the end of the year that turned

 tuesday:

a long morning getting the car sound sorted out, but with no internet at the access park coffee shop  so i read a bit and didn't make any progress. also, i forgot we'd scheduled a meeting with mr q but fortunately we were able to get together (virtually) after i got back and he flooded us with inspiration while bringing us in to a project he's working on. timing, though! it's really hard to avoid distractions as it is...

a fun sushi evening with my cousin and his girlfriend followed by another early night

 wednesday:

gd left me alone with mr smear in the morning, so we finished watching babe (beautiful)  and watched a bit more of david attenborough: a life on our planet.

the physio beat us up for the first time in a while.

mr smear and i brought our neighbour's kid into the dance dance revolution fold.

starting lord of the rings.

today:

it was a big relief meeting our neighbour's cleaning lady, she worked well and with a good attitude. the tension diffusion was palpable. otherwise, it was yet another day of getting very little done, mainly because i've been thoroughly exhausted.

today we watched big hero 6 for the first time! it's glorious. it's glorious. it's right up there with into the spider-verse. sailor came over for a bit, we argued about what constitutes scientific evidence. it's tough discussing something like that with someone who's day-job is manipulation...

mr smear is in bed, gd is sore, i'm exhausted. but we're going to try to watch wonder woman 1984 now anyway. good or bad, i feel like we're bringing in 2021 the right way.

happy new year! i hope and pray that this will be a year that brings real change to how we prioritize and organize our lives on this tiny planet.

For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

so over flutter

ye gods, the amount of stress and mindless debugging that's gone into getting something somewhat functional in flutter... only to have it failing intermittently with creatively unhelpful error messages.

i have now spent days of my vacation time struggling to get to grips with flutter. i'm now thoroughly unsatisfied with the available resources, and as certain as i am that flutter and dart are fantastic tools for mobile development i'm also convinced that it's simply not an appropriate choice for someone with no mobile / frontend experience.

so it looks like it's going to be react native for now, and in particular i'm quite liking my first contact with expo.

that was a pretty good summary of my past two days, though there has been some intermittent gaming and we have been dealing with some weird eye problem of mr smear's that saw us visiting the ER on saturday night and is keeping us out of the pool. and now that it looks like we're going back into lockdown...

we did just buy our neighbour's exercise bike, so that's good, and tomorrow morning early i'll be taking my car back to access park to see about getting a radio installed. otherwise, i've been exhausted for days so the fact that it's 11pm and i'm still awake is surprising. maybe i should hit the hay.

clear

 first off, two dreams from this morning: helping joe rogan to steal control devices for nuclear warheads, fending off a local kid reporter, hilarity ensued. afterwards, breaking in to a facility with a rapper and a drunk girl to disable something. i was super proud of my plan but we ended up failing abysmally as the other two just wouldn't stick to it.

in response to a comment about santa klaus: perhaps santa left, and for the longest time it's been krampus disguised as santa klaus, sullying kids' hearts with consumerism until they fall into his domain

big news from today: mr smear actually swimming from gd to me and back many times over! it's official, he can swim. i'm feeling immensely proud and greatly relieved.

thursday:

i holed up at my mom's place for a few hours and mostly completed phase 1 (simple login screen) of my first real app, as well as making good headway on the backend (every cloud app i've built has required a completely different approach to security, i had quite a bit to learn for this one and a lot of working around the fact that bcrypt must be compiled for the correct platform in order to work with lambda functions).

mr smear and i joined sailor for a walk along the pipe track, which ended up taking a good couple of hours and we were both exhausted when we got home.

friday:

christmas 2020 - grocery shopping, completing phase 1 (with its backend), watching part 1 of the hogfather, making page 10 public, visiting my mom and a pleasant friday evening.

today:

a great service this morning, spending some time answering questions about sonnet 104 and being inspired to resume the podcast episodes, part 2 of the hogfather (and being reminded why it's arguably the greatest christmas movie ever), a visit from my mom and an hour or so by the pool, followed by a chilled afternoon that included watching vegan 2020: i'm fascinated by this review of 2020 - i really wasn't expecting it to be this optimistic. i'm really sad that it's taken this much tragedy to jumpstart people questioning the impact of their dietary choices, but there's a glimmer of hope that humanity might be able to pull itself out of this mess and end up much stronger for it.

right, time to continue with the final installation of harry potter, and hopefully this evening will include some gaming.

doing stuff

 aside from fighting with my bank, we had a very productive day! it started off with spending some time with cousins visiting from london, it was wonderful seeing them. then i helped gd with our kitchen disaster, introduced mr smear to the chronicles of narnia: the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, delivered one of my books that's been bought as a christmas gift, hit the gym for an intense twenty minutes on the watt bike (that shit was *hard*), came home to shower, finished watching part 1 of the seventh harry potter movie, and now we're struggling to get mr smear into bed so that i can sink my teeth into flutter.

oh! and i made some significant progress with the sandman the other day, i'm halfway through the third volume now. it's magnificent.

back

 if nothing else, i made up a new terrible joke while on vacation:

q. what do you call a country that's ruled by a lion, a witch and a wardrobe?
a. a banarnia republic

anywho. we're back, it was an easier ride back to cape town (and the views are better when travelling south), mr smear was amazing but gd's injured. the rest of our stay was surprisingly great - on sunday evening we enjoyed a really nice game drive (and fortunately didn't flood the engine driving through floodwater), and yesterday the weather was miserable so we spent most of it playing board games while the kids improved their gameboy skills.

the only real bummer was this morning, as i woke up at 5.30am with a weird bug crawling between my shoulder blades and we discovered that the rains had awoke a small army of these wormy insects and sent them marauding over and around our bed. i was unimpressed, gd panicked, and we spent the next couple of hours inspecting each individual item we had before packing it into the car... which we had to do cautiously, as the rains also brought some lovely red wasps and gd's got a phobia about those...

it's late, and we're up early tomorrow to meet with cousins before i head to the gym and then dive into my holiday project.

weight lifting

there's an awkward moment that just happened, during which i realized and admitted to myself that i am, in fact, fat. and that this isn't a sudden or temporary state change. while it's not a shameful thing - i'm certainly not uncomfortable with other people seeing or knowing - i'm definitely not comfortable being this way.

the sun has just set over the augrabies national park, we arrived just in time for gate closing yesterday evening after a solid nine-hour race against waze (with a couple of hairy moments that i'm still bothered by because i was making every effort to arrive safely), and today has been a mixed bag of relaxing / hiking / feeling quite muddled as i try to process where i am and where i've been.

hearing mr smear and his friend giggling almost constantly is fantastic, witnessing his awe and wonder as we immerse ourselves in nature is a pure pleasure. 

my favourite quotes of his over the course of the past two days:

"that? not so much."

"that's sick, man, that's sick"

"i make no promises. no promises."

i read 300 today, and started on the second volume of the sandman. our rabbi friend and i played a great game of carcassonne. i chased off a baboon who, after finding my mom's car locked, defiantly began chewing on the beesting aerial while maintaining eye contact.

i'm exhausted, but my heart is light.

not without my coffee

 ow, my aching back. and neck. and my distinct lack of sleep, too.

we spent yesterday running around shopping for the trip, with one stop at nude foods for their delicious vegan wraps and roti, dropped all the things at home then went out again to pick up all the stuff that we couldn't find during the first part of the mission, then came home to organize things and eat eventually get mr smear into bed and pack and have a few minutes to ourselves.

i climbed into bed around midnight, was woken for an hour and a half by mr smear complaining of a sore tummy, was kept awake by my (can't figure out what parts of my anatomy, ligaments/muscles at the tops of my legs/front of my pelvis) which wasn't helped by any form of stretching until i passed out hours later at an awkward angle on the couch and eventually woke up at 6.15 with my neck at a bad angle and hurting.

7.5 hour drive to go: let's ride!

off.

 my last work day for 2020 was pretty intense, and not as satisfying as i would have hoped, but no matter - it's been a fantastic year work-wise. i was just mulling over how corrective an experience it's been, so much so that i've actually been enjoying putting in development hours outside of work.

yesterday was our last day of quarantine, so of course i felt sick and threw up last night. other than that and a little exhaustion / nausea this afternoon, i've been feeling pretty good so i'm pretty confident that it's just my body recognizing that i'm on vacation. it's tradition.

after dropping mr smear off at a friend's this morning, i drove through to my mom's and set up a wifi repeater - and now her home network's working really nicely! i spent an hour or so on my banking project and housekeeping, including sending my boss my last invoice for 2020 with a note to say that i've thoroughly enjoyed working with him and the team and i'm looking forward to january.

and it's true.

gd and i watched the first half of akira until mr smear came home, we had a chilled afternoon watching hotel transylvania, spent some time by the pool with our neighbour friends, spent some time with my mom, and then did the shower, dinner, harry potter thing. mr smear passed out on the couch shortly after dinner, so it's kinda an early night.

 akira and bed, seems like a good plan.

one day remains

 tomorrow's my last day before i go on vacation, and it's also our last day of self-isolation.

i still haven't figured out where the days have been going, but i've breezed past my "max" hours for this month which is a good feeling. primarily because i've mostly enjoyed my work while doing so.

mr smear's levelled up in dance dance revolution, and what was particularly cool was that that was the first thing he wanted to do after getting out of bed this morning :D

over the weekend i completely rewrote the frontend for our hackathon project (which is now just a side-project, i guess), my primary motivation being so that i could use it to figure out where our money's been disappearing to. i'm still adding features here and there, but by and large it's now pretty damned functional and i was able to get a good sense of our spending in record time! it's ugly as sin, though. i'll worry about that later.

we've played a lot of games, watched a lot of movies. of note, i bought the ultimate laika collection because mr smear was going on about paranorman (which nobody's seen or mentioned since last year), and it was great that he finally got into coraline! the other two movies are fantastic, too.

and when mr smear was in bed, i introduced gd to rare exports. i loved it then, i love it now.

my knee's been giving me grief, according to our physio it's because i'm not extending it sufficiently. so i'm going to stop typing now, stretch for a bit and then go to bed. hopefully i'll sleep more than last night, although my insomnia did give me an opportunity to watch some random cool stuff (like kurzgesagt's can you upload your mind & live forever) and tom segura's ball hog which was brilliant.

couldn't make this stuff up

it's 1am, i went to bed early and woke up a little while ago. as gd climbed into bed, i smelled perfume.

i really don't like the smell of perfume, it really bothers me. so i asked, "is that perfume?" 

and this is how i discovered that for a very long time gd has been putting on perfume after i've gone to bed, because i don't tend to complain when i'm fast asleep. we both got the giggles, especially when she made it clear that she's been doing it for so long that she's almost out of the bottle i last bought her and is going to need some more soon. 

we're used to it

 the past few days have been a bit mental, but very productive. and it's chanukkah now! and mr smear is old enough to be into it, and gd made latkes and sufganiyot and i'm going to gain more weight. we really do need to buy an exercise bike.

though mr smear and i are becoming pretty good at dance dance revolution.

today's news: it looks like our company's being integrated into its sister company, which means that as of january 1st i'll officially have a new employer. nothing else is supposed to change, though, and i'm praying that that's the reality.

i'm tired. i've had some success with the mobile app development this week (for the first time in months), and i managed to fix an irritating bug with our hackathon entry over breakfast. i have no idea how we got to friday so fast.

ventilation

 i'm trying to be rational about this, but honestly i'm just looking for someone to blame for my own screw up. it was irresponsible to go to the birthday party on saturday night, even if we had an amazing time and met quite a few wonderful people. we didn't wear masks and we didn't social distance properly (even if the event was entirely outdoors), and all it took was ONE person to put us all in self-isolation again.

did he not know that he'd been in contact with someone who was infected? or did he not care?

no matter, here we are now. with our poor kid forced to stay home from the holiday school, and we're praying that we didn't contract covid because we really, *really* want to go for our little game park vacation in twelve days' time.

this sucks.

the great outdoors

 after a very indoorsy day, and finally clearing a bunch of things that have needed clearing for a very long time, i took mr smear down to the pool for a very entertaining hour or so that included getting to know our new downstairs neighbours a bit better. we returned to get dressed, have some food and then walk to the ice cream parlour (noticing my extra padding in my reflection along the way) for the treat i promised mr smear yesterday, which he thoroughly enjoyed. we hung around a bit waiting for sailor, then went up to the pipe track. it was a beautiful evening and we walked a lot further than mr smear and i are used to, getting back to the parking lot just as it grew dark and returning home to jump directly into the shower and get mr smear into bed.

now i'm ready for bed myself. i hope i've generated enough sleep debt to sleep through...

speakeasy vibes

 it was a friend's 40th birthday celebration last night, my wife reinvented herself as a gorgeous flapper, i failed to fit into my nice trousers and we spent a jolly evening drinking and socializing quite irresponsibly (pandemicly speaking) for the first time. we met loads of interesting characters and had a great time, and today has been heavily invested in recovery.

mr smear, in the meanwhile, has finally inherited my old laptop which i managed to set up yesterday, so while i sit here drinking coffee and cleaning up my desktops (virtual and physical, if i get around to the latter) he's fully engaged in lego harry potter...

it's not awful weather, maybe we'll go out in an hour or so.

why, yes! this is priscilla speaking

for two years, home choice (or its debt collecting representatives) have been harassing gd as they chase the wrong number of someone named "priscilla". this hasn't been a big deal until a few weeks ago, when the frequency of their calls increased to a ridiculous number per day, but this week i taught gd to handle it differently... if they can't be reasonable, then we shouldn't be reasonable either. so we've been messing with them for days, now, and deriving a good amount more entertainment from their calls than they have.

...

 the long tail of the hackathon - we finally were ready to submit on tuesday morning, but it seems like every day there was more to do as the operators get their bearings. i'm very glad the other dude in our team has been managing most of it.

dance dance revolution: it's difficult. i'm perpetually on the balls of my feet. i kind feel like it's the best exercise i've had in ages.

of course, there're side effects: the bad knee has been acting up as i get used to stressing it properly.  combined with gd's tendency to mishear things, phrase of the week is "i need to make a conscious effort to extend my meat" ("meat" = "knee")

my mom's good news for the week - her contract's been extended again.

i took a long walk with an old friend on... thursday, i think? we walked the length of the promenade and back, which was great, but i did come home with a nasty sunburned patch on the back of my neck :(

otherwise, it was a short but productive work week.

gd's sushi-making skills are improving and last night's dinner was glorious! not only did we all enjoy the meal, but mr smear was reminded of the second phase of the hunter exam so we watched the gourmet hunters episodes of hunter x hunter while we ate.

gd and i got a bit of a shock this morning, our cleaning lady / nanny has asked us for paid leave (in spite of the fact that we paid her in full all through lockdown) and has decided she wants to take december AND january off. i understand "no try, no get" but the sheer audacity has me totally stunned. *i* don't even get more than three weeks off as a senior engineer...

i spent thursday morning dealing with a complete internet failure, and in the process learned that the fibre guys installed our box upside down so the button's as inaccessible as it could possibly be. eventually it came right, but then this morning our connection failed again just as i was getting ready for my part of the torah reading...

oh! and a man called ove. i've been reading it on and off since my "vacation" a few weeks ago, and i finally completed it last night. i wouldn't recommend it in the glowing terms of the internet strangers who convinced me to try it, but i guess it was a nice read and my eyes did get a bit watery once or twice.

the dumbness

it's funny, the mistakes one can make when one's in a hurry. not only did i accidentally leave my personal transactions publicly available for a couple of hours, but a short while ago i realized that i'd accidentally checked in my mailgun api key to one of my repositories and the past while has been a mad scramble to rotate my keys and make it difficult for the casual cloner to dig in to my code history.

*sigh*

otherwise it was a really nice birthday. it started with me figuring out how to mount the new network device cleanly, and while i only worked two hours today they were at least somewhat productive. i finally finished up my hackathon rescue effort, and in the morning (jesus, another short night for me :( ) i'll record a demo and submit it and then... move on to the next urgent (personal) tasks.

pre-birthday birthday

 as my birthday falls on a monday this year, we celebrated it today. it wasn't a *perfect* day, but i honestly couldn't have asked for a better one! after completing my work for the hackathon, we headed down to the pool where mr smear demonstrated his newfound ability to actually keep himself afloat. we stayed just long enough for me to get a *little* sunburned, then went to the waterfront to pick up an ethernet cable (to save myself the trip tomorrow), purchase the illustrated edition of the second harry potter book, take a spin on the ferris wheel (mr smear loved it), have lunch and ice cream, do a little bit of shopping (glad we got it done, but at some point i just needed to get the hell out of the mall), and finally return home for another - even better - round of gd's vegan sushi and the incredibles 2.

all in all, it was an excellent way to celebrate my 40th time around the sun. i'm feeling extremely blessed.

unfortunately, it looks like i was right about being ghosted, so i'm trying to rush a couple of scripts before i crash so that we have something to show tomorrow. it's kinda fun and it needs to be done, so definitely not a day-ruiner :)

outside

the past two days have been much saner. or wait... have they?

yesterday was a whirlwind, i dropped off mr smear at school, then drove through to the waterfront to pick up an ethernet cable. i managed to beat the black friday rush - i'd forgotten it was black friday until i walked in the doors - but forgot to pick up a universal remote control while i was there.

setting up the new network cost me a confused hour and a half, and as excited as i was when everything seemed to be working much better than before, i was even more deeply disappointed when i needed to help a coworker from my "corner office" (the farthest little corner of the apartment from my wife and the cleaning lady) and the line kept dropping.

so i rushed off to my mom's, getting stuck in black friday traffic along the way. it's 2020. not only is black friday not really a south african thing, but most of our population has been unemployed for a good chunk of this year. where are all these people coming from? don't they have jobs? and if not, where are they getting the cash??!

anyway, i arrived at my mom's and immediately went to pick up lunch. the nori rolls were delicious, but i totally overate and spent the rest of the afternoon regretting it. in total i got about two hours of work done, which might have been two and a half if i hadn't taken a walk to pick up a drill bit so i can install the network device properly.

which i need another cable for, anyway...

aside from gd feeling horrible yesterday, it was really nice evening.

i've spent a good chunk of today finishing up my part of the hackathon project which is due on monday. unfortunately, i don't think my teammates are doing very well on their and the thing needs to be presented on monday :(

we all went to the police station around noon to file a complaint against a company that's been harassing gd for a couple of years, and which has begun to call her multiple times a day over the course of the past two weeks. mr smear was quite unhappy there and after giving them all the details we were finally informed that they couldn't help us, only the cyber crime department can and that's only open during the week.

huh.

after dropping gd and mr smear at home, i went on a mission that took me to gardens centre, sea point, and then the wellness centre. i'd shared an exciting video with gd about making plant-based sushi in the morning, and my reward was gd's first sushi making experience - the results were absolutely brilliant!

after my mom left, we watched the incredibles, put mr smear to bed and then i dived back in to the hackathon stuff. i completely sidetracked myself (not that i didn't have fun doing so), and i'm just finishing up a small piece and hoping to be able to complete my part first thing tomorrow so that i can jump in to the rescue on the other aspects.

i have a feeling that one of the guys has ghosted us already.

oh, and we've had a couple of issues with the new neighbour downstairs smoking on his balcony. i went down to have a chat, and the dude actually came up afterwards to give me his number so i can let him know if it happens again (not sure if it's his friends, tenants or flatmates, but whatever). hopefully we'll be cool.

normalizing

firstly: i hope i'm not being too eager, but i'm thrilled to report that the agency that arranged gd's police clearance IS able to request a new document without us having to do anything, and for a much lower fee than before will get it authorized and forward it to the israeli consulate. with the holidays approaching, i expect we'll get everything beginning 2021 and hopefully things will be much smoother going forward.

secondly: today involved a lot more sitting at my desk than is healthy, but it was ultimately very productive. like, excitingly so. and i feel like it went a long way towards improving my coworker's disposition.

thirdly: i successfully resolved the dynamodb issues a little earlier and can finally move forward with the hackathon project. i feel good about this.

our new, very expensive wifi device arrived so early this morning i had to get out of bed to take it from the courier. it requires two ethernet cables to operate. it comes with exactly zero. fortunately, it looks like we're back to "normal" as of tomorrow morning so after dropping mr smear at school i'll be heading out to find a couple.

i hope this thing works as advertised.

dance dance revolution is amazing. i'm as happy with what it's getting me to do as i am amazed at what a powerful (and engaging) tool it is for mr smear. the only thing it lacks is a larger library of music, but there's enough good stuff that we'll be just fine.

dammit

i've just spent hours struggling with something really simple, after a long and somewhat frustrating day at work, and it was a combination of what appears to be some kind of regional aws service outage and me misunderstanding a fundamental limitation of dynamodb.

at least there's an easy solution to the limitation, but it's been a long night getting there that i really didn't need. 

interrupted by a phone call from montreal informing me that we do, in fact, need to start the whole police clearance thing again because the jewish agency wasn't clear (i double checked earlier in case it was me missing something) about their documentation requirements. i'm praying that there's some kind of shortened process for recent clients.

oh, yes. and one side of my jaw's suddenly swollen and sore. is that a covid symptom? 

late to bed again

 why the **** is it SO hard to do such basic things? aside from an unproductive couple of work days, and some behaviour issues with mr smear (but also some great times, at least there's a balance), i've spent an inordinate amount of hours (ie i haven't been recording my time as usual) getting to grips with CORS support in CDK, integrating it into our hackathon project, updating other projects along the way and eventually giving up on publicly available tools and writing my own API tester that does what someone who's testing an API would need.

one major hassle is that my bedroom corner network, which i rely on to be able to work during lockdown conditions, has been acting up and i've now had to sink another couple of thousand rand into a solution that i *hope* will work as advertised. i'm so over bullshit products... why are the standards so substandard?

gd and i have watched a bit of the queen's gambit, which has a couple of annoying aspects but is mostly brilliant, and i watched a few episodes of cobra kai with half an eye this evening and we're both thoroughly enjoying it.

dance dance revolution is excellent. if i ever become good enough to complete tracks on difficult level i will be insanely proud of myself, that shit is hard.

stuck and tired

 i don't know if me feeling so wiped out is a covid symptom, or just general exhaustion. but here we are, monday morning, after what i guess was a pretty good weekend - good hackathon progress, next steps taken on the graphic novel, and my dance dance revolution investment is paying off nicely. and we finished the first season of the utopia reboot, which was GORGEOUS.

i feel like i'm forgetting something, but whatever, i guess.

quarantined

 today started off pretty well, then came to a screeching halt as we learned that our therapist has tested positive for covid. we immediately went to pick up mr smear from school, alerted everyone we've since been in contact with, and spent the rest of the day figuring out what to do (or not to do) and preparing mentally* for the coming week... hopefully not more.

* cursing a lot

 what we've learned from our doctor today:

1. it takes about 48-72 hours to become infectious, so even if we did catch it it's unlikely we passed it on in less than 48 hours.

2. while it's recommended that we self-quarantine for 10 days, people we've been in contact with (contacts of contacts) shouldn't be concerned unless we begin to show symptoms or test positive
 

3. there's a lot of conflicting info floating around, but it seems like getting tested less than 7 days after exposure isn't meaningful.
 

4. it's not recommended to get tested unless we show symptoms. 

...

not that i needed much help with being distracted today.

i at least enjoyed some success with the hackathon project, and mr smear and i played some dance dance revolution before dinner.

my mom and i tried to use caribu again this evening - what an incredibly awful app! we eventually settled for a whatsapp video chat while she read, which worked out much better.

gd and i have been watching the utopia reboot, and it is *gorgeous*. about halfway through i remembered that our grocery store delivery today came with a free heineken 0.0. it's 0.03% alcohol, is called non-alcoholic, and... is not for sale to minors. gd's comment: this world is being overrun by stupid people. who are not, to paraphrase utopia, earning their place in this crowded world.

past my bedtime

 it's been a busy week, but relatively relaxed. gd's documents are on their way to canada, we had a really nice date night yesterday, work's been alright, i've just made some progress on the hackathon project, and i discovered today that i'm very lucky that i didn't brick this macbook i haven't finished paying off by updating to "Big Sur". it's an old macbook, but still very expensive.

the physio *hurt* me today, she focused on my legs and i ended up in shock and laughing hysterically. we suspect the reason my "rls" situation has regressed is because i haven't been standing and working as much, so i guess i need to start doing that again.

oh, and the new series of utopia is AMAZING. we're three episodes in and we actually prefer it to the original.

page 9!

 almost forgot! and we've finally produced page 9 of the graphic novel adaptation ^_^

the last of the staycation

 it's a lovely sunday afternoon, and i'm pleasantly drained after a really nice visit to kirstenbosch with my mom. i'm not not ready to get back to work tomorrow, but i must admit i've barely relaxed and i've barely gotten things done.

that aliyah application anxiety? we finally determined that we've been wasting months and money getting things authenticated locally when the only validation they'll accept is from within canada. so here we go again with expensive couriering.

last night i joined vfmp for my first among us experience - and it was fantastic! i now see what all the fuss has been about :)

the weird thing is that i was able to purchase it on steam and install it on windows, but the steam installer for mac is broken and the only way to play it is via bluestacks. at which point i - or my OCD, at least - decided to upgrade to macOS Big Sur, which apart from being slightly uglier has the simple but powerful feature of allowing me to prioritize wifi connections. FINALLY! this has been driving me crazy for months and i'm amazing at how much impact this little change has had.

indoorsy and outdoorsy

on sunday, i wrote down the following:

i mean, i *did* go outside yesterday to help my mom at her coffee shop, and i *did* go out for a short walk this afternoon which ended with me purchasing the gas station store's last marmite (there's a national shortage due to alcohol production being slowed down, and for vegans marmite has similar post-apocalyptic value to booze).

anyway, the weather's been miserable, and we've mostly been at home, i've read quite a bit (i was intrigued enough to buy "a man named ove" and i has to push through a few chapters before it became interesting), and i have no idea how many hours of ffix i played today.

i'd intended to complete that and post it, but i was distracted. this week has been a bit crazy, while i have had some respite it's mostly been filled with all manner of Things That Need Doing. we're having more trouble with gd's aliyah application, which is causing me a lot of anxiety, and i'd guess that i haven't done 90% of the things i had on my holiday to-do list... but i have resumed rewatching BSG, played some more ffix, read a fair amount, and generally had a good time. i've even napped at random times, and those naps have been good.

exhaling

 this past week was considerably more relaxed than the previous ones, but i still worked long hours with little to no exercise* or fresh air and was so focused on catching up on one system that i got practically nothing done on my main goal.

* although a few days this week the weather was nice enough to get in the pool for a bit.

and then yesterday morning, after consulting with my boss, i realized i need to publish the release we've been working on and the entire day was a mad rush to figure out how to do it and troubleshooting the process. with some much-needed assistance from a couple of coworkers and an encouraging amount of good fortune, it was finally published and tested by 6pm.

and now i'm on holiday for a week. i have a few things i'd like to do, but no pressure to do anything other than enjoy the now, read books and play video games. i'm kinda keen on getting back into ffix :)

gd's documents are finally on their way from pretoria, so one of the things to do this week is submit everything and try to get her aliya interview arranged. this has been one heck of a challenging process, i'm praying things go smoothly.

regarding the US elections: it's been hard not to follow the news on this, but i'm not exactly sure why as i don't know how significant it is which of these guys is elected. i have read a couple of fascinating articles, though, on why so many americans are voting for trump and these ring true: the americans have some underlying issues that they need to address sincerely, otherwise things are only going to get worse for them.

• why "trumpism" isn't going anywhere
• a culture of immediate gratification and cognitive dissonance
• tribalist tensions rising
• losing the technology war (which translates to a weakening economy, amongst other scary things)
  

celebratory chill

 friday was intense and full of surprises, but ultimately successful and we enjoyed a good few hours of real teamwork. i mean, what are the chances of our test server's certificate expiring halfway through our tests?

by the time we were ready to report on our findings, i was exhausted but satisfied. i'm excited for next week - we have uncovered a ton of friction points in our processes and this is the opportunity to reduce them - and i'll be handing back responsibility to the coworker who's returning from his month's leave and preparing to take a week off myself.

the weekend has mostly been good. yesterday morning i occupied myself with coding puzzles and guitar hero (i'm definitely getting better), an hour or so by the pool, then an afternoon relaxing and at some point picking up on ffix which i haven't touched in waaaay too long. mr smear was really getting into the battles, he loved the music :)

this morning was an early sunday, rushing to ready ourselves, pick up a gift and another kid and head out to a jumping castle birthday party. funny thing about buying books for birthday parties, is we find it impossible not to pick things up for ourselves. so today gd got ben brooks - the impossible boy and i grabbed a copy of the graphic novel adaptation of animal farm.

i've never read animal farm. i flew threw it in the afternoon and found it utterly brilliant.

the party was cool, much more relaxed than the previous year (bounce world was empty except for us), and the kids had a good time. we were taken by surprise when dropping off mr smear's friend and his mother offered to keep mr smear for a swim, we've never done something that spontaneous with him before and we enjoyed a plant lunch followed by a relaxing hour at home.

aside from an unpleasant meltdown in the late afternoon, the day has been great. we were able to watch my cousin's wedding on a live stream (much better than a hundred people in zoom), and we found the ceremony and their speeches really touching.

it made me realize that there're a number of us who've gotten married over the past few years without big family celebrations, and maybe we should all do something special together when the plague slows down sufficiently...

the fog of looming deadline

 this week has been mental. we came into it with a plan, and that plan fell apart yesterday evening after three days of grueling battles with bash and bamboo. i'm not sure if my head's feeling full of wool because of allergies, because i'm coming down with a cold, because i'm exhausted, because of my neck, or because of all the stress... or maybe it's a combination of a number of those. either way, my neck's been threatening to spasm and i really haven't been sleeping well.

but today, in spite of all this and losing two hours of my day to taking gd to the mall, we actually managed to complete a round of testing a day before deadline, giving us tomorrow to be more thoroughly certain that the release i'm responsible for is safe to go out.

and, along the way, we all learned a lot and have built some neat additions to our tooling. this is good.

aside from being relieved, i'm actually excited to complete this release cycle and write up all the lessons learned, and the big reward will be spending next week with the team making sure that the next release is a lot less stressful.

i think i'm just about ready to call it a night.

borat subsequent moviefilm

no way. but... i mean, of course. then again, no way.

sbc is not the hero anyone wants, but he's definitely the hero they need. and i'm just as impressed by maria bakalova who deserves at least as much credit!

remembering what nature smells like

i started my day writing up a couple of things i've been thinking about recently, then played some guitar hero before heading out. i took mr smear to kirstenbosch today for the first time in more than a year (according to my blog posts), it wasn't great weather but it was perfect for a light hike and we had a good time.

a migraine loomed on the way home, i'm pretty confident it's all in my shoulder / neck. i managed to keep it together, though, and it seems to have calmed down. the afternoon was mostly pleasant, i read some more of the swamp thing reboot (which is amazing) and lounged about. mr smear and i had a couple of turns at dance dance revolution - he's improving! - and everything was fine until dinner was over and it was time to shower.

i'm fast arriving at the conclusion that my son's pretty spoiled, and it looks like we're going to have to change tack quickly. it doesn't help that his behaviour upset both gd and myself, and then things escalated... now everyone's unhappy. a great way to spend a sunday evening after a generally good weekend.

mixed-bag saturday

 i slept alright last night, waking up at some point to write down the following: "why did the ambitious dancer join a studio for giants? because the bar was higher."

mr smear woke me up this morning and after teaching him to make a bowl of cereal for himself (he was so excited!) we played dance dance revolution and both had fun. afterwards, i tried to figure out how the dlc works, and while evaluating the options suddenly began a migraine. panado did nothing, but an hour of lying down and crying (just pain tears, so not crying per se) at various angles seems to have helped a bit.

i'm really feeling betrayed by my neck this past few weeks :(

stop.

 layer cake. a good, but deeply unsatisfying movie. i've just watched it as a fitting end to a weirdly unsatisfying week. my neck's still griefing me but i have this strange feeling like my mobility might be improving. i'm getting better at guitar hero.  i discovered yesterday that fifteen minutes of dance dance revolution on even the lowest settings is very real cardio.

for about a week now, mr smear has been singing the chorus (correctly) of of monsters and men's little talks. it's awesome to hear him, it's a little annoying to be perpetually stuck with the earworm ourselves, and the timing of its subject matter seems a bit creepy.

i finally completed a chunk of work today, but it wasn't as interesting as a brief moment at the end of it when i demonstrated to our older, old-school and very set-in-his-ways linux guru the value of writing detailed comments above every regex string. meaning i typed the whole thing out myself, and promptly found a bug.

the geese have been pooping in and around our pool. it's getting hot, and i wanted to go for a quick dip... but no.

anyway, i haven't been feeling too well this past week or two, some of it due to my neck, some of it due to sleeping badly (as usual), and a lot of it due to the emotional swings brought on by krybabie's passing. i'm hoping that maybe this weekend will be easier.

deep breaths

this past week has been a real rollercoaster. tonight was the last night of prayers for krybabie, it's been an emotional week and it's far from over.

our physio left me feeling beaten today, second time in a row. i really need to figure out how to hold my head correctly. i'm failing at something we evolved for at least two million years ago. i'm pretty confident nerve pressure is the reason i've been feeling tired, headachey and queasy since friday :(

fingers crossed, i'm hopeful that our canadian documents will finally get to the right people in the next few days... we're very lucky that one of gd's conversion group works for a courier company and has offered assistance!

my work week's been a bit weird, i had plans but for three days have been caught up investigating a bug and (as always) trying to make sure nobody gets stuck with the same nonsense twice. at least i've learned a lot of different things.

our dance dance revolution mat arrived yesterday! so we're set for the next lockdown, which sadly looks imminent...

our programmable banking beta program has a hackathon going on with some pretty amazing prizes, and i'm actually quite excited about what we came up with this afternoon! not that i've had headspace for much these days...

tears for krybabie

 he was diagnosed less than two months ago with an aggressive variety of cancers, and passed away on wednesday a handful of days after his fortieth birthday, leaving behind a devastated mother, sisters, wife and two small kids as well as a massive hole in his community.

although our mothers have been best friends for ever, the two of us haven't been close for two decades... but as teenagers we were inseparable and the past few days are proving tougher to process than i would have expected. it's absolutely heartbreaking to think of what his family is going through, it's honestly making my head spin.

and speaking of things this brings perspective to, my sister has finally remembered that life's too short to put up with her horrible third husband.

so it's been a dramatic week.

 ...

i've been becoming increasingly frustrated trying to plan our holiday trip in december, and my last two workdays were thoroughly unproductive due to all the crazy stuff going on, so i'm feeling VERY glad and grateful that i made sufficient hours before hump day (which also happened to be invoice day for me). and getting our documents back from the apostille feels like pulling teeth, and there's really nothing we can do about that...

...

on a positive note, swimming season's pretty much here (even if we're contending with egyptian geese for use of the pool), mr smear is obsessed with minecraft (and on an even more educational note, i managed to find rehov sesame videos teaching hebrew letters that he enjoys), and whenever i get a chance to play guitar hero live: omg, it's hardcore. for me. and i'm only trying to play on "regular"... it's great fun! even if i do feel terrible whenever the crowd boos or throws things at me.

weirdness

 the week's half over and it's been a weird one.

sunday: i actually (finally!) put a couple of hours into strategizing a legacy app i've been thinking about for a year and a half already (it's what i made the simple free encryption tool for). nystire - aka the destroyer of dreams - has validated it and provided some helpful feedback so i'm pretty confident this is a good idea.

we also spent a little time by the pool, which was really nice.

 this work week so far: i've been deploying, rolling back and fighting massive serverless/terraform/terragrunt headaches, and while today's deployment finally looks good i'm still not 100% confident and i'm monitoring nervously. the best part was discovering that one of our production services has been down for over a month and it doesn't deliver error notifications O_o

*sigh*

it's the little things.

guitar hero live is awesome, i've received my copy of dance dance revolution and tested it with a regular controller (weird), and all that we're waiting for now is the dance mat for my early birthday present to myself to be complete.

we watched a couple of very interesting documentaries on izzy the other night: blues by the beach (heartbreaking) and israel inside (making gd even more excited to move).

now to get back to monitoring and then hopefully find some time to make bookings for the december holidays...

motion sickness

 twice. once watching kids playing minecraft when picking up mr smear, and now after helping mr smear out for a bit. i'm now super queasy :(

on a different note*, guitar hero live is amazing! it took me more than just the tutorial to get a handle on what i was supposed to be doing, and i've got a loooong way to go before i'm... whatever the expression is for playing well. shredding like a rock star? whatever. it's a lot of fun.

* sorry.

mr smear and i joined gd and her friends for a promenade walk, which was mostly nice with only a few stressful moments (mr smear almost rode his bike into a toddler at one point). at least i don't feel sunburned.

i've now published page 8 publicly! 8 down, loads more to go. but probably a bit less than the initial estimate of 64.

 [gets distracted by more minecraft]

a welcome weekend

 i'm off to bed, just quick notes:

1. my work week was all over the place, but ended on such a great note i'm still excited by it.

2. i've been to the gym three times in the past week, and already gained a couple of kilos.

3. i drove out to a scrap metal place to sell our broken tap, i was pleasantly surprised to receive R120 for its 2kgs.

4. mr smear's dairy allergy appears to be lessening. he's still got to have an epipen, but it is slightly less stressful for us. gd, on the other hand, has turned out to be massively allergic to marijuana - so much so that someone smoking around her could put her in the hospital :(

5. i don't know if i resent the jewish agency or the canadian embassy more. the jewish agency for demanding an apostille / signature on every document, the canadians for making it so hard (and ridiculously expensive, $80 per document!)

so now i have to get a courier to pick it up documents from the apostille in johannesburg and deliver them to the canadian embassy, *if* i can convince the embassy to accept my payment form via email.

$#%!.

6. i really, really hope the weather improves over the weekend because gd and i are finally both able to get in the pool!

7. mr smear's been doing cool things in minecraft so we bought it. guitar hero live has just arrived today! it seems like my birthday celebrations are starting early this year >D

hitting hump day

 it's past midnight, but i've done what i needed to do. which was write a piece of software that a day full of meetings had decided was necessary, and upgrade my vmware workstation version to a) determine whether it's actually worth paying double for and b) to buy me another 30 days to decide.

mr smear stayed home again yesterday, but finally returned to school today. for the moment i'm stuck at home because not all of my hardware's actually portable... yesterday was spent isolating a bug that's only producing errors for me, and even then only under specific conditions. today was almost all meetings, although i did make a point of heading to the gym for an hour or so, and i do feel a bit better for it.

mr smear seems to be getting a feel for minecraft, which is cool.

i met with my therapist yesterday, and there was a realization that stood out - my entire life has been a long continuous stream of incoherence and contradictions: i've been extremely privileged and ridiculously fortunate, but at the same time i haven't been through a single phase of my life that couldn't be comfortably described as a psychotic mess of strangeness and contradictions.

and all i have to do now is learn to accept the lie that always raised my hackles: "it'll be okay". i think i'm slowly starting to get it. even if it won't be okay, it'll be okay.

i feel like i'm missing something important. oh, yes. apparently my bank is investigating the disappearance of my money and the woman overseeing the investigation was shocked by the breadcrumbs she's uncovered so far. that's inspiring. in other news, the apostille still hasn't communicated with me regarding our vital original documents, but mr smear's passport appears to finally be on its way which is a huge relief.

one day at a time.

end, weekend

today started off a bit sourly, as i realized that i'd missed an important notification from teams on friday (thanks, microsoft, for making it so you only get notifications when you've pinned a channel), and struggled to figure out how to respond to the alerts because they didn't actually provide useful information. 

note: if you're sending an error message to a user, include a hint as to what may be causing it or how to resolve it.

one of mr smear's friends celebrated his birthday at deerpark cafe this morning, and overall we actually had a good time. the weather was gorgeous and i actually got a little sunburned, but the kids had fun and we only had one freak-out when one of the parents assumed a candy bar was vegan and gave it to him (he didn't have a reaction so it might have been, but when i looked up the product there were no ingredients / allergens listed).

some of the afternoon was tense, most of it was pretty chilled. i finally downloaded the minecraft demo, but mr smear was too busy with little big planet to try, and inspired by a conversation we'd had with another friend's mother i attempted to get hold of dance dance revolution or a wii. wii's don't appear to be available in south africa, so we ended up splashing out on the former as well as picking up guitar hero live. which, considering the dates everything's due to arrive, is effectively my early birthday present to myself :P

a saturday night for old people

i'm in bed, i've done my rls stretching, now just reflecting before shutting down for the night.

it was yet another crazy week, even if my work-week was only three days. i'm really glad i took yesterday off, it gave me an opportunity to go to the gym, play videogames, that sort of thing. today was finish-another-page day for the comics, and after two days of intense winds (we sorted out my mum's apartment just in time!) we all walked out into a cheerfully sunny day for ice-cream and gift shopping.

the two issues i last posted about haven't been resolved yet but i'm feeling a bit less stressed about them. and my mum'vs on holiday for the first time in years so i'm pleased about that.

the hunters: good heavens, the first season finale was deeply disappointing. utterly shite.

the boys: still incredible.

utopia (the UK production): brilliant, beautiful, with only minor criticism for an overwhelmingly entertaining series. 

double jeopardy

oh, yes - and my fancy, exclusive bank managed to double charge me when transferring a large sum of money last week and they still haven't resolved it. i really don't know what to do at this point. 

breaking of the fast

i not only fasted this yom kippur, and not only did i fast about an hour longer than mandated, but it was a) an easy fast and b) a generally good day of services that ended on an inspirational note. in the rabbi's closing sermon yesterday he alluded to (or perhaps said so explicitly, i heard most but not all of it) the idea that yom kippur serves as a sort of annual near death experience, one wherein we're encouraged not only to be introspective about our behaviour but all to reevaluate who we are and what our priorities are.

as for the fasting being easy, gd and i have both picked up a little weight we're not proud of and i think my having a spare tire helped. (i think a lot of my spare tire blew up from around mr smear's birthday celebrations, we did eat a LOT of cake and donuts. also, living right near an amazing vegan donut shop is definitely a part of it.)

work-wise, thursday and friday were legitimately exciting and today was overall pretty great. the code changes i made amounted to a handful (okay, perhaps even a double-handful) of lines, but the amount of changes we've made peripherally to our testing and deployment process have put me in a much stronger position to take over from next week so we're both feeling pretty good about things.

i dragged mr smear out of bed and took him to school this morning, not realizing that the calendar changed due to the pandemic and he's still on school holiday until next week. if nothing else, we had a good time singing and dancing along to some good rock on the way :)

...

i've been wading through bureaucracy lately and seeming to claw my way up to breathe, which is a nice feeling. now that gd's eligible for permanent residence, we've looked into it and it turns out to be completely meaningless to apply - we'll be gone before the authorities grant it, and once we're outta here it's very unlikely that we'll be coming back any time soon even for a visit. my mother's admitted that she'll be following us to israel, and i'm really hoping that as many of our friends and family as can manage follow suit.

the only disturbing news of the day has come from gd's aliyah application, after a short back-and-forth via email i'm quite worried that the apostille has mislaid all our documents and those things are a) expensive and b) take forever to acquire and c) are preventing us from actually making real plans for our migration.

anyway, it's mr smear's bedtime and i'd like to finish the first season of the hunters AND get some sleep tonight.

middle of the road

wednesday night, in bed after a long but pretty successful day that included two meaningful achievements at work, a pleasant lunchtime walk in the sun and another excursions in the evening (the weather's improving).

there's pressure on, but it's okay.

hopefully i'll sleep well tonight. our physio finally worked on my legs a bit this afternoon and it was torture, she's got a theory that this whole rls thing i've been struggling with for the past decade might just be rooted in a lack of a good stretch or two. we'll see. 

a calm storm

 this week has been a whirlwind. it was a lot more relaxed than the previous one, but not necessarily good. i was mostly unfocused, and the one big job i had i never got around to because i was busying myself with everything else. uh, anything else, if i'm being totally honest...

mr smear finally went back to school, which was a bit of a relief. i've been doing what i can to circumvent resistance and at this point i've got no idea what's working and what's not.

i've had zero time and headspace to work on anything outside of my main gig, and have been making a point of catching up sleep. i'm not sure it's helping.

taking care of my tattoos has been annoying as always, but this time the aftercare has been a lot more time consuming and going over each individual line has become an interesting little ritual. i'm really stoked by how good my arm looks, now, and i'm really glad i got this done before breaking for swimming season.

it's the tail end of rosh hashana right now, i'm not sure this has been a great couple of days but i'm hoping that it's the start of a much better year than what we've all been going through. that would be nice.

"one moment"s

i began this post while sitting here listening to our friday night temple service after a painful and exhausting week, thinking about All The Things and being really grateful for the right now.

two new tattoos, and a beautiful sketch for the next page of the graphic novel in hand.

a beautiful family.

enough space to breathe, even if i'm desperate for a holiday.

a rough plan for the coming year, both in work and in where we'll be.

one small step at a time. details are just details.

one foot in front of the other

i cannot believe it's wednesday night, i'm completely buggered and i'm finding it very hard to be effective and productive.

the big changes this week are about mr smear and independence; setting things up so he can do as much as possible on his own seems to be making a bit of a (positive) difference in his behaviour. it's not all roses, but another side-effect is that we're somehow managing to bring his bedtimes under control and this is the third night in a row that we've gotten him in bed at a more reasonable hour.

other good news: gd's police clearance is ready! we're waiting for the courier to pick it up and then we're one step closer to getting all her documents apostilled...

i found this ted talk on posture and movement fascinating, and it seems to be helping a bit.

i'm a bit sad that the past couple of months have been devoid of new tattoos, but i'm excited to have completed another one yesterday and i'm looking forward to my friday and saturday sessions!

the end of a good weekend

 i'm tired, and i've been very tired for a long time. this weekend was relatively restful, though. yesterday afternoon i took mr smear to my mom's and helped her hang paintings and set up a micro-ups for her router, and last night gd and i started with season 2 of the boys - we've just finished the second episode now, and i'm not disappointed.

oh! and mr smear and i started playing the gardens between yesterday, it's beautiful but it goes from kid-friendly to wtf in only a couple of levels... beautiful game, though, and we can play it together.

this morning was a slow-starter, i did spend a fair amount of time learning flutter things before we headed out to bakoven to meet a cousin and hike a bike trail... it was a beautiful day, and we all really enjoyed the outing! we then headed to plant and sat down to enjoy the buffet, the food was great and i definitely had more desserts than i should have.

the afternoon involved a nap (for me) while gd and mr smear played video games, i joined for a bit before getting motion sickness (toy story 3's sunnyside daycare area and way too much with the driving / riding), then the neighbour kid came over for a couple of hours and i spent wasted most of that time trying to point a subdomain at my api gateway. yee gods, why is it so damned hard to find an explanation as to how to do it? (i think i've figured out everything from the aws side, but my domain host's dns settings are clearly doing something wrong)

tonight's struggle with mr smear was about getting him to practice eating with a knife and fork. ffs, it's the things we expect to be easy in this parenting shit that always seem to be the hardest.

i'm tired, i feel like i should just call it a night.

de/motivate and going up

thursday:

thursday was a bit mixed up. the good parts involved an exciting consultation with my tattoo artist and booking three sessions for next week, a little bit of success at work, a couple of pleasant short walks outside in our first spring weather and some great moments with my boy. the bad parts involved having difficulty focusing on work, realizing i've only done half my hours this week, and a moment over spilled coconut water that triggered a painful talking-to about my anger issues...

the big news from thursday was shocking and a bit surreal: my israeli passport has been renewed, but only for two years. they're literally giving me two years to return before i lose my passport. we were tentatively planning on moving before 2022, but now there's external pressure and that's made everything a lot more real.

after getting mr smear to bed i worked with SxS until late. i'm sad that the issues we're having are with the deprecated solution that's still being sold (silverlight is awful), but i enjoyed seeing what's become of the replacement project i initiated!

yesterday:

 a general sense of the day being out of control, working at my mom's, a weird dmv experience (none of us could figure out what we were waiting for, and i somehow picked up my new license ahead of the handful of people who'd been waiting longer than me), eventually getting through it and back for breakfast-lunch (i hadn't eaten a thing until 1.30pm, and then i ate too much) before diving in to strange mysteries that we only managed to resolve about an hour after i'd planned to leave for the weekend.

...

loadshedding didn't quite happen to us last night, but it did drop our internet connection:

MY ISP: "press 1 for support"
ME: *presses 1*
MY ISP: "press 1 for support"

because that's what i'd rather be doing on a friday night than watching a movie.

...

this morning:

it's been a chilled morning, except for the bit where a stripe support agent effectively deleted my account (intentionally!) because i'd complained about receiving 30 copies of the same sms. wtaf.

*yawn* second coffee and try-to-continue-doing-nothing time.

a-flutter

 godsdammit, flutter IS awesome. i've got a good grasp on which components i need to Do The Thing, and i'm pretty sure that i can produce functionality incrementally in a way that solves the real problems from the get-go.

it's also been nice to receive positive-seeming feedback from our rabbis after i mailed them all a letter regarding kashrut and veganism. we really need to start moving forward.

gd's new tattoos are hardcore, even if i had to go out in the rain to pay for them (they're only accepting cash payments now) and i was ten blocks from home when i realized that i'd forgotten my mask :S

i've got another consultation tomorrow - i'm a bit bummed that our artist hasn't been communicating with me but he seems enthusiastic enough whenever i get hold of him...

i've had a bit of a head-cold (it seems) the past couple of days, but at least mr smear seems to be better. he's really loving the activity books i picked up yesterday, just in time for miserable weather :)

1 kilo off my shoulders

 two passport applications, lots of bureaucratic details, loads of double-triple checking, and i finally couriered off two half-kilo bundles this morning. not that i didn't know these things were stressing me, but i didn't realize how much until they were gone and i could fill my lungs again.

yesterday and today were both less-than-half-days at work, so i'm not feeling entirely constructive. but overall i feel like things are okay.

yesterday i had a horrible experience with mr smear that was triggered by a failed attempt at a martial arts lesson, we all learned some shit and i think our dynamic's shifted a bit. i kind feel like it's for the better, but i guess we'll see?

i was going to work with SxS this evening but he delayed, so i've been watching steve hofstetter instead and am very soon on my way to bed.

how am i doing for time?

 it's just past 1am, i've decided i'm satisfied with flutter and its tooling. in spite of spending at least half an hour just fiddling with android studio and vs code and deciding that the latter is a *much* better experience. the afternoon / evening wasn't quite according to plan - i played a bit with mr smear, then it was suddenly dinner time, x-men and nebulizer time (he's mostly back to normal, but he's got a lingering cough and we're doing whatever we can to make sure he's good for school tomorrow), a very late shower and bedtime, and then about forty five minutes on the phone with an amazon agent because they forced me to change my password and then refused to let me in without an OTP that they weren't sending me.

****.

anyway, i spent most of the (night?) filling out passport application forms and hopefully i'll be able to mail off at least one of them tomorrow.

lovely sunday

 so far so good. sleeping late (mr smear tried to rouse me to play, but eventually settled for building up his moon base in little big planet 2 by himself (he's making amazing things), and although i felt horrible (possibly sick) this morning i was doing much better by the time i climbed out of bed.

coffee and determining whether i'd go with flutter or react native (i've been convinced to try flutter after reading a few articles), then a (mostly) nice walk with mr smear for donuts and a really wonderful time sitting on a bench enjoying my second cup in the sun while mr smear went to town on a delicious blue-and-bunny-biscuit topped donut.

i've had a chilled lunchtime, and am now actually installing flutter and will hopefully have something to show (myself) by the end of the day!

yesterday:

the usual start to my saturday, getting up early and learning the few verses i'd been assigned, a nice service and then dropping gd off at the hairdressers and mr smear's bike with protoplasm. i took him to plant for lunch after that, which was a mistake as he still had a runny nose and a cough and an attitude. i regretted getting him a burger.

the afternoon and evening were spent... gosh, i don't know. there was a lot of fighting with mr smear (he's *really* devoted to being defiant lately), and an awesome session with gd practicing and eventually completing the radioactive marshmallow challenge in lbp2. mr smear didn't like not being invited, but he'd already bored both of us way beyond our limits doing his own things... (like filling worlds with stickers)

friday:

friday was supposed to be a short day for me, but it was 5.05pm when i finally was ready to publish my work and walk away from my keyboard. the big achievement was getting both mr smear and my passport photos taken! he has RBF, so getting a shot of him not smiling was straightforward :P

mr smear and i had a very unpleasant interaction after i was done working, gd stepped in and we were all quite unhappy for a while, but the resolution was positive for all of us and gd and i appear to be on the same page now so that's good.

thursday:

i jumped out of bed at 7am with fixes to my prototype bouncing around my head, my boss wasn't as excited about the project as i was but both my coworkers convinced me that these were definitely billable hours and one of them now owes me a case of wine :)

i then found myself volunteering to be responsible for our team's next release, i'd been manic since the night before and the rest of the day was just nuts. also included was a successful cloud deployment that went much smoother than expected and an enjoyable weekly beta programme demo.

...

and now back to flutter.

rollercoaster

 mr smear's come down with something (seems like a regular cold), apparently gd's been hit too and i'm not sure if i had it a week ago, or if that was just allergies and i'm on my way too...

yesterday:

working from home on tuesday mornings is fantastic - it's not monday and things are quite quiet.

we did make some progress, but i was feeling slow and stupid (possibly due to the antihystamines).

i ended up working late, and it took hoooouuuuurrrsssss to get mr smear through the bedtime routine by which point i was done.

today:

mr smear stayed home, after a slow but moderately successful start to the day (that included a delicious improvised "krabby patty") i drove to my mother's. i was thoroughly unmotivated until after lunch and the post-lunch presentation, and then i threw myself into improving our git tools until a coworker distracted me with an interesting challenge, and i eventually left my mom's so late that she opened the door while i was putting my sneakers on.

krybabie update: it's freaking scary how rapidly things are deteriorating and it seems like it's irreversible; this is absolutely heartbreaking.

i came home to another great dinner (mr smear's being thoroughly spoiled) and spent just under four hours designing and building the MVP for our package management system which should give us all the ammunition we need for the morning's meeting on the topic.

i love that in less than four hours - less than three if i hadn't hit a really weird bug with JSON parsing - i was able to go from rough idea to functional tool using my AWS CDK repo as a guide!

seeing stars

 there're a couple of things that have become clear over the last little while:

1. i need to exercise more - i was shocked to discover i've put on ten kilos, and although i'm confident that two or more weeks of donuts and cake had a part to play i'm also confident that five months of barely going outside have something to do with it.

2. i need to invest my time better. i've been taking gd's advice and slowly adding "downtime" to each day, it seems to be helping.

3. i need to update my blog more often! what follows is missing so much and it's always been a really good tool for me to process my day-to-day.

after running a few tests, it looks like the swelling in my jaw that's been bothering me on/off for the last couple of years is just another irritating part of getting older. i've also, over the course of the last couple of weeks, given up on there being a good way for me to get a healthy amount of sleep. i'm not comfortable or safe with the pillows, or without them, and so far the biggest help has been my returning to sit on a pilates ball while i work.

in other news, krybabie's been in rapid decline since we heard the diagnosis (which appears to have been inaccurate), which is kinda hard to process... we may not be very close any more, but we were and our families still are.

work-wise, it's been a decent week overall (in spite of being dopey due to allergy season being in full swing) but i've lost so many hours to python shenanigans that i'm at the point where i feel as good about python as i do about php, even if it's for very different reasons.

i've picked up a bit of extra work helping SxS out with a piece of code i wrote a few years back - i was surprised to discover that although nobody every really tested it, it's been live for clients and working unexpectedly well :)

we had the plumbers in last week - they damaged the floors a bit, but they finally got the awful wardrobe smell sorted out! it appears that some workers damaged the seal to the stack (or whatever it's called) and we'd been enjoying open access to our neighbours bad smells for over a year...

the next sonnetcomix page is beginning to take shape, although it's turning out to be a little more complex than we originally thought. i've had to make yet another big shift in how i approach the pages in the first place, which i guess is evolution.

mr smear has been really funny and fun when he hasn't been hardcore, and he's been a lot less tough to deal with since we realized that his "thing" right now is asserting himself. the other night he told me "you're not the boss of me!", and i told him that he's absolutely right, and if he doesn't want to live under my authority he's welcome to go out, get a job and take care of himself. he's begrudging agreed that gd and i can be "the boss of him" until he's ready to go.

on a different note, last night i did something that upset him and was met with "YOU GET ZERO STARS!" - it was truly difficult to hide my laughter as he was really angry, but after my third attempt to apologize had been ignored i asked him if i really only get one star. "okay, if you apologize you can have ONE star".

he's been really getting into writing words lately (i only wish he wouldn't get so stuck on things like "PPOO"), and although we haven't got him on his new bike yet (he refuses to try without training wheels) he did a great job on his balance bike around the pinelands canal yesterday which was awesome.

oh, yes: "do we have the ben ten game?"

"uh, i don't remember any ben ten game."

"i've been waiting to play it my whole life!"

i need a break from the weekend

two days of really horrible behaviour from my five year old, i'm trying really hard not to take it personally but the only thing that's keeping me even remotely sane right now is that we ran into one of his friends this morning whose father admitted that they're going through the same thing.

my neck's feeling like it might spasm again at any time.

i've had a chat with the illustrator, it's not clear if my idea for the next page is viable or not but at least we agree on general strategy. i tried to have a chat with the tattoo artist, but he's been blowing me off or ignoring me for weeks and i'm beginning to feel like i should be finding someone else.

i've gotten into art of war over the course of the weekend, not the battles but the expedition mini-game. it's a very clever, insidiously addictive mechanism.

i finally watched avengers: endgame, and it was a decent end to what had become a generally mediocre run. i've read most of the first omnibus of the boys, and i have to admit that the tv series is better written. the comic's fun, don't get me wrong, but it's just not as tight.

i've just spent the past hour or so looking into mobile app development, and i've just realized that it's past midnight... so...

a welcome rest

it's been another long week, although thankfully not as intense as the previous ones. the major theme of this week was a continuation of the weekend - setting up virtual machines - but although i've lost a day's worth of billable hours and tons of productive time, i feel like my equipment is in a good place right now. i'm immensely amused by the fact that after much hunting, i finally found a way to get accented characters on my windows machine! my first (and possibly last) purchase on the microsoft store is a relatively expensive app called holdkey, which makes your keyboard do exactly what a macbook does out of the box. if i wasn't regularly typing my german boss' name, i don't know if i'd feel it was worth it but as it stands i'm getting great value for my money!

speaking of which, gd's totally addicted to duolingo and her hebrew's improving dramatically ^_^

by the end of monday i was finally ready to prepare all of gd's aliyah documents for the courier, and then realized that i was so focused on her canadian police clearance i completely forgot that she needed south african clearance as well, so that was another workday effectively struck from the record :(

mr smear's birthday celebrations seem to have calmed down, there's something palpably more mature about him all of a sudden and it's kinda freaking me out.

i've finally gotten back into the sandman comics again, and the boys is AMAZING. i'm also finding a bit of space to think about mobile development for a volunteer project i've agreed to take on, and hopefully i'll be able to make some space this weekend for the sonnetcomix project. and teach mr smear to ride a bike.

i just heard that krybabie has been diagnosed with the same thing my father had around the time we became friends, feeling really sad for him and his family right now.

too-long weekend

 working backwards:

 i don't know if i'm cut out to be a software developer for the rest of my life. sometimes i feel like the thing that really separates us from the rest of humanity - the thing that makes us worth the money we're paid - is the willingness to persevere through a never-ending world of broken tooling to get to the point where we can actually do what we *think* it is that we do, which is write code.

 i've now spent most of my weekend - and a large part of that is time i'd set aside to do some actual work - trying to get my new computer configured so that i can repurpose the other machines and get on with my life. the new computer is fantastic. the new internet connect is fantastic. trying to get software building on virtual machines using shared folders is torture.

 birthday stuff: mr smear's birthday was great, but he's been so damned difficult since turning five, so defiant and seemingly incapable of listening to the most basic instructions...  the worst was yesterday, when we went to protoplasm's to pick up his new, very expensive big-boy bicycle. he seemed excited, then got scared, then decided he simply didn't want it. the cowardice and lack of gratitude were deeply disappointing, i may understand intellectually that he's only five but emotional i'm still quite bitter. then this morning we had a zoom birthday party for him and a few friends, it was freaking weird (obviously nobody else got to eat the cake).

friday was utterly unproductive, i was supposed to be making up for it this afternoon but it's now 2.30pm and i'm still trying to get my computer set up. i need a break.

the birthday

my son woke up this morning as a five year-old. kinda hard to digest. he had a great day, from his class celebration (gd was upset seeing the video of the kids all singing wearing masks), to a play-date with his best friend (who gifted him with a really noisy spiderman toy which he broke soon after the friend left), to a mission to the waterfront with my mom to find both toy stores closed. he's been begging for a remote-controlled car, but there wasn't much we could do, so we wolfed down falafel laffa and then walked through to the computer store so that my mom could look for a keyboard.

the computer store's alarm was going off, so i hustled him to the other side of the mall entrance which is a music store. which has remote controlled cars for sale. win!

he got to call the telly before bedtime (adventure time), and after showering and brushing his teeth he decided he wanted pie (gd baked him a proper gorrammed apple pie today because that's what he'd told us he wanted) and even got us to light a candle with it. and then he fell asleep to me reading harry potter.

i think the birthday went well :)

...

i've been really unmotivated to work this week. it hasn't been a bad week, but i haven't worked nearly enough hours and the thing that i've been distracting myself from is preparing a presentation i have to give next week that i'm not looking forward to.

i just wanna focus on development, really.

i did get a haircut yesterday (finally!), and the bloodwork for my life insurance (which i haven't been getting around to for four months), and gd's fingerprints have arrived, and my new computer's waiting for me at my mom's, so things are moving. i really do feel like i need a big PAUSE in my life, although at the same time this week feels like a pretty good proxy.

...

gd's got me watching the boys. i really dig karl urban (because of dredd), but godsdammit the writing of this series is so damned good. it's been forever since a show really sucked me in, i've seen three episodes so far and they're absolutely crushing it.

still (mostly) good

yesterday was a massive relief, our team is generally happy and on the same page. last night was the first time in ages that i had nothing pressing to do but relax. it was good.

today was still relaxed, but i was convinced this morning to make a significant investment in my tools and i was very lucky to find the machine i was looking for at a surprisingly reasonable price. and this afternoon i checked out a new internet provider, and with their offering even if i have trouble getting out of my present contract i'll still end up paying less money per month overall.

this evening was heartbreaking. mr smear has been pushing boundaries pretty hard lately and he continued at bedtime even after i made it clear what the consequences would be - that i would stop reading to him - and then he forced me to carry out the threat. i find this to be one of the hardest aspects of parenting. 

passion of the oh, christ

it's been a weekend. tomorrow's promising to be a difficult day. the weekend was mostly pretty good - although mostly spent cleaning up / productionizing the project i successfully presented on thursday - and then this evening was (completely unnecessarily) emotionally exhausting.

we discovered izzy this morning, which has some amazing content (we watched children of the fall, which was surprisingly good considering we were expecting a drama and i'm not usually a fan of horror films), and we got to share in a cousin's zoom wedding which was pretty great until the connection died on their end. but it was really cool seeing all the fam after such a long time.

forgotten night notes

every now and again i'll wake up in the middle of the night and scribble notes:

1.

battle of iedie: amin vs brickell

nose whistle battles of the rich and famous

2.

the thing about my wife's pyjamas is that they're so warm and toasty that slipping under the covers and falling asleep sees me popping out a while later feeling uncomfortably warm and crusty

death of blogger?

good lord, i've finally (okay, a couple of months ago) imported my lost journal entries, and now blogger's forcing an interface update which has limited some functionality that makes this unpleasant to work with. if it doesn't improve / i don't get used to it soon, i guess i'm going to bail. i'm so over poor UX decisions.

in other news, after months of work i've finally presented my serverless solution to the programmable bank card beta group and received an enthusiastic response. and i've finally gotten to the weekend after two really nasty weeks in which i failed to keep things running while my coworker was on vacation.

the former feels amazing, the latter does not.

i've now renewed my license, but not without another story: the eye exam. the machine sucks, and unless you're looking into the lenses from *precisely* the right angle the image is fuzzy and weird. on the third or fourth attempt i managed to adjust my head correctly, and at that point the letters were totally clear and i had no more issues, but obviously *i'm* the problem in the equation...

health-wise i'm feeling much better, but then gd managed to hurt *her* neck so she's been out of action and struggling for the past couple of days :(

mr smear's been mostly awesome - oh! and he's been accepted into the cottage school we applied for, so we're all very excited about that ^_^

drop the pillow

i read this article on sleeping a couple of nights ago, and i've been dropping my pillow on sleeping on my arm since. and it seems to be helping.

...

this past week has been... really horrible. my neck and shoulder were simply awful for two days, and have been threatening to seize up again since. to make matters worse, i've spent days trying to figure out how to deploy code so that i can troubleshoot the thing that seemed broken, and over the weekend it began breaking frequently. so lots of stress, loads of repeating the same actions with minor tweaks and praying for a different result. when the alarms continued ringing on sunday, i decided to change tack and use a different OS to deploy (i've been working on a mac). i began setting up my windows machine but that started getting overly-complicated, then make the decision to completely wipe my old laptop and install linux on it.

this turned out to be a good idea for two reasons:

1. i discovered, during installation, that it was never a 32-bit machine! my whole struggle with it a few months back was unnecessary, the idiot who owned it before me installed 32-bit windows which reported it as a 32-bit machine (because windows), and running 64-bit debian on it is surprisingly performant.

2. as of this evening (after an hour or two troubleshooting with a coworker), i finally managed to deploy. the big lesson: the combination of serverless, docker and python is heavy and insanely expensive compared to CDK.

...

the weekend was mostly good, although there was one unpleasant incident of arguing about arguing. also, mr smear's been all over the place, his main cry this past week has been "don't boss me around" and "stop forcing me" and when he's not being generally fun to be around he's *really* testing us and pushing boundaries as much as he can.

...

i finally went to the traffic department today to renew my license, i had everything on the list. photos were not on the list, so i ignored the warning from security and walked on through. i waited my turn, supplied my documents, and... it turns out the list is wrong. after telling me what should be on the list, the clerk sent me to speak to a supervisor. the other clerk insisted on hearing what i had to say, then argued facts with me until i read the document out loud and explained that what she was saying isn't how english works. she fetched her supervisor. who not only agreed with me, but explained that the traffic department has been requesting an updated form from the department of transport for over a year now. she gave me a different list of requirements. i have to go back tomorrow again.

...

my side-project presentation is in two days, i feel like it crept up faster than expected. i'm *this close* to a functional product, and i'm really hoping that the others will be excited enough to participate.

it was good while it lasted

i mean, i'm still feeling grateful and all. life's alright. heck, i tried a new pillow last night and actually slept well (crazy dreams about a burning man event in a montreal university notwithstanding). then this morning i made the mistake of trying to flatten my hair a bit before heading out, and my neck and shoulder went into spasm and have made today one long, arduous battle.

after dropping off mr smear, i drove gd to the mall to get her new sewing machine fixed (turns out it was nothing serious, just a rookie mistake), and tried to get some work done while she was being attended to. that didn't work out so well due to wifi issues :(

yesterday, my first day alone at the helm of our cloud solution, was full of surprises. the first being that one of our customers is having issues that we didn't anticipate, and the last (and biggest) being that i discovered that i didn't have access to our production infrastructure - and i did *not* want to have to harass my counterpart on his vacation. fortunately, with literally two minutes of assistance this afternoon, i managed to sort out my access which was a huge relief. 

so i've spent most of today sore and unfocused. i got gd to watch hannah gadsby's nanette this afternoon, which meant i rewatched it too, and it was just as powerful the second time. mr smear told me a great story at bedtime because i couldn't read to him, gd and i watched the first episode of good omens which is brilliant, and now i'm going to bed early-ish and praying that i'll be functional in the morning. 

one more time, with feeling

it's past midnight, time for a quick memory dump before another night of trying to sleep without hurting myself. the past few nights have been abysmal failures.

the past week was hardcore. my counterpart has taught me as much as he could before leaving for vacation, and as of yesterday i'm now the only person available if anything breaks and i feel like we've barely scratched the surface. the next two weeks will hopefully be much quieter than i'm anticipating, and i suspect my low-level anxiety has been triggered more by my previous work experience than anything real.

my side-project's going pretty well, over the course of the weekend i've figured out another piece of the puzzle and i feel like i have enough to get the critical functionality ready before presenting it in a week and a half.

 i spent a couple of hours sorting out my great-aunt's computers, and i'm really proud of the fact that they got back to her with the changes feeling familiar enough for her to be enthusiastic about them ^_^

yesterday's mission to the mall: three and a half hours of supporting gd, entertaining mr smear, and spending a month's rent on a sewing machine. it was exhausting, but we shared a lot of good moments too.

on friday evening i noticed a box that gd had "hidden in plain sight", it was my swag from the beta-program i've been working on as my "side project". mr smear was particularly excited by the lego stars wars hover bike, so we made that together yesterday morning and he's been obsessed with it since:D

 i don't recall what made me watch hannah gadsby's nanette, but i'm glad i did. it's pretty powerful, and while there are a couple of nuances i disagree with i think it was brilliant.

i feel like there was something else important that i needed to put down, but if there is it's escaped me. i guess overall i'm feeling pretty grateful right now. life's mostly excellent at the moment. fairly tough. occasionally infuriating. generally gratifying.

circles under my eyes

it's 2am and i've been up for an hour after being restless for about an hour... i've really been struggling to sleep the past few nights. last night was because no matter what i did i was hurting my neck, tonight because i'm now trying to learn how to sleep on my back.

this is hard.

i worked from my mom's on monday morning, installing heaters but remaining cold as the doors, windows and vents still need fixing. gd joined me for lunch, though, which was nice.

yesterday mr smear's teacher sent a panicked message making sure that his fake cheese wasn't nut-based. every time we have an incident like this it makes us really angry, because other kids' allergies are being taken seriously whereas nobody gives a shit if contact with dairy might kill our son. that's fucked up. i told her so when i dropped him off in the morning, but it's not like she's going to be able to change anything.

you can tell how difficult it was for me to get motivated today by the fact that i finally hung the mirror we "inherited". i got sucked into grocery shopping after picking up mr smear, picked up an obligatory cup of coffee from my mom's coffee shop, and after finally working out and documenting the steps to a new process i joined an onboarding call for a couple of hours - at the end i registered that i was caffeined up to the gills and totally wired...

today our little neighbour came over to play with mr smear, and she asked why we don't drink dairy. we gave her the for-kids version - that cow's milk is for calves, and what happens to dairy calves when they're born - and i'm very curious to see if her mom's as okay with us answering questions as she claims :P

*sigh*

i've now refactored some of my side-project code, hopefully it'll all run so i can go to bed with a clear conscience...

circles

another week down. this last one was cold and stormy. 

mr smear going back to school has been an *enormous* relief. it may be tough getting up at 7 every morning (in utter darkness) but the payoff in hours of being a functional adult is immense. in combination with me now able to work from our bedroom (the wifi repeaters are good!) i was actually really productive. and gd made me awesome pyjamas that are so comfortable i forgot to change before my first work call on friday. 

tattoo 10/154 is done! i'm very happy with these last two, i have a solid idea for filling in the gaps, and our plans for the next two are quite exciting. 

after two months of stress, gd's fingerprints are finally in the mail. next step: mr smear's passport renewal... 

reevaluating how we deal with mr smear's regressions

leyning: i did alright with yesterday's torah reading, but i get so nervous that i tend to stop breathing properly after a couple of verses... 

mr smear bashing his head on a boom yesterday, then on my mom's couch today :(

side-project achievement unlocked - as of today, infrastructure and security are taken care of and i can finally focus on the core functionality with no distractions :)

harry potter rewatch + a few more hours on the lego game. loving them all the more. 

after midnight

yep, it's 1am and i've been restless then up for a while now. so much for a good night's sleep...

we rented the invisible man last night, it's an excellent concept with great production, but there are parts of it that were so poorly written that i spent them raging with disappointment. there are infinitely better ways to move a plot forward than to rely on characters being completely ****ing stupid. there were a number of great scenes that make it clear that the writers were just lazy, as opposed to incompetent.

today was a much better take on "anniversary". we dropped mr smear off at our cousins for a few hours, went to plant for an enjoyable lunch date, chilled at home (i completed a chunk of my side-project, and we re-watched some of bill burr's paper tiger), and then spent about four hours picking up mr smear.

it was late by the time we returned home, and in a few hours we'll be getting up for his first school day since march 12th.

i hope we've got everything we need.