improved

i was still off on friday, it was difficult to focus but i did make some progress with work.

yesterday, for the first time since the monday night mistake, i woke up feeling tired but functional. after our temple service i spent some time fiddling with my arduino kit, took mr smear down to the pool for a most successful swim (he's now jumping into the pool and swimming off, or letting me launch him from my knees, and in addition to us having a great time i saved another kid from drowning).

we visited my aunt in memory of my late uncle's birthday, it was great seeing her, her boyfriend and tgtbt and we quite enjoyed the afternoon.

today started off with lego: marvel super heroes 2, which is amazing but some of the puzzles are quite frustrating. especially when playing with a five year old who occasionally bails on you in the middle of the action, or decides that attacking you is more interesting than defeating the bad guys...

mr smear is mostly pretty cool, but some things make me feel like i'm raising a villain...

the morning was great, but there was drama trying to get him to come out with us and when we eventually got home we had a "family discussion". it was an interesting experience, it seemed to have a positive effect but maybe that's just today ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i played some braid, we watched shrek, then wanted to watch the second movie and couldn't find it. except in a 17-movie collection (just over $1 per film) so we should be good for a while. we watched shrek 2, put mr smear to bed, i made my arduino board flash HELLO WORLD in morse code, and have just finished upgrading expo and cleaning up some of my project.

i'm tired, but feeling really grateful that i seem to be back to "normal".

two different nights later

 tuesday night: back to business with the hip flexors + whatever the opposing things are, so a couple of hours unable to sleep or stretch but otherwise getting some rest.

wednesday:

mr smear's first day with his new class! it's outdoors until the school's officially allowed to reopen, and our grade r year is off to a great start. after picking him up in the afternoon, we let in the exterminators, i dropped gd and mr smear off at the waterfront, picked up a falafel lunch, ate it at a small beach parking lot, then got an hour of work in at my mom's before they arrived and we rushed home to our physio appointment.

omg capetonian drivers are the worst.

our physio beat me up thoroughly and gave me a couple of exercises (and some advice to not sit so much), and mr smear made up a song about gd screaming in agony. it was pretty damned funny.

also, rehov sumsum is becoming a staple in our household.

still not quite functional, i went to bed early last night. the hip flexor thing? no issue! but my body couldn't let me get in a good night's rest, oh no, and i woke up halfway through the night with a post-nasal drip so bad i needed to throw up and i spent a couple of hours alternating between trying to sleep and reading random shit.

today:

second day of outdoors school, an easier start to the day even if i did have to drive there and back twice because gd forgot to pack a windbreaker.

omg capetonian drivers are the worst.

a long workday, somewhat successful, and i got in forty minutes on the exercise bike. the sun has just set, we're putting mr smear to bed, and while i'm not present enough yet to work on my own things i do feel up to pushing through on today's job and making up some hours before the weekend...

recovery

 today was long. today was hard. today was me tired and wired and dysfunctional and pretty damned convinced that i should never take any form of psychiatric meds at any dose ever again.

that shit done fucked me up.

i took mr smear with to meet my mom and deal with nedbank. the poor clerk had her work cut out for her, by the time we left she was becoming frustrated with their credit division but a few hours later she called to inform me that she'd finally gotten somewhere, it looks like it was a mistake rather than fraud and it seems to be resolved.

it would have been nice if the person who resolved it, in mid-december, had reached out to communicate all this before generating this drama.

we then went to mr smear's new school to pick up his uniform (which is two sizes too big, but we'll try to sort that out tomorrow).

by the early afternoon i could barely see straight, so i lay down for half an hour and began feeling a bit better. the afternoon was relatively functional, i'm still feeling slow now but i was able to make progress on a ticket and end the workday on a positive note.

i feel like i should get to bed now and try to sleep. i have a million things to do and i don't think anything's quite that urgent.

it made things worse

 my doctor convinced me to try a small dose (5mg) of amitriptyline to see if it would help me sleep. i meant to start it on the weekend, but finally remembered last night for the first time.

instead of helping me sleep, it made the hip flexor pain much worse for much longer than usual, my entire nervous system was jittering and i was restless the entire night. so i'm feeling horrible right now.

...

sunday was a pretty good day. we walked to and from my mom's coffee shop for a visit, we had a (much longer than i'd like) lunch at plant, and we played quite a bit of little big planet together (all three of us now that we have spare controls).

yesterday was a decent monday. i completed the task i've been working on for a couple of weeks, participated in my first sprint grooming / planning in over a year (we're introducing agile/scrum to our now expanding team), gd and i picked up our new bank cards, and watched kubo and the two strings (which is absolutely gorgeous). and mr smear and i played frisbee in the garden for a while, he was actually pretty good with the throwing but did catch the thing with his nose at one point...

two of his moments that had me in hysterics yesterday evening:

1. he sits down on the swing, and before i catch start pushing he says "dad - my back is itchy. i'm just saying."

...

"you can scratch it if you want"

2. in the evening, on my way past the bathroom i noticed him sitting in the bathtub examining himself.
"is everything okay?" i asked.
"i'm playing with my private parts," he responded, then raised his eyebrows, nodded meaningfully in the direction of the living room and suggested: "could you...?"

so i closed the door and left, grateful that he seems to have understood the "only when you're alone" instruction but amused that he didn't think to close the bathroom door first :P

hip flexor nightmares

this morning i woke up around 4am from a dream in which i was trying to solve an unsolvable problem, and although i recognized it as unsolvable upon (half) waking i simply couldn't get my brain to let it go. coupled with the fact that i was half-asleep and my hip flexors were in agony, and none of the usual routines made an iota of a difference, i was just miserable for however long it took to get back to bed (probably an hour).

i guess it didn't help that i had only gone to bed around 2am in the first place, having dragged my afternoon's "i'll just clean up some of my projects" into "let me just make a start on a python cdk guide" into "i realize my mobile app backend needs some refactoring if i want to be able to charge customers separately"...

wednesday:

i headed over to my mom's so that i could be focused for my company workshop ("hackathon"), and in retrospect i think that made it harder to concentrate as a) my phone didn't stop ringing and gd wasn't around to help me out and b) i was distracted by a letter from nedbank informing me of a new policy that i never authorized (i'm not a client) followed by an email from my new bank informing me that there's some sort of debit order registered for them as well. WTF.

the start of the workshop was kinda slow and boring, but its value became apparent later on. i was really pleased that my boss joined our team so that he could witness my performance (i feel like i've been a black box since we went 100% remote, we don't sync very often and it's almost never on details. i like that he trusts me, but i would like my wins to be more visible). by the end of the day i felt stretched thin, but i'd managed to condense the problems raised into a long-term solution as well as a strategy for the next day's prototype that everyone agreed on.

i had a (small) drink with my mom as we discussed our emigration strategy, and then came home for dinner, showertime and an early bedtime. i was exhausted.

thursday:

after wednesday's debacle i let gd talk me into working from home. the morning was high pressure as we worked towards the demo, and the great news was that we pulled off a functional tool that general management quite liked. the sad news was that i ate leftovers that didn't agree with me, and spent the afternoon purging my lunch and feeling awful. second time in two weeks.

i felt a bit better by dinner time. eating a few bites was a mistake, and the rest of the evening / most of the night was horrible.

friday: 

friday morning was a visit to the doctor and a full checkup, she's a bit pushy on the meds but i do understand where she's coming from so i'm willing to give it a go (she's more worried about my anxiety levels than anything else).

friday afternoon was a long, long series of repetitive test steps with slow but steady progress until it was suddenly 6.15 and way past time to walk away.

friday night was great until bedtime, massive drama over watching tv that left everyone unhappy.

...

aside from my cdk projects, i spent a good chunk of yesterday doing not much. i read the first volume of frank miller's sin city (which i'm almost certain i must have read before, but can't remember and it's so good i'm sure that i would have), got on the exercise bike, watched titan a.e. with the family and starship troopers after mr smear went to bed (sadly, gd's really not a fan).

this morning's been pretty good. a little productive, a little gaming, and we're getting ready to go out for a walk now.

won the battle, lost the war

i am a lot of steps closer to completion. i'm also two hours down on sleep and i have to be up and functional all damned day tomorrow for an company hackathon.

oops.

oh, and my shoulder's been hurting since my shower earlier. really hurting :(

chilling with the non-alcoholic beers

 and by that, i mean i haven't had one today :P

i got up early to ride the exercise bike, unfortunately mr smear got up around the same time and managed to interrupt quite frequently... but he was mostly alright. a little later he went with gd to our cousins for the day and got to spend it alternating between work and dealing with bank people.

i eventually made some progress with both.

my frequently interrupted workday ended with actual success, though, and i rewarded myself with a walk to the store to by tea and ice lollies.

in the evening mr smear and i played lego: batman together, which was actually quite fun until he started griefing me, at which point i griefed him back then shut off the machine. what followed was a loooooong story of bringing him back to reasonable behaviour, culminating in a fairly pleasant shower and bedtime.

i made some progress with the mobile app, watched the rest of bohemian rhapsody with gd (i understand why there were complaints about the film being "flat", but i do feel that it was reasonably entertaining and certainly more than just a romp through their songs).

now i'm fiddling with the mobile app again and will hopefully win the text entry war before going to bed.

maybe i should chill with the non-alcoholic beers

 i mean, i was kinda starting to make progress with the weight loss, and i'm pretty sure alcohol-free doesn't mean significantly less calories...

i got in a good day's work today, although it was full of stop-starts and context switches.

mr smear had a couple of moments this morning which ended with him repeating "i'm a fool of me!"; the first when he angrily shut the lid of the computer when he became frustrated (some of the lego: batman 3 puzzles are quite hard for a little person) and was unhappy that that meant game time was over, and then just as i was entering a meeting i caught sight of him too-casually standing by the balcony ledge with an arm over and heard something land three floors below...

good grief.

gd and i got to the bank this afternoon, it took an hour and a half but we left with what we wanted and i'm still waaay more excited about opening a bank account than i should be. possibly because for the... tenth or eleventh time?... i'm in the middle of a battle to get my salary released into my account because my current "prestigious" and "exclusive" bank's forex department is just completely and utterly incompetent.

the mosquitoes are eating me. it's midnight-ish. we've handled load-shedding being cut short by watching a third of bohemian rhapsody (it's mostly fun, but i don't want to ruin by witnessing the impending darkness so i think i should just get back to listening to their albums), and i've done nothing with my mobile app project.

breathing

 friday:

"getting the job done" but not well enough to be proud of it. a walk to my old bank to open a new account having forgotten that i needed FICA documentation. mr smear griefing his friend in little big planet, which was deeply upsetting, but seeming to sort himself out after a little break.

we headed off to our cousins for a lovely friday night dinner, although the return home was a bit intense and we managed to arrive two minutes before curfew.

fortunately after learning that the police have been convincing people to sign admissions of guilt over curfew infractions. that means that these people will have criminal records that could only be expunged after a decade. holy shit.

yesterday:

yesterday was game day (mainly braid and guitar hero). and i read quite a bit (still re-reading mort).  we walked to my mom's coffee shop to meet with her for a bit, and acquired a very fancy sushi knife which gd made a point of using (mr smear and i both appreciated that). and i ended the day with a great thunderstone session with vfmp's brother.

today:

an early start this morning and submitting the layout / script for page 11 to the illustrator. playing a bit of lego: batman with mr smear. feeling horrible and throwing up, feeling better a short while later.

feeling like i had made progress with my mobile app just before heading down to the pool for an hour, which was mostly great. we then rushed off to meet with a couple of gd's friends on the promenade, mr smear (with a little motivation) got back on his bike and enjoyed himself (he did pretty well, too, although he did get tired pretty fast). a little while outside newport deli, and i ended the afternoon by spilling orange juice on gd's new dress (made, not bought) so we rushed home to put stain remover on it.

aside from visits from sailor and my mom, and the shower/bedtime routine, i've spent the past few hours totally focused on refactoring the mobile app and i *think* i'm finally at the point that i *thought* i was at earlier. and it's late, and tomorrow's a busy day, so i'm going to bed.

glorious

 well, today was busy.

1. a big, painful life lesson on how i express my frustrations

2. replaying the first level of braid over lunch and clearing it completely first shot (having a decent gamepad makes a huge difference)

3. apparently making good progress at work in spite of the fact that i was kinda flying blind

4. four hours after receiving the updates, realizing that we've tested negative for covid (apparently there's some kind of bug floating around, and we must have gotten it from getting a meal delivered over the weekend)

5. taking off work to visit our cousins and their pool to celebrate

6. a call from montreal - gd's documents are finally on their way! and i was absolutely right to get them reproduced.

7. a lovely memorial for my late uncle

 8. how is it so late already? good night.

learning the hard way

 is there any other way? after a long workday yesterday, a nice dinner (albeit with irritating entertainment, my wife and son railroaded me into putting on hulk from 2003 and it a) kinda sucks and b) was hard for a five year old to follow and his constant confusion wasn't worth it), and a straightforward shower-and-bedtime, i settled down to make some progress on what i thought would be the easier part of working with react native: the display of data that i've already acquired.

boy, was i wrong.

i eventually went to bed around 1.30am, quite frustrated, only to be woken up by uncomfortable hip flexors and stretching out in a wide variety of poses kept me miserable (not awake, but not exactly asleep) for a good couple of hours.

and then i woke up and immediately jump back into the fray with useless theories that had floated by while i wasn't sleeping.

now that i think i've got a handle on how to proceed, it's time for work. and my hip flexors are still doing a thing. and it's really hot and another fan's motor died yesterday.

out for the count

 yesterday was awful. it began sometime around 3am with me almost passing out any time i tried to use the loo, kinda like my experience a couple of years ago but actually worse. then it became really hard to breathe, i don't know how many hours i'd been gasping before i finally realized that taking a puff of gd's asthma pump might help (it did) and eventually that calmed down a bit. but i still felt terrible and for most of the day couldn't get up without severe dizziness.

so i spent all of yesterday and last night in bed, mostly drifting in and out of consciousness or reading mort for the first time in... two decades? this morning we all got up around 7.30, at which point my stomache was still in full grief mode but my mind felt clear for the first time in over a week.

mr smear and i went to get tested for covid, which was a lot less unpleasant that i expected (they're swabbing the back of the throat rather than going through the nose), and the worst part of the ordeal was missing an opportunity to take a video of a karen in the wild, who'd arrived without an appointment or a doctor's reference (everywhere explicitly stated as mandatory) and then demanded to see a manager (because she'd driven so far and demanding those things is clearly unnecessary).

i've got some work done today, which i'm happy with, and then after getting our new gamepad set up i played some shiftlings over lunch, and it is brilliant.

i'm almost ready to get back to work, so just one little mind-dump before i do so:

the other night i had a strange dream in which i watched a doll being torturously filled with fire ants, eventually having its mouth sewn shut and turned into a weapon.

i also had a dream recently in which sailor was trying to tell me something, but i couldn't hear him because i was laughing helplessly at a newspaper headline which mentioned the "wing bash shin hospital".

tired and sad

 in the middle of saturday night my uncle passed away. he was a truly wonderful man, and it makes me particularly sad that covid made the last year of his life so much harder and eventually took him.

in other news, it has been heartbreaking witnessing the effects of our current quarantine on our son. also, since sunday he's been exhibiting symptoms (including sporting a fever), so after a very confusing conversation with our doctor today we've booked him for a coronavirus test on wednesday and we're praying that the symptoms (which appear to have subsided already) are unrelated. otherwise we'll be in for a much longer quarantine :/

otherwise, the rest of my weekend was mostly spent hacking away at the mobile app and making good headway, it's not quite finished (i haven't completed the display of the data that i've now managed to sync) but i'm so tired, and the workday kinda took it out of me too, so i think i'm going to crash (relatively) early and complete it tomorrow.

after much noise in the news, we've begun the slow migration to non-whatsapp alternatives. signal's UX kinda sucks, so it looks like it's viber for now.

oh, and the transfer of my contract to a new employer is calling for its first contractual changes... right after i asked a kit-bag question this morning and might now have to go through the formal annual review process. probably not a bad thing, to be honest, but... i kinda don't wanna.

joyful tedium

 yesterday was friday. i mean, we're most of the way through saturday and it's still hard to believe that a) the week flew by so fast and b) that it did so while i felt distinctly separated from everything i was doing.

aside from my awkwardly ending of a friendly chat with a coworker at the end of the work day yesterday, it was mostly a good day. we enjoyed some game time as a family, my mom brought us challah and cookies (both appreciated), and the evening was pretty good (albeit with some minor five year old drama, and a very slow and worrying moment during the ending of the fellowship of the ring, but after reading a few papers i don't *think* we've damaged mr smear too much. having said that, i think we should skip all of these movies until he's much older).

i don't usually engage in work on shabbat, over the course of the past few years i've made a point of avoiding it, but i will do work-ish things that bring me pleasure. and this mobile app i'm building? good heavens, every small victory has been gratifying and i'm learning a heck of a lot very fast!

so it's now 3.30pm on saturday afternoon, and my mobile app's authentication management is complete. i feel really, really good about that, even though the process has been a seemingly infinite loop of renders and debugging. i don't know what i'd do without expo.

the loadshedding hour

eskom threatened us with loadshedding right about now, then cancelled, and here i am wondering if the cancellation was for realsies.

i made the mistake of chiming in on what i thought was a conversation about cancel culture, but turned out to be a most unwelcoming echo chamber. delete - back away politely - worry about whether or not i'm next...

i've spent these past few hours getting sqlite integrated into my app, and i feel like i've learned rather a lot today. i don't know if my "by monday" estimate is realistic, but i'm still hopeful...

less fuzzy, but definitely slowed down

 i managed to complete the day's task, but i didn't feel particularly present while doing so. and mr smear was wheezing a bit while excelling at dance dance revolution, so not sure if that's just excess exertion, covid, or the fact that someone's cigarette smoke was blowing into our living room while we were exercising (i was on the bike at the time).

anyway, mr smear cleared a song on basic and i managed to clear one on difficult so i'm actually feeling immensely proud of us right now.

we've been watching the extended version of fellowship of the ring for the last couple of nights (not consecutively, but whatever), i'm trying to decide if stopping for bed right after the balrog takes gandalf was a good idea. come to think of it, i wonder if reading from the magician's nephew before bed is safe... although we did that yesterday and it seems alright...

it's very warm, this summer. yesterday's addition to the fan-ily was a jolly good idea.

a little bit fuzzy

 both gd and i have been really tired and occasionally dizzy, we're praying that this isn't us being nudged by covid. mr smear's friend's father has tested positive, so we're definitely right to be self-isolating, but godsdammit, we don't want it. on a related note, my uncle's over 90 and has been in the hospital for a couple of days with covid, and his idiot son hasn't sorted him out with a smart phone yet so he's been forced to go it completely alone :(

 two days back at work, the first being a struggle to get anything done and the second making some progress in spite of half a day's worth of code reviews...

our yard time yesterday was about half an hour in the pool (nobody else was there), but today the pool was packed (all day on a wednesday?!) so we resorted to a short walk through the company gardens. it's better than nothing. although, from an exercise point of view i was very proud of myself for starting my day with half an hour on the exercise bike.

after a chat with our doctor i think i've pulled a muscle or something in my abdomen. and i think i may have pulled it simply by being overweight.

oh! i had a long chat with the mongoose yesterday for the first time in forever.

right, i've made some progress with my app, and i've posted. to bed! (i finally bought the killing joke this morning on comixology, looking forward to reading it until i pass out)

so, how was the last day of YOUR vacation?

 well... today started off nicely enough, i dropped mr smear off at his friend and made some progress with my mobile app, got some exercise (on the bike while watching titus - 5th annual end of the world tour)... and then received a call from the other kid's parent to be informed that they'd just been informed that their kid had spent saturday with a kid who's just tested positive for covid. which means that if he got it - which he likely has - then he's already infectious and mr smear spent all morning with him in close quarters.

so. this is now our third $#!@ing ten-day isolation inside of two months. when the weather's finally nice enough to be outside and to swim, after he's barely been outdoors and has had so few social interactions since before the school year ended, and when he's *just* getting a handle on swimming.

and with another month of summer holidays to go.

here we go again.

...

i spent the afternoon either struggling to find a way to use an encrypted database with expo (eventually coming to the conclusion that it's unnecessary as long as my app's not being used on a jailbroken device) or working through the architecture for the first feature.

and now it's 11pm and i'm exhausted and off to bed. i'm not unhappy about going back to work... but i do feel like i kinda need a vacation...

deep sigh

 in only a couple of hours this morning, i managed to follow this tutorial series which a) makes sense and b) required only a minimum amount of hacking to bring me to a useful starting point for my app. over the course of the day i fiddled and tweaked and am now at a point where i have a healthy authentication flow and the user's credentials are stored securely. i'm still in a rush to get something usable into my client's hands, but as soon as i've delivered something i'm going to have to put some of my learnings out there...

otherwise, mr smear joined me and my mom on a hardware shopping trip, i took apart our exercise bike to oil it (which apparently didn't help much), we spent another lovely afternoon by the pool, enjoyed a lekker vegan dinner, and loved seeing the iron giant for the first time.

it's the littlest things

 i'm super stoked right now, it's 1.30am and i've just cracked the following optimization on a particularly nasty level (good neighbors year #58) in 7 billion humans:

(never you mind what made my previous solution was so awful, it's not the point! and i've just seen a faster optimization, but mine actually operated with a relatively simple algorithm)

i'm also very happy that i made it home in one piece this evening, as sailor and his friend railroaded me into going much further up the pipe track than was prudent and we had to hike back down in the dark after curfew. gd was as upset about that as i was. after wishing mr smear a good night, i put on titus' born with a defect which gave us a few cathartic laughs [good lord, i just located that link when not signed in and i was completely thrown by seeing my first youtube ad in many months].

new year's eve: wonder woman 1984 was spectacularly mediocre, but we did enjoy the evening.

i spent a chunk of my first day of 2021 completing the react / react native tutorials, and i am rather irritated that a) i didn't go with react before and b) that i'm going back to work in two more days and i've essentially achieved nothing on the mobile dev front.

today was great - it began with mr smear rushing to tell me about this crazy dream he'd had, and i managed to get him to repeat it while recording so that i could send it to his future self :D

gd and i both participated in the shabbat morning service, but for once she got a taste of her own medicine as she's been laughing at me for months about how nervous* i get and now it was her turn...

* there's an enormous difference between performing my own memorized poetry on a stage and reading from a parchment without vowels and cantillation

it was a beautiful day and we spent a good couple of hours by the pool. the hike up pipe track was pretty good, especially considering how self-conscious about my flab i've become. it's a thing, now. it's a really irritating thing. but i have learned that fat does float better than muscle, which is something i never realized before.