lockdown imminent

it's been almost two weeks. it feels like almost three. other parents aren't playing ball, so mr smear's pretty much been stuck with us. it doesn't seem to be the end of the world, but it's really hard to get work done sometimes. it also doesn't help that today and tomorrow got messed up because a physical playdate from a few weeks ago left us with ****ing fleas, so we had our place sprayed this morning and we're having my mom's done tomorrow.

it's been hard getting work hours made up, the world seems more demanding than usual (it's probably not), every time i go out and see people i come back more happy about being isolated from them. people are ****ing stupid and nuts, half the people outside are acting like there's nothing going on and the other half are wearing masks that aren't really covering their faces. ffs.

but hey, we're (as a species) learning to operate remotely. this is good. very good. i'm giving a talk to some other parents tomorrow about tech literacy and parenting, mr smear's learning to amuse himself (mostly) for hours on end, and we're making a point of taking him outside (yard time) and being very grateful that we live in a complex with a foresty garden and a swimming pool. this past weekend we experienced an historic series of moments with an online temple service and even a barmitzvah. i've finally bought tabletop simulator and we're gearing up for a game on saturday night. the toronto poetry slam has been online for two weeks now, which would be fantastic if i was able to watch it (2am on a monday morning, nuh-uh). the world's getting smaller, in a good way.

we're still paying our cleaning lady, but we (mostly gd) have to do the actual work. i don't know how this is going to work out. protoplasm was telling me he's paying his hairdresser regardless of whether he sees him, i've just sent an email to my tattoo artist to see if i can purchase a voucher now and cash it in when the lockdown is over.

stay safe, everyone. look out for each other. we need to get through this.

time flight

this week has been a bit of slog, though it's had some good points. i'm feeling a bit disconnected work-wise, and i've got lots of hours to make up, my torah reading for the weekend is alright but not fantastic, it's tough making sure mr smear spends enough time outside (it's fun to do it, but gd's not in a great state at the moment so it's feeling a bit single-parenty), and i'm really struggling to find time to do the other things that need doing like taking the UPS in for repair and writing. and there's two hours scheduled tomorrow for our front door being reconstructed, which will hopefully go a long way to reducing our electricity bills.

i'm starting to wonder if it's not a good idea to throw coronavirus parties for young healthy people who subsequently quarantine themselves and are then pretty much guaranteed to not be a disease vector. am i losing it?

the witching hour

hmmph. that's how i feel about the workday. hmmph.

it was tough to keep focused - a million distractions now that i'm stuck at home, and mr smear and i have both started an unpleasant cough and we're praying this isn't it. but it's theoretically possible. so there's that. some of today was heartbreaking, but most heartwarming. in particular, the good night hugs; i had a flashback to our midnight corridor walks when i was having a flash-forward of hugging my much older son, and there was something about tonight that seemed to connect the two moments.

travel plans? holy shit that's a lot of money. maybe... maybe not so much.

i've finally got my side-project pretty functional! needs a fair amount of TLC, but the bones are solid ^_^

right. bed.

you know you're the a**hole when...

that previous post actually got me blocked from the amitheasshole subreddit, what i *should* have done was report the dude for harassment but instead my response was read as threatening (which wasn't the intention, but it was poorly worded). anyway.

the rest of the week was a bit nuts, lots of frustratingly slow going at work and mr smear's school shutting down due to the covid-19 story made things very complicated. not helped by the fact that gd has had a bad cough / lung infection for a week.

i'm not impressed that she decided to test a food allergy last night with everything that's been going on, she ended up in the hospital again :/

this weekend's been... full. i've spent a lot of time writing, i've finally (as of a few minutes ago) brought the personal project i've been working on to a point where i can actually use it for its initial intended purpose. i've had some good times playing outside with mr smear, but also a lot of really unpleasant moments - mostly him just being mean or rude to us. but the good times have been good, and being stuck indoors (bad weather + no playdates due to "social distancing") we've watched star wars iv, spiderman into the spider-verse, the nightmare before christmas and toy story 2 together.

we also played about three hours of samorost 3 this morning, which was excellent.

i didn't mean to go to bed so late. damn.

press my buttons

go on. do it.

i tried to back out of being harassed on reddit:

you might be surprised to learn that your opinion, based purely on a few lines of text written in a reddit thread, is missing a whole lot of facts and nuances that provide context. honestly, as enticing as it may be to respond with all the details, i don't feel that this is going to be a constructive endeavour as you're clearly not interested in learning anything that might change your mind, so i hope it's okay with the gods of the internets that i walk away from this encounter.

but the asshole was insistent. so i responded as follows:

damn, you're unpleasant - i'd love to have a chat with you face-to-face, see how ugly your behavior is when you're faced with potential consequences.

1. my wife has character, agency and backbone, we discuss everything and we debate constantly. you might not know this, but it is actually possible to convince people with data and by setting an example (until she got pregnant and needed me around more, i was in MMA training and in incredible physical shape... now i've been out of the gym for a few years and i'm just in good shape)

2. the tension during pregnancy was due to the fact that she insisted on eating things that are known to harm a foetus in utero. seafood, in particular - with the amount of mercury having long surpassed all safety limits, children whose mothers eat seafood during pregnancy are born with significantly smaller brains. pardon me if protecting my child's future cognitive abilities took priority over keeping the peace. i learned over the course of the pregnancy how to share data and then keep my opinions to myself, and we figured shit out, which is what responsible, mature adults do.

our son has two parents, i'm not just a sperm donor.

3. by the time our son was born i did not insist on him being vegan, and sadly that decision led to him developing a life-threatening dairy allergy. no, soy milk is not a replacement for breast feeding or formula. neither is cow's milk, so that's a strange twist you've got going on there. soy formula is as nutritious and much safer than dairy, but my wife chose to supplement breastfeeding with dairy initially until she realized there was a problem and from that point he became a soy-formula kid for the months it took for her to be able to breastfeed exclusively*. which was fine. i pretty much left her alone with the solid food decisions when the time came, until she eventually had her "ah-ha!" moment. once she understood that there was nothing in animal products that he couldn't get more and better from plants, that was when SHE decided that we should all be vegan. some important information that she learned in those documentaries were a part of that "ah-ha!" moment. if incorporating new facts into your life is "brainwashing", well, that's your problem.

* and because you're so *good* with parsing what i write, i feel like i need to specify here that she had a *really* hard time breastfeeding to the point where *i* was encouraging her to give it up, but she insisted and persisted and courageously pulled through

4. we have had excellent pediatricians, and we regularly do blood-work and check in with dietitians to ensure that we aren't missing anything. i came to veganism through a desire to learn - i was actually anti-vegan when i started reading research papers on nutrition because i began my journey with a b12 deficiency (on a decidedly animal-based diet) - and it was only after i realized that the more i followed an evidence-based diet the more plant-based it became that i was able to let go of the cognitive dissonance surrounding our food choices and started becoming vegan.
like most parents we care deeply about our son's health and welfare, and while he's the only vegan in his last three preschool classes he's usually among the biggest, toughest and most active. he's also really smart, constantly impressing his teachers and other parents, so i don't think we're completely failing.

5. if you're going to call the aforementioned documentaries brainwashing, i suggest you take a step back and consider where all your dietary information is coming from. who's informing you? who's informing your doctors? we've all been brainwashed by about a century of marketing, we have to train our kids to deal with the dissonance of eating animals that we'd otherwise befriend, and watching my non-vegan friends deal with these issues with their own kids has been eye-opening. it's easier to teach compassion when you're not being a hypocrite.

next time you're reading an article demonizing plant-based diets and promoting animal products, do yourself a favor: check the sources. and when you read the sources, read the abstract, and the conclusion, and then look at how the study was done. you might actually learn something.

a full week

highlights and lowlights. a whole bunch. some more memorable than others.

1. the saturday morning reading. i have learned not to say "sure!" when i have only two days to prepare. i practiced until i arrived at the synagogue, kinda had a handle on it. then i went up and had forgotten... everything. it was super embarrassing, less because i cared about what others thought and more because i felt like a proper idiot.

2. the financial advisors have been really pushy, generating a lot of drama. i'm inclined to figure shit out myself.

3. an uncomfortable event that took a day to sort out.

4. i was late to post my creative writing submission, but i ended up quite happy with it.

5. i left work on friday feeling really good about my week's achievements. i'm quite satisfied overall.

6. mr smear has been testing us really hard. but he's also been really cool. in particular, we've had some interesting bedtime conversations about the nature of god (i already need to correct some oversimplifications he's gotten from the school); yesterday i picked up the first seasons of batman: the animated series, x-men and the fantastic four from 2006 and we watched an episode from each this evening, he was over the moon :)

7. mr smear swam by himself yesterday for the very first time! the combination of pride and relief made me emotional, and then the teacher came over to comment on how fast he's learning ^_^

8. purim was fun! i took mr smear to the wynberg temple and he really enjoyed it, i had a couple of interesting conversations and the little musical play before the megillah reading began had the desired effect on him. it was only yesterday that we received photos from his teacher and discovered that the "secret" he'd kept from me the other day when i asked him how his day went was that he was haman in the class play :)

9. oh! we finally got the projector up and running, it's awesome having it back again.

tuesday

i'm feeling a bit... tired? not really, certainly not like the past week or two. antsy? possibly. anxious? hmm, a little.

the anxiety is partially fueled by insurance broker drama that's been unfolding and folding and unfolding again over the past couple of days. also, by my almost posting a submission to the AITA subreddit and receiving a clear YTA from my wife regarding about five years of taking every opportunity to remind her that once upon a time she told a burly hardware store dude that i wasn't good with my hands. i didn't realize just how bad i've been making her feel, so i feel kinda shitty now.

the trigger for this whole thing was that yesterday evening i attached a shelf to the top of our bookshelf for the projector, and this morning i put up another shelf for our router which i've been talking about doing for at least half a year now. the resulting wifi coverage is very satisfying.

at work, i've been the git police since thursday - it panders to my ocd and it seems to be appreciated, so double win!

sunday: after shelf shopping with my mom, we took mr smear to the big herzlia school 80 year celebration thing. it was exhausting, but he had a lot of fun and we enjoyed running into some people we haven't seen in a while. it was crazy hot, so we swam for a bit when we got home although the water was surprisingly cold.

i think tattoo season is on its way.

last night i got down to some writing, i'm loving the concept but not keen on writing dialog. huh.

okay, now i'm tired.