brain pain train

 it's been two days of mr smear fucking with everyone and making things shit. this is really, really hard.

i swear to god everything is testing me and my patience today. it's an everything is broken kind of day.

yesterday:

our family meeting yesterday took a long time, and had some rough moments. then i left to meet up with firefighter, it was pretty early but already dark.

firefighter and i had a great catch-up, with a lot of surprising things coming out and connecting with our often-overlapping philosophies. kind of similar to my earlier meeting with arnavot. life is weird.

while mr smear was getting ready for bed, i took gd aside to discuss something troubling she'd said to mr smear during our family meeting. she did not take it well.

i don't recall much more of the night, but i did go to bed relatively early, and i guess i slept alright.

today:

back to work. i started my day setting up my paypal business account, then went to the office. i'd say it was a pretty good day, but mr smear's call in the morning was the start of a series of shit moves, and it set a nasty tone both because i suspected he was up to no good and because i told him so in rather crude terms before i realized that i was on speaker with the head of his arts program :/

aside from trying to help my buddy work through a couple of gotchas (one surprise in how java handles floats, and that floats were used in a system that deals with large quantities of money, and one surprise in how a database index was built in a way that renders it unusable), i managed to push through a fix that unblocked me for testing and begin the next piece of work. i had to leave the office early to join gd and meet mr smear's new therapist, but between the bus rides and after we got home, i managed to run a successful test and establish that the second one wouldn't be worthwhile.

the therapist seems nice, though i don't know if the two of us made such a good impression. i think she knows everything she needs.

coming home turned sour because gd insisted that we stop somewhere to pick up hummus, and we explored multiple blocks and then sarona, and there was no hummus (none open, at least). eventually, once i was thoroughly pissed off, we settled on getting the fuck home and ordering hummus via wolt.

fuck.

dinner would have been great if it wasn't for mr smear pushing buttons non-stop. that wasn't good for the vibe, but then while i was getting out of the shower i suddenly remembered what gd had told me he'd done in the afternoon - i warned him if i catch him or hear of him taking his phone into the bathroom again (he was pretending to use the toilet to sit on his phone and avoid doing his homework) i will fuck him up.

i don't know if the threat will work or not, but holy shit, that kid seems to be in dire need of some good ol' capital punishment.

it's been an hour or so, and i guess i'm still sitting with that shit on my chest. i've been upgrading my telephony project, and as soon as i'm done with the current phase i think i'm going to try to get some sleep.

charging cycles

 these "two days off" are surprisingly good, and destabilizing, at the same time. and they're only really "off" from my client work...

...

yesterday started with some very positive, encouraging news: sfs sent me a video demonstration of what he's been working on, and it's really cool! it's also pushed him to do all the kinds of things that our employer wants us to be doing, and then to top it all off he informed me that he's not only excited about that, but about his kid (who's mr smear's age) being late for school because he was so invested in putting in the work on the game he's developing ^_^

...

yesterday was heavy on the extension effort, while at the same time involving a fair amount of admin. mostly healthcare stuff, like making an appointment for a consultation for the surgical removal of something that i think i was supposed to book half a year ago, and that i could only get a booking for february for...

i did take a serious, half-hour nap yesterday morning. that was nice.

at one point i took a cup of coffee and my laptop to the park for half an hour of working on a bench in a pleasant, green space. i was visited by a crow, and i was amused by a very sweet toddler learning to walk and play with a ball at the same time.

i had a short overlap at home with mr smear, and i explained to him that gd needed his help even more than usual so he needed to be more cooperative and proactive than usual. unfortunately, that fell on deaf ears and i understand that gd had to lose her temper and threaten him with punishments to get him to do his chores...

our class yesterday evening was good, although i was upset by two women sitting on either side of me who had coughs that clearly deserved to stay home and join over zoom :/

one of them walked to the train station with sfs and me [posting interrupted for a long call with mr smear's teacher, his behavior is making all our heads spin but i think the trajectory is okay] and i was embarrassed when she mentioned her kids and i realized i'd been so busy talking about mine that it never occurred to me to ask :P

i got home, ate, read some more of the light fantastic to mr smear, then sat down to explore payment integrations. this is my life now 🙄

today so far:

i slept relatively well, and woke up to my wife freaking out about the "monstrous" field cricket on our balcony. poor think didn't move very fast, so i wonder if it was poisoned or something. my main focus this morning was revising my AWS / CDK skills after an agent dropped the ball on an architecture design, and i don't quite recall what else i did before i headed out to the museum to meet up with arnavot (a play on the name of an old friend scr and i worked with at the university), and we ended up talking for two hours before i realized i had stuff that needed doing. it was really interesting, and we're very much aligned on all sorts of big topics.

i picked up the second books of akira and kick-ass from the comics library, feeling silly for forgetting to return stuff, and then stopped by the pharmacy to awkward cut the queue to find out if gd would be able to pick up next month's prescription early (no). then i walked past a homeless guy deliberately lying across the entire sidewalk to catch a bus home, and on the way we got stuck in traffic and the girl driving alongside us was literally doomscrolling while driving. guess which one of those two i consider the bigger asshole.

my employer posted today about my AI specs library on their linkedin page, i'm feeling quite flattered ^_^

mr smear's hand-drawing is out of control. the teacher sent me a photo, i told her to explain to him that just like with the daily record, there will be consequences for not listening to his teachers. and then, against my better judgement but with gd's encouragement, i added "it does look pretty cool, though" 😂

i had a large lunch, i've made a little progress on my payment integration (in spite of the phone call and constant sirens and honking from the highway), and am now gearing up for mr smear's arrival (family meeting time) and then catching up with firefighter a bit later.

trick and treat

 there was no housekeeping done yesterday. i did break from the music extension work to watch three episodes of evangelion with mr smear, but i think i passed out for quite a significant amount of them :P

otherwise, i tried to coach him and encourage him to work on his rube goldberg machine (homework), which was rather demanding on my patience (but my patience prevailed).

and i learned something fascinating about calf muscles and exercising them that i think everyone should know.

i walked mr smear to his friend's place at around 4pm - it didn't occur to me that there might be a bus - with him dressed for trick-or-treating. some teenager on a scooter whizzed past and as he clocked mr smear we heard him loudly "what - the - fuck?!" which had us in hysterics 😂

it turned out 4pm was the time for the kids to meet up, 6pm to go trick-or-treating. so i caught a bus home, got some more stuff done while stuffing myself on leftovers, and then bussed back to accompany the three friends as mr smear's shadow pack-animal.

first, let me just say that the number of kids participating, the effort invested in their costumes and treat stations, was heartwarming. it was so much fun!

second, five minutes before arriving to accompany the kids, i was struck with sudden bloating and gas that lasted a little over an hour, rendering me decidedly uncomfortable during the hour-long mission.

on the one hand, following them was an interesting experience and generally positive, particularly because of all the other kids and parents and the general atmosphere was great. on the other, there were a couple of behaviors that made the hour drag considerably.

first and foremost, mr smear's wrong-side-of-the-tracks friend, whose constant swearing and use of combative language is jarring and embarrassing, even at a distance. then there were his greedy attempts (often successful) to grab all the candy, sometimes its containers as well. mr smear told him off a number of times, and even yelled "my friend's a thief" when he managed to grab an entire pumpkin-shaped candy container...

second, mr smear didn't understand the concept of me being a shadow, and he kept trying to make sure that i wasn't going to lose them... which was sweet, but really took him out of the experience and separated him from his friends on multiple occasions :(

when we returned to his friend's place, they wanted to watch a horror movie. the other two were asking for movies that are really inappropriate, and i took the opportunity to explain why watching great movies before you're ready for them is a mistake - that you can only ever watch a great movie for the first time once, and it's a shame if you're not old enough / experienced enough to fully appreciate what makes it great or shocking.

"you know we're going to forget this whole conversation in, like, five minutes, right?"

fuckin' A.

i also took my turn trying to teach his friend how to blow his nose. how the fuck does a kid grow up not knowing how to blow his fucking nose?

mr smear's friend's mom gave mr smear a full bowl of mushroom krupnik soup, which was delicious. it was also the last of their soup. his first few spoons were enthusiastic (he said it reminds him of fry's mushroom pies), but his next few were less so and then he did what he always does... "garbage bin dad?" 🤦‍♂️

to make it worse, he told him friend that "it started off tasting really good, and then it stopped tasting good". his friend told him he shouldn't insult his mom's cooking, and his response was "yeah, but..."

FML.

anyway, after a bit more awkwardness i managed to extricate us from the dinner and we caught a bus home, with him informing me along the way that he's not sure he wants to do this again because he's so self-conscious. i really don't understand this kid :(

while he showered, i caught gd up on the evening's shenanigans while sipping on the "drink me - penis reducer" parting gift from tahoma's (i don't know what was in it, but it was delicious). after putting mr smear to bed, i spent some more time tweaking the extension, and eventually went to bed.

i guess i slept pretty well. i'm trying to make the most of these two "recharge" days, which started with gd upset over our neighbor's treatment of their dog and now has her cancelling her physio appointment and sewing class because something just twinged in her neck and she's unable to leave the house :(

...

alright, one crisis at a time, one admin item at a time. i can do this.

into the looking glass

 well, it was less of a looking glass and more of a few shots of particularly interesting cocktails, plus a fair amount of freeze-dried passion fruit and strawberries mixed with good ol' fashioned fizzers. nystire's wife called it taffy, which i'd never considered before.

the one person i didn't expect to bump into was my team lead! turns out we served in the same unit :P

all-in-all, it was a fun gathering, gd had a good time without any incidents (in spite of herself, she insisted on trying things without checking ingredients 🙄), and the night sky on our way home was pretty spectacular.

...

it was after midnight when i called mr smear to check in on him, and he feigned shock that it was so late :P

when nyah nyah and her husband dropped us off at home (after 1am) he wasn't asleep yet, and we had a bit of a bad vibe because he'd turned on the air conditioner again without talking to me, and he did everything precisely against the mold prevention instructions 🤦‍♂️

...

i woke up with a bit of a hangover, but plenty of water and coffee and hellsing and a heavy challah-peño with peanut butter and vegan nutella breakfast seem to have settled it well. now to try and wrap up yesterday's efforts on my music player and then do a little housekeeping.

haphazard

 my tongue hurts, because i bit it. like, i managed to bite myself in the center of my tongue, somehow. it hurts.

i'm so tired, that i just crashed on the couch for ten / fifteen minutes. after having had a fourth cup of coffee earlier.

my wife - who's dressed up as a dark elf - just posted about how i called her the fairy fart-mother, i don't know whether to be proud or embarrassed.

mr smear and i played through a fair amount of day of the tentacle before dinner. good times.

i read through quite a bit of hellsing this morning. i'm enjoying it, but i kinda get why gd got bored.

sfs contacted me this morning, after our recent interactions he's finally started diving into game development and he's doing something so crazy that i don't have a clue what his descriptions mean... but it looks like he's about to embark on one heck of a journey and i'm really glad to have been able to get him to take the first steps ^_^

i let him play a bit of moon sweepers, after i gave it a try this morning. i can see the attraction (nystire gifted me a copy, i think he's trying to test my resolve on my side projects :P), but i wanna get stuff done. later i watched my son take it in a whole other direction by drawing in the moon sand instead of clearing it.

i spent a lot of time make improvements to my chrome extension, but went down a re-architecture rabbit-hole with codex's terra model that astra has spent the past 1.5+ hours digging me out of. i feel like we're all learning stuff together. at least, i hope that's what's happening.

i had a chat with my mom earlier (we weren't able to connect properly at kiddush time because she and krybabie's mother were out for a walk on the mouille point promenade), she broke down what happened at her apartment building's AGM last night after she's been working her ass off for the past half a year to a year to extricate herself from the board: the majority of apartment owners are idiots according to carlo cipolla’s behavioral matrix.

they voted off the three guys who've been doing good work because "they're too controlling", and between them and my mom's efforts over the years the apartments are currently valued pretty highly. i suggested to my mother that now seems like a good time to bail, and was both surprised and relieved to learn that she agreed.

if she sells, that's going to remove what is possibly the largest obstacle to her picking up sticks and joining us over here.

we're about to head off to tahoma's for their annual halloween party, for which i don't have anything to wear. we're leaving mr smear home alone, after having checked with our upstairs friends that they're okay with being leaned on in an emergency, and i think he's as excited for the home alone time as we are for the adults-only time :)

not-so-free will

i think i slept alright. the eczema seems to be calming down. i started my day reading a bit of hellsing on the balcony.

then i jumped into work, right after realizing that today was the last day i can use my monthly food allowance and we hadn't spent any of it yet.

i ran the test, it went well. i needed help from my buddy, and only understood - after being quite a nudnik - that i'd missed her message to the team earlier in the morning to say that her daughter was sick and she didn't have much bandwidth 🤦‍♂️

i felt awful, and i apologized profusely...

i spent the next few hours re-evaluating the work i'd planned... or that my AI agents had planned... by the time i'd figured out my next steps, it was time to do a grocery run with gd to use up as much of the allowance as we could, on stuff we actually need. i honestly felt a bit sick, and tired, about halfway through the shopping experience. it could have been worse, i guess, but i just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

i got home, had two carrots with some hummus, and was about to do the thing i'd told my team lead i was going to do when an upstairs neighbor began heavy drilling. i had less than an hour to go until my meeting with my mentor, and if i'd done the thing the team lead wanted i'd have been stuck at home with construction site noises, which left me no choice.

i sent a message to the neighbor group, explaining how some of us work from home and doing any kind of construction without prior warning is inconsiderate (how do people still not understand this?!), then packed my bags and rushed out to catch a bus to my employer's office.

i had a little bit of time to spare to Do The Thing, and my mentor ended up being five minutes late, so i managed to pull the trigger before our meeting got started. of course, i ran into yet another surprising bug...

the roadmap meeting with my mentor was very positive. the feedback from him, and from my current client, was the same as my self-diagnosis two weeks ago: ironically, he informed me that while it's critical to focus and effectively communicate how focused i am at work, he believes that my lack of focus is one of the reasons why i'm doing as well as i am in so many different ways.

can those two things be true at the same time?

when he got to the point of asking me which technologies i wanted to focus on, i immediately thought of what i need to get my number one main personal side project i'm now working on to succeed, networking and security, but even as i said the words i was nervous about biting off more than i can chew. which, if i think about it, is kind of the point of this whole roadmap exercise, so...

i had some time before my evening course class began to do some more investigating, report to the team lead and work on a solution, all the while talking to coworkers / async game jammers, and a dutch coworker, and two guys who are essentially using our offices as a coworking space.

the class was full of useful information, but it started so slowly and with such basic material that by the time the good stuff came up i'd already checked out. i spent most of the class evolving my agentic skills, understanding that i've been dealing with a wild array of conflicting guidance, and a lot of the skill cleanup was being done by conflicting skills that weren't aligned with what i'd just corrected... so i had to figure out a solution for that, too.

i walked out with sfs and another guy who seems interested in joining our asynchronous game jam, and then split from them to go to the supermarket and try to spend the remaining hundred shekels. i got to the self checkout with a heavy load that i'd estimated would just about reach the limit, only to discover, after passing everything through that there were a couple of significant discounts! fortunately, the place was practically empty so i rushed to the dried fruits area and picked up some healthy snacks, which did the trick.

i waited a few minutes at the bus stop, and there were a few of us frantically trying to wave the next bus down as he skipped our stop entirely. i reported the fucker. at least the second bus stopped, and in retrospect it was actually a better route for me :P

i got home to a delicious meal - gd has outdone herself with her salads, and whatever it is she's doing with the potatoes - and we had a chat with my mom before putting mr smear to bed. mr smear didn't have such a great school day today; nothing dramatic, but his behavior wasn't good enough to earn him screen time. we talked a little about it at bedtime, and then about the girls in his class doing tiktok videos 🙄, and then i said goodnight and hit the shower.

he'd already gone to bed, so i had to keep my anger over his gouging the soap and leaving me with practically nothing to myself :/

i sat down at my work machine and continued with the skill evolution, which took me until almost midnight to get through... but i think i'm happy with it, and i'm hoping it's going to make a real difference to both my work environments ✌️

i'm so fucking tired now. i can't believe it's the weekend. even less that it's a long weekend, because my client gives everyone a mandatory two days off every quarter. that's pretty cool.

unscheduled

 i just extricated myself from a 1.5 hour async game jam call with horseman, my coworker and his brother, and that's only because aside from the fact that i'm getting really tired (and the brother's online ninja game made me a little motion sick) but because i need to write this up before i hit the sack.

[yawns and makes one last cup of tea]

[ahhh, chamomile and honey]

i got up, sat outside on the balcony with my coffee, and couldn't figure out what i wanted to do with myself. mr smear, after having badgered me for a while (and a few days, really), was allowed to watch the youtube playlist i curated for him, which included an inappropriate ze frank video about cuttlefish procreation, and i went inside and watched with him until he left for school.

i did a little "desk" clearing, with my new playlist extension working so well that gd came and parked herself on a beanbag next to me, with both of us overjoyed and shocked by the songs we haven't heard in years! unfortunately, the desk clearing got a little rabbit-holey with overcomplicated government websites, and gd never having earned a payslip in israel...

eventually i managed to make some proper time to prepare for my work day, trying to understand what had gone wrong on monday evening and what needed to be done to fix it. when i finally felt ready to respond, i noticed that i'd kinda misread my team lead's last sentence and that it wasn't as heavy as i'd thought.

i walked to the office, discussed the solution with my buddy before our daily, and after our daily got into it. it - would - take - me - until - around - 4pm - to - be - ready - to - merge. gods, it was a long day. however! by the end of it, i believe i'd finally solved the real issue with my tests taking so long.

i mean, i hope 🤞

i had a couple of employer meetings this afternoon, one of them with my mentor, who seems to think i'm doing alright.

the most frustrating part of it all was that as soon as i was ready, the entire company's build system went offline.

...

during the time that it was offline, a crane broke in the construction site next door and i went to investigate the drama. i saw lots of emergency vehicles, and then a bunch of first responders around a body they were performing chest compressions on. it looks like the poor guy didn't make it, and i regretted my curiosity.

...

my buddy came into the office with veggie crisps, saying something about the taste. i love veggie crisps, so i took a handful and tried one, and it tasted somehow wrong. instinctively, i reached for the packet and looked at the allergen listing, and saw that it contains dairy. it's fucking veggie crisps, the packaging is almost identical to the vegan crisps, and it has no mention of dairy anywhere visible. and everyone in the office agreed that the milk powder didn't taste good.

WTAF is wrong with people?!

...

when i finally came back online, it took so long to get my PR green, merged, and the build completed that the company's no-deployments-past-5pm rule was in force. i literally clicked the button when the clock said 17:00. i secured special permission from the team lead for an emergency deployment, and we let it run.

i came home past suspiciously heavy traffic (though i didn't think much of it at the time), straight into an hour of monitoring and troubleshooting. eventually, my buddy agreed that something was wrong with the deployment pipeline, and that it wasn't my code (which had deployed successfully into a region we can't test with), and i sent off a kit-bag question / update to the team lead.

fortunately, by the time we finished dinner and i saw his response, it was to say that we're stopping for the night.

we finished watching evan almighty at dinner, then talked to my mom, then noticed for the first time that something big was going on in our intersection - some kind of roadworks - and traffic was gridlocked and emergency service vehicles were getting trapped. the honking and the sirens and the angry yelling went on until just a short while ago, it was pretty intense.

[a few more sirens and some honking]

after getting mr smear into bed, my evening turned into an unexpected combination of vibe coding (mr smear gave me a good idea for monetization!) and pitching game ideas and playtesting. now i've written this, i think i'm ready to crash.

waiting for the results

 it's late, and my focus is whizzing all about like a deflating balloon.

i guess the most important thing today was voting. so we voted. i'm sitting and listening to the interim election results and analysis and i think, i hope, that my optimism isn't misplaced. in my opinion, all we really need is to not have shas in the government if we want the ultra-orthodox to serve, and if they serve then a part of the army's mandate is to integrate them into society.

if we can get that right, a lot of our other serious issues begin falling away.

🤞🙏

...

of all the things i could have and should have been doing today, i've sunk hours into building an chrome extension that i'm extremely excited about, not least because i've finally got a real solution to a problem with music playlists that i've been bothered by and complaining about for many years.

it can be argued that i'm not using my time appropriately. it is being argued by a voice in the back of my mind 🙄

...

it was a bit of a mission getting to herzeliyah and back for the election day barbecue with ze germans, but we had a good time, and ate well.

i guess it's kind of comforting that we're not the only ones struggling these days, and it's certainly good to be able to have big conversations (and little conversations) with all these people and feel connected.

...

it's my doppelganger cousin's birthday today, but his nephew is gone. i couldn't exactly wish him a "happy birthday"... i ended up writing "i want to wish you a happy birthday, but also..."

jesus.

gd and i had a possibly-not-quite-age-appropriate talk with mr smear after dinner, before switching gears and watching some evan almighty before bedtime. i hope he understands what we said, i hope it lands, i hope he remembers when things get tough. may they never get quite that tough.