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 ^_^