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.

oh, it's THAT kind of night

i just managed to step on gd's recovering toe. FFS

the malicious compliance genie

 today was rough. i started writing an article inspired by it, but then the evening fell apart, and by the time we all reset i was too tired and depressed.

today was a long and difficult day battling with AI in an effort to get it to explain the current state of the system i'm working with. and the more i dug, the weirder things got. i feel completely out of my depth, and i'm under immense time pressure, and it's not fun. and most of the effort was in getting the AI to follow my instructions without doing its own thing.

i was ready to leave the office more than an hour before i was finally able to walk out the door. i came home, dropped off my bag, took the recycling down, then left again to try and get my hair cut. i managed to get my hair cut, and it's not bad but it's much shorter than gd's happy with... so i had to buy her a bottle of wine to make up for it :P

gd had her wine, i had a beer, and dinner was nice. after dinner we chatted with my mom, and then things got tense because gd's struggling with the infestation (which she's already effectively stopped, but she's freaking out about the final clean). and along with that, the usual struggle to get mr smear to just shower and get ready for bed without drama. and then he got out of the shower and showed us that he's got some new issue with a couple of his toenails (looks like his shoes might be too small) which is yet another thing we didn't need to deal with. and then, while trying to calm down and get ready for bed, gd needed to discuss something political which i didn't really want to talk about, but i also didn't want her to stew alone about.

so now i've played (and been defeated in) a map of slay the spire 2 with the regent, and i've written this, and i've finished my tea, and i'm hoping that i'll not only sleep tonight, but also not wake up feeling like a haven't.

i can't believe tomorrow's thursday. i have a one-on-one with my manager, i guess it's going to be an interesting day.

unfocusing

 today was... awkward. not bad, but a little weird.

first, we all got out of bed half an hour late - gd had disabled her alarm because she's been relying on mine, i'd disabled my alarm for last week's jewish holidays and forgotten to reactivate it, but the last couple of days was woken by a different alarm that i subsequently disabled yesterday.

i know i got some stuff done before i left for work, but it didn't feel like it. i called to wish my brother a happy birthday, which he's spending trying to organize an inverter because his broke down and johannesburg doesn't have much electricity 🤷‍♂️

my work day began with a message from the product guy to say that what the report i put together shows is unpalatable. during and after my team daily, i spent some time putting together advice for my team, and over the course of the day shared it with a bunch of people in an attempt to raise general awareness. everything else (that wasn't a bunch of random distractions*) was preparing for the big meeting, the meeting itself, and then reporting the results of the meeting to various people. but the results of the meeting are, essentially, do some more research, and if i find that the real source is what we think it should be then i have a plan of action...

* including a kickoff to my employer's hackathon, and a video was shown where i recognized a woman i studied with in my first degree. she appears to have worked for my employer for many years, but left within the last few, and hasn't updated her linkedin profile. very strange.

mr smear got off the bus at the wrong stop, so he arrived home later than i did. very sweetly, he thought that he was saving money by only taking a single bus home, so i explained (again) that a chain of buses and light rails is one trip. i hope he internalizes that.

after he did a little music practice and helped gd in the kitchen (gd had a big day today, she went to the dentist entirely by herself for the first time in ages), we did an mma session. he complained about his post-rollerblading soreness (ow! my tailbone!) but with only minor coercion his was a reasonably good re-entry after more than a month (which was also after a break). the post-training stretching in particular did me some good.

we showered, ate a delicious gluten-free pesto spaghetti while watching more infinity train, spoke to my mom, got mr smear into bed, and ended his evening on the sour note of me asking him multiple times to stop making the evening end on a sour note before having to yell at him.

that sucks.

anyway, it was more performative than emotional and the rest of the evening's been pretty relaxing. i'm a bit nervous about tomorrow's work, but i'm absolutely done for the day and i'm considering going to bed early tonight.

...

oh, yes:

recalculating

 today was a DAY. i managed to get some annoying admin taken care of after mr smear left for school, and sort out an impending price hike from my mobile carrier, and try to help prepare gd for her day ahead with the cigarette bugs.

just before i left the apartment, i pulled the trigger on my PR, knowing that my bulgarian support team was on holiday and praying it wouldn't break anything.

i was still extremely anxious on my way to work, but i got in touch with my mentor and managed - through a bit of blathering - to explain the situation. he, positive as usual, assured me that i'm doing great. he asked if i've verbally abused anyone in the office, or physically abused anyone in the office, and said that as long as neither of those things have happened and that i'm doing my best to operate as professionally as possible, i can stop worrying about my misjudgment hurting my employer's reputation (and therefore my standing with my employer). and that besides, everyone must be fully aware that i'm doing damage control on a system that has been left in utter chaos due to bad management... just like everyone else's.

so that was really comforting, and although i still have leftover anxiety, it's worlds' less than it was.

i came in to find my deployment successful, which was another relief.

then i was asked by one of my client team's how long my contract is for, to which i replied, somewhat evasively, that i don't really know. on the one hand, i'm learning a hell of a lot of what i'm supposed to be learning. and it's a great place to hone my craft with (somewhat) less risk. on the other hand, it's a really toxic situation. although apparently on par for the course, these days.

i discussed yesterday's achievement of disabling all of the garbage that was unknowingly being injected into each and every prompt with a couple of people, two of them heavy, experienced users of AI. not only was i pleasantly surprised by their finding my personal skill-sharing strategy intriguing, but they'd never known about the extra weight either and one of them asked me if i wouldn't mind giving a short talk to the group about it 😅

i spent some time crafting a message asking for help with the new data pipelines, got called in to consult on a language identification problem and was surprised to find myself effectively running the meeting, and then i left the office to return home for lunch, stopping by the supermarket on the way home and finding precisely the kinds of plastic containers i was hoping to pick up for gd, who was apparently up to her elbows in cigarette beetles.

i believe i have a handle on their life cycle, now. it looks like if we manage to, erm, contain the present situation, we should be able to put a proper stop to the next potential generation. unfortunately, gd's had to throw out an enormous amount of very expensive food, which is thoroughly distressing.

i think i may have mentioned that money's a little tight right now...

after lunch, i returned to the office and began redesigning the monitoring dashboard. i would spend most of the next four hours troubleshooting the results, half of that time refining my agents' troubleshooting and self-improvement skills. while the improvements after yesterday's cleanup were palpable, by the final stages i just wanted to tell the AI "don't be an asshole" even though i knew that that probably wouldn't be constructive :/

i also finally delivered that report that had been causing me so much trouble - once the product guy gave me the green light this morning, it took about six hours to run...

i received an unusually helpful answer to my plea for help, from a couple of guys i've worked alongside before. one of them was in the office and introduced me to the two people who can actually help me, who very luckily are also in our office. and now i know that the work i've been planning to do - AI-guided, of course - has been entirely wrong 🤢

once my dashboard was looking good, i made my way home, dropping off my bag and picking up my child (essentially rescuing him from the trauma of experiencing gd freaking out over the nuisance beetles all afternoon) and heading to the container store. we bought a bunch of stuff - it's a little more expensive than the supermarket, and not quite as high quality, but it was a bunch of different shapes that we needed - carried everything back home and then continued on to the supermarket again, picking up a bunch more containers there.

we got home in time for a take-out dinner (gd was in no position or mood to cook), watched casual geographic and learned about gay giraffes, which was awkward.

we chatted with my mom, but mr smear brought the vibe down considerably when he became uncooperative at shower time. then, to make matters worse, he decided he needed to toilet. for almost an hour. it was very late by the time he finally had showered and brushed his teeth and gotten in to bed. i don't have any idea where we're supposed to get the patience from.

it's been a day. i think i'm probably going to go to bed soon. i'm expecting to sleep a bit better, he said out loud and then instantly regretted it.

sleep journal entry

 heavy anxiety before bed - about 45 minutes before i managed to fall asleep - and after waking up (i got up an hour early to go to the toilet, and couldn't get back to sleep after). i was physically okay, though. so there's that.

discouraged

 the more i worked today, the more despairing i felt. i'm extremely anxious and overwhelmed, i feel like i'm drowning. every layer of the onion i peel shows me that the onion was far larger and deeper than i thought; or, at least, each wall that i break down thinking it's the last one turns out to have two more standing right behind it.

it doesn't help me personally that i understand that what this company has done to itself is dangerously stupid: most of the companies in our industry, it seems, have shot themselves in the foot by attempting to drop headcount and fill the gaps with AI. even if we were using the latest models this would be a stretch, but with the model pricing being raised across the board (the drug dealer's sample period is over) and the israeli shekel having strengthened significantly against the dollar (making actual developers more expensive to the company), it's a race to the bottom and everyone's losing.

the only positive thing i managed to do - i'm not holding my breath about the disappointing reports i put together after five additional hours of investigation, or the plans for tomorrow so that i can ask for help - was to disable and migrate all of the thousands of lines of irrelevant and contradictory repository rules and skills that i didn't realize were polluting each and every AI context i've been working with up until now :/

...

gd and i were a little late to the school meeting this morning, because of course we hit ridiculous rush hour traffic and of course we decided to get off and switch to the light rail just as we got through the worst of it. we had a good, productive hour with the councillor and new homeroom teacher, though, some of it was funny and some deeply concerning. the homeroom teacher did a little snooping right after, though, and called me to clarify that the incidents were not quite as serious as they'd been made out to be.

that was an enormous relief.

gd stopped at azrieli by herself on the way home, which was the first time she's felt safe enough (from a health perspective) to do so in many months. i came home and dived into work.

i had a really rough afternoon, and i don't know if my regularly running back-and-forth to the bathroom was the result of something i ate, or the anxiety that was slowly building up.

either way, my first real "break" was after mr smear came home, and we had a very long (an hour or so) family meeting during which we discussed All The Things that had come up during the school meeting. it was mostly positive, but the big stuff is him needing to learn to avoid alienating his peers, and find more ways to connect with them.

oh, yes - mr smear came home sporting a weird rash on his hand. gd and i suspect that it might be from the borrowed wrist protectors, but it didn't seem to be getting any worse so now we think he must have brushed past a bush or something that he had an allergic reaction to.

because we were super-bored, and not stressed about anything, we discovered that in addition to everything else we have an infestation of cigarette beetles - or something very similar :/

by the time we had dinner i didn't have much of an appetite, and neither did gd, though we managed to eat anyway. after a couple of great episodes of infinity train (we're into season 2, now), we chatted with my mom for a while, fortunately discussing her birthday present and not making the mistake of getting her something she doesn't want.

...

we also discussed my cousin who was scammed a while back, and taken for literally everything he had. not only has he just gone from wealthy to destitute, and not only is he seemingly making every effort to not get back on his feet again, but gd made a good point today and now we're all really concerned that he's essentially dragging his son down with him, because nobody else is going to put him up.

it's just awful.

...

i honestly don't know how i'm going to sleep tonight, but i have to. i'm so nervous about all the steps i need to take in the morning, and i feel just horrible about everything.

sleep journal entry

 hip trouble again last night. i think i slept most of the hours i was in bed, though i've still woken up really tired.

the great peeling has begun.

...

i wrote this a while ago, and got distracted by a whole bunch of admin. we have to leave in ten minutes to meet with the school team and i haven't done any actual work yet 🤮

good vibes

 today was really cool. i completed a previous slay the spire 2 run (ascension 1 with the silent and some insane shiv combos), and mr smear and i both spent some time reading on the beanbags.

gd gave hair a try while i set up blink for her so that we can put mr smear's money somewhere constructive. there literally aren't any viable banking options for us, and that's messed up.

our upstairs friends let us borrow their rollerblades and pads again, so i mr smear accompanied me to the recycling station and back. it was tough going - the ones he borrowed today fit better than yesterday, but they're damaged and caused him more pain - but learned an entirely new thing is hard, and he handled it very well.

we've agreed to go shopping on friday.

after showering, and then after dinner, i spent most of the evening working on my AI harness and honing my agent skills. dinner was late, and simple, and we spoke to both my mom and my sister.

between prompts, i watched an interview with angine de poitrine and then their live performance again. dammit, these guys are aweomse, and i can't help but wonder how insane it must have been for people to see them live for the first time not knowing what they were going to witness.

right, bedtime. not only is tomorrow going to be a high-pressure day work-wise, but we have a meeting with the school staff and no idea what to expect.

one drama at a time would be nice.