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.