follow up

and then, almost immediately after hitting the post button, i fainted. 

ugh

omg, i've barely slept tonight. between the 2nd jab slight wooziness and the work i was doing until just before i went to bed rattling around my brain this past six hours has been very uncomfortable indeed.

the day was a bit mental, too. a tad more excitement than i'd have liked for a release testing week, even if a fair amount of that excitement was positive. 

two down, two to go

 well, mostly down. i've spent the past two days at my mom's, very focused and making up as many hours as i can before month's end. omg it's almost october already. anyway, aside from my right eye inexplicably taking a *lot* of strain, it's been a productive two days and i've got quite a few hours under my belt.

sunday was another good day. mr smear made crazy things in minecraft (including building the minecraft letters and a few of the minecraft characters), and i spent a large part of my day hacking away at the database. it would take me until the middle of the night to understand that the script i found was actually working fine, and the field i was trying to extract actually *was* encrypted. kind of. using a variation of a rotation cipher, which literally amazed me (not least because they had the audacity to describe their encryption as unbreakable in their documentation).

seriously, hacknet just got *so* real for me.

i took mr smear out for ice cream but grumpy & runt had just closed, though my mom was in the area and we went through to mouille point with her for oreo shakes. she dropped us off at home just in time for me to grab my gear and drive back to sea point to join the rollerblading group, and then next couple of hours were really nice and heavier on the cardio than my body was expecting.

big news: it looks like gd's police clearance has *finally* been delivered to the montreal consulate, so hopefully we'll have her authenticated documents here within a couple of weeks. we're also expecting her local clearance to arrive soon, so we *should* be able to move forward with the aliyah process soon.

also big news: we've been discussing my mom's plans, too, and it looks like there are some pretty good options for her which is really exciting!

right, now to see if we can get mr smear into bed reasonably soon so i can jump back into one of my jobs. gd just got her last tattoos for the year, on her shoulders, so i don't know if she'll be able to join me and get vaccinated tomorrow...

the sigh

today has been a good day. yesterday was rough, but i guess it was also a good day.

yesterday morning was intense. it started with a cousin's kid's barmitzvah, it was nice to be able to join the family but aside from the highlight of the barmitzvah boy's reading from the torah the orthodox service was not very inclusive and it dragged on forever. i jumped straight from that into aligning our bamboo builds, which was simple work but required a high level of concentration and a "system" for making the changes and testing them, and after a few hours of that i finally completed the task but with my vision all blurry and the sensation of my brain bleeding out my ears.

so i took mr smear out for a walk and an ice-cream (which for me, at that point, was medicinal). the walk with mr smear was great, the ice-cream was phenomenal, but the people we encountered along the way were all a massive source of stress.

afterwards, i dived back in to one of the other team's issues, and although i didn't completely resolve it, i did manage to achieve some level of progress before hitting 6pm and calling it a [expletives deleted] week.

a quick-ish shower, and slow-ish getting mr smear out the house, and we were off to my mom's for a really lovely dinner with cousins. we left really late, mr smear was totally wired, and we were forced to fill up the car on the way home in a gas station filled with unsavoury characters, but we arrived home safely, just before curfew, and got mr smear into bed with relative ease.

i played a couple of hours of hacknet, then went to bed.

this morning i got up early to practice leyning, then after a pleasant shul service (gd helped us make a minyan after getting back from the hospital to get her bandages redone, but she really hasn't been feeling too well today) i was too curious and i started poking around my client's existing solution.

the weird thing was the sensation was very much akin to playing hacknet, only it was real life. i was worried that i might have to reverse engineer or decrypt things without knowing algorithms or secrets, but boy, was i wrong - it's 100% amateur hour with these clowns, and not only do i now have access to most of the data they've been trying to export for me, but i understand why they're unwilling to export the "special" fields: they don't know how. i've managed to find a tool to extract it but it's a bit buggy, and there're a couple of off-the-shelf solutions that might even be worth paying for if i get desperate.

the neighbour's kid came over to play minecraft with mr smear (that sounds like that was her intention, but it probably wasn't), and then let me take mr smear downstairs to try out her bike (that doesn't have training wheels). i'm embarrassed to admit that i didn't even notice that the chain was off and the back wheel flat until her mother pointed it out to me, and while i could fix the chain i didn't have a bicycle pump.

needing to go out and do something, the weather seemed nice and i suggested we head to kirstenbosch. mr smear argued that he wanted to hit the pool, i acquiesced, and by the time we got outside there was a chill wind blowing. we carried on anyway, and in spite of the wind it was surprisingly nice for a while and both enjoyed a very peaceful series of moments relaxing in the sun with our feet in the ice-cold water. then the sky clouded over and we returned to our minecraft and hacking, and i'm just feeling so much better about the world.

vacation required

i'm, uh... i'm a bit tired. and stressed. and in need of some time off.

playing a couple of hours of hacknet doesn't count.

i'm pleased to report that the "one job" i was supposed to do yesterday was quick and painless, but we then ran into issues with our build server (atlassian products don't like to enable developers to do things that developers normally need to do without a fight) and it took a lot of trial-and-error before we understood the nature of the limitations and could put a viable-but-ugly workaround in place. on a tenth of our builds. so it will require a fair amount of time to implement the rest tomorrow.

that was for the old team. for the new team, every step along the way we've been uncovering more urgent blocking stuff, it's kinda like shaving a yak except everything is a real dependency. at least i've been able to feel like i'm contributing, which i guess is nice?

today was mr smear's last day of term, so he's on vacation for two weeks. some of this afternoon, with the three of us in the same space and all trying to do very different things, was entirely infeasible and gd's "encouraging" me to go work at my mom's over the course of the next couple of weeks.

oh, geez.

 between my neck and my brain, sleeping is work.

in contrast to yesterday, today was a nightmare. it started with a rushed morning (i can't even blame mr smear like usual, *i* made us late), and then the one (paid gig) job i had to take care of got sidelined by very weird bamboo behaviour.

convinced that everything would go smoothly, i finally sat down with my client to import the data and give a quick tour. well, that didn't go very well... after a couple of hours of high stress debugging, interrupted by my wife slicing off her thumbnail and needing to be rushed to the hospital (that literally, and very dramatically interrupted the meeting) and needing to pick up mr smear who was *not* interested in listening to anyone today, i finally discovered that an update that i pushed last night had broken the import. the fix itself was trivial, so all that drama (well, the client drama) was entirely unnecessary.

at least, once the import was done everything else worked beautifully. 

so i eventually got back to work, spending my afternoon performing a lengthy code review and discovering that my manager left for parental leave without posting important credentials to our secrets server, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise because while recreating the credentials we realized that we have some critical administrative functionality that only works in dev. so tomorrow's surprise priority will be figuring out what needs to be deployed and deploying it before friday...

in the late afternoon my mom arrived to show us something amazing: while sorting out my late great aunt's apartment with her cousin, they discovered a small store of documents from my great-grandparents, in particular their travel documents from lithuania at the turn of the 20th century!

also in mom's news, she's justifiably excited to have won a golf club event yesterday that got her name on a trophy that my granny's name is on too :)

...

this morning i showed mr smear the dawn of man sequence from 2001: a space odyssey, now he wants to watch "that silly movie" :P

we started watching the golden compass, he began with his usual "i don't wanna" and ended up with his usual "i don't wanna stop" at shower time.

right, i've been up for an hour or so, and all i've done is post this and watch random stuff over gd's shoulder. additionally, catching up with an old friend and trying to figure out what i called him (i think it's overclocker), but getting a bit lost in reading my old blog posts from a particularly rough period...

one day at a time

 that's the only way to navigate my world, these days. we still haven't received word regarding gd's canadian documents, and juggling between paid work, my side project, the graphic novel, the tattoos, trying to be a good husband and father, dealing with neck and nerve issues, and not being completely sedentary is proving a little overwhelming, so i'm kinda just rolling with things as much as can and hoping i don't screw up or neglect anything too important.

yesterday was a rough but successful work day - at one point i only almost cried out of sheer frustration, but a coworker jumped in to the rescue and was able to solve the mystery with secret knowledge (it turned out he'd broken the thing a while back and we hadn't figured out how, then subsequently got distracted and forgot about the entire incident).

i was ready to deliver my side-project yesterday, but my client was forced to bail on our meeting so we're doing it tomorrow. which is nice, because i've taken today off for sukkot and it's given me a chance to add some nice little improvements.

speaking of sukkot, today was our first hybrid prayer service and it was a great success - i was not expecting to feel emotional but hearing a bunch of people singing together today was really nice. and then i ended up hearing live music for the first time in ages, which was fun. even if the music itself was a bit crap. mr smear's class (including the parents) was treated to a live band before they put on a little show of their own, and i was lucky to be able to make it (gd arrived late, after mr smear had performed, because she'd been getting her neck examined).

the weather's been lovely and it's been a great day so far.

oh! back to yesterday: mr smear and i finished his lego technic alt-build and it was really cool, and we also received a "frog robot" that needed some "man of the house" assembling - it's such a cool little thing (it's a very simple design, but it's behaviour is very sweet) that mr smear took a while to grasp that it's not a voice-activated servant :P

either way, wins for dad.

chag sameach!

check, check, check

app and portal ready for delivery? check.

spending a good chunk of the day watching the *new* new he-man series on netflix with mr smear? (it's legitimately excellent, far superior to the kevin smith reboot): check.

convincing mr smear to go five rounds of dance dance revolution with me because neither of us had done anything remotely physical all day: check.

getting started on an alt-build for mr smear's lego technic kit: check.

now - to bed. a little later than planned, as usual, but with waaaay less on my shoulders.

cold 'n wet sunday morning

 good. yesterday was the last tattoo of season 2021, and although the tattoo itself went well i'd forgotten that the first night generally doesn't. it was a night full of nightmares, discomfort, and thinking about stuff i could do nothing about. i'm not quite feeling my best this morning, though it seems to be starting off well (i've played through a hacknet mission - i started from scratch a few days ago because i wanted to continue and, years later, had absolutely no context to work with).

thurday:

after a generally constructive yom kippur (though i did need a nap due to the lack of caffeine), we went to my mom's for the breaking of the fast and had a jolly evening. the main takeaway - from my six year old's perspective - was that my sister and cousin have potty mouths.

friday:

i really struggled to focus on work, my morning was very much wrapped up in a visit to the doctor (looks like i'm going to need antibiotics for my sinuses after all) and the hairdresser (omg so much better), and by late afternoon i'd done relatively little and was thoroughly over the week. so i dived back into steamworld heist when mr smear was busy with other things, and the two of us constructed a lego technic birthday gift together and that was a fantastic experience! especially figuring out together how all the gears interacted.

saturday:

a pleasant temple service, steamworld heist, then taking mr smear to the promenade with sailor to take advantage of the surprisingly hot and sunny weather before heading off the the tattoo parlour. i was saddened by the large numbers of antivaxxers protesting vaccines, and at some point just couldn't handle being within 50m of them and we skedaddled just as mr smear had decided he was ready to go home.

my favourite part of the morning - we were struggling to get mr smear out of the house while i was on the phone with sailor, so he suggested i tell mr smear that if he hurries we'll introduce him to a mermaid. this worked for about a minute, and then suddenly backfired with a loud wail: "i - don't - WANNA - meet - a - mermaid!!!", and we then had to convince him that if he would cooperate we would cancel the meeting.

...

the new tattoo is beautiful, though there's a weird line that gd noticed and that's now impossible to unsee, but overall it's all good and i'm now ready to dedicate my sunday to figuring out these android issues and trying to make the website feature complete before the new week begins.

reflection

a theme ran through last night's dreams - i'd returned to israel to discover that a bunch of coworkers from my tech support days and fellow students had been involved in producing a zombie movie, and it was a pretty good zombie movie.

this past week has been laser-focused on work and my side-project, with very little space for exercise or fun.

side project: as much progress as i've been making, i discovered yesterday that i've only been testing with the ios emulator and for some reason my android phones are not behaving the same - but in ways that are thoroughly inexplicable. i'm a bit stressed about that because i basically have a hard deadline of monday to get the current state (plus additional functionality) out the door...

paid work: my manager has left for parental leave a couple of days earlier than anticipated, i feel like he's left us well-prepared. one of my team members has been pretty ill the past couple of weeks and i'm a little worried that it may be more serious than it seems. otherwise, i've been working (a long and arduous slog) for works against a deadline of tomorrow, and yesterday managed to complete all my tasks which is quite a relief.

my nose is still bloody since covid, so i've finally booked a doctor's appointment for tomorrow. my neck's been in a bad way for the last week, i'm praying that the physio beating me up yesterday will help. mr smear is thoroughly enjoying his newfound skill: sharpening pencils. i'm nervous about getting a tattoo on saturday because the weather's starting to get warmer; it'll definitely be the last tattoo of the season, this year i've already managed nine tattoos so far but ten's a nice round number...

oh! i think i've forgotten to mention - this past year has been a year of separations, from my cousins separating to my sister finally divorcing my passive-aggressively abusive brother in law (it looks like the only step left is just a formality) and her daughter finally getting through her insane divorce proceedings against her disgusting i'm-rich-but-i-won't-help-with-my-kid married-my-beard trash.

anyways, today's yom kippur and i'm very grateful for my family, and for my family putting up with me as i slowly unravel and unlearn my "sharp" behaviour. i've lived forty years as a  consistently angry guy, and that's made me rough even on my good days...

not with a bang, but a whimper

 that's how my weekend's ending, although to be fair it was mostly excellent in additional to being wildly successful on the mobile app front. it took me most of today but i've finally got the thing working really nicely and now it's just a couple of features shy - and i believe they're minor ones.

friday was a great and satisfying work day, saturday was a very sabbath-y sabbath and after my mom picked up mr smear in the late afternoon gd and i headed off to protoplasm's where he and his partner had put together a phenomenal vegan meal for a few more people than actually arrived. we had an awesome time, we ate too much, we got home just before curfew and we both passed out soon after (i did try to watch primal, which looks amazing, but i fell asleep on the couch).

today had a couple of rough patches but was primarily about mr smear discovering that he could make stop-motion videos while i made slow and steady progress, and when the miserable weather cleared up the three of us went for an enjoyable walk in the company gardens.

i'm a little disappointed in the tattoo artist, who had forgotten to put me in the book for yesterday, but i'm actually relieved 'cause it would probably have messed up my evening.

gd's just gone to bed, i've just pushed my last changes for the day, and i guess i need a cup of tea and a little decompression before i crash 'cause my brain's still buzzing.

...

on the health front, it hasn't been such a great weekend. the back of my head's very tender and a bit swollen (apparently it might be related to my neck) and whatever's going on with my neck has been causing me pain down my left arm into my hand. which for the most part has been fine today, except now that i typed this out my thumb's hurting. well played, me, well played.

the scat man

 jesus, today's had some hectic moments. someone's... umm... been making a bit of a mess in the bathroom the last little while. and i got a very angry "I HATE YOU" today (after a couple of straight hours of lego harry potter i said it was time to go offline for a bit, which wasn't received well). that really doesn't feel good.

on the other hand, mr smear's birthday circle at school was absolutely great. we managed to score just enough mini-donuts (which are the perfect-sized donuts) from grumpy & runt and the kids and teachers made it a really special experience.

i spent all day reviewing other people's code, at one point just managing to log my time before literally passing out for fifteen minutes. it was a lovely day that i'd missed, so in the evening i went out for a walk and on the way ended up picking up a really nice falafel in a pita from nish nush that mr smear and i enjoyed together.

six episodes in, and mr robot is still excellent.

it's almost 1am and i'm a bit disappointed by how slow my expo app progress is going.

happy 5782!

 so far, so good. well, one minor hiccup (i need to learn how to handle mr smear more effectively and less negatively) over the course of the last three days, but mostly things are good. work hasn't been particularly thrilling but it's been good nonetheless, and this evening i made some progress with the mobile app in spite of the fact that i've spent the past hour yawning (and trying to watch riddick, and finding it a bit pathetic).

the rosh hashana services were good, our family dinner on monday evening was really nice, and mr smear stayed at my mom's which gave me and gd a nice little break. then, on tuesday afternoon, i put on my blades and mr smear got on his bike and we rolled around the promenade together, every now and then joined by my mother who'd taken the opportunity for a walk.

we definitely need to do that more often.

ready for the new year

 well, this weekend has been a surprisingly good one. a great one, in fact. i'm pretty stoked about it. the only downer this weekend is that gd's been struggling with neck pain since yesterday, but she seems to be doing better today and hopefully she'll be back to relative normal by tomorrow. as for my sinuses, they're still not 100% but seem much better than yesterday, so that's good.

yesterday was a miserable-weather indoors kind of day, perfect for discovering a fantastic humble bundle for kids, one with two titles of particular interest. so we installed pajama sam: no need to hide when it's dark outside and as soon as the morning service was over i jumped in with mr smear who absolutely loves it. i mean - to be fair - i love it too. it's a great game.

i was exhausted, and needed to rest quite a bit, but in the late-ish afternoon got sent on a errand and took mr smear with me. we walked to the shopping centre, and after a successful mission sat down to eat carob rice cakes and enjoy some drinks. my mom rocked up, gave us a ride home, and after dropping mr smear off upstairs i went through to sea point to join sailor - well, to record him, not actually join him - for his fifteen minutes in the rock pool. aside from the fact that it was a beautiful sunset and it felt really nice to be there in spite of it being a bit chilly, we also had a really interesting conversation.

i was exhausted after putting mr smear to bed, i crashed and ended up having a pretty decent night's sleep for the first time in many days - not being on prednisone probably had a lot to do with that.

today started off on a good foot. mr smear returned to playing pajama sam and i made great progress on my project. in the early afternoon i took him to the museum but there were too many people in line with too little distance between them, so we headed off to the aquarium instead. after an enjoyable visit - as mr smear gets older his experience of it changes dramatically - we then entered the super park for the first time since it initially shut down for covid. it was awesome. i cannot described how much i enjoyed seeing mr smear enjoying himself, challenging himself physically and learning new things (i was a bit nervous watching him figure out the zip line by himself for the first time, but after his first success his confidence and mine shot right up).

the car ride home wasn't great, as a demonstration of why sharing and kindness pay off (seaweed vs jelly tots, i don't feel like explaining) turned into a teaching moment or two. otherwise, the rest of the afternoon and evening were great, in addition to taking a bath i finished off the current phase of my project's website development (so i'm now back to working on the mobile app) while mr smear played little big planet 3 and then sailor and i continued yesterday's chat which we developed into an idea that we're both very excited about.

my mom is (via video chat) continuing to read harry potter to mr smear at bedtime, which is fun, and after saying goodnight i joined gd for the second half of the suicide squad. i'm usually not a big fan of the dc universe, but the reboot is fantastic - the story and action are excellent, the characters are wonderful and there's a great balance between cool and silly. we thoroughly enjoyed it!

and the meds weren't worth it

 i thought the meds were helping (at least, in contrast to how much they've been hindering), but after a couple of days doing much better i've just woken up with a stuffy, bloody nose again. i guess it's time for a face-off with the doctor...

i ditched my day-job yesterday morning and spent some hours trying to make my project presentable. while jumping off the top of the live demo tree i - hit - every - branch - on - the - way - down. fifteen minutes before go-time, i found a showstopper that forced me to ask for a fifteen minute delay, and then it was too late...

halfway through a minor refactor, i demo'ed.

somehow, the demo wasn't an abysmal failure.

i was actually surprised by how well the system held up, i'd been so frantic all day (arguably not helped by the prednisone) that my mind was all over the place, and forgetting that i had no idea whether the import would work i ditched the existing data to demo it and clocked the onosecond. and then, doubling down, i hit the import button and - magic! - it performed.

ultimately, there were plenty of nitpicks and little improvements to be made but overall my client is looking forward to using this and i have more than a week to take care of the issues that came up.

for the rest of the day i dived into day-work, then called it a week and cracked open a hunter's that had been sitting in the fridge for months waiting for its moment*. i spent the next hour or so alternating between sipping and coding, and by the time i was ready to switch off for dinner i was feeling much, much better about the state of the world.

* this past week has been a "cheat week", i've gotten almost no exercise and i think i've managed to gain back all the weight i lost while down with covid :P

---

oh! funny story from the yesterday morning: i finally called the department of home affairs about the existing passport application that i never made. after waiting twenty five minutes for someone to answer from the department of home affairs contact center, i explained the problem and was asked to hold again... fifteen more minutes of hold music before she got back to me - she had sent an email to someone else and was keeping me on hold while she waited for the response.

+2

 two hours later, and i've actually managed to make a lot of progress that i'm really happy with. unfortunately, i now have much less time for sleep.

*sigh*

damned if you do...

phasing

 jesus, it's past 2am and i've spent hours lying in bed, too exhausted to do the things i need to do but unable to stop my mind from racing around a track filled with anxieties about where we are and where we're going and imagining random aspects of reconnecting once we (hopefully) (eventually) get there.

this week has been a mess for me, for two reasons. the first, that covid is the gift that keeps on giving and i've been forced to treat the ongoing sinus infection that started when the main symptoms ended and always seemed to be on the verge of getting better. the treatment - prednisone again, in an attempt to avoid antibiotics - has been effective regarding the sinuses, but has (as it does) completely messed me up. i've been wired and tired and for days, now, under the gun on my personal project, i've been forced to go to bed early but not really sleep.

the second, in two parts:

1. that at work (my paid gig) i've been trapped in an endless code review cycle because a *small* change that i started at the beginning of the week opened a can of worms, and between the conflicting opinions of my coworkers, massively time-consuming tests and annoying shortcomings of shell scripts and python i only managed to close the damn thing yesterday afternoon.

2. that after breaking the back of the changes for my personal project, and setting a delivery date to (today, as in less than twelve hours' time), i subsequently discovered more sharp react edges and my personal time has been consumed by a long slog of steady improvements, each costing much more than expected. and with the meds, instead of working until late at night and then getting some rest i've been restless at night and dragging myself out of bed at 6am each morning to be able to get *some* time in.

so here i am, trying to drop some of my mind-spinning experience into a post before maybe doing a little work before hopefully going back to bed and actually managing to sleep.