bad vibes

after a very long, very intense day at work (i've been coopted in something that doesn't make any sense), the building furniture thing combined with gd's attitude that anything of mine she doesn't care for is "garbage" led to a massive fight this evening. and then, because that wasn't enough, i got a message from mr smear's teacher that he fucked up today. twice.

so not only has it been a miserable, angry, unpleasant evening, topped with a miserable, angry, unpleasant bedtime for mr smear, but i'm not begrudgingly building furniture between keeping an eye on a production rollout*.

* it seems to be going alright now, hopefully that's it for the night. i shouldn't be doing this, though, babysitting a rollout that doesn't belong to me.

...

gd and i did get to misrad hapnim this morning, finally, but it was closed to the public.

nagging (feelings)

 today was... calmer? i mean, gd and i were not vibing this morning, she was upset with me for asking her to do two things outside (that she had to do, but we ended up deferring the misrad hapnim visit), and i was upset with her for harassing me about building furniture.

the weird typo is on gemini☝️

...

i killed another silverfish last night, which led to me doing a lot of research. we're currently serving their favorite meals - books and clothing sandwiched in cardboard boxes :/

so i began my day building a malm desk of drawers and one of its drawers, then off to work i went.

work was weird. firstly, i arrived late for a meeting that had been extended, and i must have joined just after the others signed off, so i was basically alone in a zoom meeting for a while.

then i resumed my investigation, quickly determining that there was a chain of services doing a lot of very silly things. i explained my findings to my client team, who asked me to verify them with my teammate who was also on the case.

"i have good news, and i have bad news."

"we're a bit overwhelmed right now, i only have bandwidth for the good news."

"the good news is that my teammate and i came to the same conclusions. that's also the bad news."

my salad lunch was boring, after i'd been frustrating getting it by crowds of inefficient people (including one guy who was trying to evenly shake canned tuna over the top of his salad).

i excitedly shared my new comic and process with my client team, then made myself a coffee, and then did relatively little (reviewing PRs, mainly) until i realized that i didn't have much to do, but also that i had a small window to pay the mattress store a visit.

the guy tried to convince me that what i'm missing for a good night's sleep is coffee with turmeric and honey before bed. i tried a bunch of mattresses, but had a difficult time determining the harder from the softer ones, and eventually he put in an order for what we have, but customized with something called "super soft".

it took a while to get out of there - he kept chaining his (interesting) stories together, even after i explained that i really needed to go - and i bussed home in time to put together another drawer. mr smear, who had irritatingly refused to take the bus home from the library, arrived just in time for us to grab a cab to gd's dentist appointment.

we waited a long time. we played, roughhoused, and napped in the waiting room. mr smear farted while a woman on the next couch was tried to rest, and she almost immediately got up to get some fresher air 🤣

the secretary who helped us was very kind and helpful, and she explained things clearly, and gd has a treatment plan that seems to be on a reasonable timeline.

we caught the bus home, had a delicious* dinner from jars and bowls, and a long chat with my mom, and a pretty smooth but late bedtime ritual.

* mostly delicious, the mexican bean stew was a little too heavy on the liquid smoke and i overcompensated with hot sauces

i have no idea how tonight's going to go. hopefully alright.

overload

 well, i made a thing: short-fuse at the ball (originally titled "prosthetic cinderella"). it's far from perfect (and required a bit of interference with gimp), but i'm nonetheless very pleased with the result ^_^

i did it more as an experiment with notebooklm than anything else, but i'm very happy to be able to share the story in a fun way!

...

i'm still feeling overwhelmed with the move, there's still a fair amount of admin to get through, and at the same time i'm fighting with social security about unemployment, and dealing with a painfully incompatible mattress, and the temporary fix for the balcony door really does seem to be rather temporary, and gd and i have to go to the ministry of the interior in person while she's really struggling with stomach issues, and i have to take care of the authorization for mr smear's next allergy test, and our apartment is still in a state of chaos and gd's pressuring me (gently?) to build the furniture so she can put things away...

mr smear apologized again to his friend today and apparently things are fine. i hope they are. i hope he's learned from this, though i'm very pleased that he knew to try and fix things without us having to intervene... but he's a bit concerned that he's turning into his parents :P

work today was bizarre. it's become very clear that nobody knows what's going on when it comes to architecture and data flows, but everything i've been told has been said to me with authority. i explained to my client team's lead that it seems to be better if i just don't take anyone's word for anything and do my own research...

halfway through the day i took the train (and walked) to my employer's office, where i was presented with a cute lego representation of myself. i spent half an hour first talking to a lawyer about my mother's aliyah case (he blew my mind asking if she was a messianic jew, and suggesting that from the sounds of things the jewish agency might actually be playing games), and then having an argument with someone from social security (apparently, i was about to be paid more than i thought for january and she stopped it, which is good because it could have caused me real trouble).

then we settled in for a workshop creating an AI agent, which was quite interesting in spite of my fatigue, and a birthday celebration for which i got my own vegan cinnamon cake and vegan cream.

[goddammit, the neighbors' super cute dog is on their balcony barking non-stop]

i didn't have time to go to the mattress store, so i returned home for dinner. after reading some more of the colour of magic to mr smear, and "completing" the comic, and posting this... i'm just about ready to try sleeping again. hopefully i'll manage tonight.

the night is long and full of tossing and turning

when you're so tired you can't get up, but your bed is actively hurting you and you no longer have a couch to escape to.

via GIPHY

it's been a long night, so far. i don't know what to do.

the sadness

 mr smear had a difficult time this evening, and he cries a bit while telling me about it, but i was confused because none of what he said sounded so bad... but it came out at bedtime that he'd lost his temper at his best friend, in a situation where he knew that it was unjustified and hurt their relationship.

he apologized, but he's not sure that the apology was enough :(

it also came out that they didn't take public transport home - they gave up and his friend's dad had given him a ride home...

post-birthday different-kind-of-special

 dinner last night was nice - gd's first home-cooked meal in about a week. a little slower to cook with the borrowed plates, but it didn't bother me or mr smear.

the rest of the evening was all about getting into bed as quickly as possible, the shower was amazing, and i crashed pretty much immediately after.

in the middle of the night, i awoke from a sequence of nightmares: nightmares of being trapped trying to get home from work in a cavernous escape room (that was part of the office on a bond-like villain's mountain fortress), then of living at the docks and catching mr smear skipping school to hide amongst cargo loading equipment to play on his phone.

so that was me getting up at 3.45am with my nervous system on fire, raging at the afterimage of my dream son fucking up his imaginary life.

i did get back to sleep, a bit, but then i spent most of the rest of my time until alarm o'clock uncomfortable, and ultimately woke up with a stiff neck and the dizziness that often accompanies it. i mean, i might just be sick - gd's feeling similar today, in addition to the stuff that's been messing with her for months already - but still.

i think she might have been right on friday, that i shouldn't have let the mattress guy convince me to give it another week or two.

at least gd's happy with her side of the bed.

over coffee, i started putting together an article about producing comics with AI, but then i spent a large chunk of the morning sorting out address changes. and struggling - not for the first time - with the fact that we have money in our bank account but are unable to use our credit cards because we can't pay them off whenever we want.

not right now, but i think we need to consider finding ourselves a new bank.

on the way to the office i called social security, who informed me that the unemployment office hadn't updated them as they're reported. at the office, i remembered that nobody goes to the office on sundays, and according to the cleaning staff there was some kind of power outage as well. on my way back from the office i called the unemployment office, who after a very long time informed me that social security was lying. so then i called social security again, and the agent told me that the unemployment office was lying, and then i got really upset. eventually i got through to a manager, who "helped" me by directing me to the website to request that they look into it 🤦‍♂️

all the while in pain and dizzy.

i spent the rest of the day - until now - fixing the first iteration of my changes and learning how to test them. and eating and snacking a lot; i guess after yesterday's exercise (on top of the past week's) my body really needed more calories.

aside from pain and dizziness, my only real distractions were the electric hob installation (hooray!) and getting mr smear and his friend to come home on his way to the comic library to return the books (today was the deadline), and on their way from here i managed to catch them heading to bat yam by mistake in time for them to turn around.

parenting in 2026 is hard. navigating screen time, inappropriate content, lack of exposure to nature…

… but holy shit, being able to see where my kid is on a map, and know that i need to intervene so that he doesn’t end up in a different city by accident? priceless.

it's dark, the two of them should be making their way back soon, god knows how i'm going to get his friend home 🤷‍♂️

...

i have to say, slowly but surely our new home's starting to make sense. and it's huge compared to our last one, or at least it's much, much longer, because i've discovered over the past day or two that it's more sensible to call gd on whatsapp than to try to yell to each other, or get up from whatever i'm doing :P

the birthday special

 omg i am PAINFULLY tired. as in, i don't feel so good tired.

...

mr smear woke us up to delivery the birthday card this morning, and from there we progressed to making the following (using a combination of gemini and gimp, because the AI guardrails for images are frustrating and the generated images are mostly garbage anyway):

gd loved it, and mr smear and i had a positive educational experience.

afterwards, i spent some more time trying to get notebooklm to make the cinderella reboot comics i was working on last week. i managed to get better results, but still a lot of weirdness. i suspect that i'm going to need to copy/paste across different attempts to get it to the point where i feel comfortable posting it.

i then proceeded to built some small units (i'd promised gd that for her birthday i'd put together as much furniture as i could), while mr smear got his first screen time at home in ages (he used his half hour on oxygen not included), and then suddenly it was noon and time to take mr smear to south tel aviv.

his friend's mother did warn me that it was very far. i didn't think it was such a big deal, but in addition to it very much being a big deal it was also unseasonably warm and very sunny with very little shade. i really hope this doesn't trigger an outbreak for mr smear :)

anyway, he handled the ride better than ever before, was rewarded with his favorite drink (sprite) without even begging for it, and after riding through proper poverty and squalor (and chickens in the streets) i dropped him off in good spirits.

i took a more direct path home, straight through a very busy predominantly sudanese populated area, and the vibe was very different from the other direction...

i only stopped to pick up a desperately-needed coffee on the way home, then arrived home to begrudgingly make good on my promise and begin putting together the first of four chests of drawers.

actually, i guess i must have done something else before then, but i can't remembered anything else and i can't believe it took me quite that long... anyway, i'd constructed the body and two drawers (out of four) before i realized it was 6pm already and i needed to pick up mr smear.

there was no way i was going to ride that distance again, certainly not when it was so late and i was so thoroughly pooped, so i tried to catch a bus (or buses) and was caught off guard by the fact that they weren't operating yet. so i called a taxi. the driver was cool, and i was very grateful when he said "no problem" to picking up mr smear and his bike, as opposed to me walking mr smear and his bike to hunt for a bus stop on the wrong side of the tracks.

it was a story getting the bike into the trunk.

i almost died when mr smear excitedly started listing the contents of his friend's home in front of the taxi driver, and there was nothing i could say to stop him that wouldn't have been insulting. but his friend's family is a true gamer family, with multiple systems online, and he's now extremely excited about their tekken 3 arcade cabinet.

i can't tell you how pleased i am that he's begging me for tekken 3, which is still my favorite of the franchise by far, nor how sad i am that it's so difficult to get hold of.

mr smear has got the chorus from ticks and leeches stuck in his head, he's been singing it on a loop.

i completed the chest of drawers, mr smear helped me get all the cardboard boxes downstairs, and now it's dinner time.

shabbos

 the first week in the new apartment is over. it's peaceful, the air-conditioner is on, gd's on the balcony smoking a joint, watching the highway traffic, mr smear's in bed (he told gd that since we've moved, he's excited to go to bed - i suspect it's the combination of his door not closing and him enjoying the night-light view of bright skyscrapers), we've all eaten well (or, possibly, too well) and the apartment's feeling a step closer to home.

gd managed to cook us dinner on the borrowed electric plates, we lit candles and made kiddush and mr smear joined me for benching (he started falling asleep at the end, i guess he totally caught the vibe) before showering, and i just got out the shower feeling pretty darned good and just about ready for bed.

...

it was a busy morning, lots of stuff about aliyah bureaucracy. and old trance friend (one of the doof crew) who's a lawyer called me to give me some advice (gd was bothered by the fact that he barely let me finish a sentence, but i got useful information out of it), and i had a chat with one of my cousins who's trying to help my mom out as much as she can and might be able to connect me to someone who can do or say something.

...

gd came with me to the ace hardware store, first stopping by the pharmacy. we subsequently had to return to the pharmacy because she didn't realize that the protein in the "protein water" she'd picked up was dairy 🤦‍♂️

we didn't find the main thing we were looking for - insulation tape - but we taxied home with a full kit comprising of "babushka" bins (they had toilet brushes inside), a complex-to-assemble stand for fruits and vegetables, a drying rack for dishes that i made sure she wanted but she now doesn't seem to want, and a couple of small things. then i hopped on a bus heading to south tel aviv, but we were on the highway when half of us realized we weren't going the right way.

"i didn't have the energy to yell at you all to get off the bus," the bus driver said when i asked him why he hadn't told us he was taking a detour. [there was a bad bus accident this morning]

after being encouraged to stick with my current mattress for another week or two, i ended up walking quite a ways around the area and happened to find a hardware store with insulation tape!

i grabbed a coffee, caught a bus to dizengoff center, looked around a bit for cheap air tags for mr smear's new key, gave up, took a bus home, and then we went shopping.

our local supermarket is completely shit. our 24/7 is great, but expensive :/

we came home, rested, coffee'd up, and i began building one of gd's kitchen ikea units as our upstairs friends arrived, and gave some much needed help. aside from putting together furniture, and our kids playing nicely for a while (in both apartments), we had a pleasant afternoon of adult discussions until eventually it was time for our respective dinners.

i built another small kitchen unit by myself - taking breaks to help mr smear put together a birthday card for gd - and that was all i wrote.

fiero

this move has possibly been the most prolonged intense physical and mental exertion i’ve endured since officer’s course.

[redacted: a photo of me in full fiero mode holding a toilet seat over my head ("why's dad making a war cry?!") taken by gd, who had to be convinced to come back and support me after being thoroughly disturbed by what i was putting my body through. as well as by me accidentally lifting the entire bowl slightly off the floor in a moment of lost composure.]

i just won a tough jiujitsu match against two manky old toilet seat screws that were jammed right up into the holes by an incredibly sadistic or incompetent worker and i may need a few days to recover.

...

gods i'm tired. and sore. and parched. [goes to get some water]

i couldn't sleep last night, i spent most of the night "eating movies" [translated from the hebrew] about the damage, and the costs to fix the damage, and a million things that all need to be taken care of.

by 4am i was out of bed and on a ladder, slowly and methodically dusting all the surfaces of the kitchen. and discovering and cleaning chunks of revolting sticky grime on the top of the cupboards. it took over two hours to get everything clean enough for gd to be able to get mr smear ready for school.

then i dove in to a whole lot of admin, but at the same time posted about the ridiculous new obstacle that's been set in front of my mom's aliyah application. i've spent a lot of the day receiving advice and commiseration from strangers on the internet.

speaking of internet, we have fibre in our apartment now. gd oversaw the installation, and as long as the bomb shelter's door isn't closed we have decent wifi access from all corners. we should probably find a solution for when the door's closed, though.

apparently, begging for the technician to install the hob to be scheduled earlier worked, and he's coming on sunday instead of monday. in the meanwhile, our friends upstairs have loaned us a couple of small plates.

...

the window guy said he'd be here around 10-11am, so i marked my calendar for 2-4pm. he arrived just after 1.30pm.

he kind of fixed the broken cupboard. i'm not satisfied, but the doors are working. i didn't hide the damage from the landlord, but i didn't highlight it either, and he seems okay with it.

he fixed some of the bomb shelter window, but not the sealing strip which was gd's primary concern, and which he somehow convinced her hasn't been necessary since the 90s.

he totally fixed the broken, rotting board under the kitchen sink.

he fixed the kitchen window and balcony door, so they can both now be opened and closed. i say "fixed", but it's more like "patched". good enough for now.

apparently gd *really* pissed him off by insisting on compulsively checking for leaks, when he hadn't touched anything to do with the plumbing, and i'm still giggling at the thought of it. 'cause he was pissed before he arrived, which i'm assuming was a combination of having done a lot more work than he quoted for last night, and making an embarrassing mess, and having to clean up said mess.

that said, by the time he came to pick up his cash he seemed to be in a much better mood.

...

my work day was weird. it's certainly not what i'm getting paid for, but as long as it's short term i'm fine with it. i got reassigned to unblock my "customer" team by doing QA for their latest updates, and

a) it was an extremely long, complicated manual process.

b) i was falling on my nose from before i arrived at work today, and i had to have a lot of coffee to compensate. the lot of coffee wasn't as effective as i'd hoped.

c) i had a mojito at happy hour. half an hour later i got a little work done, and then had to bail before i passed out at my desk.

...

our neighbor's eldest came downstairs to take mr smear to get his first ever house key cut. now i need to find out about smart tags for android phones...

...

[yawns]

[gets more water]

i figured out how to update my cibus card on wolt, put up shower curtains, reported the courier for leaving the food without so much as knocking on the door, and we ate a huge hummus meal (for the second time this week) with both mr smear and gd enjoying the potato kubeh just as much as i did. then i went around the apartment replacing toilet seats.

i'm not 100% convinced that the seats i got are good, but they're definitely better than what we had.

[suddenly realizes he was supposed to take the old toilets seats out the building, they've been sitting outside the front door for hours]

[washes hands on return, hands are so messed up that washing them hurts]

once that was taken care of, and mr smear had been put to bed, i climbed in the shower and between the shower curtains, the shower head holder, the hot water and the good water pressure, i had a proper, decent, pleasant shower for the first time in... a very, very long time.

though i did feel a bit faint a couple of times.

now everyone's in bed, i've posted this, and i think i'm about ready to bundle up and get some rest.