achievement unlocked: vegan shakshuka

 gd just adapted a recipe we found online, replacing the eggs with black salt avo, and it was delicious ^_^

she nailed it first time, in spite of her feeling pretty sick since yesterday.

today: made sufficient progress on the web portal to be able to focus my energy on tackling the actual problem, took mr smear out for shopping + ice cream and spent *almost* too much time at the pool with him. mr smear's now swimming underwater and his diving's improving :)

yesterday: loads of ratchet & clank: tools of destruction for mr smear (i can't play it, i get motion sickness), some pool time, me playing ftl in the morning and... right now i haven't the faintest clue what i did for the rest of the day. aside from getting through some of my "watch later" youtube playlist after everyone else was asleep :P

friday: "take tomorrow off," he said. yeah. i tried and failed to replace the lightbulb in our bedroom (it's an awful design, and now it looks like it might be a wiring fault), gd accompanied me to send her document back to the israeli consulate in montreal, and my team and i spent the day very busily testing the release and finalizing it for delivery.

i delivered it at 5.45pm, with 6pm being my personal hard deadline so that i could stop for shabbat.  i played ratchet & clank: all 4 one with mr smear (that one is fine), and i love the fact that it forces you to cooperate. we were so wrapped up in it that we totally missed the temple service :P

phhhoooooooooooooo

 chag purim sameach! i'm starting this post while halfway through my post-rum cider, the megillah reading began at 7.30pm and i finally delivered a release candidate at 7.05pm. after a full, panicked day with five of my coworkers jumping in to help me in my battle against the broken things.

one of my coworkers strongly advised that i take tomorrow off, but we still have to deliver the actual release before the weekend and at the very least i need to figure out a way to script away some of the release process pain.

i was very grateful that another of my colleagues helped me rip out and replace his own code because it was giving us trouble, it's a relief to work with professionals who focus on Getting Shit Done over their egos.

the network device seems to have been a good investment, although i've barely worked from that corner of the apartment since installing it. last night was another late night, although not as bad as the others, and tonight's i'm feeling utterly buggered and i'm going to go to bed fairly soon.

the document saga: after spending a chunk of yesterday trying to communicate with the israeli consulate in pretoria, i realized that it will be quicker and cheaper to ship the document back to montreal. which is $#@!ing insane.

i jumped in to a game of ratchet and clank: all 4 one with mr smear yesterday afternoon, and felt really bad when i realized that my stress over a boss level (probably compounded by the work stress that needed venting) made him feel bad. he was super understanding when i apologized - why does that somehow make me feel worse? - and we mostly figured the stage out together which was cool.

gd had her first singing lesson yesterday, which triggered some eye-opening discussions.

 mr smear had his second ukulele lesson today, and that seems to be going well.

i really, really want gd to try making vegan shakshuka this weekend. i have a theory about replacing the eggs, and i hope she's up for it.

miserable post post

my outdoors adventure was a hurried walk to buy ethernet cable, so that i could install the net network device which arrived. that installation took a while, lots of testing, and i *hope* it's going to do what it's supposed to.

work has been a real bitch these past couple of days, this is the second past-midnight day spent fighting with things that should just work. and i'm right now struggling with the only java project that is sorely deserving of a) TLC or b) being tossed and rewritten in the same language as everything else we maintain.

golang is better than java.

in other news, the israeli consulate in montreal didn't authenticate one of gd's documents, even though they could have, and we now have to go through an additional process to get them to confirm to the local consulate that *they* can authenticate it. or we can send the document back, or get a new one issued. that'll only cost us another couple of hundred dollars and a few more months.

post

 it's past midnight, i've spent the past... half hour?... trying to install python packages in order to run tests in order to go to bed having accomplished something work-wise.

...

okay, let me try that again. it's now just after 00.45, and i've spent the past three quarters of an hour coding to the point where i *think* my solution's code-complete and ready for testing. so now i'm going to finish this post and then go to bed.

saturday: the day was unproductive (as it should be), everyone had a chilled day and i played a fair amount of stellaris. i'm sure there's more but i can't recall much.

yesterday: i spent most of the day working on a portal for the mobile project, and was pretty successful. i also had a really interesting chat with someone who i met through a poetry performance, who pitched me an idea that i really, really hope moves forward.

today: gd's documents have arrived! it was a long day, the best parts of which were walking mr smear to and from school and taking him out for a bit in the evening, where we bumped into wp who was out for a jog.

hopefully tomorrow will be good.

i still haven't prepared myself for thursday night's leyning.

saturday morning cartoons

 omg my alarm woke me up at 7.30, all the lights were on and mr smear was watching the hulk animated series with no sound so that he wouldn't wake us up.

i'm very grateful *that* is what he was watching. it could have been anything.

we dropped mr smear off at the forest yesterday, and he had a great time "forest bathing". we had a few minutes to walk in ourselves when we picked him up,  it was really nice!

between lots of meetings and a team lunch, i barely got any work done yesterday. the good stuff from yesterday was mr smear's first ukulele lesson*, gd's documents being picked up, and my nephew getting the job offer he wanted. so it was a good day.

we did have some high stress over mr smear's swimming lesson, in that the receptionists and manager at the gym keep giving his nanny trouble when she wants to go inside and this is the third lesson he's missed half of. i had some angry words for the manager, but i have a feeling this isn't the end of the story.

* when asked what songs he knows, he regaled the teacher with rob zombie's superbeast and the goblin king's song from the hobbit - that's my boy! and although i was working in another room it was clear he was enjoying the lesson and doing pretty well ^_^

two exciting things that have been kind of happening over the past few days.

the first: i made a suggestion in a vegan group about crowdfunding a vegan food truck for a high traffic area that has generated some support, now we just have to determine the right mechanism to enable people to buy in without lots of effort.

the second: our temple council was extremely receptive to hosting a community networking / upskilling / digitalization workshop event and we already have one professional network on board. i feel silly only thinking about doing this almost a year into covid, but better late than never!

...

mr smear is watching the hulk animated series, i just heard the voice of brain from pinky and the brain and realized it was doctor strange. what an impressive resume!

right, i have to practice today's leyning and then continue my struggle to prepare for thursday's - the megillah cantillation is hard.

can't even

 these past two days have been overwhelming enough, thoroughly exhausting and full of context switching and stressful occurrences. but none so much as this morning's revelation that gd's original, certified documents, which have now travelled the world more times than we could really afford, arrived in south africa weeks ago but its container would take another few months to be processed.

which led us into a frantic scramble to begin reproducing the documents (a complicated and expensive procedure) and reauthenticating them (same), and planning for the possible eventuality that we'd need to move back to montreal temporarily in order to complete our aliyah process from there.

and then, a few hours later, my mother's efforts paid off and someone there miraculously managed to locate the documents in the unopened container! so we're praying that they complete the rest of their journey unharmed so that we can get on with all of this.

...

i've been sleeping a bit better lately (even if my neck's been acting up). so that's good.

the banking struggle continues, but we seem to be making progress. so that's good.

mr smear is loving his new school, and we are too. so that's good.

our cleaning lady managed to see the dentist and get a tooth extracted this morning (as opposed to her original plan of waiting a week for an appointment). so that's good.

i feel like i need/deserve a moment to myself. so i think i'm going to hit stellaris (timeboxed, though) and then *maybe* do something productive before bed.

i said i wouldn't but i lied

 i just dragged myself out of a serious stellaris session (another do-over, another completely different game). to finally sit down and look at the ten verses from megillat esther that i've agreed to leyn next week. which i now realize is going to be a lot more difficult than i expected.

today was super long, i spent it on my feet, and i was wiped out by the end of it. my live demo crashed and burned: turns out cdk doesn't play nicely when teams is presenting, and the moment i left the presentation it returned to normal. otherwise, i made some real progress in a number of ways today but the end of the day was discussing an internal customer's pain with him, and it was pretty bad.

family time post-work was great, though, as we finally got around to putting up a bunch more of our stickers and our bathroom's looking pretty darn cool. oh, and i managed to sort out our bank cards today (turned out they forgot to notify me that my credit card arrived at the branch a week ago). and mr smear was pretty cool about forest school.

did a week go by?

nope, just most of one.

today was a long, but pretty good day - the most satisfying part was raising an issue and getting buy-in from all involved both on its severity and on a resolution timeline. i'm pretty happy with the fact that page 11 of the sonnet comics is completed, too ^_^

there're a million things i haven't done today, and i'm not doing any of them now. now i'm going to bed. even if what i'd like to be doing is firing up stellaris again. that game is addictive.

the weekend was covered in muggy and miserable weather, my biggest achievements were writing up an article on saturday (which i apparently need to split into two parts) and building in account confirmation into two of my projects (at the same time, at least). 

i've been stressing a bit regarding gd's aliyah application and our timeline - we still haven't received her documents, and my mother reminded me the other day that august comes before september. my internal timeline's been all wonky, for some reason, and now i'm realizing just how close that is... and after a bit of research over the weekend i've realized that getting him into a school for first grade might be a bit trickier than i anticipated.

otherwise, i wonder if anything interesting happened last week? i know i put a fair amount of effort into a new project - a rush job that we urgently need for work but that we're not authorized to build on work time - otherwise, i vaguely remember getting work stuff done and not getting enough exercise.

oh! and i was really anxious about not being paid on time, but once my team lead stepped in i was so immensely relieved by speed of the transfer (the next day) and the ease of accepting money with my new bank account (a couple of clicks) that i actually became emotional. now if only i could get my damned bank cards to work...

a good birthday

 sunday was really nice, we stuck a candle in a donut (although it took forever to light, but hey), we visited the sa jewish museum (the exhibit on the history of progressive judaism in south africa was a lot more interesting than i expected, i guess i will buy the book), the now-traditional toy shopping (gd's birthday presents are toys that she "shares" with mr smear, this year's are a (plastic) woody and buzz lightyear), a failed book shopping (when we actually shop for a book for gd, she can't decide), and sailor joined us for a swim in the afternoon (it was too cold, but we enjoyed chilling by the pool anyway while mr smear practiced diving).

monday:

i was super tired again. i really wasn't enthusiastic about what i was doing, and i'm still struggling to sleep*. drop-off drama again, very warm weather for walking, and in the afternoon the play-date was quite distracting. i did exercise bike, though. mr smear's loving the 1996 animated hulk series. i went to bed early, slept badly.

* here i am posting this at 2am after a couple of hours working on something because my hips were hurting. interestingly enough, the moment i gave up stretching and sat down the discomfort went away, so i guess my underlying problem is that i'm now so used to sitting that i can't lie down any more.

tuesday:

a much better work day, even if i'm not making a lot of hours. more drop-off drama, and gd's made it clear that i need to work from my mom's again. again with the exercise bike. the fireball documentary on appletv+ is pretty cool. here we are is absolutely gorgeous.

over the weekend i cleaned up my mobile app, which is now "good enough" to deploy. for the past couple of days (when i haven't been working, sleeping or busy with my family) i've been quite focused on a web portal to support the solution, and it's my first real react project as well as my first website in over a decade where i actually care about UI (as opposed to UX, i always care about UX): tailwind is superb. it's mostly been a good experience, with the usual minor grievances against poor documentation, but as of half an hour ago i'm pretty much done with the login process.

oh! last piece of news: the illustrator has sent me page 11 with lines and colours and it's looking pretty good :)

sunday morning shenanigans

i *think* my last post was on tuesday, but the rest of the week was a blur.

we had serious trouble dropping mr smear off at forest school - high drama farewells, even if he was fine right after - and thursday was an online school day and he behaved really badly from sunrise to sunset. but otherwise he's been pretty good, he even handled his MMR/adacel vaccinations on friday with more bravery than his mother. and his swimming's improving in leaps and bounds, literally as he's starting to enjoy jumping while slowly becoming less enthusiastic about face-planting.

my favourite moment from thursday: i overheard gd during one of the online classes:

"what are you excited about for your new school?"
...
"no, you're not going to get married and have a baby at your new school"

work-wise: after the week's initial frustrations we hit hump day, and when i say it was all downhill from there what i mean is that the last two days of the week were full of back-to-back mind-melting super-long code reviews.

wednesday evening: i joined a make event to put together a self-watering plant, but halfway through the evening went thoroughly pear-shaped and i've yet to figure out how to connect the pump.

and i suspect that at least a part of my deep exhaustion was due to my still recovering from the nightmare of the week before.

...

the marilyn manson story has been bothering me for days - yet another phenomenal artist has turned out to be an utter piece of shit and i'm pretty disappointed, in particular because ever since bowling for columbine he's been a bastion of rationality in a thoroughly corrupt industry.

and now, after a couple of days being bothered by this, all i can think of is how literally he has manifested the peter gabriel song sledgehammer

...

yesterday: a very relaxed saturday morning, i spent a couple of hours learning to play stellaris, went for a walk to pick something up for gd's birthday (yay! it was just opened and appreciated), and spent the afternoon swimming and watching wolfwalkers (passing out and being prodded awake by mr smear). a beautiful movie and a great story for kids, but the character of bill goodfellowe was so irredeemably stupid that it made it impossible to sympathize.

over the course of the past couple of days i've resolved almost all of the outstanding issues with the mobile app i've been developing, and i'm hoping that i'll be able to put together a basic management portal today so that we can begin field testing!

...

mr smear wanted to surprise his mother for her birthday this morning, i managed to convince him that if i hide behind my computer she wouldn't see me.

<whispering loudly>
"dad! we need it to be darker!"
"then turn off the sun!"
without hesitation, he drew the curtains. so proud.

early bedtime

superfreakonomics: a bit dated (some of the stated facts have been disproved), but mostly brilliant.

it was a relief dropping mr smear off with his class this morning, even if he was a bit disinterested at first.

gd has officially sold one of her dresses! 

the afternoon swim was fun, but the water's becoming colder... 

today was a very long, frustrating workday with only a partial payoff at the end. i spent a lot of the day eating my emotions. 

expo is mostly great, but the production builds and publishing are a bit finnicky.

small victories

 gd and i just watched the little things, which is pretty good. on a different level of little things:

• i've just made some more progress on my mobile app, at least enough to feel like i'm ready to give my client a trial run
• i finally got back on the exercise bike this evening
• aside from an embarrassing (public) brain-fart in the evening, and in spite of heavy distractions today, i actually managed to get some work done. those heavy distractions included:
• helping to manage mr smear's first virtual lessons for the year (my bad, he missed one of them)
• him and his playdate shrieking at the tops of their lungs in the afternoon
• a large herd of yaks that queued up for shaving
• mr smear and i had an unpleasant run in this morning while gd was out, but i managed to turn it into a calm conversation and improved behaviour so i'm feeling pretty pleased with myself

oh, yeah - and my day started with me waking up a stranger to inform her that in response to my complaints about their negligence, nedbank had sent me a copy of her personal details and private account numbers and balances and that she might want to reconsider which institutions she places her trust.

oh, and one more oh yeah: after a bit of back and forth, it looks like the illustrator and i agree on the concept for page 11 so i'm quite excited to see the results.

oh! one extra "yeah" - gd's documents have arrived in the country, we're praying they make it the last stretch in a reasonable amount of time.