the crest of the wave

 it's been a wild few weeks, i've been feeling overwhelmed even since work pressure eased off just over a week ago. last week mr smear brought home a cold, so that was a bit of a scare, and last tuesday's tattoo session was so intensely painful that i was suffering from shock for two days afterwards (saturday's also hurt a lot, but nothing like no. 15).

i've been stressed about my side project (not that i haven't made any progress, but it's been hard to make headspace for it), i've been stressed about gd's documentation (after giving us the runaround for a couple of weeks, they informed us that the form they'd given us was invalid and that the lawyer who's helping us isn't lawyer enough), i've been stressed about pushing out the graphic novel (although we did just complete a really cool page), and i've been stressed about the awful stuff going on in israel almost as much i've been stressed about the world's ridiculous response to it.

it's funny, though, that through all the anxiety and the day-to-day trials and exhaustions i'm sitting here typing this and feeling pretty okay about the world.

...

in mr smear news:

the past couple of weeks have been easier than before when we were going through a period of particularly difficult behaviour. he's been repeating to whoever will listen that i'm always working and never play with him (completely untrue, but not the point), even though he's (in the same breath!) told someone that i don't have a job. *facepalm*

twice over the course of the past week or so i've managed to get him to come down to the parking lot with his bike, and both times he's had a blast and made real progress. i hope we can gather enough momentum for him to be confident enough to drop the training wheels.

while things have generally been pretty good with him, tonight he pushed gd too far and for the first time ended up going to bed without dinner. to put it simply, he was being an asshole. i don't know how we correct this, but i think this evening was an important step.

...

 right. imma going to bed now.

happy mother's day

 today was an excellent mother's day: mr smear dragged me out of bed early and we made some nice cards for our mothers. we played through the first couple of levels of lego star wars: the complete saga which, along with the other lego series' we own makes me want to thank each and every one of those responsible for producing those games because the fact that they exist is AMAZING for me and my boy. they've hit on the perfect formula for making adult movie experiences interactive and appropriate for children while still being super fun for us bigger kids.

my mum picked us up and we went through to maker's landing to sample the wares of three of the vegan food shops - it was all fantastic! the vibe there was really cool and we had a great time. i was exhausted when we got home, so i crashed for a bit, then got dragged into a little more lego star wars before we all went out again to visit my great aunt, who we haven't seen in person since a while before lockdowns began. it was really nice spending time with her :)

it was quite late when we returned home, we ordered curry club for dinner and - for the very first time - managed to convince mr smear to dig in and he enjoyed it too ^_^

...

the past week was hectic, i don't know if my fogginess on tuesday and wednesday were due to intense allergies or if i had a cold or something, but those two days were hard. thursday and friday were a bit less stressful, and included a meeting with the programmable banking team which was very interesting and probably quite fruitful!

otherwise, on saturday afternoon i sat through the tattoo for sonnet 14 and in the evening gd convinced me to watch in the name of the father... i cried a lot after that movie, i would have been deeply moved by all the unjustice in the film (and the true story it was based on) but dad-me was utterly heartbroken.

a checklist that includes my first harry potter tattoo

yesterday:

new page's script off to the illustrator: check.

a lovely visit to the museum with mr smear: check.

a great 5km evening hike up the mountain with sailor: check.

a four-hour upgrade of one of my mobile app's components after putting mr smear to bed: check.

today:

a morning full of meetings, ages logging my hours and invoicing my employer, lots of context switching, and enjoying the walks with and waits for mr smear to and from school: check.

managing a git repo rescue and helping a coworker put out a release and leaving the house with ten minutes to get to the tattoo parlour: check.

getting an amazing tattoo done in about forty five minutes: check.

playing lego batman: the videogame with mr smear, then totally firing up his imagination with honey, i shrunk the kids at dinnertime: check.

learning all about push notifications while polishing off gd's oversized, delicious raspberry pie: check.

getting ready to wash my tattoo off before going to bed: check. check. check.

the blur

i went to bed after posting on wednesday night, i'm still not clear on why mr smear was sleeping in our bed but that and my neck were the least of my troubles - with everything else going on, my ear starting hurting and it felt like i was heading for an ear infection. i managed to get an appointment with the doctor first thing (well, first thing after dropping mr smear off at school and joining my morning meetings), and was relieved to learn that we'd caught it in time, so i could avoid antibiotics but still had to engage in preventative medication, which appears to have done the trick.

sleep-wise things didn't improve, though, as i've spent half the nights waking up around 1am with what seems like post-nasal drip-induced acid reflux, being too tired to do anything constructive so just resigning myself to hours of watching youtube (okay, some of it was educational, at least).

otherwise, the rest of the work week was arduous but much improved, i closed off the week with a new release candidate with which i believe the problem is resolved.

yesterday was fantastic. hido's down in cape town with his family and we joined them for a braai, it was wonderful seeing everyone and introducing all our kids ^_^

after an excellent day, mr smear and i played some biped in the evening (hardcore, absolutely brilliant) and after getting him to bed i jumped in to a thunderstone evening that was a little slower than usual, but between turns i figured out how to get my expo app working on an android emulator and by the time i got to bed i had moved all my TODOs out to a backlog board which seems a lot saner.

on the shakespeare front, on wednesday i received page updates for the nymphs' breast reductions but haven't had much bandwidth to publish them, so i'm going to do that now and then dive in to putting the page 12 script together for mr cat.