unexpected things

i jump-started my day yesterday by taking the rosh hashana cards mr smear forgot to deliver on tuesday to the school.

on the way, our bus was stalled by a homeless guy who literally stood in front of the bus, smoking a cigarette and trying to goad the driver into a fight. the driver kept edging towards him, with his fucking bus. the homeless guy didn't give a fuck. then, suddenly, another bus pulled in front of us and the homeless guy ran into it with his lit cigarette to go and terrorize the poor people on it :/

i stopped at the pharmacy on my way home to pick up gd's meds (a long wait, but less long that usual), then came home for breakfast and to begin working.

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it was my first group meeting with my client, and i was unpleasantly surprised to be asking to introduce myself to the group immediately after the manager had given me a pretty robust introduction. in retrospect i should have probably focused on the personal aspects of my life rather than the professional 🙄

regardless, two people reached out to me privately as a result of my introduction: the first, a fellow contractor who i didn't realize was in the same group. the second? a guy from the officer's course i haven't seen in almost sixteen years, who i happened to be thinking about on wednesday because we were last together at the same place our company status was held!

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the work-from-home day went alright, but for two things:

the first, that i had a real snacking problem yesterday, and by "snacking" i mean "i ate a few more actual meals than i should have". so it's not that the quality of the food was questionable, but the quantity was out of control.

the second, that at the beginning of my meeting with my lead he asked me to pause the recording, and after a congenial personal sync during which he wanted to know how i was feeling about things, i asked him for feedback and learned that there is a point regarding my progress on which he's disappointed.

i spent the rest of the day heavily focused on resolving that, and i believe i finished the day having made good progress.

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gd had a big day yesterday: she finally got the haircut she's been longing for for months (she had to postpone her appointment until we were sure we were through the lice incident, and the incident caused her to cut her own hair in a way that bothered her), and she finally got it cut short which i've been suggesting for years. so we're both happier now :)

in the afternoon we went to two stores to do the grocery shopping, and by the second we found what we needed for the long weekend and, specifically, her experimental kebab dinner.

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while i didn't enjoy the experimental kebabs, the episode of spider-noir we watched along with it was great (i *love* the cameo musical phrase appearances borrowed from all the other spider-man movies). after dinner / showering and brushing teeth, we sat down to watch the second half of judge dredd. overall: it's a bit childish, standard 90s action fare with one-dimensional characters and some heavy character assassination by wedged in "romance", but the concept of megacity one, and the ABC warbot and mean machine, was great and we all had fun.

two puffs before bed (my lower back and hip flexors were doing their thing), and it helped.

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i woke up this morning to a coffee on the balcony (no comics, no computer) while thinking about my tarot game (i'm feeling quite lost, actually, when it comes to the actual game mechanics), and i've since spent the past few hours working through my open work in my auto-doc project and my employer's spec project. i'm done with the former and just about (i think) done with the latter, and now gd and i are leaving our heavily coughing mr smear at home to go to the mall and find a board game that she's interested in playing.

cheat day

 i did *not* lose weight today.

mr smear woke up worse than he was yesterday, so he stayed home. i began my day on the balcony, cleaning up someone's cigarette ash (apparently it's the woman above us, she's promised to be more careful) and trying to read knights of sidonia, which seems cool but i struggled to make sense of what was going on, or care.

i've just read through some reviews, and i'm not interested in giving it more of a chance than i already have.

i hopped on a bus to herzeliyah, walked through my mom's favorite mall (most of the stores were closed, but in general it looks very much the same as it always did), then past the country club and the school i once re-took linear algebra in (and still failed to understand very much), and then to the company status.

"breakfast" was pretty good, pizza and a too-hot grilled chilli and a bunch of nice salads. heavy discussions about south africa, the state of the industry, and then my previous employer.

then we were given a motivational talk by omri rozenblit, which was really powerful, and then we had our status, which was... unsurprising, which is more than desirable. it's comforting to know and have known what's going on, and we got some clarity into how we're adapting to the rapidly-changing market situation.

i returned home, after waiting for a while in the sun, herzeliyah style, and stopped for a hearty leftover lunch. then i got mr smear to draw on two stickers for my work laptop, then i walked to the office.

my first meeting was with the guy who wanted to hire me at the beginning of last year, and it was pleasant, though i did make it a little awkward. the second meeting was with my line manager, and aside from it being a fun talk, i caught him off-guard when i spoke about conway's law and i enjoyed seeing his gears start turning.

aside from those talks, i had two meetings with a couple of my teammates, both of which gave me insight into what we're doing and one of which gave me some really cool ideas of how we could operate financial analysis in a similar way to how we write code.

i didn't need to snack so much in between all of those...

the end of the day was packing up our work stations for next week's move, my manager needed to remind me that this weekend is rosh hashana and that we won't be seeing each other in person until tuesday :P

i rushed home - stressed about tomorrow's acupuncture session in my calendar that turned out to be non-existent - to get onto a webinar about the metro works that are going to be starting in the next few months. it was a looooooong talk (i played a lot of minesweeper games) but with a lot of encouraging aspects, not least of which being how clearly the people responsible for public transport in this region understand their mission.

i coerced mr smear into giving star fluxx a chance, and we had fun, and then we started watching an episode of the wonder years which involved animal cruelty so we had to stop halfway, and mr smear and i watched an excellent talk on the history of sumeria while i not only cleared my very large plate of food, but also the rest of the bag of liquorice allsorts along with a few blocks of chocolate 🙄

...

dark matter upsets me. phenomenal writing, great concept, but i just can't deal with that level of darkness right now.

sideways

 last night gd and i started watching dark matter. we continued this evening, and it seems appropriate; i feel weird. like, i'm in an alternate reality kind of weird.

yesterday was a work-from-home day, which began with one of my new teammates outing herself as a nose-picker while centered on on our team call, which led to me recording gd's hilarious response which gd doesn't think is that funny - mr smear agrees with me - and which neither my mother nor my sister were able to watch because of the subject matter :/

then another teammate outed herself as a "meat proxy".

i'm new, i didn't say anything.

mr smear was home "sick", and according to him the reason he didn't have any real symptoms all day was because he was entertained (screen time)...

after hours of onboarding and an awkward demo in which nobody else spoke either, i took mr smear for a walk to the comics library to pick up some books for the high holy days. i still can't believe that's in a couple of days!

oh - he learned about "stippling" from a youtube video and drew a really impressive looking ghoul / zombie.

i tried out the new astra model yesterday evening, it burned through my tokens but i'm not confident it did a good job 🤷‍♂️

in fact, it feels like all the models are chewing tokens more rapidly than usual. i've been half-assing two projects (one for my boss, and my auto-doc) and i feel like i'm spinning in circles.

...

in spite of his cough, we sent mr smear off to school this morning, snapping a photo of him with his toolbox and his portfolio as he headed out the door for his first full arts track day. he appears to have had a great day, and made a new friend, and he came home with a really cool couple of pieces ^_^

i continued with my half-assing this morning (i'm kinda doing it in the background now, but more like a quarter-assing), then went off to the office. today was more onboarding, but with a few surprises:

1. almost two hours talking to a monitoring expert about their lack of vision, who was really excited to hear my ideas

2. today i discovered that my division manager is the guy whose offer i rejected when i joined the defense startup, which turned out to be a dodged bullet because his replacement was unpleasant to deal with.

3. i forgot my headphones at home, and nose-picker offer to lend me hers. nuh, uh 😂

4. one of the guys keeps trying to prank the girls, and one of them almost fell for it but asked for confirmation (he was out of office). they turned the tables on him, and he's now convinced that she fell for it and feels bad, general hilarity ensued

5. i began to realize how powerful my client's solution is, and that it's used internally by default. zero privacy - all intra-org calls are recorded and reviewable by anyone in the company - but the benefits are enormous!

6. i think i'm dong a good job of getting some of my teammates on board with new AI best practices :)

7. there was a big "do" for rosh hashana. not only did i witness some surprisingly antisocial behavior by a couple of people, but the vegan option was malabi and it's the first time i've ever eaten malabi that wasn't enjoyable. i don't know why i finished it, and it took a while + another coffee (decaf) to get rid of the bitter aftertaste :(

after coming home, taking down the recycling and running into big data kicking a rubber mouse and dealing with a bicycle that doesn't belong to our building, mr smear and i played a game of cthulu fluxx before dinner that got absolutely ridiculous - he'd play draw 2 + doom and kept pulling creepers, by the last round he was literally holding half the deck in his hand!

we watched another episode of spider-noir over dinner, i really enjoyed gd's polenta but she didn't :(

it's late, i have a big morning (our company status), which was the retroactive reason for not rollerblading tonight...

shredding

 mr smear appears to be sick, so he came early yesterday and he's staying home today...

i bought him a lock yesterday morning on my way to my client, and discovered an amazing stationery store across the road ^_^

i realized on my way to the office that the client's catering is saving me a significant amount of money per month, which is a really nice bonus!

my day at the office was a combination of onboarding, meeting new people from the team, investigating the build failure that turned out to be affected more than just me, and all of this punctuated by round after round of shredding documents i've been gathering for the last eight months.

i'm most of the way through :P

my team lead has authorized me to take off a week for the sukkot holidays - i'm really excited for the staycation!

also, a decent lunch, a couple of healthy snacks, and too much shame to take an ice cream after going upstairs to find that the ice creams were all right outside an office filled with people and only a glass wall separating them. so my weight's down a little today already (back to 80kg after a week or two hovering around 82, and i have some shame to thank for that.

on the way home i called up sailor, and we ended up talking about his trauma-bonding. i hope my advise was helpful, but i also woke up around 4am this morning with an interesting idea for a game based on my understanding of mental trauma and spent twenty minutes or so working on writing it up.

while mr smear completed his rosh hashana cards (this was before i understood that he and gd hadn't understood the hebrew lit homework instructions), i watched more of des bishop's breaking china series, which is really fun!

we watched a sad episode of the wonder years over dinner (the piano recital), and after mr smear went to bed (relatively early) gd and i finally finished watching the first season of ludwig together, and i crawled into bed soon after.

...

we seem to have been out of the lice woods for a while now, and mr smear just got invited to sleep over at the carrier. so here we are strategizing over how to manage the next outbreak before he's even told us whether he wants to go or not 🙄

almost boring

 it was a bit of a weird weekend. i guess i slept okay, i got the balcony pretty clean yesterday morning, mr smear had a very long and screen time-filled hang out with his friend on his last day in israel, and i managed to make a little progress on my tarot game, though a lot of my time spent on that was understanding that my initial ideas didn't really make as much sense i thought they would, and subsequently thinking very hard about what could and would work.

i've nailed the experience of getting into and out of a "level", and i've understood that i need to figure out the relationships between tarot, astrology and alchemy in order to put something coherent together... and i really didn't have bandwidth for that...

in the evening i took mr smear out for a walk, which was great right up until the last five minutes or so. at that point, he got into fight mode and started pissing me off (the trigger was him being too precious to drink from a water fountain, and asking me to stop and buy something instead), and when we got home he went into a downward spiral from which gd lost her shit.

it got so bad that we agreed he wasn't welcome to eat with us, and the situation wasn't improved by him coming out of the kitchen to tell us he actually quite enjoyed eating alone in there and could he please do it every night 🤦‍♂️

anyway, we had a family meeting after dinner that went late, but very positively.

i've spent this morning uncovering things that need to get done, but not actually doing anything (aside from a little tarot game polishing), and now i'm off to by mr smear a lock for his toolbox (he appears to have thrown away the lock i bought him last year, jesus fuck) and then go to work.

le'chaim

 i spent very little time last night making sense of things, i was very sleepy and went to bed soon after posting. i slept... i guess i slept alright.

the morning got off to a rough start, but then it calmed down, and then i became quite nice. big data paid us a visit, and we played a pretty interesting game of cthulhu fluxx, and a bit later gd and i went to the school to pick up mr smear and take him to dizengoff center to pick up his art supplies.

we bumped into his friend along the way and travelled with him, apparently everything is cool but it sounds like he was taking a break from mr smear over the holidays (when he wasn't drumming with his dad).

the shopping experience went relatively smoothly, we found the toolbox we were looking for along with a gluten-free toaster for gd, and the woman (?) at the art store really helped us get All The Things, and mr smear received a pretty hefty arts school discount which was particularly welcome.

then we came home, i had lunch (the last of the chili), and gd and i went out to pick up wine and snacks, and the rest of the afternoon was me slowly but surely making progress with my tarot game and spec repo projects.

mr smear and i just got back from shul, and i'm still stunned by the fact that next week is rosh hashana already (O_o)

i'm enjoying an arak and mr smear's testing out a new minecraft skin he made, while gd finishes preparing another sushi dinner (we're feeling pretty spoiled).

good shabbes.

cleaning the filters

 i slept like shit last night, but at least i woke up without the headache. and gd got her shit, so that's okay.

it was a long day, beginning with me leaving the apartment with mr smear and going to the clinic, only to discover that i didn't actually have an acupuncture appointment today. i took care of a bunch of admin and chores when i returned home, then dived into the troubleshooting session that i walked out of the office on yesterday, which i resolved at roughly the same time that a guy came to clean our air conditioner and vents.

oh! and i spoke to one of the async game jam guys for half an hour today, mainly encouraging him and assuring him that there are no rules or guidelines regarding which tech we use :)

the cleaner was very respectful, and didn't make a lot of mess, but it still demanded a lot of running after him and then cleaning up once he left. he did a great job, but there's mold in the tubes and he explained to us that it'll cost us more to clean them than to replace them...

so that's a fight for another day, at least i know how to take care of the superficial cleaning myself now and harassing the landlord about the tubes is for later.

poor guy (our landlord) is currently dealing with his father developing dementia, so definitely not today.

the rest of the work day was spent onboarding / setting up my dev env for my new client, which was mostly successful by the time i called it a day and headed out to the school for the parents' evening.

i walked into the school with firefighter and his wife, who were very interested in my mom's aliyah story. i mentioned it to her when we spoke a bit later, and now i'm concerned that she's not moving on it...

the arts track for the sixth graders just got serious, and their program sounds amazing. i was stressed about not having known about the arts stream whatsapp group - were we supposed to have joined it last year? - but then i learned i wasn't the only parent worried and that we were only supposed to find out about it today :P

the class meeting was a bit awkward, but peak awkward was the crazy mom yelling and putting on a show because she's - apparently - the only parent who doesn't want there to be a class whatsapp group with the teacher 🙄

there was a big deal made about which parents would be on the class council this year, and i think everyone was rooting for the teacher who was using every trick in the book to prevent the crazy mom from being on it. i really didn't want to volunteer, but in retrospect i think i should have.

it was already 9pm by the time we walked out the classroom, and i felt awkward, so i walked straight out and took the light rail and bus home, said good night to mr smear, ate and then spat out some leftovers that i think were bad, had a whole other bowl of chili (just like i did at lunchtime), didn't join big data for a game of fluxx (it was too late by then), showered, and am now drinking a cup of tea and writing this before i spend a little time trying to make sense of the world before going to bed.

undo not disturb

gd's phone tends to beep all night, which disturbs me but not her. so a few days ago i set up do not disturb on her phone, with exceptions for when anyone calls more than once during a short period.

i noticed that this didn't really stop the notifications, but whatever. tonight, though, it made big drama - gd was waiting for a delivery of something, and her phone never rang. it's clear from the suppressed notifications that it *should* have rung.

fucking samsung.

so now she's pissed, but also terrified that she'll be blacklisted for putting a delivery person through this :(

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i wasn't sleeping well, but now i'm not sleeping at all. and my head's still aching.