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.