restless

it's been two hours now and i've imagined countless lines of code that would never compile to solve a problem i don't care about.

 

reminder: breathe

 today was mad. work-wise, this week was going pretty smoothly until my manager got hold of me yesterday and informed me that we're doing a quick "pivot" on our current plans, and in order to follow through on the new plan i've had to put in hours and hours of frustrating troubleshooting, which would have been bad enough but after finally being able to stop, eat breakfast and focus on getting some work done i then spent the next five hours in back-to-back meetings, some planned, some completely spontaneous.

my sister got divorced this morning, then went straight from the court to the hospital for a minor procedure that had her under general anaesthetic, and i finally got the call to pick up my car around 4pm which was just about the time that she needed a ride home so at least that worked out well - my mom escorted us as i drove her in her car, then dropped me off at the gearbox specialist so i could get mine.

i'm still buzzing with nervous energy, even if it's now shabbat and i'm officially off work, and i feel like i need to get quite a bit of work done on sunday which kinda sucks.

---

on tuesday morning gd and i both escorted mr smear and had a chat with his teacher. we weren't sure if we'd be leaving him there or bringing him back home - even if he was and loudly told anyone who might listen that we were pulling him out of the school - but she convinced us that things weren't as bad as we thought and now we're a bit suspicious but mostly okay.

in good news, mr smear went home with another kid this afternoon and they apparently had a really good time, so it's a pity it took half a year to arrange that but we're glad it happened.

...

the rest of this week seems to have flown by and i barely recall what happened. shadowslight, muadib and i watched dune together, but the experience ended up pretty much the same as watching it alone, except not as comfortably. it was still amazing - absolutely stunning, and a massive relief that villeneuve has done the book justice - and gd watched it the following night and i'm very pleased that she loved it too.

oh, and we finished watching the first season of gravity falls and the second season of adventure time. both awesome.

and i learned about debouncing, which is a useful trick.

toxic: round 3

we're angry. no, we're furious. we're distressed. we're feeling lost.

i was showering with mr smear this evening when he touched something and suddenly remembered a large bruise on his hip, which apparently was caused by a rock being thrown at him by a new kid who's been griefing him for weeks. this, after he came home today covered from head to foot in sand complaining that another kid had dumped it all over him after he'd asked him to stop.

we don't know what's going on, but we do know that something's very wrong if the people we're entrusting with our child aren't telling us things before he is. and we're obviously still smarting from friday's emergency.

whatever's happening, mr smear's been feeling unsafe and we haven't registered that until tonight, although in retrospect his recent reluctance to go to school should have raised a red flag. so tomorrow morning we're off to the school to confront his teacher, but there's already been a breach of trust and i don't know what the fuck she's going to say that's going to make any of this better.

one thing's for sure, though, if we don't leave with a good feeling then he's coming home with us, and that'll be the end of that story.

success

 today went well. mr smear slept at my mom's last night, so i got to wake up with no harassment (although not that much later than usual). i started my day diving into the calendar package i've been avoiding for months, and the deeper i got the more broken it turned out to be. so i tried looking for alternatives, and found one that works on all my platforms and is made for sane people! it still needed a little bit of trial and error, but by the time we were ready to go out i'd achieved what i set out to do and was feeling pretty good about my day.

my mom took me and mr smear to newlands forest - too cold, he said - so we continued on to kirstenbosch - too hot, he said. we all enjoyed a really nice walk.

i picked up a copy of prison architect and played for a while, then had a bath (i didn't know i needed that), then played some more until dinnertime. we continued watching gravity falls, then had some trouble with mr smear before bedtime... it may have taken a while, and lots of patience, but things got better and even though he didn't get story time we all said good night in good spirits.

our plan for this evening was to do a "watch party" of dune with shadowslight and muadib, but muadib was hit with loadshedding so we've postponed and i spent the evening tightening up my mobile app changes and fiddling with dependency versions. now i'm finding excuses to not go to bed while my macbook updates xcode which is taking forever.

mid-weekend

yesterday:

my son now has a certificate from the ER commending him on his bravery. somehow, after years of explaining to teachers that he has a dairy allergy, we ended up in a situation where a parent surprised the class with cupcakes, nobody informed us, and another kid convinced my son that the cupcakes were dairy free. this apparently happened just before i picked him up - how long before, i guess i'll find out on monday - and i walked/carried him straight to the emergency ward (my car's being checked, an uber might easily have taken longer than walking, and it didn't occur to me to get a teacher / another parent to drive us) where in spite of a thoroughly incompetent triage doctor we managed to get him inside and on a drip before anything too crazy went down.

so that happened.

otherwise, it was a mildly fun work day and quite productive. a highlight of the day was a surprise call from my manager who i haven't spoken to in over a month, and it was nice to find ourselves quite well aligned (i'd been a bit anxious).

anyway, it's somewhat relaxing about being expected to focus on only one project.

...

i think last night was the third night in a row that we tried to watch an episode of resident alien and both passed out halfway through.

today:

this shabbat's morning service put me in a grim mood, because hypocrisy. the same hypocrisy that's been bothering me for years.

blessed are you oh lord our god who authorizes us to employ willful ignorance as we encourage and support acts of extreme cruelty that bring destruction to our planet and ourselves for the sake of our gluttonous desires

otherwise, good service. i had breakfast, watched evangelion 3.33, then passed out for a while. mr smear and the neighbours' kid spent the day together and we had the afternoon to ourselves, i read a little bit of sláine: time killer, sailor came over for a short visit, my mom picked up mr smear and we enjoyed a date night. we watched free guy! aside from, like, three irritating hollywoodisms, it's an excellent and entertaining movie :)

i've spent the past few hours trying to migrate my services to an upgraded droplet, and it's been a slow and frustrating process. hopefully, i'll score more than one win before i give up and go to bed.

*SPOILER ALERT*: evangelion reboot

finally - after years of thinking about watching them - i've made it through the evangelion reboot (1.11 - 3.33). i loved the original series since watching it through in 2001, and the first movie was great. the second movie? also great, although the closing music missed the mark so badly that it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

i've now finally watched the third, and i was mostly bored by the pacing and lack of coherence. there were some cool bits towards the climactic end, and then, at the end of the credits... a preview so cheap as to make me utterly disappointed with and disinterested in the entire franchise.

a week that was

 parenting failure: it's really hard to wrap my head around the fact that i've engineered a child whose default response to anything i say is "no". he's wired to fight me and the only option i have is to just let go and focus on making good memories. this is not easy.

yesterday things came to a head at shower time, and while we managed to settle a bit as he went to sleep, i woke up at 3am deeply troubled. today was a good day. i feel like a recovering alcoholic - one day at a time.

...

how is today thursday? uhh... or friday, already?

this week has been mad. i've gotten in way less hours than i'd like, primarily due to tuesday's tortuous nightmare at the department of home affairs. i arrived late - 5.45am - and took my place about a block away from the entrance. sandwiched between people coughing, someone with a bullhorn would come out about an hour and a half later to insist on social distancing, but that only held for an hour or two. i was fortunate that my mother came by to drop off a cup of coffee just before 8am, and then a bottle of water at the 6 hour 45 minute mark just as i made it inside. it was a hot, sunny day with very little shade and no place to sit, and aside from a sore lower back and getting badly sunburned on my right arm and the back of my neck i also ended up with mild heatstroke and my brain has been foggy since. an hour and a half later - the torture continuing with no seating inside and an absurd ticket system - i stumbled out of my eight-hour ordeal with an invitation to return in a couple of weeks.

after much anxiety, we've applied for both of the documents that were lost to be reproduced. my mother managed to get in touch with the consul general at the ministry of foreign affairs of israel, but that unfortunately proved less than helpful. and of course, we've had to continue to be super-careful with the consulate as they don't appreciate frustrated responses to their unprofessional behaviour. it may not be their fault that fedex lost our documents, but as they don't require pickup documentation we have no way of being sure.

i had to drop my car off today for a gearbox inspection, not sure when i'll get it back.

*sigh*

although i haven't got much work done this week, it's still been a productive one. there's that, at least.

i should go to bed now.

checking boxes

we both felt better this morning, although still a bit tired. i managed to cross off a bunch of items on my todo list, including discussing our plans with nystire, singer and a friend from montreal.

this morning gd convinced me to buy a minecraft skin pack for mr smear, there was much joy for about ten minutes and then he decided he'd rather have something else. i'm not doing that again, for ten bucks i couldn't picked up a whole new game. or pay for another tree (we sponsor a tree monthly with greenpop, highly recommended).

to be fair, though, the skin pack *is* pretty cool.

i convinced gd to join me and mr smear on a walk during the one part of the day it wasn't raining, and it was an enjoyable walk. we ended up at plant for the first time in ages, gd wasn't too pleased with her meal but i had the bao buns and they were fantastic.

my mom came over for a visit (and read some more harry potter to mr smear), then we watched steven universe and gravity falls and aside from one very unpleasant moment (i did something that terrified mr smear, it took a little while to get him feeling safe and comfortable again and i felt a bit daft afterwards), the shower/bedtime ritual went well.

gd introduced me to resident alien yesterday, we're only about halfway through the second episode (she was too tired to continue) but i have to say that alan tudyk just keeps taking awesome roles and doing amazing things with them.

i'm finally watching the evangelion reboots, i'm halfway through 3.33 and aside from the ending of 2.22* it's been amazing.

* the music ruined its closing scene, the concept was good but the execution was distressingly bad

 ...

 the anxiety comes and goes in waves. there are some pretty big unknowns and i'm praying we don't screw anything up along the way.

dream capture

 this was from weeks ago, i guess i forgot to put it down (or i'm just failing at blog searching):

my uncle and i had to walk a couple of of kilometres and i suggested we take what looked like a shortcut, it rapidly became steeper until it twisted like a roller-coaster and he kept walking until he fell 40/50m into hard sand. i managed somehow to swing down in stages to reach him and then woke up wondering if he was still alive.

writing this down here just got super creepy because we recently learned that the uncle in question has developed a horrible degenerative disease - myasthenia gravis - that he's been battling with, and i think i dreamed this before we found out.

falling apart

 not sure if just exhausted from an emotional week full of anxieties, or if we've picked up a bug, but we had to cancel our dinner plans and do nothing this afternoon - after a mission to cavendish to fix something that wasn't broken, and i was having difficulty keeping my eyes open even before that.

relief cancelled

 on wednesday night we felt relieved, thinking that our package had been found, but we were wrong. there is no record of the package ever being picked up, so we're back to square one on gd's first marriage certificate which will take months to sort out. and we have to reapply for her police clearance certificate - it's a very good thing i paid that extra $50 so the third-party fingerprinting company keeps her documents on file for a year.

last night i posted the summary post on social media, after lots of talks and planning yesterday we've given notice to the school and mr smear's swimming lessons, and at the end of the month we'll give notice to our landlord, and we're going to start making all the arrangements so that we can be out of her by mid-december.

gd's nerve block went without a hitch - or, at least, she was drugged well enough to not remember it properly. i got home on thursday to find her enthusiastically sewing again, which is exciting.

work-wise, we finally got the release out the door yesterday morning, and i'm immensely relieved that it's off my plate so that i can focus on (pretty much) one job. my team's retrospective yesterday afternoon left me feeling good about how things are going. another money chat with my local coworker also left me feeling positive.

i have a long list of things to do that are nagging me from the back of my brain, but it's shabbat and i need some balance.

i must remember to breathe.

the summary post

for the impatient, there's a TL;DR at the end of this post.

OUR STORY
---------

just over a year and a half ago, when the south african government responded to covid with steps that could only accelerate its downward spiral, we made the decision that it was past time to get out. we've discussed making aliyah on many occasions, and we decided that that's the move that makes the most sense for our family - we want to be with family and with our friends, we want our son to grow up in a jewish environment with (generally) good social values and an attitude of participating and contributing, fixing and improving.

we approached the jewish agency, and began gd's aliyah application. after half a year of expensive document production and deliveries, we understood the following:

1. the canadian government makes the production of documents (police clearance, birth / marriage / etc. certificates) for non-resident canadians very complicated, and requires third parties with high fees for every interaction, each interaction also costing high fees. not to mention long processing times (even before covid), expensive courier fees on top of the aforementioned fees, and complicated rules regarding who can speak to whom and when deliveries and pickups are allowed.

2. courier companies - we've used quite a few different ones - are generally very bad at picking up and delivering documents. one would expect the opposite, but one would be wrong.

3. canada is not a signatory of the hague convention, so the only authorities able to authenticate canadian documents are the israeli authorities physically located in canada. consulates cannot communicate between themselves or make use of modern technology like fax machines, scans or emails for authentication purposes. nobody informed us of this, so we paid and waited to have the documents authenticated by a south african apostille and then the local high commission of canada, but neither of those authentications were considered acceptable.

towards the end of 2020, my israeli passport was renewed, but only for two years. i can only keep travelling as an israeli if i come home - this lines up with my intentions to return, but does put pressure on us to get through a process that we have no control over.

by the beginning of 2021, we miraculously* had all the documents in order and submitted them to the jewish agency. a few weeks later, they got back to us to tell us that we needed one more document which had never been mentioned before. apparently the reason they needed this document was to make sure that gd's name - which is the same on her birth certificate, her passport, our marriage certificate, our son's birth certificate - hadn't changed at any point.

* thanks to my mom, who heroically managed to retrieve original documents that the israeli consulate had posted by regular mail in spite of our instructions and that had been stuck in a container in pretoria that wasn't due to be unloaded for many months.

...

as we've been outside of canada for more than five years, and gd's a temporary resident here (and doesn't have proof of residence), she's not authorized to apply for her own documents. so we had to find a lawyer to submit an application, then wait a month or two to discover that the directeur de l'état civil representative we'd spoken to had given us the wrong form and forgotten to tell us that the lawyer needed to identify themselves in a specific way. so we reapplied, and eventually the certificate (a few months later) was returned to the lawyer (it can't be sent to anyone else) and we sent it off to the israeli consulate in montreal.

we then applied for a new copy of gd's police clearances, because the israeli authorities don't consider clearance older than six months to be valid even if you haven't returned to the country it's issued by.

(i haven't been keeping track of all the costs, i'm honestly scared to go back and put it all together. the authorities involved have made certain that we've had to tighten our belts to make aliyah. suffice it to say that every single interaction we've had with a canadian authority or the israeli consulate in montreal has cost us a lot of money, the last round alone costing us thousands of dollars US)

finally, after half a year of waiting impatiently and trying to plan to move on with our lives, our two canadian documents were authenticated by the consulate in montreal and we scheduled a pickup.

did you know that consulates don't operate after 12 noon? did you know that couriers can't guarantee pickups before 2pm? we didn't.

so after a report of a failed pickup, we made alternate arrangements. unfortunately, before the consulate received my email informing them of those arrangements, fedex picked up the document (outside of that 12 noon window, it should be noted).

and promptly lost it.

TL;DR
-----

so now we've been set back by half a year on top of the year and half that this ridiculous sham has been dragging on, and we're totally over it. we're going to try a different approach. we're now winding up our south african affairs, and we're going to restart the process from israel. we *might* need to swing by canada to sort out the documents, that's not clear at the moment. but what is clear is that wherever we land up, we're outta here, before 2021 is out.

next year in tel aviv.

the relief

 today has been a rollercoaster.

let's start at the end, with the immense relief (but continued shock and disbelief) that after most of an hour on the phone with three different fedex representatives (the first call cut after 25 minutes because my finger slipped and hit the end button), we finally understood that the number we had been given was actually the fedex tracking number and the intermediary is a bit of an idiot.

sheesh.

aside from the immense stress / anxiety that caused (not helped by the fact that gd's scheduled for a nerve block procedure tomorrow and after her last experience she's understandably a bit scared), this evening included a positive adrenaline rush as the release - after weeks of sisyphean efforts to get the damned thing out - is finally ready to go out.

also, my coworker and i had a followup money discussion that put me at my ease.

other streams of work are progressing positively, so that's good, although it kinda sucked being stuck at a desk all day. again. my new monitor arrived, though - and it's gorgeous. it'll be even gorgeouser when the adapter arrives so i can plug it in. and today i learned that microsoft teams upsets my mother even more than me, and that i need to buy her a noise-cancelling headset.

this morning we had another blowout with mr smear on the way to school, although gd and i saw our usual good cop / bad cop roles reversed. we were about a minute away from the school when we finally had a breakthrough moment and fixed the day. a part of me wishes i'd been recording the experience for later analysis.

yesterday:

last night's bedtime had some rough spots (mr smear was "holding onto his poison"), but eventually relented. after posting, gd and i watched the first episode of doom patrol and really enjoyed it in spite of both of us crashing by the end.

the roughness

after costing us thousands of dollars and about half a year, gd's documents seem to have gone missing and i'm really trying hard to not let this get to me.

my eyes are frequently hurting, i just dropped a few grand on a new monitor that i hope will stop this from happening (it's due to arrive on friday). 

my car's been looked at for one thing (a false alarm brakepad warning) and now apparently needs to be seen by a gear specialist. 

two looong days without much progress. and then a repeat six-year-old argument that gd tried to help with, but no joy. 

i'm fucking tired. 

conflicting

 mr smear and i had a pretty mixed up day. it started with him being afraid of his shadow, this time claiming minecraft monsters and asking me to delete the game. then i took him out for a walk, which he didn't protest against too much, and on the way to visit my mom at her coffee shop we happening to be in time to go through the art gallery. he was still too scared to go close to the butcher boys, but he was absolutely riveted by sebidi's the child's mother holds the sharp side of the knife.

this gave way to a wonderful teaching moment about the function of art and the possibility of finding a painting beautiful but its subject awful, which tied in nicely to how he really doesn't like the butcher boys which is a really powerful piece.

we had smoothies with my mom - mine was unpleasant and needed to be chased by a chai - then walked home. it was a beautiful, hot day and everything was great until we were almost home, at which point we got into an argument about something really dumb (he was upset with me that i'd said something even though i hadn't said it) that rapidly escalated into an "i hate this family! i don't want parents" to which i responded, probably wrongly, with a pretty calm "come on, i'm taking you to the orphanage".

i guess i handled that badly, because he still doesn't seem to understand that i only said that in response to what he said and that i wasn't actually planning on taking him to an orphanage.

six year olds, amiright?

...

at least the rest of the evening was alright. i had a great catchup with vfmp, and otherwise have invested the vast majority of my day (morning, noon and night) in experimenting with encryption tools because  i just couldn't get what i wanted out of the decompilers. if i don't come right soon, i may have to give those another shot...

in other news, gd's been feeling sick.

oh! yesterday: my sister's birthday. we all went out to a restaurant in melkbosstrand. being in close quarters with a bunch of other people was weird. seeing my niece for the first time since she blocked me for unfollowing her on instagram was weird, even weirder that she actually seemed contrite. being disappointed by the vegan offerings was not weird.

another highlight of the day would have been taking mr smear down to the pool for a bit, but unfortunately there were a bunch of indian tourists with a bluetooth speaker smoking and drinking and generally being inconsiderate.

at least that was chased by a long and rather inspiring chat with horseman.

yesterday we gave season 2 of adventure time a go, and i'm surprised that we felt it inappropriate before. it's amazing. i think we got through half of it in one sitting.

i'm getting sleepy. i should probably go to bed soon.

we'll probably be hit by loadshedding soon. so over this country.

money ugliness

 yesterday, a coworker i get along with really well - who's in the middle of a salary negotiation - asked me flat-out how much i earn. when i was hired, our boss explained to me that everyone in our company plays with open cards, and although i felt uncomfortable sharing my hourly rate i also felt that it was the right thing to do.

it turns out there's a relatively large disparity between our salaries.

the conversation that ensued was awkward, and i said some things that i realize now were an emotional response and possibly destructive. they were said with good intentions, but the reality is that he's earning a very decent salary for his experience, capabilities and output. i feel uncomfortable talking about my strengths, and that made me say things that may have made him feel that it was unfair for me to be earning more, when in reality i do have a lot more experience, not to mention a broader role, than he does.

and now that that conversation's done, it's done. there's no way to take anything back and it's preying on my mind that i may have generated unnecessary drama.

needing this weekend, needing this rum

 good lord, today was relatively relaxed but it's been a looooong couple of weeks and i neeeeed this glass of rum followed by a weekend.

mr smear finally went back to school yesterday morning, which was a relief to everyone. the first part of the day was spent resolving our broken tool, and the moment we succeeded i actually had to walk away and scream silently. i wrote an article about it.

after picking up mr smear with gd and paying grumpy & runt a visit (gd got her "fakin and feggs", mr smear got a soft-serve), we returned home and i spent the next couple of hours experimenting with debian package installers until finally arriving at the conclusion that they don't actually support our needs. i wrote an article about that, too.

it's intriguing me that two of my articles have been earning me enough money to cover my medium membership fees, and they're not articles i was particularly excited about.

our neighbours' kid joined us for dinner, and we watched the first few episodes of adventure time. and now i realize that one of the things mr smear does that kinda annoys me, he copied from the ice king. it's our own gorramed fault.

i went to bed early, but i was less sleepy than i was tired and i didn't sleep particularly well.

this morning i got up early, and one of my first achievements was learning how to make gifs from youtube videos (replace youtube.com in the video's url with gifyoutube.com). i dropped mr smear off at their forest school, then got to my mom's just in time for the morning meetings.

my morning was interrupted by a cousin calling me for help with his exam prep (comp. sci.), and we spent an enjoyable hour going over a problem together. then i continued working until it was time to pick up mr smear, dropped him off at home, and was going to return to work but my #$!@ car showed me a warning that i couldn't interpret and i couldn't find my owner's manual so i had to take it in to the service centre. fortunately that was a quick visit, it's booked in for a quick check on tuesday and it's not displaying the warning any more, so i guess i'm safe?

in the afternoon, my mom returned to find her and gd's south african police clearance certificates, which was great news! not so great, though, was discovering that the tracking info for gd's canadian documents hadn't been updated and that the courier service had tried to make contact with me at 11pm last night. after a stressful back and forth via email, i eventually learned that they hadn't picked up the documents at the scheduled time and i've now cancelled them and need to figure out an alternate route - hopefully vfmp will be available, and if not horseman's back in montreal so maybe he could help too.

in spite of the stress, i finished the day with an achievement - the new release candidate is ready and if it makes it through our tests then i won't have this monkey on my back any more and can focus on the tasks that have been piling up in my new team...

i made it home in one piece, and now that i've dumped all this i'm taking a breath...

interminable

whoooooo.

yesterday:

after another (relatively) early night,  i woke up early to get some work in before we all headed out. mr smear wasn't cooperating and we were running late for our dentist appointments, things got dramatic. maybe he'd forgotten that i can still carry him over my shoulder?

i managed to get half an hour in while waiting for gd, then it was my turn. it felt good to hear that i've been doing a good job of taking care of my teeth in the years since i last paid a dentist a visit. getting the mold made for my new guard (last one i used was probably almost two decades ago) was a lot less unpleasant than my first one.

we picked up mr smear, who'd calmed down by then (and helped his granny bake crunchies), then returned home. my presentation went surprisingly well, after which i went through to my mom's again for testing... leaving my flash drive behind, but at least i could buy a cheap new one next door.

i finished my workday on a positive note (completing the almost-complete refactor of my coworker's code), then returned home.

everything was fine until dinnertime, mr smear triggered some more drama just as my mom came over for a visit and the next hour or two felt interminably long. at least, we figured one thing out - there's a behaviour that's really not mine that gd's been anticipating from me since the very beginning of our relationship, maybe recognizing that will help us going forward...

mr smear's attempt to "get revenge" by putting together a "trash pile" of things we've given him made for a good teaching moment, but it was pretty effective even if we won't admit that to him.

fighting is exhausting.

today:

another early morning at my mom's. today was the third in a series of "we should've released friday, hopefully by today's end" that ended with us finding a new bug (with debian installation scripts, the documentation is pretty much useless and they seemed to work before). this is demoralizing.

even more demoralizing was, for the second week in a row, being hit by a malfunction (this time, in the tools we use to test an important product) that after hours of investigation only became more mysterious.

forty five minutes before my physio appointment, i packed everything up and was preparing to take a ten-minute walk before driving home when gd called, asking me if i was coming home for my appointment, which i was already late for. d'oh!

after my half-appointment (which kinda helped) i did some more work, then managed to convince mr smear to join me for a walk on a pleasantly warm evening. we walked a reasonable distance, enjoyed each other's company, and ended up at the pool where our neighbours were so we joined them for a while before returning home for a shower and a good dinner.

all without drama.

shadowslight, muadib and i spent an hour trying to get a discord "watch party" going, it looks like we finally figured it out and we'll try again in a couple of weeks.

lol i said productive

 yup, last night was the exact opposite of productive - i couldn't even manage two pages of reading to mr smear before i had to say goodnight and crawl into my bed, but i did get a fairly decent night's sleep.

oh! i woke up on sunday morning from a disturbing dream: wartime, off to the front of a far east war, had to jump off the train to get a woman and her kid to safety and drop mr smear off with a stranger before racing to catch the train at its next stop.

my neck's been wrecked - not nerve pain, just really stiff, kinda stuck in a bad position, for days now.

i got up just before my alarm this morning and went straight to work, thinking i could knock off early and take mr smear somewhere fun in the afternoon. not only did i get trapped until 3pm, but he's come down with a cold and when i got home he told me that he'd like to play a game with me but he really wants to play minecraft (which i can't play, gives me motion sickness). so i ended up working instead.

my biggest achievement today was managing to postpone the dreaded presentation i hadn't started preparing, instead i'll be giving a talk on testing tomorrow. i still needed a couple of hours to put the presentation slides together.

we watched zootopia this evening, for the first time. it's an awesome film in spite of it being sandwiched between two renditions of a really crap song.

...

we just got an email welcoming us back to the fourth term. we thought school was only going back next week!

back

yesterday:

after a lot of nothing in front of my computer, i decided to take a walk and get some exercise for the first time since sunday. i passed kak lucky tattoos as my artist was enjoying a cigarette outside, so we had the chat we've been needing to have for the past week or two, and then i continuing on my way.

about two blocks away from the hospital, an inconsiderate PoS driver drove past and sprayed their windshield wiper fluid right into my gorram eye. fortunately i was close enough to the hospital to head over and wash my eye out, but wtf, man, that was horrible. i came straight home to put in the next-to-useless eyedrops we had. two kids had come over for an extended playdate, i hid in my room and finally finished reading the nao of brown. then i took one of the kids home, and the other stayed with us for dinner and a movie.

her parents had okayed jurassic park, we'd decided we give it a try. firstly: holy crap, between the two kids we were constantly pausing the movie to have discussions about e-v-e-ry-t-h-i-n-g. some of the discussions were interesting and fun, some of them really annoying. secondly, we hit 9pm just as she decided she was too scared to continue, which we felt was the perfect time for her to go home anyway :P
mr smear, on the other hand, was pretty cool with everything but had to cover his eyes for the raptors.

fair enough.

anyway, overall it was a great experience with lots of teaching moments (like why screaming and shining lights at a predator is really, really dumb) and the inspiration and amazement were (imo) worth the minor anxieties.

today:

i've just got out the shower and into a long, unexpected but important talk with gd who's had a bit of a breakthrough moment, all while mr smear enjoys a skrillex playlist that he's been begging for since we left home earlier for a very long promenade walk to try out the falafel guy's falafel (we must have walked about 9km, he was a trooper and the falafel was good, though not quite as good as nish nush one).

this morning was quite sombre - two consecrations, the first for krybabie (zoom) and the second for sailor's dad (i held the camera). mr smear played lots of minecraft, and after we got home from the cemetery (my mom babysat) i fell asleep next to him watching a tintin movie.

now it's dinner and movie time and hopefully i'll be somewhat productive this evening, but i'm not stressing about it.

nasty stuff

 the past two days were pretty horrific. the work i did on wednesday night was scrapped first thing thursday morning (turns out we didn't all agree on the way forward, which was unfortunate), and the day was long. i had a headache and felt horrible for its entirety, and it was filled with discovering more unexpectedly broken or badly made things.

yesterday i felt MUCH better, but work was a total cluster****. we discovered a bug in one of the releases that has delayed the release by another day (which messes with my plans for monday). testing the other one opened up a can of worms, but we HAD to release before the end of the day and everything that could have gone wrong, did, and did so thoroughly. by the time i finally managed to push out the release - which i'd pretty much been working on alone - i was completely buggered. i was also highly stressed, and i think everyone who worked with me over the course of the past two days was very aware of it and quite understanding.

plans for today: take a break from life. i finally defeated the red queen in steamworld heist, i've been occasionally encouraging mr smear to continue making cool stuff in minecraft, and i've dumped this post.

...

at least we've had some more good news regarding gd's documentation: it's been authenticated and now we just have to manage to get it delivered and then we can - theoretically, at least - finally proceed with the application.