.

and we don't have a couch i can escape to.

...

grocery shopping, electricity shutoff anxiety (fortunately for gd, they started late and finished early)

misrad hapnim, a 10 minute wait (and failed attempts to use their "self-service" machine) for a one minute print job

phone calls there and back: clinic, municipality

client office experience: 100% of the time in a telephone booth, receiving praise from team lead for handling the previous day's deployment like a professional (i thanked her, awkwardly)

miraculously perfect timing for supporting my team between phone calls, because most of the day-long rollout meeting wasn't interesting to me:

receiving a receipt showing that the municipality owes me (so hopefully we'll get our deposit back soon), the representative recommending a pre-approved "forgery" in order to honor a reasonable request from our new landlord, my new mattress is ready for testing but i have to physically get there during their uncomfortable opening hours, the grocery store confirming that they charge differently to what's posted on the website (i'd used a voucher, it got weird)

discussing the past two weeks' organizational weirdness with my religious mentor, and his stunned silence followed by a heart-felt WTF 😂 half an hour writing an email to update my ("my" my) team after scheduling a one-on-one with my client

a bus to my office, pleasantries and small talk, followed by a class on docker that i didn't need to be in

forgery: doc editing and printing issues

on the way home, receiving a rejection response from the local comic publishing house. zero constructive feedback.

arriving home, completing the forgery (same pen and everything), submitting the request

celebrating a letter from yad l'olim with a double-shot of rum and reading its translation to my mother

a delicious dinner, overeating (probably compensating for nothing but healthy snacking all day)

more of the colour of magic at bedtime

trying not to wake myself up before crashing (but it was all for nought regardless)

...

the world is shifting. it's not subtle (even if you're trying to look beyond the hype), and it's fast.

• anthropic’s 7 billionaire founders just pledged 80% of their wealth (because they know what’s coming)
• openclaw: 160,000 developers are building something openai & google can't stop. where do you stand?

plans vs reality

 on the plus side, it looks like the code i delivered was good enough. my bulgarian teammate pushed the updates last night, and by this morning everything was (theoretically) ready for me to step in, merge his code and deal with the fallout.

only i didn't know how to deal with the fallout, so it was mid-afternoon by the time i was able to pull the trigger, feeling mildly confident that i knew what to do if things went south and that there were others on board who could step in if need be.

the intensity of the afternoon was high. overall, it was "an experience". i was only ready to merge the final changes (for the day, in preparation for the big migration starting tomorrow) just before dinner time.

everything seems to have gone well 🤞

...

mr smear decided this morning that he was going to get out of going to school because it was dusty, and he's asthmatic. i mean, he wasn't entirely wrong that he shouldn't have to leave the house in those conditions, but after a couple of arguments we handed him a mask and booted him out, and apparently his day went well.

i mean, his teacher hasn't sent me an update yet.

gd and i caught a cab to the clinic, where for the most part i just sat and waited. once we were done, i bussed home and prepared to go to the office, although i caught myself in time (unlike last week) and decided to start setting up my home office instead.

so here i am, in a corner, with a window behind my monitor (not much of a view, but it's the principle of the thing).

over lunch, i finally took care of a couple of bills, and i thought i was done when our previous landlords reminded me that i hadn't taken care of the municipality bill yet. d'oh!

...

one step at a time. one foot in front of the other.

heavy dust

it's the end of the weekend, and i'm feeling totally drained. my brain's pretty much offline, and i'm praying that i'll get some decent sleep tonight.

we had a massive dust storm today, so bad we put masking tape over the wonky balcony door. the only time anyone went outside was to take out recycling or trash.

today was, for the most part, about constructing two wardrobes. i started the first one by myself, mainly because i didn't feel comfortable asking big data for help before i knew what was required, and then i kinda got into the mode of doing it. i completed most of the build with a little help from mr smear, invited big data (and his son) to help, and the rest of the build and the next one went relatively fast.

with minor breaks, for vegan cookies his son made, and for gd to angrily wash the floor again after mr smear forgot to take his shoes off when coming into the house (in his defense, he's not used to not wearing shoes in this apartment).

gd and i had an argument over punishing mr smear for sneaking upstairs to play roblox (when neither of the kids was supposed to be on screens), and i compromised. i hope the two day punishment doesn't detract from the lesson 🤞

i have to say that in addition to making my wife happy and enabling us to move forward with the unpacking, it's remarkable how much space there seems to be in this apartment now that our stuff's in here. it felt much smaller before.

...

my legs are hurting in a way they haven't for a while. is my body regretting not maintaining last week's insane level of physical activity?

i'm a bit nervous about this coming week. financially (closing our accounts and getting our deposit for the old apartment back), health-wise (gd's going to the doctor tomorrow), and work-wise (i've got to figure out how to manage this weirdness, and i'm praying that the code i delivered was actually good enough).

...

i don't know if it'll help, but i've put the three sets of imagine (the amazing youtube channel that was deleted) AI covers up for torrenting. i feel like i've become the keeper of a sacred artifact from a parallel universe, like something out of the movie yesterday:

imagine - the battles.torrent

imagine - boogie sabbath.torrent

imagine - synthknot.torrent

hot water

 omg i'm tired. and i just realized, while on a call with my mom, that mr smear had been in the shower for a VERY long time and i now have to wait for more water to heat up so that i don't have to have another cool shower 😡

...

it was a very long day. aside from doing some weekend shopping with gd, and building the last of the chests of drawers (with the help of big data and his younger son), i walked mr smear to his class picnic at the bird park. although he arrived straight into his usual antisocial routine, he soon chilled because one of his - and i quote, along with his airquotes - "clique" was there. he even made his own pita bread on a tava over the fire. we hadn't warned them we were coming, and the other allergic kid wasn't there, so the kids were covered with / covered everything with labaneh and nutella, so we had to be as careful as if he was with his previous class...

i tried to record a jackal that was just chilling as we passed, but my phone decided i wanted a photo instead and i captured exactly nothing :/

mr smear's been a bit rude this evening, but mostly alright. gd's really not feeling well... hopefully we won't have any shabbat emergencies 🤞

discomfort zones

 yesterday morning started off bitter, then got a little better (gd and mr smear had had a talk about being kinder to me). mr smear telling me i needed to stop clinging to bad feelings stung a little, but he wasn't wrong.

over breakfast, i read the veldt to him, which was an interesting experience. he was firmly on the side of the parents, and railing against the spoiled children, but there was just a moment when i was talking about how it maps to screen time and addiction that he got defensive - then i finished my thought that his entire generation was suffering from this stuff, as well as all the adults, and he was back on board :P

a little after he went to school, i completed the base of the chest of drawers and gd and i left for misrad hapnim. this time it was open, and we got numbers and sat down to wait, but immediately gd started feeling terrible and we soon had to leave and come home.

that was a very frustrating and disappointing experience, and also a complete waste of time.

i had breakfast and went to work, arriving in time for a lengthy discussion with my bulgarian teammates as i described my redesign while one of them diagramed it, and once we were done they were totally on my side - "this is how it should have been made in the first place" 💪

what followed was a few hours jumping between reviewing the results of the previous day's rollout - discovering later that i'd been instructed to look at an intermediate file, which explained the conflicting results - and reviewing large quantities of code (ultimately deferring to the AI review bots because i didn't have bandwidth and we were in a hurry), getting buy-in for the redesign, and then working on the redesign itself.

that last part was mostly - hours - me fighting with java tooling and an AI that helped in some ways, but for the most part insisted on "fixing" the problems by either breaking things, or injecting obvious security risks into the code 🤦‍♂️

...

on the one hand, i really want to impress my client and represent my employer in a way that makes them look good. on the other, my client is behaving in a disturbing way and it's uncomfortable for me. i'm working with technology that i want to be learning to work with, and it's an interesting technical challenge, but i'm working with a team whose only member with tribal knowledge is leaving in a week or two and whose other members were nowhere to be found during a week of a massive, highly sensitive rollout in the middle of which they handed everything over to a contractor without context and without any real guidance.

WTAF.

...

by the time i was ready to deliver my part of the solution to my teammate, in the hopes that it wasn't hot garbage because i hadn't had any way to properly test it, i had just enough time to go home, spend twenty minutes with my family, unblock a toilet, and head to the ozen bar for a surprisingly intimate (~50 people) show of yohay sponder, alone because gd was still feeling too ill to come with and mr smear's too young.

the show was a lot of fun. very awkward, both because of the crowd and because he was testing new material, but some of it was hilarious and a fair amount of things that amused me when he said them made me laugh later as i was on my way home.

when he got to the end and invited questions from the audience, things were a bit too silent for a bit too long, so i took a chance and asked a question that i thought he might find funny. i caught him off-guard, and was completely blown away that he didn't get the reference for the question (from his own set), and while he responded with a pretty clever comeback (after asking me why i had to bring the show down) i remain with the hope that he has a revelatory moment later where he suddenly gets it 🤣

i came home just in time to say good night to mr smear (who'd gone to bed much later than he should have), ate a lot (the leftovers from dinner were great, and yo egg on toast was a jolly good idea), and then had a cool shower (that was disappointing), and pretty soon after went to bed.

i guess i slept alright, relatively, at least.

the morning began with a stupidly shit vibe (mr smear "intentionally" doing something wrong instead of just accepting a minor correction, gd pissed off at a person rather than a situation - although she came around eventually), and i completed yesterday's chest of drawers so i can now being on the last one before moving on to the wardrobes. i need new tools, which is another source of frustration.

anyway, i've had some relaxed time, and i'm shocked to discover that i'm down to 76kg, and i have a ton of stuff to do this morning...