two down

work today and yesterday was extremely frustrating. after hours more than exptected spent getting my "quick win" friday task sorted out (mostly due to atlassian bamboo's specs reference being difficult to navigate and only partially correct), i then dived in to producing and testing a new release candidate and we still haven't managed to root cause why it's broken. and each attempt to try something different takes an excruciating amount of time to set up.

i've spent a lot of time walking away from my machine to avoid angry-crying.

on the home front, yesterday was a difficult day (mostly just sad), and gd's been really struggling with a bunch of things all happening at the same time (including having a wisdom tooth extracted yesterday morning). today we all had to get up early (failed) to get mr smear to the hospital to get the dressing for his stitches replaced, which turned out to be a pretty good start to the day.

in the late afternoon (when i gave up with work) i took him to the company gardens where he made friends with a gangly older kid, and things were pretty cool except for the bit where they got excited and he bashed his stitches into him while they were trying to hide from the other kid's mother... i really hope he's good.

 we've been having trouble with our apple tv for ages - gd's had it since before we met - and today our roku premier arrived. it was a welcome distraction around lunchtime, and after waking up a little while ago (after falling asleep reading to mr smear) i've been playing around with it and it's sooooo much better than the apple tv! it has exactly one shortcoming - that we can't install the prime video app on it - but that's covered by the ps3 and everything is working excellently.

my neck's been giving me a bit of trouble. i'm nervous about sleeping on it, but i guess it's time for bed.

sunday school

 ugh, it's almost 1am and i've just eaten (again) so i need to wait a bit before going to bed...

today was... well, it started off quite frustrating, with mr smear griefing gd while i bashed my head against a wall of react native documentation. things weren't working, and there was no indication of exactly where or that the broken bits were caused by me using an older version of the packages than the documentation was for.

*facepalm*

i walked mr smear through to visit my mum, she helped me put together an email i was supposed to send out weeks ago and then we checked out a cool bookstore and stopped at her coffee shop for a treat.

after we got back home i finally finished redesigning and refactoring (it's not perfect, but it's definitely far better than it was) and then did my stairwell exercise for the first time in a week or two. i found myself energetically walking that off and ended up doing some very basic boxing/taekwondo exercises in the park, which felt good until i was halfway back, walking slowly, and tweaked something in my back.

it seems to be okay, now, i hope it stays okay through the night.

our rabbi friend (who traveled to augrabies with us) came over for dinner, after which we put mr smear to bed and watched half an episode of invincible before gd bailed on me and i got back to the expanse. then i finished publishing my changes and celebrated with hot chocolate and youtube videos (chubbyemu videos are amazing).

lacerations, or "stitchnik junior"

 well, today was an interesting one. it started off well, pretty relaxed, and in the early afternoon gd and i left mr smear with our neighbours and hopped off to the waterfront to make a big purchase (a new ipad, it's been seven years since i bought the last one and apparently it's not handling old-age very gracefully). we arrived back just in time for the afternoon's excitement, as mr smear had just been demonstrating his breakdancing abilities and managed to bash into a drawer knob that opened up his forehead enough to need three stitches.

there was much drama, and way more screaming than i was ready for. trying to get him to breathe and do a quiet "big boy cry" didn't *ahem* cut it.

anyway, one parent only in the emergency room so after hanging around for a while i went to my mom's coffee shop to chat over a chai latte, and we both arrived at the hospital just in time to greet our war heroes.

the evening was pretty chilled, and after putting him to bed gd and i watched the new mortal kombat movie: surprisingly good, and great fun!

it's now 2.30am, and the only reason i didn't go to bed two hours ago is because i've been setting up the new ipad and logging in to all the apps etc. but that's done, i think, so now i'm free to crash.

 i'm tired.

breathe

 1. mr smear's behaviour improved, and one thing that he kept repeating that was worrying me was clarified: he claimed that me "using [my] body, not [my] words" was a factor in his misbehaviour - i discovered the next day that what he was referring to was me physically carrying him to his room for a time-out after he refused to go by himself :P

things seem much more settled now, but i'm still making an effort to be easier (and more patient) in general.

2. the feedback from thursday evening's presentation was amazing, even if i felt like i'd done a terrible job. some of the programme managers / investors were inspired enough to want to have a chat with our team next week to take this project further. of course, mid-presentation i found a bug i'd introduced the night before in one of the most important pieces of functionality :P

either way, very validating.

3. as i told my department in our morning meeting, yesterday was supposed to be "me time". so i subsequently ended up doing lots of code reviews :P

i did, however, manage to put a few hours into a ticket i've been wanting to take on for ages, and i completed it successfully! but not without taking down our build server, which we discovered at 5pm on a friday afternoon. i hope we can resolve this quickly on monday morning...

4. while struggling with our apple tv and airplay yesterday evening, it became apparent that our home setup is long overdue an upgrade. after a deep dive into all our options, it seems like the most cost-effective way to get what we need is to acquire a roku (to replace the apple tv) and get a new ipad for gd. considering the fact that her current one has (more or less) lasted seven years and that it's still much cheaper than the most basic laptops available, i guess it's worth it.

misbehaving

just in case i don't post soon, this is a reminder to myself that yesterday and today (yesterday, in particular) were troubling days with mr smear that needed hard conversations.

also, it's now 2am and i'm only just going to bed after spending all evening preparing for a demo of the hackathon project and doing a fair amount of refactoring and bugfixing.

otherwise the week began with devastating fires and everything still feels kinda slowed down. 

remember this day

 there's a scene in f is for family in which kevin shares a memory of his father, when he was much younger, telling him to remember that day as it was a really good one.

today, with that in mind, i said that to my son. in spite of the fact that none of us likes getting up early in the morning, and in spite of the fact that (apparently) neither do any of the other parents involved, we arrived at acrobranch at 8.30am and we all had a really good time.

we (sadly) drove past the beginnings of the massive fire that we only learned in the evening wiped out the UCT library, which was and is heartbreaking.

we came home, i napped, and mr smear dragged me out of the bed to ask for my help with opus magnum. firstly, he didn't actually need my help, just me sitting by his side asking him what he should do next. secondly, the solution he came up with was really cool and very different to what i would have done.

after spending an hour working on my budgeting app for a presentation on thursday, i took mr smear to sea point, picked up sailor, and we headed to queen's beach.

it was lovely. it was a hot afternoon, but the sun wasn't too harsh by the time we arrived (around 4.30pm), and we had a great time playing around in the rock pools and clambering around the rocks. we even stopped in at scheckter's raw on the way home to try out their vegan "twix", which is pretty darned close to the real thing!

i really, really hope mr smear remembers today.

some of the evening was a bit of a bummer after all that, but whatever. after shower / dinner / bedtime and an episode of wandavision, i sat down and hammered out the upgrade for the presentation and i'm definitely happy with the state of things. the only thing i need to do before thursday is create new accounts and import fake data so that i don't have my personal data exposed on the recording...

milestones

 this week was simultaneously long and went by in a flash.

it was manageable from a work perspective although i was... not very motivated.

two special things have occurred, though, that made this a weekend to celebrate:

1. since last year, i've been pouring a lot of time and energy into building a mobile app and portal and this week was the first time that i managed to put it into my client's hands. it's ugly as sin and i have understood now that i finally need to buckle down and learn all about css, but the client's (at least two of the users) first response was so enthusiastic and grateful that i'm feeling very validated and excited about the prospects of this app for the future.

2. aside from a week of rough mornings with an uncooperative mr smear, things have been generally good between us. then yesterday, i introduced him to opus magnum. i've now sunk in quite a few hours since last weekend, and it's amazing, but i realized when he showed an interest that it's actually a fantastic way to introduce someone who's (pretty much) illiterate to coding concepts! witnessing him "get" it, successfully making products, getting excited, and coming up with very different ways of solving the puzzles from me made for an incredible experience.

 otherwise, our little family is breathing a huge sigh of relief since monday, when we realized that a huge source of our stress (gd's in particular) was the idea of having to return to canada in order to make aliyah. so we stopped, reevalutated, and made a decision to stay here until our file is in order and approved. this will entail extending her south african visa again, but compared to the alternative that's not such a big deal.

ten?

 i don't get how ten days have gone by since my last update.

easter weekend: everyone else was taking the long weekend, so i did too. and i relaxed. and i breathed. and it was good.

extra-long "holiday": mr smear's school had an extra week of holiday, and i needed to work from home, so there was that. it may have been a four-day week, but it was a loooong week of complicated, sensitive, highly-repetitive work and the testing was even more so. the good part was ending the week satisfied that the work was (pretty much) complete. the bad part was standing so badly and so long on thursday and friday that i've been suffering from sciatica since.

i'm lucky it's not too bad, but it's not fun.

bad school news: we just received an email this evening that mr smear's amazing school is in financial trouble because too many kids have pulled out (apparently mostly due to relocations), and his (and our) favourite teacher is leaving at the end of the month. this is deeply distressing, but as i've just told gd: if the worst come to the worst, i would rather struggle with homeschooling than put him back in a traditional south african school system.

i've made some great progress on my mobile app today (resolved some thorny issues that came up during the week), and i'm now trying to add "one more thing" (and possibly do another round of opus magnum) before bed.

nipple ring no more

 well, it's been in for more than two decades - more than half my life - but its time has come and gone and i no longer have a nipple ring. i'm honestly not sure how i feel about it, but i'm glad it's healed.

speaking of which, gd helped me change the leg bandage this evening and it's finally starting to look better, so that's a positive thing.

it's late, i've done much less than i was hoping to do. for gd's documents we've had to change tack, hopefully the new tactic will be more successful. today was a really long day that was only partially successful, and tomorrow is the last day of the workweek (for my colleagues, at least) so i'm hoping to clear some things off my desk before it's over...