locking down

another lockdown. we're praying that mr smear can go to school tomorrow, but that's still not clear. thursday and friday were pretty much lost causes as far as work was concerned. i was a total mess until thursday afternoon, and a partial mess until this morning. on friday evening my hackathon team made the deadline by about fifteen minutes. yesterday was basically spent playing videogames, either with mr smear or by myself. i was still very fuzzy, and i'm amazed at how successful i was with braid and super meat boy (i didn't have headspace for much else). i was really impressed with crossover (to play 32-bit games on my mac), but disappointed by how much they're asking for it. mr smear slept over at my mom's last night. gd and i gave up on lawnmower man last night and finished watching blackspace instead - the former is not a good movie. the latter is a powerful, superbly-told story. i *think* my cough / sinus / etc. situation is finally starting to clear up; this morning i woke up and took care of a few things, not least of which being that i put together the outline for pages 13 and 14 (the new A3 whiteboard helped, though i'm not certain how much of that was psychological). my mom, mr smear and i went up table mountain this afternoon, it was pretty cold and windy but we all enjoyed it immensely. after mr smear went to bed this evening gd had a bit of a breakdown - being stuck in south africa is taking its toll, and we're praying that our year-long slog through the swamps of bureaucracy pays off. i've finally made some satisfying progress on my side project for the first time in weeks. omg it's approaching 1am already.

still hacking

 i'm *still* struggling with the coughing. i went to the doctor again today, this time armed with better information after looking up decongestants and "rebounding" yesterday morning and learning that gd and i have been unwittingly maintaining a decongestant addiction because we thought that infrequent low doses were fine.

they're not. we've been paying the price for months. and these past few weeks we both just happened to blow up at the same time :(

i'm on different meds now, not sure how i'll sleep tonight but at least i don't feel as wired as yesterday.

...

mr smear was so excited to go back to school today, and we were overjoyed and relieved to hear that he had a fantastic time. i didn't get much work done today, mostly because of my doctor's appointment and a "quick" visit to the bank (the ticket said "estimated wait time: 5 minutes" and it lied). we tried playing unstable unicorns before dinner and i think we both enjoyed it :)

...

the last two work days felt oddly productive considering the mess i've been. it's funny, but as my role's never been very clearly defined i find myself straddling both management and development in an interesting way.

...

back to the hackathon stuff.

around the world

 i think we're all starting to feel better, to varying degrees. mr smear still isn't ready to go back to school yet, but *knocks wood* his cough seems to be subsiding a bit and we're hoping he'll get a good night's sleep for once. gd's exhausted and has actually gone to bed already.

i didn't get a lot of hours in at work today, although i did get through some stuff i wasn't looking forward to and i did manage to fix our shower door, so... winning. gd had a busy day with two visits to the dentist - the first to get a temporary crown (neither of us are convinced that it was worth the trouble) and the second to get the broken temporary crown fixed.

otherwise, it looks like her canadian document might actually be on its way to us, so that we can send it back again to be certified. because we, like all the other immigrants, are rich and can afford to throw thousands upon thousands of dollars at couriers and a wide variety of government agencies.

mr smear and i had a couple of altercations today, but we're mostly fine. this parenting stuff is hard.

i'm finding myself drawn more and more to steamworld heist. a part of it is that i need a break, and it's giving me one. a part of it is that it's a gorgeous, atmospheric game with a cool story and great mechanics.

right. back to the hackathon stuff.

father's day

 today was a great father's day. i played quite a lot with my boy, he was excited for a boxing lesson and actually did really well, he picked a weirdly father's-day-themed movie (bambi), i picked a weirdly father's-day-themed movie (stardust), we all felt sorry for our super-allergic selves together and generally enjoyed each others' company.

in other news, gd participated in an online "aliya fair" this morning and there's a possibility that we could handle the rest of her process from within israel, which i expect could make things considerably easier for us.

after putting mr smear to bed i jumped on a hackathon call, but there were only two of us and we just ended up have a great chat about a million different things for quite a while. then gd and i watched the second episode of blackspace, which is brilliant.

...

otherwise, i'm a little nervous about going to bed now as my sinuses are starting to feel blocked again. i've been on five different kinds of medication (antihistamines, prednisone, antibiotic, cough syrup and mometasone furoate) and i'm not really feeling like it's all making a huge amount of difference. i mean, it's definitely helping, but not as dramatically as i would expect this whole routine should.

so much hacking

it's friday night, i'm still coughing. and this morning i woke up before dawn and coughed so violently that i injured my throat. it was initially so painful that i was worried that maybe i should be heading to a hospital, but over the course of the day it's calmed down considerably. this evening it was still sore, now it's a mild discomfort.

gd's still not feeling good - looks like she may have gotten food poisoning yesterday, but at least her lungs seem to be doing better. mr smear's super snotty and stuffy, so we haven't sent him to school in a couple of days (or been outside at all, how very "lockdown"), but aside from that we've been fine and mostly in good spirits.

things that have gotten me through the week:

work: we've successfully published the new release with days to spare.

the hackathon: whatever happens, i've successfully completed an enormous share of the work and almost all of it worked first time.

my tattoo healing: the harry potter (sonnet 13), titan ae (14) and groot (15) tattoos are healed, and my chest is still a bit itchy from the hair regrowth but it's bearable now.

steamworld heist: good lord, what a sweet and fun game! a very firefly feel for a turn-based platformer, and interesting without being too demanding.

mr smear helping me put together the new shelves today? awesome. the new shelves making an enormous difference to my "corner office" of the living room? awesome. picking up chickpea fudge at the chemist and both of us absolutely loving it? awesome. his enthusiasm when i picked up a discounted copy of spongebob squarepants: battle for bikini bottom - rehydrated this evening and we played it together for a bit? awesome.

more hacking

 i can't tell if it's allergies or not, i'm feeling like it may have been a bug (not covid, pretty damned sure about that at least). it was hardcore sunday night and all of yesterday, then last night it kind of calmed down and it's been on / off today.

half of today was spent doing paid work, which was surprisingly productive, and the other half working on the hackathon project. i at least felt like i was making progress, but it's a much bigger piece of work than i anticipated. like, a LOT bigger. so i'm really, really pleased that i've just deployed a basically functional version of it and if i don't go to bed really soon it'll be because i'm enjoying some "me time" :)

*sits down with a fresh cup of hot chocolate and a box of rusks*

otherwise, project mr smear has been running pretty well even if there have been a few hiccups along the way. gd's feeling a bit better even if she's still struggling to breathe. the directeur l'etat civil charged us for her documents this evening, now we're just praying they'll ship them to the right location.

for now? i think things are okay.

hack

 i would feel much better about today if my nose and throat hadn't been doing a thing for the last few hours. i'm praying it's just allergies and doesn't turn into anything worse.

praying.

this weekend was pretty good, barring having to drop off gd at the hospital this afternoon on our way back from a really nice world of birds play-date. my tattoo artist cancelled yesterday so i ended up watching big hero 6 again with mr smear, and today i woke up super early and made lots of progress with my part of the hackathon project - although i was hoping to have something deployed before going to bed, but when i finally had some alone time this evening i got stuck troubleshooting global secondary indexes instead...

 mr smear convinced my mom to play toy story 3 with him this evening. hilarity ensured.

 ...

i'm excited that netanyahu's finally on his way out, but i worry that his style of politics has already infected so many in government that the new crew might just be bringing in more of the same.

i hope not.

acceptance

this week has been... much better. it had some ugly parts to it, but i'm learning yet another important thing that i really wish i'd learned long ago: to let go of stuff and prioritize relationships i care about over my ideas of right and wrong. this week i've pulled back on anything even remotely discipline related and focused on making good memories, and things seem to be better.

...

this week my chest has been itching just as badly as last week - post-tattoo regrowth is not a joke. it's been fine if i've been shirtless, but it's either been very cold or i've been at work so that hasn't helped much.

work-wise it was a very interesting week. it took us the entire week to take a basically solved problem and render it release-ready, with a lowlight of our efforts being updating a golang package version to indicate a breaking change, which proved unnecessarily complicated. i also got pulled in for a two-day investigation that left a bunch of us a lot more knowledgeable and with a few interesting ideas of how to move our project forward.

side-project-wise, i got side-tracked by a mid-week emergency when one of my clients forgot his password and i realized that i hadn't implemented any kind of password reset feature yet... the back-end changes were almost trivial, but it cost me two nights of fighting with react before i was able to give them something that not only looked decent, but wasn't going to fall over if something breathed too hard.

hackathon-wise, we've had a couple of cool discussions and made a lot of progress. no idea how far we'll get in two weeks, but the fact that there are three of us who have drive to make this thing happen long-term is satisfying.

gd's been coughing again, apparently she's landed up with yet another chest infection. mr smear's also been coughing a bit, but we're convinced his is just a result of post-nasal drip and bad allergies.

...

it's friday evening, and for the first time in a while it really feels like erev shabbat.

bottoming out

 life is good, but my relationship with my son is not. today was a really rough day after a lot of other rough days, and it's clear that he just doesn't give a damn what i think and that he doesn't like me. it doesn't matter how good my intentions are, clearly i've screwed this up. and he's not even six years old yet.

so today i've decided to take a step back and keep a bit of distance between us. i don't know what direction things are going in, but i know it's not a good one and something needs to change.

...

the thursday night meeting and presentation was brilliant, there's a lot of enthusiasm for our idea.

on friday afternoon my coworker and i finally figured out a big chunk of the elusive bug that's been plaguing us, which is an enormous load off as we now have over a week to tighten up related code and test the crap out of it.

gd took over my tattoo session yesterday, i'm a little surprised (her new ink runs all the way down her arm and into her fingers) but it's definitely cool. my latest one seems to have calmed down, and my regrowing chest hairs from the previous pieces are giving me a bit less grief than they were (they were thoroughly distracting for days).

this evening i went for a stroll with sailor along the promenade - good exercise, great company, but damn, he lives in a different time zone from the rest of us and i keep finding myself synchronizing with him... i got back much later than anticipated.

...

 i finally got some work done on my side project this morning, and a little bit this afternoon - i was going to continue now but i really, really feel like shit at the moment.

the joys of parenting

it's so hard to have conversations with our five year old. in some ways, he's just so darned clever and in others... he can be a real dumb-ass.

we've been going through a really painful time with him lately. he's got such a good heart, and he loves connecting with other kids, but there're a bunch of behaviours he's modelling from the little bastards at his previous school and he keeps doing things that turn other kids off... we're doing our very best to help him but it feels like it's out of our hands, like we just have to leave him to figure this stuff out the hard way.

it's tough watching someone you love make mistakes. it's even tougher when you know that it's not their fault. it's even tougher when you know it's kinda yours. if i'd had understood how much damage being in that school was doing him, i'd have pulled him out instead of trying to deal with unqualified, uninspired seat-warmers.

and now the new school's switched the teachers because the school's running out of funds, and they've clearly made an enormous mistake. his teacher for the first few months was AMAZING. the new teacher? she's mediocre at best.

can't we just catch a break for once?

...

things have been a bit overwhelming of late, i've been worried that i'm burning out. or, burning out more than usual. at the same time, i have to Keep On Adulting and the universe just keeps throwing more stuff at me. half of those things are opportunities that i can't refuse but don't have the bandwidth for.

case in point: there's a new hackathon going on, and my teammate and i came up with something so cool that even people outside of the hackathon are getting excited - i don't even know what to make of that.

and i had a chat with a university friend who's now a game developer, and he's on board with this educational thing i've been talking about for years now.

otherwise, work is work and i don't feel that my downtime is nearly enough. i've just given gd my next tattoo session so i can get over the latest one, which was insanely painful for an interminable hour and a half, no matter how brilliant it may be (although it will need a bit of a touch-up). it's right underneath no. 16,  exactly on my ribs and i yelled and wailed and moaned a lot.

we got page 12 out the door, though. so that's good.