small revelations

it dawned on me, on saturday, that i've been depressed, and burned out... more than usual. i was feeling thoroughly defeated by the combination of the israeli minister of interior / jewish agency / canadian government and i was really struggling to get through normal things.

that realization helped, at least. i've spent a fair bit of time mulling things over and making backup plans for our backup plans, and shuffled things around in my head a bit. back to one day at a time.

the pesach seder was really, really nice. it's the first time mr smear's actually engaged, he had a great experience and eventually passed out on his granny's bed - we left him there, and got to have a very relaxed sunday morning to ourselves ^_^

i did make some progress on sunday with my project, although it was very slow going and debugging react native is a pain. but eventually things seemed good...

on sunday we had a call about a different project, it was a good call but i'm not sure what direction this things going just yet.

yesterday was a long day, but today felt longer. it began with me walking mr smear to school, only to realize when we arrived that it was a tuesday, and tuesday's an outdoors day. so we had to walk all the way back to get in the car, and about half that was mr smear whining loudly that he wanted to go in the car when i'd already made clear that we were going in the car. we had words, he sulked a bit, and by the time we'd got in the car he'd calmed down and was ready to admit that he was being a bit silly. we arrived *just* in time for him to join the others as they left the meeting point, and i arrived home too late for the morning's first meeting.

from that point on it was either grinding work (two days of highly repetitive, sensitive work) or hours of back-to-back meetings, but between my work day and gd and my experience with the paperwork i feel like we made progress.

oh! and my mom's last day at work is tomorrow, she's been on contract with her employer for a couple of years now and as much as they're all sorry to see her go, ageist policies. this is not her first rodeo :(

gd and i had great fun playing rayman: origins after putting mr smear to bed - it really is an amazing game and it's probably fair to say that it's her first "real gamer" experience :)

damn. it's past 1am and i've just done fixing a bug that only shows up on a real device. out of a corner of my eye i'm watching the end of se7en, which gd noted was released more than a quarter century ago. and my nipple ring seems to be healed after a few days of being infected (not a clue where that came from), and i'm trying to decide whether to keep it in or take it out for good... that's a more difficult decision than i expected it to be.

dazed and confused

 if puella magi madoka magica turns out to hold the answer to sonnet tattoo no. 13, and watching the first episode last night was my "homework" in that subject, and i've definitely seen that episode before... why did it not warrant a mention on my blog?

i'm exhausted. depleted. the week's social events were great, but i'm full of stress and anxiety caused by gd's aliyah documentation story, not getting enough work hours in, not feeling healthy (shoulder and neck and back and knee pains), and just in general feeling like i need a vacation.

i did make some exciting progress on The Project, though, so that's good.

midweek

my cousins joining me for a late 40th birthday celebration at rick's this evening was really nice!

yesterday's stair walk felt pretty good, in total i did 35 floors up and 35 down and my knee's definitely feeling stronger. i was a bit disappointed in the number of calories burned, though, i expected that much exertion to be worth more...

gd changed my dressing yesterday, it went better than before but the hole gouged from my leg is pretty big. it's a rather annoying spot and all the days between changes feel like forever. 

sunday was super frustrating, because working on my project felt like things were moving backwards and really slowed me down. but brunch at plant with cousins and dinner with friends at the curry club were both great!

it's closing on 2am, i would have gone to bed more than an hour ago if i hadn't been distracted setting up a new VoIP number. kinda.

saturday night

 overall, the last few days went well. the demo was a bit of a let-down, but nothing too bad and i learned a lot. paid work: we ended the week on a good note.

i've been pretty consistent with my new exercise regime, and the results are noticeable. like, i can walk up stairs without pain. and i'm definitely getting fitter.

mr smear: things seem to be smoothing out, there's been considerably less tension in the house. i enjoyed a wonderful breakthrough moment with him the other night when i discovered that the story of phaethon was engaging enough to get across a message that he simply wasn't interested in hearing otherwise, and that led to another great moment where he showed an interest in the sonnet comics for the first time! and today we read some of coraline together - which is a significantly different experience from the movie - and the past week i've been reading the ocean at the end of the lane to him and it seems to be going down well.

did i mention i've been growing my hair and beard out? i became irritated a week or two ago with the upkeep so i'm trying to see how long (literally) i can go.

the hole where the dermatologist took nothing interesting out of my leg last friday wasn't healing, so i went back to be informed that every time we've removed the dressing to clean it we've been tearing up the new tissue... so now it's a three day regimen with gauze instead of plaster and it's really quite annoying.

i'm about ready for bed. just one more edit...

2am

i didn't get much day job work done today, not sure why. but i did schedule a document pickup for next week, and i did take mr smear outside for twenty minutes, and i did get beaten up by our physio. also, i realized how tragically lopsided my trapezius is.

i spent the evening / until now struggling with tomorrow's delivery, it's really not where i wanted it to be but it's surprisingly functional considering i needed to redesign a major chunk of it due to dynamodb's write/read delays. i'm exhausted, but very happy with what i've built and i'm praying tomorrow goes well. 

closing in

 where do i begin? it's approaching midnight, and i've spent hours trying to configure nginx and this web portal i've been working on to play nicely together. and JUST as i typed this, i checked again and it freaking worked! i'm so stoked right now it's ridiculous.

*stops posting to defensively commit the code, backup all related configurations and document everything*

right. *phew*.

where was i? oh, yes. so i was supposed to deliver something to my client, who's been waiting very patiently for half a year now, over the course of the past few weeks... but it was only last week that things had settled down enough for me to actually get my head back into the game. over the course of the weekend i completed the backend half (the "real" half, at least emotionally), and made a lot of progress on the frontend but *just* couldn't quite get over the finish line. we've now pushed the due date to thursday, and while it's far from polished it's functional and i've just managed to deploy it, so that's a great weight off my shoulders. now it's small fixes and improvements and then i'm hoping they'll feel ready to install the app (via expo) and we can start working on serious features.

that's work. the day-job's been alright, i'm making slow and steady progress but i'm hardly feeling motivated these days... i'm certainly not unhappy, though.

family-wise:

mr smear's been really hard to deal with the past few weeks - primarily because he just doesn't listen without heavy "encouragement" and he reflexes says "no" to everything - but the last couple of days we seem to be getting through a bit better / more effectively / more positively. we were as surprised as his teacher when, during our term 1 feedback session yesterday, she informed us that not only has he decided that he wants to become a veterinarian when he's older, but that he wrote the word "vet" on one of his drawings, unprompted, after figuring it out itself. i think we're doing alright with the literacy thing!

gd's back has been giving her trouble, some days better than others. i'm never sure any more what's "normal" and what's not.

the two of them have been seriously getting into rayman: origins and mr smear and i have been digging ratchet & clank: all4one, and we're rewatching hunter x hunter again and loving it.

my fitness:

i've been really struggling to do any kind of exercise and my knee still hasn't healed. a few days ago i had a revelation, and i've now twice put in my headphones and spent 10-15 minutes walking up seven flights of stairs on the one side of the building, then down the other, and following that up with a walk to reset. it's tough (two stairs at a time), but i'm already feeling a difference.

there's a lot i'm forgetting, but i'm tired and i'm going to bed now. i'll just try one more time to get audible to understand that i've already signed up for one trial and i'm not interested in another.

the tooth fairy

today:

now that gd and i have done the thing (with gd giving a wonderful and woefully under-appreciated performance as a dancing tooth fairy), i can't help wondering what the idea of the tooth fairy teaches our children about organ harvesting...

mr smear's excitement about his first tooth falling out was infectious.

getting paid without friction, followed by a wire transfer completing in a handful of hours

jewish agency stress

a great chat with horseman

yesterday:

my mom's first outing post-isolation, a long evening with mr smear being difficult and quebec government services being impossible, a long wintery night's sleep

 monday:

my brain really not working, feeling like i was coming down with something

the last week including the weekend:

last week was recovery from the week before, everything a bit slower, and i needed to do nothing on the weekend (although we did watch the two wreck-it ralph movies, which are awesome).