a good day

today was my birthday. it was excellent. lots of people i care about got in touch, my work day was spent doing something straightforward yet satisfying, my wife made sufganyot for chanukah, my son excitedly made an effort to contribute to my day being good, we had a great dinner out.

...

the weekend was good. i spent a lot of it doing "me" stuff, either gaming, or doing small pieces of side-project work. and publishing the latest sonnetcomix stuff. the rest of the two days are a bit of a blur. yesterday i was... distracted. technically i got stuff done, but it sure didn't feel like it. i recall something was bothering me but i can't quite put my finger on it now...

final update for the day

i needed some "me time", even though the evening was good. before dinner i managed to get gold in a rayman: legends challenge, watching mr smear deftly navigate the same challenge was pretty amazing. after dinner i passed out watching ralph breaks the internet, eventually showering and getting mr smear into bed around 10pm and then making some tea and watching half of the first episode of electric dreams. so far, so good. then i made some more tea and played some more space haven which i picked up in a humble bundle yesterday, and i'm really digging it. the aesthetic, the concept, and the soothing vibes of the peaceful mode.

good night.

bring on the weekend, please

i'm feeling better, but my post-nasal drip / resulting cough hasn't entirely gone away and that's been upsetting.

not as upsetting as mr smear throwing the weirdest tantrum this morning - he was so excited to get out of bed for the school's field trip to the science centre, and then somehow got it in his head that this field trip and becoming a scientist in israel are mutually exclusive. and then, after making us late, waze threw its own tantrum and tried to steer us in the completely wrong direction, so i got lost in obs for five minutes before coming right.

so *i* started the day needing a stiff drink.

the good news is that halfway there he decided he was going to try to enjoy the trip, and when we picked him up later he'd had a really good time.

i spent the majority of my day figuring out how to test my changes from yesterday. i didn't finish off the day with a good feeling - i'd picked up a code review that i really wasn't in the right headspace for - but i'm at least confident with my changes and desperately in need of shabbat.

laundry list

yesterday:

finishing up my primary task for the sprint

mr smear coming home from school saying he wants to keep a diary. mr smear generally reading very nicely and even gaining confidence writing

snacking during an insanely long PR for outsourced work

making time to hit the pool

aladdin

switching cars with my mom

watching more arcane (which is amazing), but having trouble staying awake

today:

waking up exhausted, not enough coffee in the house

asking my manager for feedback

wrapping up the insanely long PR for outsourced work

making time to hit the pool

getting some good (and satisfying) work in before dinner

wreck-it ralph (director's cut, it's even more amazing)

delivery of the latest sonnetcomix pages (one edit, one new)

...

we've been playing a lot of rayman: legends again lately, mostly the daily and weekly challenges. they're freaking brilliant.

recap

my post-nasal drip has been getting progressively better, though i'm still not 100%. i am feeling loads better, though.

i dropped mr smear off today, drove to my mom's, sold his old balance bike, and tried to square things away so i could get some work done.

the first order of business: docker. i spent forever troubleshooting All The Things, eventually it turned out that window's firewall was silently blocking it without any kind of notification or monitor logs. fuckers.

then something bizarre started happening, and it took me a long time to identify exactly what was going on: whenever something was running with administrative privileges, the mouse and trackpad would be completely disabled. i spent hours searching and trying things out, to no avail, but eventually started shutting things down in desperation and lo! the holdkey app that i've been using for a year was the culprit. clearly i hit a bad setting, and once it was closed my system ran beautifully.

over the course of two work days, i've managed one day's worth of billable hours. i have enjoyed exactly none of this whole ordeal, and effectively lost four irretrievable days of quality of life that i sorely needed. the biggest lessons learned? a bit more patience with some of windows' worse flaws, and that i'm most definitely a windows person - at least until the millions of well-meaning asshats who make linux products for money learn that user experience is meaningful and begins at installation.

...

mr smear:

we had a pretty good start to the day, although as we were leaving for school he told us: "we were playing 'simon says' and one of the kids said 'simon says hit mr smear' so they did". i don't know how accurate/true that story is, but even if it's 100% true then he waited so long to tell us (he hasn't been at school in a week) there's not much we can do about it. the whole thing is heartbreaking.

he got himself into trouble with gd this afternoon, and we suspect that he has been having too much screen-time. he's usually okay with downtime but he wasn't today, though he did calm down eventually and got to choose our dinnertime movie as a reward: i'm glad he chose coco, we all enjoyed it immensely (again).

...

gd and i had a bit of a fight this evening, two rounds, and she said/did some really brilliant things (even though i was angry, i couldn't help but laugh at her legitimately hilarious impressions of me), one of which brought up something really powerful: she described me as operating out of a tiger's cage that i've constructed for myself. and i realized something crazy: my father, as abusive and mean and violent as he was, was not as consistently abusive as the kids (and some teachers) that i was forced to spend most of my days with.

i went to a particularly toxic school, where a culture of bullying has always been the norm - not just the students, but the parents and teachers as well - and i always made a great victim. i came from a home with constant fighting, and was socialized with constant fighting, how was i not going to grow up a big, angry baby? i'm embarrassed about my flailing about, but i still don't know how to handle my emotions, how to express myself in healthy ways. i might not be on the spectrum, but i do exhibit similar behaviours and tonight's little revelation makes me realize that i've spent the past two decades on a sine wave of resocializing. some days are better than others, unfortunately the ability to understand a behaviour or emotion doesn't directly equate to managing it properly.

back to my father: it's intriguing that there are some (positive) things i do with mr smear that remind me of him. i think he was very confused about this whole "life" thing, i don't think he was capable of really loving another human being, and i'm very confident that having children was something he wasn't too excited about, but amidst all the awful memories i recall a few fun ones. it wasn't all bad, and it feels surprisingly peaceful just remembering that.

and back

today was torture. the post-nasal drip made for a nasty day, it's still not great now but seems to be a bit better. and my head? didn't feel so good. it didn't help that i spent half my day struggling with my ubuntu setup even with help, and by the end of the day i was ready to throw in the towel.

which i did. and my new setup is already sooooo much cleaner and easier to deal with, and even the minor obstacles have been... not unpleasant.

my mother had an interesting idea today, which set some things in motion: first, that we've pushed back our notice on our apartment by a month (i hope they don't cancel our internet before we leave), and second that we've begun the application process for gd's south african visa, just so that we can stay long enough to get her aliyah status sorted out.

this is all such a nightmare.

...

the other half of my work day was spent prepping for a ten minute presentation that i've been dreading for months, i couldn't be less interested if i tried. also, i took the car in because we were concerned about a possible oil leak and i'm glad everything checked out.

we've been watching the reboot of cowboy bebop, and it's gorgeous. considering we own the original series i hope this gets gd to give that a watch, too :) 

it's late, i have to be up early to take mr smear to school and then sell his old balance bike.

squandered

i truly regret migrating from windows to ubuntu - after all that, the performance of my windows VM is pitiful the moment i try to use it for development and it causes my linux box to freeze irrecoverably more than host windows ever does. after spending most of my weekend on this, i'm feeling exhausted, frustrated, and confident that my coworkers (and all other users who love linux) are suffering from stockholm syndrome.

our day was a mix-and-match of emotions, good and bad behaviour, a visit to the mall (which at least two of us are never in the mood for), and spending some time with kibbutz cousin and her sister and brother-in-law. and then, after putting mr smear to bed, i finally decided to add a feature to my phone control system and discovered that the service had been down for a couple of days because of a certificate issue.

because linux, i guess. i figure it's high time i moved this this to the cloud, at least AWS and CDK take care of all the stupid stuff.

oh, and i've got hectic post-nasal drip.

i'm so over this. at least it looks like mr smear should be back at school tomorrow.

a long day

it's approaching 1am, after a long day spent backing up windows, installing ubuntu and battling with each and every installer along the way i finally have a functional machine (i'm actually very impressed so far with running windows on a VM, even if getting vmware installed almost pushed me to switch back to windows.

gd gave me a talk today about facing off with my issues with my father's memory, i wouldn't even know where to begin but i am certain that i'm not dealing with All The Things in a healthy manner, and i'm reminded of something profoundly true and painfully apt: "If You Don't Heal What Hurt You, You'll Bleed on People Who Didn't Cut You".

the end of the work week was alright, i guess.

though we learned that the missing documents really are missing - the idiot from SecureShip hadn't been looking for the documents, and was reporting on an entirely different package and wasting everyone's time (and money).

inside out

they're all mad. apparently fedex found the documents, but now they're denying it. apparently they were sent to toronto instead of cape town. the consulate representative i spoke to assured me that she'll do what she can, but also explained that they took our complaints about the documents going missing personally and now that they've been found they'd like me to contact the consul general and report that they did, in fact, give excellent service (perhaps sending our critical, sensitive documents to the wrong address is part of "excellent service"?).

and time marches inexorably on, and it's becoming more and more likely that we'll have to go to canada before we get to israel. this is all very nightmarish.

at least my current contract continues regardless of where i'm located. i cannot overstate how grateful i am nor how much of a difference that makes.

this week started with some bad news - the deployment was successful but exposed a problem that, now that we have useful dashboards set up, has been a long time coming. we scrambled to fix it and managed to get that out early on tuesday, and getting that resolved has left a very good feeling.

mr smear's really sick, just as our kibbutz cousin has arrived for a visit - hopefully we'll all be healthy enough to have drinks or dinner before she leaves.

i managed to help out my aikido friend this evening, while adding really useful functionality to my telephony application. and i also put together an outline for a really cool team shirt design and handed it off to my nephew (who's a graphic designer) in the hopes that he can make it beautiful and we can get prints done in time for our department's end-of-year presentations.

we(e|a)ken(e)d

saturday morning's service turned out to be a cousin's barmitzvah, interesting that none of the family was invited...

i spent a good chunk of the day trying to back up my home network controller configuration, which is the only real barrier to me reformatting my dev machine. i don't understand how such a critical feature to a piece of software that's intended for corporate professional use is broken, nor how a company that makes networking products produces software that can only be managed by a single device.

i've no idea what else we may have done - although we definitely watched a few episodes of adventure time - and i've gone to bed early both nights.

yesterday started off with some side-project progress and an excitingly positive pivot with swordschool.

yesterday's main events were shoe shopping and drama at access park, then swimming pool and drama. my boy's really struggling with some things and we're really struggling to help him manage his emotions when we've no idea what's actually going on in his head.

sailor joined us by the pool in the late afternoon and the two of us brainstormed a bit until dinner time.

and today is monday. not a clue how this one's going to go, but at least the weather's nice.

better

i slept last night, my neck's still a bit wonky but definitely more stable. and then i woke up this morning from a long nightmare of trying to escape pennywise's clutches with my family - he was throwing some kind of party at a hostel or daycare and the dream ended with me telling him he needed to love himself.

mr smear's class went to kirstenbosch yesterday, and he's been hypersensitive about bullying so he's perceiving it even when it's not happening - i've borne witness to this personally -  and i tried talking to him about it. after a while he shut down, and then later when i returned home he seemed to be doing okay, i hope he's been processing in a good way.

work yesterday was a mixed bag, but mostly good. one thing that's come up over the past few days is that it's become clearer and clearer that i need to reformat my dev machine to linux. so i'm going to do that this weekend.

worthwhile

neck and leg issues notwithstanding, the past two work days have been long but successful. we learned all the lessons we needed to learn during our staging deployment, and our production deployment was so smooth that we did an extra round of testing just because i was suspicious.

weeks of changes made everything significantly better, and that's feeling good.

sleepless

i wonder how much my quality of life would be improved if i didn't spend so much of my sleep time struggling to actually sleep. this morning i woke up with severe chest pain that turned out to be triggered by my neck, this evening it took hours for my neck situation to calm down and since then my legs have been giving me grief. and i'm really too tired to just get up and do something else instead. 

two-in-one day

 two days in a row sitting in front of my laptop for many hours straight (not including getting up occasionally to make tea). i managed to walk around the block yesterday, today not so much.

monday was super frustrating, because instead of starting the deployment we've been working towards, i spent most of it making nitpick changes to code that's going to be ripped out later anyway. having said that, the nitpicking wasn't wrong, and the code does look better for it. today wasn't frustrating, but highly irritating (i feel like there's a difference), as i spent most of it waiting for terraform / terragrunt and struggling to fix things that really should be taken care of by the framework.

having said that, my manager seems pleased with my efforts and i've definitely learned a lot from the experience. it also helps that i'm paid hourly wages.

we've been having conversations with mr smear, and are at a point where we're trying to teach him basic manipulation techniques: be kind to others and listen to them, so that you can find their levers to get them to cooperate with you. it's an odd lesson, one i feel i need to be working on myself.

...

stage 4 load-shedding on top of everything else is making me feel like south africa is not-so-gently shooing us away. i'm feeling a bit less anxious than i was before, having a list definitely helps. even if that list does seem to be constantly growing :P

monday already

thursday/friday:

long days at the "office" (my mom's), although not all the hours were paid for. at least one of them was spent brainstorming about a really exciting new ARG concept with swordschool, another was spent walking with sailor, who informed me of the awful things going on in ethiopia on the day i booked our tickets through addis ababa and then inspired me with an amazing use-case for the phone software i've been using/building over the past few years.

one thing about the paid gig, though - i seem to be the new expert for two critical elements of our solution, and my manager seems happy with this. some of the last week was frustrating, but a lot of the work was pretty gratifying. the last thing i was working on was so intriguing that i had to make a conscious effort to not work on it over the weekend.

saturday:

after the morning service i was absolutely exhausted, and passed in and out of consciousness on a number of occasions while playing little big planet 3 or watching avatar: the last airbender (the original anime, we didn't enjoy the movie) with mr smear.

i found the right screwdriver to fix my rollerblades without having to go shopping. win!

we expected loadshedding, and i used it as an excuse to get mr smear outside for a walk without a fight.

i watched pete davidson: alive from new york and was surprised by how much i enjoyed it in spite of his delivery... i mean, eventually he just won me over, delivery included.

"yesterday":

i started my day early by documenting all the things that need doing before and when we leave. it's helped a bit with my overall anxiety. 

we were going to take mr smear to a friend of his' birthday party, but then realized that at least one of the group of bullies from the previous two years was going to be there and we agreed to just drop off a gift some other time.

we booked tickets, picked up my mom and went through to hout bay to do a seal island cruise. it turned out to be a great day for it, except that mr smear and i felt... a bit green... as the waves were really choppy. at least we all enjoyed the first half of the trip, and mr smear was really excited to see all the seals ^_^

we had a nice lunch at a market in hout bay, it was a bit of a relief to find a good vegan option and i was surprised by how much i ate (or the fact that i ate at all, considering).

i was so tired i actually misjudged the length of my car while parking and bashed into a pole. i'm VERY grateful that there doesn't appear to be any damage.

a bunch of us saw my sister off at the airport this afternoon, she's off to london to live with her daughter and i really hope she finds a new employer once she's there (her current employer's a real bastard).

shower/bedtime went very well.

i've just managed to deploy an updated version of my "side-project" web portal: hours spent upgrading one of the components because heaven forbid the react peeps would release a new version without significant breaking changes... anyway, the final version i deployed is working really nicely so i feel it was time well spent.

now:

it's almost 00:30. i'm going to bed.

overwhelmed

 it's very hard to function properly when you've got a million urgent things that need doing and no time for any of them.

i managed to spend all day in front of my pc, i'm very happy with the work i got done but i still feel like a lost a day.

i've been able to spend some time on my side-project (is it really a side-project?), in addition to getting some banking done, and it's just about midnight so i reckon i need to go to bed soon. my neck's been threatening me all day, i'm a bit nervous about sleeping.

crick

this week i've been exhausted and work's been quite frustrating (although yesterday did end with a great payoff). i've been going to bed right after mr smear, and last night i slept really badly and at one point had a scary incident where something in my neck "clicked" and my left arm immediately went numb.

i don't like this one bit.

the weekend flew by, i don't recall too much.

on sunday, i took mr smear to newlands to meet with a friend and his kids who we haven't seen in years, and learned that he's had a really horrible couple of years since his marriage fell apart. in the evening i joined the rollerblading group, and it was windy so we all got a lot more cardio in that usual. i convinced the guys to go down to the helicopters at the harbour, and we all enjoyed the (minor, but fun) downhills and great views.

my mom was supposed to done with her coffee shop by the end of sunday, but there appears to have been some accounting issue which will hopefully be resolved by now (i'll find out when i get to her place).

i've asked our travel agent to book tickets for christmas, which makes this madness feel a lot more real. i've solicited advice on where to stay once we get there, and someone made the observation that renting a place when we don't know if we'll be allowed to land might not be a great idea.

*sigh*