win some lose some

 on my way out, our upstairs friend arrived to rescue us with a portable electric hob! so that's awesome. and i was interrupted in the middle of my team daily by a phone call from the public transport company, hopefully they'll now reach out to the landlord.

it was a relatively productive day, i delivered the second part of my changes and learned a heck of a lot.

otherwise, i dived in to a conversation about parenting and content (games and videos) and freaked out my onboarding buddy, which i apologized for, but she was grateful for the advice and the insight, so 🤷‍♂️

then i got home to find out that my son had had an incident at school... instead of working on his assignment his teacher found him making his hand completely black with a marker, and when she asked him to stop he just carried the fuck on 🙄

he swears blind that he did the work, though... i guess we'll find out tomorrow.

at least he did his math homework well.

with a break for dinner and showering and mr smear's bedtime, i've basically spent the past few hours making up for lost time, burning tokens on my social media side project, on my sudoku game, and on the fairy tale adventure game. i'm trying to use as much as possible before i downgrade on the weekend, and the past two days i barely did anything because of all the stress and the gremlins...

gremlins

i took a puff last night, or two, and it helped me get to sleep but i still spent some of the night awake and uncomfortable. where did i see a video about humming affecting the vagus nerve and reducing anxiety yesterday? i don't know, but i tried it and i'm not sure if it worked or not.

yesterday's hospital mission went surprisingly smoothly, and mr smear was able to go to school afterwards. i worked hard the whole afternoon, mostly battling to make sense of the AI agents telling me contradicting things and revising my plans in a way that i hope makes sense.

i managed to have an actual conversation with our landlord yesterday, which may not have resolved all the issues but it was an enormous relief nonetheless.

in the evening i took mr smear rollerblading, it was an absolutely gorgeous sunset / twilight along the yarkon river, so that was great.

after reading more of the light fantastic to mr smear i napped on the couch before i went to bed last night. so i didn't get much done, and i certainly didn't use my token reset like i'd planned.

it's been a week.

this morning we woke up to find both our stove and our dishwasher not working. i managed to get an electrician in early, and he checked everything out and it looks like the wiring is fine, so gd and i have named the gremlins in our house and i'm struggling to get technicians in. the stove guy will come on thursday. that's a lot of meals without cooking... fuck.

a bundle of nerves

 i mostly didn't sleep last night. i was tired, restless, and struggling with anxiety all night. i did have a few brief periods where i slept deeply enough to dream, but for the most part i just lay awake, uncomfortable, all night.

my gods, life is hard right now. and it's Big Stuff. i'm riddled with anxiety and my stomach's roiling with it, and i'm struggling to catch my breath. i have so much to be grateful for, but i'm having a lot of trouble seeing the wood for the trees, and two trees in particular are beating me with their branches.

the first tree is my job. we're living beyond our means, and that obviously needs to stop as soon as possible, but the only way out is to find another job. as i'm a contractor and on contract, if i do find another gig i'm going to be screwing over my employer and my client. if i don't, i'm going to be living on borrowed funds (time). i've got to find a side-gig that makes money, or gd has to, but until any of those conditions are met we're basically a ticking time bomb.

the second tree is our home. gd turned on the air conditioner yesterday and we didn't smell anything, which was an enormous relief. then she turned it on last night and it was blasting mold smell everywhere (it's central), and our landlord doesn't want to spend more money and has been out of communication for about a month already. on top of that, he's supposed to authorize the fixes to the windows and doors that the transit authority is offering to protect us from the construction noise, and i don't think he's done that.

...

yesterday was a monumental fuck-up regarding the holidays. i don't know where everyone else gets their information from, or if the holidays document i got was updated and i just missed the memo, but i only found out yesterday afternoon that mr smear was supposed to return to school yesterday morning. and this morning, he's missing school because i'm taking him to appointments at the hospital. so 🤷‍♂️

i also confused my workday schedules, and didn't realize until i joined the team daily by zoom that everyone was supposed to be in the office yesterday, so i scrambled to get there once the meeting was done.

the work day was pretty okay. i took the leftover challah-peño, which almost nobody wanted to try, and in the afternoon managed to guilt two of my team mates into trying, and then another became intrigued, but i still ended up eating most of it by myself :P

i merged my first PR yesterday, and then spent the remainder of the day buggering about with an indecisive/self-contradicting AI. my team introduced me to the spend dashboard, i was pleasantly surprised to find that my AI spend is very reasonable, and shocked to see some of the bigger numbers on the board.

after work, i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear to the comics library, where we returned the broken judgement on gotham and i was relieved to find that it was clear to the librarian what had happened and that we weren't at fault. mr smear took a while to figure out which books he wanted to borrow, but i discovered akira and evangelion.

i don't know if i'll sound as dumb to you as i do to myself, but with all the frustration of being disappointed by the reboot and annoyed with the series revisions because i don't know what's canon, nor what any of it is supposed to mean, it never occurred to me to seek out the original text!

we watched another great episode of the wonder years over dinner - it's amazing how well that series holds up - and then i read a little of the light fantastic to mr smear at bedtime, but i started nodding off and he took over and read to me, and then he switched to reading from the grimm fairy tales, and at some point i realized it was late and that we both needed to get into bed.

which, for me, was clearly a mistake. i couldn't sleep in bed, so i moved to the couch, where i didn't sleep very well either, but also found myself constantly overheating and sweaty.

...

it's now just after 7.30am, and i'm going to have to take mr smear to his appointments today, so i guess i should get some work done before we leave...

regression

yesterday:

while posting, gd came in to talk, and while we talked a wasp arrived at our window and hovered about for a bit. after looking around a bit, i think we see it - right above the same window of our downstairs neighbor. i hope we're right so we can get it cleared...

the fighting with mr smear didn't end with the board game. after i posted and did a bit of side project work, and then tried to get him to come out with me, which triggered a regression behavior and we got into the same, tired old battle of getting him to come outside on a saturday. here's the thing: we could choose violence and punishment, or choose rationalization and negotiation. the former would be much, much easier. *much* easier. because our child is not a rational being, and he's so set in his belief that him needing to go out and get exercise and be in (relatively) natural surroundings is wrong and is not how the world should be...

... it was a rough hour of our lives performing the dance, but he came out with me with a positive attitude and we took a proper walk* about the city, the park and then the port, even stopping by the games arcade to experience a painful loss on their giant pacman game.

* i'd wanted to go rollerblading, but i compromised on that part.

overall, we talked about a bunch of different things and we had a good time, and i even got to do another couple of tests on the social media app i've been working on, and it's getting there!

dinner was nice, accompanied by the barmitzvah episode of the wonder years, after which mr smear disappointed us by decided he didn't want to watch total recall with his crazy awesome parents who think he's old enough for that level of excitement, so we let him have half an hour of minecraft while we watched game night instead, at the end of which he declared that he might have made a bad call :P

gd and i went to bed at a relatively reasonable hour, and i woke up this morning quite relieved that i managed to sleep alright in spite of everything.

...

oh! and i figured out why i was so confused about shmini atzeret and simchat torah this year. not only is it always confusing that in israel the two are merged together, but the school holidays including an extra day (today) really threw me off. so it's a relatively normal work day for me today, and gd's off to the dentist, and mr smear's got one last day of holidays.

the game of life

 thursday evening's rollerblading was nice, and my back didn't do anything interesting, for which i'm grateful.

my anxiety shot up during dinner time, though, and even though we watched the first half of the suicide squad, i ended up going to bed feel positively ill.

yesterday:

a lot of thinking. i've got a lot more thinking left to go. additional stress because the amount we borrowed to make rent wasn't enough to pick up gd's meds, and it's a long weekend for simchat torah so i was worried the transfer wouldn't be done in time (it was).

mr smear and i played a few invasion levels of rayman: origins yesterday afternoon, which was great fun.

i spent some time writing, and built a sudoku game, and worked on my social media platform. and worried a lot all the while.

oh! and i tried my hand at an adventure game, which came out a bit crap but does have some potential.

mr smear didn't want to go rollerblading in the evening, so we took a walk to the beach instead, where i got to try out my app on the sunset. it was a good, long walk, with only one short argument towards the end. the evening was nice: we finished watching spider-noir, which is beautifully made, and we watched the second half of the suicide squad, which was thoroughly enjoyable even though i did pass out for a chunk of it.

today so far:

i continued reading about garden of earthly delights this morning, hans belting has opened my eyes just in the first few pages and it is mind-blowing.

our upstairs friends came down for a pancake breakfast, with gd making a whole lot more than we needed, and then we sat down to play settlers of catan. unfortunately, about halfway through the game mr smear decided he wanted out, which after some interrogation turned out to be because - due to his frustrating habit of not paying attention to what everyone else is doing when it's not his turn - he had misunderstood some of the game mechanics (and taken certain actions personally), and once we'd explained things to him the situation improved. he still needed a talking-to after the game about being a good sport and not spoiling games for others, but he seemed receptive?

now late afternoon is approaching, and in addition to everything else i'm now freaking out because the air-conditioner smells like mold again after we just had it cleaned, and our landlord hasn't been responding to us for a while and i'm not sure if he's authorized the window and door repairs for the upcoming metro station work...

it's shabbat, and erev chag, and here i am trying to relax, and figure out my next steps career-wise, at the same time.

...

oh! and the woman i called pioneer appears to have blocked me and gd on social media. weird.

sinking feeling

 mr smear got up early today without a fight, which was a relief and a great start to the day. i read a bit of my book on the garden of earthly delights, so my day began with some inspiration, and i took care of a little bugfixing before sitting down with gd to go through our budget again.

i don't know why, but last time we did it we missed a bunch of important things, and now it's clear: we're living beyond our means. but a couple of thousand shekels a month, which we weren't doing before we moved here. this was, in large part, hidden by the first half a year of moving expenses and refurnishing, and it's caused less by the costs in the new apartment and more by the drop in salary that i took after losing my job last year.

so this... this is a problem. the bonus my employer's giving me will ease things for a few months, but it's not a real solution. now i either have to find a new job, which i really, really don't want to do, or sort out some kind of supplemental income. or both. i'm freaked out by the fact that one of the guys i'm friendly with who works for the same employer is currently juggling three jobs because otherwise he can't make ends meet. this does not bode well.

my bonus, which is attached to the condition of me continuing to work for my employer for another year, is now looking more like a loan.

...

we walked to the pharmacy to pick up some stuff, and that's where mr smear began pushing both of our buttons. this would become progressively more serious until a couple of full-scale blowouts back home later, but the past couple of hours have been alright.

from the pharmacy we went to the mall, to pick up a couple of things and, unable to locate a water cooler in the mall itself, discover that you can easily walk across the bridge to the hospital and use the coolers there without getting wet when it rains.

oh, yes - it rained a bit today, and we got caught in it :P

this afternoon involved lots of thinking (employment), and building (my social media side project, as well as a traditional game that i'm hoping i can make a little money with), and cleaning the floors with mr smear.

now it's dark, almost dinner time, and i'm about to drag him out on our rollerblades while by back threatens to spasm before i'm even out my chair.

a series of unrelated events

 i guess i slept alright last night. i woke up to a pleasant morning, it's was cooler and cloudy today (the heavy summer appears to be over) and i finished reading the history of western art in comics, which was a bit dry, but nevertheless an excellent teaching tool and the illustrations are great. i was also struck by inspiration to do something with hieronymus bosch's garden of earthly delights.

i managed to take care of a bunch of admin today. i was disappointed to learn today that the voucher for a pizza hut pizza which i was gifted by an employer a couple of years ago had expired. gd and i got into a bit of a tiff about something - parenting related - and i was pleased to have been able to figure out (eventually) how to express my side of things in a way that landed. i might be rougher than i need to be, but it's important for me that my wife and child understand my motivation, and that my number one priority is and has always been keeping mr smear safe and making sure he can handle himself out in the world.

it's after half-past eleven and mr smear is reading in bed and giggling to himself... and that's after i finally finished reading the colour of magic to him a little earlier...

mr smear and i walked to the comics library, which we found closed until next week. that was sad. we continued walking to the icon festival, but as soon as we arrived mr smear decided he wasn't feeling well (i believe it was the crowds that put him off) so we walked right through it and caught a bus or two home.

i then chatted with sailor for an hour and a half (!), and i'm relieved and pleased that he's excited about the social media app i'm building, and while we talked i formed some ideas about how to turn it into a platform that supports others building "apps" on top of it ^_^

mr smear chose cthulhu fluxx, which is apparently his favorite, and it was a fun game.

we watched another episode of the fall and rise of reggie dinkins over kimchi rice dinner, during which i convinced mr smear to try a drop of the carolina reaper hot sauce 😈

after showering after dinner, we sat down to watch the second half of suicide squad. i must admit i dozed off a couple of times, and a lot of the writing and acting was iffy, but mr smear enjoyed it immensely so 🤷‍♂️

now, post bedtime (even if he's not asleep yet, and it's been about twenty minutes since i started writing - largely because i've been getting distracted poking the AI in the background), i've been making progress on the side project and also on my mini-games, but i think i might end up going to bed soon.

architecture adventure

random thing i made a little while ago

 what happened today? it started off simple, reading more of the history of western art in comics while sitting on a beanbag and using one of the new little tables for the comic and my coffee.

after gd and i did some online grocery shopping, i sat down to work on the database redesign for my social media project, which turned into a proper collaboration between me and the agents and i ended up with something that feels really solid and clean.

gd had to go to a physio appointment, so we accompanied her, and then i took mr smear for a walk down to migal hashalom, found the entrance on our second try and hung around the ground floor exhibit* for a while examining the designs for what could have been and musing over an "i can see my house from here" artist's rendition...

* i tried to post a video to my app while there, but there was a bug. i just learned now that the "bug" was that the AI "forgot" to complete the work 🙄

from there we walked to bialik square, through nahalat binyamin, which triggered the only drama of the day - mr smear noped right on out the moment he recognized that we were near the market, and i needed to threaten him with punishment to get him to follow me on a speed run through the crowds.

we did okay.

we eventually met up with gd, then wandered around a bit looking for a place to have lunch, and the walk through the holiday crowds of mall people down king george and through the actual mall raised my stress levels step by step until i was almost as emotional as mr smear had been earlier... but we finally found some peace and quiet, pleasant reggae and good hummus and i pretty quickly regained control of my nervous system.

it was a great meal, and i don't think i ate too much.

the bus ride home was a bit rough - line 5's drivers are always really heavy on the pedals - and when we got home i was suddenly overcome by a deep, desperate exhaustion, the kind that made me wonder if i was sick, or narcoleptic after all. when the groceries arrived i got up to try and help and ended up sprawled on the living room floor for a forced nap for half an hour (i was feeling really faint, so i lay down on one of the beanbags). i woke up groggy and still really tired, and even with a 4th coffee i still felt like crap for a long while after.

the recording of gd fixing my hair had been processed by then, and between then and dinner i set about downloading the auto-generated captions, cleaning them up, and then running them through a local AI (ollama + gemma) to translate them to french and hebrew. that's been an experience, let me tell you. challenging, but interesting.

we had a very light dinner, watching youtube videos on the playlist i curate for mr smear (he'd been watching that while i was focused on the caption editing), and after dinner and showering we all sat down with a bowl of salt and vinegar kettle fried chips and watched the first half of the original suicide squad movie.

i think mr smear's enjoying it, and it sounds like leto's joker is his favorite 🙄

since putting him to bed, i've been watching lots of random videos, slowly turning my brain off, and i think i'm just about ready for bed.

moving forward

 dinner and spider-noir, deconstructing this year's jigsaw puzzle, and then me getting back to my projects while mr smear got ready for bed. i paused, around 11pm, to go and read him to sleep (we're sooooo close to finishing the first discworld novel!), then returned to long conversations with AI, involving lots more typing than usual, as i dived deep into why its database design was wrong, what it should look like, and how to climb out of the hole it had dug itself into. at the same time i finally, a few minutes ago and after a couple of hours of mind-bending fails, managed to get the AI to make a rubik's cube function just like a rubik's cube, and i'm elated!! ^_^

between prompts, i've been drinking tea and watching youtube. i think i should probably hit the hay soon.