checking out after midnight

it somehow feels like the fact that my workday ended a few minutes after midnight just fits in with a general theme over the past few days.

having a car is a game-changer. on wednesday, gd sat down across from me and sternly informed me that i needed to go work somewhere else... on thursday morning i picked up the car and have been working from my mom's since. game-changing! although i'm a bit sad to not be seeing my family during the day, i'm actually able to focus on work for hours at a time and the difference is palpable.

friday was a particularly validating workday, again. it really is a great feeling working for a great employer with a team of decent, competent human beings!

also on friday, i called up telkom to try and find a solution for our "uncapped" connection being throttled every month. i couldn't help laughing out loud when the agent described the different "uncapped" packages - none of which are uncapped - and was stunned when i finally understood her explanation of why i couldn't pay for more data: even though they were throttling us, we technically hadn't run out of data so if we *did* buy more data we'd never get to use it :S

this weekend i finally completed exapunks, i finally got back to it after many months and i was about to give up and copy a solution to the final level when i was inspired to try a simpler but less efficient algorithm. i ended up feeling very pleased with the results, and i really internalized the "moral" of the game by doing so.

on saturday we went to my brother's flat to pick up some stuff.  we left just as the storm started, it was bucketing down.  there was a lot of nostalgia, and a lot of shaking our heads. also, i really feel sad for my younger nephew who's clearly making an effort to right himself after a lifetime of spiritual neglect.

i lost a couple of hours on saturday night trying to synthesize my cdk project, eventually realizing that there are really good reasons for using typescript instead of javascript. on sunday morning i managed to convert everything and by end of the weekend i'd made exciting progress!

all three of us joined gd's friends for a promenade walk on sunday, after which we bumped into one of mr smear's friends at a playground. after that we went to the mall for a looong shopping, and i was so tired that i passed out right after putting mr smear to bed. my legs were *sore* this morning.

sailor's father passed away yesterday, i feel sad for his passing and particularly sad for our friend being in a different country while dealing with his grief :(

i sorted out our ISP problems this morning, we now have a new capped connection that should cover our needs.

there was a complete stuff-up with the removals, and in addition to that the couches my mother brought to her place appear to be infested with something. i was *not* impressed that it didn't occur to her to warn me before i arrived...

omg it's 1am. bedtime.

"the world lies on the brink of madness"

meh. the world's been utterly mad for at least a hundred years, now. it's more likely that we're on the brink of sanity...

hump day approaching

i can't believe it's wednesday already/again/whatever. this has been a productive week so far work-wise, and i've made some real progress with my personal project. i've published the results of my learnings, and i've moved on to using them :)

i've had a throat thing going for a couple of days that makes me uncertain as to whether i'm suffering from allergies or whether i have a cold or something, and my neck's been quite uncomfortable.

mr smear likes lemon + poppy seed donuts. he's been good, my wife's been mostly good (she's going through some stuff, we're both feeling a bit old of late).

it's 1am, i think i've just spent about half an hour writing an answer of about three lines about infant sleep patterns on a mom's forum (i answered without realizing i know the mum personally, so her response was quite surprising). i'm definitely ready for bed.

feeling weekend

as usual, i'm a bit surprised to realize that it's late on a sunday already.

this weekend was mostly awesome. friday was a great day, i got a bunch of stuff done and dusted and i was really happy with the results. dinner at my cousins' was really nice, and there's something about carrying your sleeping kid from the car to the bed at the end of a great evening.

the entire weekend's weather has been miserable, so we've barely gone out except to inspect the car and determine that we're going to have to trade it in...

yesterday was a game day, i got the hang of magic: the gathering arena and spent some time playing lego: harry potter with mr smear, and played with real lego for a bit. in the evening, we settled down to complete the hobbit trilogy.

that was a mistake.

aside from a couple of particularly graphic moments in the first two movies, we felt they were fine for our kid as long as we were watching with him and explaining things. i wish i'd read the reviews from all three movies before beginning, because we felt compelled to complete the story and honestly, it's the most obscenely graphic and horrific violence i think i've ever encountered on film. if the battle sequences were in another movie that wasn't based on a children's book and i was watching with my peers i would have loved it, but i definitely agree with an R rating for this final installment. from a values point of view, i have to say that it was mostly alright but legolas' antics, tauriel's forced romantic relationship and the incredible amount of damage that the main characters were able to withstand made it impossible to take things at all seriously.

so that happened.

shadowslight and i played a couple of games of thunderstone after mr smear went to sleep, i may have lost them both but i was really pleased with my second game!

today was father's day, and it was a good one. from the card delivery while on the can, to an hour or so of mtg arena, to a great family lunch at home and making decent progress with my aws guideline project. the only bummer was mr smear having another "regression", but we have a strategy in place and the internets have been reasonably consoling (it looks like it's not age-inappropriate, at least).

right, i'm done for the night.

what a long, strange trip this week has been

there's something decidedly awkward about receiving something that was yours to begin with, was stolen in a fit of malice and spite, and is now being returned - sixteen years later - because it was never actually wanted in the first place and is now simply taking up space.

this week we've "inherited" furniture, cutlery and crockery, beautiful paintings, and a car that might actually cost more to license than it's worth. i don't know what's more uncomfortable - that we're getting things that should have been ours in the first place, or that when i called my brother to thank him he was so indifferent about the whole thing. the car has literally been sitting sadly in his garage for a decade and a half.

...

after last week's mad rush to make up hours, it's been another half-week. most of it spent being demoralised by *another* massive code review. at least it looks like the team is onboard with my suggestions to cut down on the size of our pull requests, but we'll see if that changes anything in reality.

otherwise, i've made a couple of excursions on principle (i'm increasingly uncomfortable with how out of shape i've become) and taken mr smear along with me, and he's mostly been pretty cool. all three of us went to the shops today and picked up insanely delicious vegan donuts on the way home. it was a good day.

the past couple of nights i've gone to bed straight after getting him in bed, so maybe tonight i'll manage to get something done before i crash. i think i might have been ill, i can't fathom any other reason for feeling so tired and low.

just because i disagree...

... doesn't mean i'm right. but knowing that doesn't make it any easier to accept that i'm not, and the internal conflict is painful. also, i've been feeling miserable and ashamed because of my reactions to others' reactions that were (in my opinion) equally toxic, and while i've agreed (ages ago, in theory) to attempt to retake control of my emotions / reign in my bad behaviours, i'm not (and have never been) certain of my ability to do so. which is all very depressing, and depression is where my bad responses stem from. apparently.

gods, being a human being is messy.

friday itself - up until the evening's unpleasantness - was intense, but surprisingly and wildly successful. i finished the day on a high note, feeling very validated and appreciated.

yesterday was a long, low day. i'm still not feeling fantastic now. but the things that have been happening since yesterday morning have all been very positive: after a very small portion of torah reading (started off fine, then i got nervous and breathless), i had some time to myself to just go through my youtube "watch later". lots of blm stuff - very powerful stuff - and then a fair amount of fluff. mr smear jumped straight into lego: harry potter when he got home and i joined him for some of it, gd and i are both happy with the framing for the prints we bought last week, mr smear enjoyed reading comics with me (swamp thing, we both enjoyed the experience), and then we all watched about half of the desolation of smaug before bedtime. shadowslights, djelibeybi and i were going to play board games online but ended up just chatting for a few hours, i was convinced to purchase the bundle for racial justice and equality (two or three items out of 1650+ made it worth it), and being introduced to LP (the two "live session" videos are amazing) was awesome.

this morning is off to a pretty good start, i've published page 7 publicly. and pancakes. now to get back to trying to wrap my head around the thumbnails for the next few pages: i'm just learning now that as much effort as i put into the panel breakdown, it's really only half the work.

hobbit hole

"down, down, down in goblin toooooown"

we finished the first part of the extended cut of the hobbit this evening, mr smear loved it and i think he's finally excited about reading the graphic novel with me. he was totally into the swamp thing last weekend, and he got angry with me when i stopped reading before the guy's head gets twisted around because i thought it was too much.

meanwhile, we witnessed a bunch of goblins and ogres being decapitated tonight so i guess a slightly extreme take on looking over one's shoulder is probably fine. 

his biggest worry at night is an evil queen (i think it's since watching willow), this evening he tried to convince me that she's allergic to the theme of pirates of the caribbean so i should leave that playing all night.

... 

this week has been intense. first, because i'm paid hourly and i realized that last week was actually average for the month, second because i've barely had a moment to focus on anything, it's just been a constant barrage of distractions both work and life in general. 

at least we've gotten a handle on online groceries. i wish we'd done that months ago. 

... 

the latest comic page is done! 

unintended unpaid leave

this past week has been... let's start backwards. i'm sad and angry right now, it was a fantastic weekend (that included spending time with our cousins and bringing home a massive part of their lego collection) and then mr smear did something awful a few hours ago that just turned everything sour and unpleasant, so this probably isn't the best time to put everything down but hey, if not now...

anyway. the lockdown level shifted down to three, and on monday morning our domestic worker (i'm tired of saying cleaning lady / nanny) was finally able to return to work. the relief was palpable, it made such a huge difference to our week and a lot of stress just immediately and dramatically lifted.

that was followed by massive relief on tuesday morning when i discovered that the aspects of our passport renewal and police clearance stories that were caught up in a catch-22 weren't actually problems after all, just poorly explained.

those two things set the tone for the week, and i was so relieved that i just lost all focus for work. i think* i got about fifteen hours of paid work done in total, the rest of the time was spent taking care of random things or working obsessively on my aws cdk/sam project. by "obsessively", i've lost a couple of nights' sleep over it...

* i record my hours meticulously, but i can't be bothered to check right now.

i realized yesterday that the new internet hardware hadn't arrived, then discovered that there was some issue with my documentation and they hadn't bothered to contact me about it. if they can't make an effort for a new customer, i don't want to know what they're like to deal with when there's a problem, so i've told them to cancel everything and not waste my time.

why is this world so full of shitty service? appropriately, i'm typing this into blogger's updated interface and they've manage to make it SO much worse than it was before.

speaking of which, i had an interesting discussion with our temple chairman this week about the technology we use, as a result of which i've come up with some ideas for a vastly cheaper system that i can build myself and then productize. also, i made a mailgun web interface for bulk mailing, which i feel takes me full circle to the first paid project i ever did. it's been a productive week for things that aren't bringing in money, at least :P

finally: racism politics. black lives matter. it's been hard not to get too caught up in everything that's going on, i've learned some startling facts about the history of american racism. i've also had some interesting conversations about our local travesties, which are racist in the opposite direction (against the white minority) while at the same time managing to hurt the black majority even more. at least i've learned that there are lots of people having similar conversations, but unless we start having these conversations as a community i'm not certain the talking will turn to walking.

i'm totally over this weekend, i'm frustrated and exhausted and i'm not feeling ready to kick into gear tomorrow but i'm going to have to make up a LOT of hours this week and i've no idea how i'm going to manage that.