yesterday was better

i tried recording one of my poems yesterday, but i'm not particularly happy with the result. on the way to work, i stopped by the clinic prepared for a fight about covering our hospital visit, and was caught off guard by a lack of protest on their part. having said that, it's only the first round (the cover request needs to go through a committee or something) so i guess it's wait-and-see-time...

it was a productive work day, and relaxed. i struggled a bit with an overactive last-mile digestive system towards the end of the day which was uncomfortable. although i left the office later than i would have liked, it was due to helping out our on-call resolve something so i ended the day on a successful note.

amusingly, my boss was working with me on the final stretch and he witnessed copilot giving me a hand: all it takes is one good suggestion that saves time and increases confidence to make it worthwhile, and he's sold. even if its suggestions are often wrong, they're almost always useful. sometimes they're useful in that i can press tab and i'm done, and sometimes they're useful like a rubber duck.

the shopping experience on the way home was a bit frustrating, but still better than spending double or more money and carrying a small bit every day is certainly preferable to huge loads irregularly.

i was tired last night. gd and i couldn't agree on what to watch so we ended up restarting 2012's dredd, and i'm pleasantly surprised at how much sleep i got.

i had plans for this morning but i got distracted by a number of notifications on mastodon.

...

oops.

i got to enjoy it for half a day

 yesterday morning started really well, i Got Things Done, i Figured Things Out, and i Made Plans. then i went to work, spending a good chunk of my first couple of hours catching up or being distracted by my teammate's dog who's clearly decided we're each other's support animals.

we have three people in the office leaving soon, two of them having "kind of" been let go and the fact that it's only them working from the whole crew feels off somehow. and one of them's feeling slighted because an aspect of her job was covering for someone who hasn't been hired yet and they're still trying to hire that hypothetical person.

anyway, office drama aside: i was (noticeably) in good spirits, taking my time to dive deep on solving an unexpectedly difficult problem, when i was called in to a meeting with my boss (previously my team lead, that's a bit weird too). we were in the middle of refining what it is i'm supposed to be doing when gd called. i ignored the call, but then looked again a couple of minutes later and that was pretty much the end of the meeting: something had happened to mr smear's head and nobody could tell if he needed a doctor or a hospital.

i tried to finish the meeting but obviously that didn't work out, so i packed up and left and met gd and mr smear at the hospital. along the way i tried to find out what protocol we needed to observe from the medical insurance's point of view, but it was so difficult that i gave up after my third phone call.

with a little help we found the kid's emergency unit, then went through all the motions. the triage nurse was a bit horrible, but everyone else was great. eventually a doctor came to see him and decided he didn't need stitches, she checked him for signs of concussion/nerve damage and declared him fit and fine. but we didn't know if or when he'd ever had a tetanus shot, and for some reason it took them a long time to deliberate and eventually decide to administer one.

mr smear was not into it, but with the support of the nurse (after a quick search, my description of lockjaw wasn't particularly precise) he agreed that the vaccine + death by old age was preferable to the potential alternative and he calmed down. he barely felt the injection, which is a far sight better than *my* first tetanus shot - it was my first shot that i remember and i tensed, and the needle bent in my arm...

by the time we were finally able to leave i was exhausted. i'm still feeling exhausted, i think we all experienced a giant adrenaline dump. we did a quick emergency shopping and then walked home, and the evening was all about getting through the evening and getting into bed.

aside from a battle between gd and a rogue mosquito which i participated in for a while, that was the end of my first day back from staycation.

today's plan: to battle with the medical insurance and hopefully get yesterday's job done.

not as planned

 gd and i walked to the school to pick up mr smear yesterday evening, and on the way home we got caught in the heavy rain of a thunderstorm and mr smear and i returned home with soaked shoes.

mr smear's animation classwork is really cool, he's been heavily inspired by alan becker and he's nailing it!

i had some trouble sleeping last night, and polished off the telephony solution migration. i'm not sure how i managed to drag myself out of bed this morning.

or mr smear, for that matter.

OOOOOOH. i just remembered where i developed my thing about hating rain - israeli municipalities don't understand drainage and sewerage systems. we have approximately two drainage points in the 500m around our apartment, so as long as it was raining (well, drizzling by capetonian standards) every single road was completely flooded and there was no way to cross any of them without getting soaked shoes. everyone's cars parked on the main road had water most of the way up to their doors, and drivers couldn't pass us faster than walking pace without drenching the sidewalks.

mr smear is now at school with wet shoes because a) we didn't have galoshes for him (that's today's investment) and b) i expected it to keep on raining (as it had done all night) and not let up five minutes after i said goodbye.

in retrospect, i feel shitty because we should have just called it a "rain day" and kept him at home.

so that's how our day began. it got immediately better when i received an email from social security that our allergy stipend application had been approved, we need all the help we can get and this was a huge relief!

aside from a lot of reading (articles, not books) and watching random things (ultimate fighter season highlights), this morning passed by quickly. the air conditioners are finally starting to pump out hot air, which is awesome. then gd and i headed to the mall to look for shoes.

i hate malls. gd's not too fond of them either. we went through the entire mall (azrieli), every store with shoes, and eventually found a great pair, waterproof, to my taste, and not too expensive. but their credit card machine was offline. i'm still deeply disappointed.

we tried at a different mall (the hospital mall), and found stuff for mr smear but nothing for me. we ate laffot and had an altercation with a nasty old woman (gd did an amazing and hysterical impression of her to her face, i'm still conflicted but it *was* brilliant), then returned home where i soon passed out on the couch. she woke me up at ten minutes to pick-up time and i was a mess, and it was pouring outside.

we managed to book a car, drove to pick him up, i dropped them off at the mall and drove around while they got the shoes, picked them up and we all went home.

mr smear thinks he has worms. we don't.  🤦

anyway, it wasn't the best use of my last day off work but i guess everything's good. since last week i certainly feel a bit more rested, a bit less stressed. i've enjoyed a lot of nice times with my family. i've gotten shit done - and enjoyed doing it. i definitely needed this.

...

i've spent bits and pieces of the last day or two trying to get an s3-hosted website to work with my domain name. that'll open some doors when i get it all squared away, and allow me to shut the door on running an ubuntu instance, but it's taking a lot of reading and fiddling for something that really shouldn't be so hard.

leaps and bounds

thursday:

thursday began with a pleasant walk to school with mr smear culminating in a super-cute moment when, after ten minutes of waiting, the gates finally opened and all the kids ran towards their classrooms. i'm struggling to remember anything else from thursday.

like, anything.

friday:

friday was almost entirely about helping urchin and her mother move out of tel aviv. the van cost me a lot more than i was expecting, but they really needed help and it was great being able to step in and step up. it was even greater seeing that their new space is really good for them. it was sad seeing her drooly dog not well. helping out as a family - mr smear begrudgingly did his "boring" part by standing by the illegally parked van and looking out for traffic police - was great and the drives in both directions were very pleasant sing-alongs :)

yesterday:

yesterday was mostly superb, though there were some bad feelings all round in the evening. this was for a number of reasons - one of them being that somebody's been generally grumpy since stopping an anti-depressant, and somebody else is still learning that being rude or mean to a parent's face doesn't make for good feelings... but enough about the negative, the positive was REALLY positive. we finished the build of the beautiful lego set that the mongoose gifted mr smear when we first arrived in march, it's a ford mustang shelby gt 500 with pull-back action, not only were we super-excited by its looks and details, but the thing really motors and mr smear was jumping up and down for hours.

it was a great bonding experience and we were both thoroughly pleased with ourselves, for myself not least because there was an issue with the pull-back mechanism and i managed to hack together an effective solution using two of the leftover pieces.

i spent most of the day continuing to work on my telephone management solution, which i finally began migrating to serverless lambda / dynamodb components on friday. it took a lot of work (mainly debugging), but i finally have it functional and it's a huge relief to be one step closer to dropping my cloud "droplet" which demands a lot more maintenance than i'm comfortable with.

in the evening we watched snoopy come home, and it's amazing to me just how well that 1972 film has aged. mr smear was very upset towards the end, and i needed to explain to him (not for the first time) that good movies make us feel the things they want us to feel, and that's not always good feelings. i loved hearing the theme song ear-worm burrowing into him, it's a song i've had floating around in my own head since i watched it as a kid.

today:

it's a beautiful, cold, rainy, wintery day today. it's easier to appreciate indoors and warm. just like yesterday. i began the day positively, finishing up the phone management migration, then gd and i grabbed a coffee and did a big shopping run, and we've spent the subsequent hours just lazing around cozily.

now i'm actively ignoring a flurry of work messages (i go back online on tuesday), and i'm feeling inspired to put together another poetry video. and then i wrote that word and got distracted by seeing an image of a very grey-haired sandman in a neck-brace and wheelchair (recovering, thankfully) and now it's time to start moving out (in the pouring rain) to pick up mr smear from school.

...

i keep making tea because i need hot tea and then by the time i get to drinking it its cold...

holy holiday, batman!

i'm conflicted. on the one hand, i'm trying very hard to be on vacation. on the other hand, this is the opportunity to do All The Things! i've already put out another video, this one for the now-polished step away from the vehicle. i'm extremely pleased with how it's come out. i'm even more pleased now that i've configured the captions, which i must admit was a lot of work but very satisfying.

now i need to do the same for the musing video... but that's going to have to wait another day.

i worked sunday and monday, long days but generally good ones. i'm still amused that i was the only one in the office on monday night who knew the blessings for the candle-lighting, but not one of us remembered all the words to the first verse of ma'oz tzur...

yesterday morning gd and i went down to ozen hashlishi (after passing through dizengoff center and browsing comics and figurines) for a hipster breakfast and a browse through their enormous catalog of awesome media that we most certainly do not need. sailor came over for dinner, which was a bit of a failure from a food perspective but it's fun to be able to spend time with him again.

...

we're all still coughing. it's been weeks now. this is ridiculous.

we thought mr smear was sick yesterday, so we turned off our alarms and slept in. he picked up on this, which was unfortunate because we quickly realized he was fine and this "betrayal" started our day on a rather unpleasant note - not entirely his fault, to be fair - but we were extremely pleased to pick him up at the end of it and hear that he'd actually had a really good time.

this morning gd was more certain that we should keep him home, and by the time she regretted that decision it was far too late. in the grand scheme of things this worked out well, because in addition to starting our day with a couple of hours playing through the lego harry potter game together, i took him to the tel aviv art museum in the afternoon. he's been wary of galleries every since we encountered the butcher boys, and our tour began with him immediately whining to turn around and go back home...

my initial attempt to draw him in were almost a complete failure as we encountered a (legitimately) creepy doll statue, but after a couple of talks about practicing bravery and opening his eyes and heart and reassuring him constantly we started coming across installations that piqued his interest, we ended up have a really good time!

we'd both had enough at roughly the same time and i thought i'd get him an ice-cream on the way home, but he was more into a falafel so we split a particularly satisfying one (meaning i got the leftovers).

we all forgot about candle-lighting this evening because mr smear and i were invested in completing the artful escape. what a delightful game! i also cleaned up scrapper's bass guitar and amp (after gd had already taken care of the worst of it) and plugged them in, but i suspect that the guitar's battery is dead because i couldn't get a sound out of it with either of the two cables...

anyway, it was a good day.

breathing and crashing

 i'm still struggling at nights with the coughing and the post nasal drip. i'm tired.

but now i'm tired for an additional, positive reason; this morning, the mongoose woke me up with an invitation to join them for mushroom picking in the forest. while gd was unfortunately unable to join us due to a crushing headache, mr smear and i went along and we (mostly) enjoyed ourselves. mr smear got a bit whingey when the ice-cream truck showed up close enough that we could hear its eery tunes, and then a bit more when he thought that worms were going to fall from the trees because that's an actual thing that happened at his old school.

anyway, it was a really nice morning out in nature. i'm exhausted now and i think i need to lie down even after my second coffee...

ticking boxes

 this has been an intense week.

i'm still struggling with the post-nasal drip / horrible coughing. it's been relentless, for weeks. i'm so over this.

i didn't manage to get any rest on tuesday night, i just lay in bed miserably tired and wired until i had to get up in the morning. not wake up, mind, because i was still wired and didn't need any caffeine until wednesday afternoon - the trigger for that cup being desperation after an hour-long all-hands that i struggled to keep my eyes open for.

everyone left was in the office on wednesday, and the office had already taken on a completely different vibe. we're a tiny startup now, less than a company, and our department is now a team. it's a palpable difference, and it's bizarre.

yesterday, i was the only developer in the entire office for the first half of the day, and only a single coworker joined me for the second half. counting the product dude who's also a dev, there were three of us in the wide open open-space.

the morning hours were lonely.

my ex-team-lead-now-boss had forgotten that i have c# experience, so i volunteered to give him a hand with a .net bug-hunt and found myself with a new task. i'm not used to working with visual studio on a mac, which is weirdly different from the windows offering, and i'm not used to working on an x64 project with an arm64 computer, so it took a little while to get a handle on where everything is and running the tests.

it was late afternoon by the time i found *the* bug. which was just one amongst a bunch of others, but while i was trying to figure out what was broken and where (it actually looks like the code might be fine but the tests are badly-written) the product dude jumped in demanding that we release the fix urgently (on a thursday evening, which is a friday evening for the rest of the modern world) in time for a call with the complaining customer.

we assessed the risk, and pushed the button. and then i had to leave - taking some FOMO with me - to pick up training gear from scrapper before they leave for canada (tonight!). let me tell you, the update a bit later to say that we'd successfully solved the customers problem and delighted them with our performance was a fantastic start to the weekend!

also seeing scrapper and partner and picking up a whole box of awesome (if very dusty) stuff and just happening to be there when another friend of his explained that he'd take the bass guitar but wouldn't actually be able to do anything with it. so i returned home with a box of gear and comics and books, ate quickly, said goodnight to mr smear, and then went back for a guitar and amplifier and twenty minutes of tea and an interesting book club reading that i'd walked in on.

it was a great evening.

this morning began with an hour of yelling at idiots*, then i walked with gd to the clinic to make an urgent appointment (she's having trouble with a prescription) and picked up a couple of household items before coming back home, scarfing down breakfast and then heading out to the barber shop. it's not the best haircut, but it's fine.

* my cellphone company has been blocking my twilio messages, and when i asked them to remove the block they contacted twilio and informed them that i requested a block; our medical insurance company sent gd an sms with a link to their app, but the thing we were supposed to find in the app wasn't available because reasons

while gd and i were shopping, mr smear's teacher called us - mr smear was throwing a proper wobbly because they made latkes in class and the other kids were using eggs. we're trying to teach him to lead by example and take the soft approach, but it's hard not to empathize with a kid who understands just how evil the egg industry is.

...

finances: mistakes have been made, and we're trying to navigate the fallout. if we miraculously get through the next few weeks without surprises we'll be okay *knocks on wood* but we're in a really dicey position and we have to make dramatic changes. the good news is that after a couple of long and sensitive chats with gd, we have a plan and we think we can handle this.

the sad part is that we wouldn't be in this situation if it wasn't for the ridiculous levels of debt we incurred emigrating, we'd actually be doing just fine. i think i may have mentioned this before, but our income to expenses ratio is much better in tel aviv than in cape town because the economy here, while tough, is still far more reasonable than in south africa.

...

anyway, as crazy and rough and heartbreaking as this week was, i feel like i've taken care of the most important stuff. now to try to get the paintings hung before shabbat comes in.

all over the place

 i'm too tired to be vertical, too wired to be horizontal. i knew the 5.30pm coffee was both a good idea and a bad idea. also, i was totally right about there being a round two on the coughing/post nasal drip, it's horrible.

today was particularly interesting. it began with a very unpleasant goodbye after mr smear made it clear that he had no intention of participating in the class "project" - the teacher has been pairing up different kids for playdates to try to get them better integrated and he had to go to one of the two kids in class that he really can't stand. i managed to apply for the government allowance for kids with life-threatening allergies before heading to work, so that was another administrative load off. the work day was pretty good, all in all.

about an hour before my evening meeting with dod and co, one of my teammates announced that he'd just been fired. i literally didn't believe him at first, but soon after it became clear that we just got thoroughly reorganized and about half of our department just got dumped. i was finally over the reorg that just happened a few months ago, and as much of a relief as it is to have "made the cut" this is really, really horrible. my teammate? he's just announced that his wife is pregnant with their second kid and is currently renovating his new home, so not the best time...

... not that it's ever the best time...

on my way to the meeting i spoke to gd and was pleasantly surprised to hear that mr smear had cooperated, with no drama! later i'd learn that he actually had a really good time and i'm so pleased for him!

the meeting: i get it now. it's an amazing idea. it's elegant. i know what we have to do. the long-term prospect was attractive anyway, but is even more so considering the updated state of my current employment. now's the time for research and due diligence, and i'm excited.

...

the weekend was mostly good, although saturday night took a turn for the worse (gd's been having a rough time lately and i pushed a red button) we did get over the hump and the past few days have been easier for both of us as a result. on friday evening we went to mr smear's friend's family for a really nice dinner. a large chunk of saturday was spent playing around with midjourney, culminating in my releasing musing on sunday morning. i'm extremely proud of it! in the afternoon we walked to the beach, which on an almost-empty winter's day was absolutely lovely.

there was stuff i meant to post about regarding sunday and monday but whatever it was has been so dramatically overshadowed by the sandwiching days i simply can't recall right now...

oh! on sunday morning i got up around 3am and spent an hour or two writing up an outline for an app i'd discussed with a coworker on thursday morning. on sunday night i met with said coworker for the game hack thing, and we settled on building a different social app based on an idea i had just over a decade ago and i was pleased that he was so excited by it.

i think that's everything for now.

antsy positive

 it's a friday afternoon and i'm itching to *do* something, but i don't actually have any idea what it is i *want* to do. so my mind is jumping from vague intention to vague intention while i try and catch up on reading from the infinite reading lists while the kids behind me argue about how to spell things for a minecraft session and i try to get over this morning's revelation that my kid doesn't like babies "because they cry all the time".

the work-week ended on a good note. most of the week was a stressful mess of me vs the machine (in this case, our ci/cd setup), which culminated in a glorious moment yesterday afternoon when everything finally turned green and 

[posting interrupted by a massive tantrum caused by mr smear griefing his friend by renaming her virtual dog]

i was finally able to Push The Button. the rest of the day was spent slowly and methodically preparing a whole bunch of migration PRs and i got to leave early and enjoy a cider at the end of a long week.

i appear to be finally over the week and a half of post-nasal drip, though last night i was woken up by gd unconscious and coughing into my face so maybe i'll get to enjoy another round...

worse? or better?

 same pattern, two days later... it was so bad last night that i got up in the middle of it and ended up going back to bed so stupidly late that i still feel like i'm in dreamland.

the past couple of days have been a bit mad. work's been good, but family's been... complicated. sunday started off rough (mr smear not quite getting that being horrible to me won't make me nice to him), but by the evening things had settled and we'd worked it out. and then gd and i had a blowout just before his bedtime that was a real night-destroyer. let me just say, for the record, that winning an argument doesn't actually feel good if the process of getting to the bottom of things was horrifically unpleasant.

anyway, we seem to all be fine now.

after a week home sick, gd returned to the ulpan this week and had a big test yesterday - it looks like she's done pretty well and it's really helping her confidence! and she's back on duolingo in addition to her homework, so that's cool.

mr smear's biggest lesson lately is the (for him) revelation that the primary reason he's being sent to school is to learn how to interact with his peers and teachers. i hope it's helping. we're workshopping fears of the dark etc. too, and seem to be making progress.

on a totally different note, i introduced him to wikipedia last night and it totally blew his mind.

...

i said work's been good, but it's actually been excitingly positive. i've been slowly but surely coercing our CI/CD pipeline and bash scripts into better behavior and things are starting to gain traction and move faster.

finally, mr cat sent me all the edits and the last few pages are now looking much cleaner and crisper!

still coughing

 this has been ridiculous. every day i think i'm getting better, and every night i experience a sinus reset that sees me either coughing up constantly or feeling like i'm about to start a throat infection. i woke up at 5am "this morning" (saturday morning) and spent the subsequent hours playing the artful escape (which is absolutely stunning), until eventually i was exhausted enough to pass out for a bit but i still spent the afternoon feeling thoroughly worn out.

and here we are, after 12.30am, with me afraid to go to bed.

...

friday was more interesting than i would have liked. primarily because on my way to pick up mr smear from school i saw two messages that i'd missed warning me that our rent cheque was about to bounce if we didn't take immediate action, but considering it was a friday and already after cut-off there was already nothing i could do about it until tomorrow (later today).

and there's not much i can do about it. it turns out our "debit" cards aren't actually functioning as debit cards, and a whole bunch of money unexpectedly disappeared from our account when i was under the impression it had already been counted. that in addition to the fact that our credit card payments are entirely automatic and there's no choice in the matter of how or when we pay them, which is very different to how things work in south africa and canada.

in short, everything is wrong about how israeli credit cards work and it's hurting us. and it's hard not to be anxious about the consequences.

...

last night i explained hormones and puberty to my seven year old son and hilarity ensued. it was a lot simpler than i expected, but i think that's because i've got a pretty good understanding of how it all works...

another time round the sun

 (sung to the tune of "another one bites the dust")

hear i sit, starting to write this post at 6.20am on a friday morning, sitting in my onesie having sadly giving up on trying to sleep in favor of being vertical and coughing up green.

swell.

these past few days have been a whirlwind of positive crazy.

let's go backwards to tuesday.

i went to bed a few hours ago, having watched most of romesh ranganathan's the cynic and giggling hysterically.

that was after finally calling it a night, having spent my time after reading mr smear to bed early (for him, anyway) trying to reproduce a weird bug with my italian coworker and meeting online with potential partners for a particularly interesting little enterprise.

there was a lot that was very gratifying about successfully demonstrating that my code was working well despite my coworkers snarky suspicions to the contrary.

the meeting with my potential partners was also gratifying, but in a different way.

i brought home what remained of the birthday vegan mango cheesecake from the day before because mr smear had woken me up yesterday worried that we hadn't really celebrated my birthday because we (from his perspective) hadn't had any cake. we ate it together while he watched the end of how the grinch stole christmas, although he enjoyed just a small amount and then decided it was mine.

fine, i'll finish it.

yesterday was a really great day at work. i delivered something really impactful that i've been working on all week, i dived into golang code that's been untouched for (hi-tech time-scale) generations and uncovered something juicy, and generally enjoyed the peaceful wind-down to the end of the week.

in the morning, i received a mind-blowing email from my ex-team-lead: after i left, he went on parental leave. the combination of the two of us not being around demoralized the other two teammates, which was bad enough, but then the company decided to revoke certain employee "privileges" (being able to work 100% remotely) and both of them quickly found other employment. once my ex-team-lead returned to find that he needs to completely rebuild the team for what is a) his baby and b) a core component of the company's success, he became so demoralized that he's walking away too.

aside from feeling... not guilty, but at least partly responsible for how things have turned out, i feel like the leadership of this company which i thoroughly enjoyed contracting for for two years of my life has galloped full-tilt towards the trust thermocline and won a race to the bottom that they hadn't realized they'd even entered.

never mess with your employees. compensate them fairly and make them partners in your success.

another thing about yesterday morning was mr smear getting up early enough that we got to play hue before i took him to school, and hue is beautiful.

wednesday:

i didn't need to celebrate my birthday any more than i actually did. physically or virtually, i felt surrounded and supported by people i care about, i had a surprisingly lovely regular day at the office, a nice dinner + the rest of the seventh harry potter movie with my family, and i'm home in tel aviv for this one.

i am full of gratitude.

i've also decided, after hearing again about the effects of nostalgia on aging, that i'm going to start counting backwards. besides, my age is now equal to the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything which is the ASCII value of the asterisk character * which means "anything". so i'm just going to roll with "anything" as a permission slip to be well and feel good.

tuesday:

i don't recall too much about the actual day that was tuesday, but in the evening i joined spot and the mongoose near the beach and we sat a talked for ages. i then walked spot all the back to the bus from across the road from our apartment and finally went to bed.

that was exactly the moment when my throat started warning me that i was coming down with whatever this horrible post-nasal drip thing is. no, wait - looking back at my previous post, that was the moment when the looming throat infection stopped looming and launched a full-scale attack.

now that i think about it, i must have worked from home on tuesday. whatevs.

...

overall, this week was a good one. gd was upset about being too sick to go to ulpan, but she's at least learning to navigate the healthcare system and receiving treatment.

mr smear was mostly great, he's drawing really interesting things and we've had a lot of good conversations. while he's a bit damaged and struggling in some ways, he really is a good kid with a sharp mind. i mean, he's obsessed with demons (when he isn't terrified of his closet) and he can be super-naughty sometimes, but then he refuses to play the artful escape because there aren't any dialogue options for "i don't want to commit a crime" 🤣

...

oh! and mr cat has sent me all the edits, so i can publish them this week. things are looking amazing.

off and on again

or on and off again.

friday:

in the evening i walked through to scrapper's farewell. i ended up having some really interesting conversations in the kitchen and in retrospect i think i was the only person not high for them.

saturday:

bedtime was an explosion of unhappiness, triggered by an incident at the park. aside from that and gd feeling really sick, mr smear and i had enjoyed a really lovely day together that included a good frisbee session.

yesterday:

i wasn't feeling 100%, but i did go in to work. it was a day, i guess? i was stunned when i looked up to see how dark it had gotten by 5pm.

today:

i worked from home today after a long night with a looming throat infection - it was mostly fine during the day, and now it's started up again. i started the day by taking gd to the clinic to get her reassigned to a new doctor because her experiences so far with the previous one have been pretty awful.

i made good progress at work, and things generally feel positive with my team lead.

spider-man: no way home is a beautiful way to tie up the existing franchises and pull an into the spider-verse.

spot's grandmother's just passed away, which makes me sad.

one foot in front of the other

wed: vaccine failure and a report about mr smear getting along with the other kids, not cooperating with the sports teacher, being too disgusted by snails to be in the same room as them, and making good progress with his reading and writing.

mr smear's "friends" being warned away from him? we're not sure that's what happened, but we're concerned

dod's proposal

two days of intense juggling at work

gd coming down with a cold

today so far: getting caught in the rain after dropping mr smear off at school, making page 26 public

what a long, strange week it's been

 i finally had my performance review yesterday, and it was mostly positive. after all my discomfort and anxiety the past while, it turns out we didn't have a trust problem, just a communication problem. and we've now identified it and we're working on it.

it's an enormous relief.

on sunday evening i went off to a reunion of the last unit i served in, but i arrived to discover that i hadn't registered properly and they wouldn't let me in. so the half hour i spent waiting for nystire to rock up felt eerily like the last six months of my service... he was good enough to skip the thing and join me for a walk and a drink, it was nice catching up properly (it's different without the kids).

one of my coworkers and i then spent an hour or so playing around with a gamemaker tutorial, and we learned some interesting things! i've subsequently spent the last couple of days rebuilding it and polishing it for mr smear, it's been a great learning experience and lots of fun ^_^

work has been... busy. an insane amount of juggling, but for a good cause.

last night was, i think, the first time i've headed out to the rollerblading group feeling solid. i was feeling quite dry when i arrived, though, and picked up an iced-coffee, which i suspect helped - but the second half of the 25km was still a fitness struggle and i finally got home with big blisters. on the flip side, it was a really, really fun route!

i haven't slept much, but what sleep i did get was good. i've got a bunch of stuff to take care of this morning, not least of which being that i need to make sure mr smear actually gets his flu vaccine...

it's not my party but i'll sulk if i want to

 wednesday was rough, my neck was hurting all day after sleeping badly and by late afternoon i was starting to have headaches and needed to get out of there.

wednesday night i seemed to have gotten my pillows right again (and marked them, this time), and so thursday was much better. i ended the week on a very positive note, super excited by getting the thing i wanted to work working.

yesterday morning i made the mistake of enthusiastically setting up a test for the thing i got working on thursday. setting it up took a lot of effort and time, testing it was hard, and the ultimate failure sucked. not an optimal way to spend a friday.

we did, however, manage to get the bathtub's drain unclogged.

in the late afternoon i took mr smear for a walk down to the marina, we had a really good time.

this morning started with dragon's quest builders 2. i cannot praise this game highly enough! it's what happens when final fantasy meets minecraft, and i was thrilled at how invested mr smear was in reading all the text. and playing the game, which is exquisite. and the music was so lovely that i ended up passing out behind him on the couch for a while.

that gave me more than a couple of hours of "me time". then we all headed out to the birthday party. gd's neck has been in spasm since she got up this morning, so she bailed a few minutes out of the house, and mr smear and i had a nice walk to the trampolines. we arrived in time to verify that my registration earlier this week was valid, and after i installed a dice app on my phone we played an oversized game of snakes and ladders.

so far, so good.

the party started off well, but some kid told him that only one kid per trampoline was allowed and he walked out of the fun area to sulk.

i don't know how to deal with the incredible sulk. i tried supportive, i tried manipulative, i tried coercive. i failed. over and over. every time i almost succeeded, i failed. eventually, many lifetimes later, i managed to convince him to come give it one more try and then we arrived at the gate to realize that he'd been so upset he'd ripped off and thrown away the bracelet so we weren't allowed in anymore.

genius.

at least there was a whole vegan pizza just for us and he got his own private dessert in lieu of cake, and then end of the party was positive.

i mean, mostly. i'm not taking him alone to a party ever again. it was heartbreaking and horrible.

over the hump day

it's raining right now and i need to go to the office... like, really raining heavily as i type this and it's beautiful and warm and cosy inside.

yesterday was a pretty good day work-wise, but i was completely buggered by the afternoon and it was tough keeping my eyes open. then i caffeined up for the office game night and had a good time, making it home just in time to say goodnight to mr smear.

i slept horribly.

i've managed to get a couple of admin items squared away this morning, and now i'm going to do some dishes and be off!

dishing it out

 we're two days in and this isn't a bad week so far.

work-wise, iffy but trending positive. the week started sour with my team lead "taking me off the project", but this morning i got him on board with letting me close it out and so far mostly good. i also managed to deliver something everyone is excited about, in spite of losing most of yesterday to writing up last week's incidents...

mr smear was still at home today, although i suspect he should've been back at school already. he really likes chilling at home. i guess i should be grateful he's feeling safe and secure.

i managed to upgrade the mobile app on saturday night! expo's new system is a little weird, but good enough, and it felt good to do something with the project.

this evening i met up with scrapper for frisbee. we did play a little, but we also did a very basic old-people's workout at the park gym and we caught up on a ton of stuff. it was fun.

finally - doing the dishes has been a big deal for both of us. it's like a forced meditation for me, and a huge break for gd. i wish i'd thought of this before.

...

i had a revelation a couple of days ago, and it's that as high as the cost of living in tel aviv may be, it's not actually as expensive to live here as it was for us in cape town. of the three cities i've lived in in the past decade, cape town is by far the most expensive.

economics are weird.

last night on-call

 yesterday ended on a much better note, although mr smear was still fiery hot and i lost the argument about him sleeping in his own bed - until the early hours of the morning, when gd eventually lost it (after i'd spent the night receiving kicks to the nether regions and elbows to the eyes) and he left ours.

today was a recovery day. i don't know why i hadn't thought of it before, but gd *hates* doing dishes and i kind of enjoy it, so the other day i offered to take over and since yesterday it's been my responsibility. everyone's happier with this arranged, so that's cool. and the few times i did it today were... meditative.

otherwise, we spent the whole day indoors, quietly watching things or playing games. the only constructive thing i did was give feedback to mr cat, who was understandably unhappy with me realizing that the background needed a big change after producing what he thought was the final draft...

it's better, though.

i guess the other thing i did today was play around with the brave browser, which is now basically a thin skin for chrome with better privacy stuff and generally improved performance because of it. i now warmly recommend it, not least because i didn't have to give anything up - all my extensions work very nicely and the profile system is exactly the same.

not quite the weekend i was hoping for

 the past few days haven't been all bad. but they haven't been particular good, either.

tuesday and wednesday were a continuation of the deep dive into unhandled promise rejections in aws lambdas, which was not fun but did produce some interesting learnings.

tuesday and wednesday i worked from home after i found myself having a coughing fit five minutes before entering the office, i seem to have picked up from mr smear. who has subsequently gone on to become really sick with something else - he's been spiking a high fever since yesterday and we're keeping a close eye on him.

gd reported that the two of them got their bloodwork analyzed recently and the results were excellent, so that's encouraging. vegan ftw.

unfortunately, by the time i was ready to head back into the office on thursday my team lead was off sick. i'm being reminded of "optics", because he's never around to see the successes but i have to report to him whenever i have trouble. this is not boding well. especially because i was feeling much more confident by thursday and getting all sorts of little things squared away. i'm sure he was or will be around for my recorded knowledge share which i'd been too overwhelmed to prepare for, and i feel like i made an ass of myself.

...

by the time dinner arrived (at the office) yesterday i was utterly *done*. but i really wanted to go support my teammate at his improv competition. i'd ordered a meal from four one six, and was thoroughly impressed by their vegan shwarma, but their portions are so big i had to stash the remains (about half of it, even after significantly overeating) in the fridge. then we left.

we hadn't made it to the bus stop across the road before our support team got hold of me, asking me about something i was unfamiliar with. fortunately one of the coworkers with me could help, so i passed on a suggestion from him, and from that point until we walked out of the improv competition things were calm. i got to have a drink, and a beer, and enjoy the entire show without being paged, and the show was brilliant - most of it, anyway, there was one team i found a bit tiring - but we generally had an excellent time. our coworker's team won the evening, and our coworker definitely stole the show - he was quick, and he was hilarious!

after congratulating the team, i opened my phone to find that the support agent hadn't quite understood the instructions. so i clarified - but having no experience, i worried that i might simply be giving bad advice. so when i got home, after a quick shower, i sat down and began tinkering. if i got home around 11pm, and i went to bed around 1.30am, i can say that most of that time was spent diving deep into lambda logging.

finally satisfied that i knew what i was talking about and had tested all the possibilities, i squished into the bed next to a furnace - mr smear has been too uncomfortable to sleep in his own bed, apparently - and because he was overheating we were sleeping with the aircon on.

conditions were less than ideal.

...

and then woke up to the pager alarm at 4.40am. i spent the next hour and a half bleary-eyed, trying desperately to figure out where the fire was and unable to reach any of the team leads nor our department head. this is not the first time. and i felt especially guilty trying to contact these guys at stupid o'clock in the morning when one was sick and the other having just had beer with me before continuing on for more drinks with the other.

and then, all of a sudden, the metric returned to normal.

it had been a false alarm the entire time.

stunned, i climbed back into bed.

stunned, i woke up fifteen minutes later to another page.

a different one. after an hour and a half unable to find the fire, it also auto-resolved.

it had been another false alarm.

i crawled back into bed.

...

and woke up about three hours later to urgent messages from our support team asking me to investigate and then join a call with a super-important client.

being on-call for my employer is awful. it's ugly. and it makes me feel things like "i hate my life". i'm building resentment at every incident. i don't want this, and i don't think i'm being paid enough for this.

another coworker came to the rescue, fortunately, and a little while later i was ready to take a bus to the office to rescue my dinner leftovers.

...

which had been turfed by the cleaning staff.

...

the rest of the day has been recovery, and a fair amount of silent prayer that the rest of the weekend will be quieter. and i posted a haiku i was inspired to write yesterday. you're welcome. i don't know where i'm going to find the energy to upgrade the mobile app for my side-project, which has been neglected so long that it's no longer supported :/

...

we've been making great progress on the sonnet comics front. so that's good.

pray for me.

so far, not amazing

 my sunday didn't begin so well, it started with the beginnings of a sniffle and a sore throat which has gotten progressively worse. thanks, mr smear. as the day progressed i became more disheartened, i'm very unhappy with having to babysit a highly complex solution that's full of components on fire, and the more i looked into things the less certain i became of what was relevant and what wasn't.

after a long day, i came home, watched an episode of pokémon indigo league (we've finally agreed that we can put aside the animal cruelty and exploitation and give the series another chance) and finished watching the chamber of secrets. almost immediately after putting mr smear to bed, while i was trying to decide whether to chance going to bed myself, my pager went off.

i had neither the knowledge nor the permissions to deal with the issue, so my team lead put me in touch with another team lead and the two of us worked on the thing (i bore witness, at least) until around 11pm. and then i crashed.

to be woken yesterday morning at 4.40am. again, no knowledge or permissions, and i woke up my team lead and we spent the next couple of hours on a call. we ended the call on an unpleasant note, and i couldn't get back to sleep.

frustrated, and with so much frustration having accumulated, and full of bad feelings, i started updating my resume and am considering putting feelers out.

i tried to have a conversation with my team lead when we were both in the office, but it would take all day to get an opportunity to speak to him privately. during that time, i got paged for two further incidents that i still don't know anything about.

we finally had it out in the evening, and while i have no way of knowing whether things went "well" or not i think we both did some airing of grievances and went a long way to clearing the air. i certainly feel like we're more aligned than before, and we haven't spoken properly in months which i suggested might be the cause of the drift.

he took over my night shift and told me to go home and clear my head, which i think i've managed to do. hopefully things will improve.

...

i'm shocked that the aircon people charged us NIS 500 for two remote controls that cost at most 100 each, where the main cost was apparently the "call out fees" for delivering said remotes. i wouldn't have paid, but these are the bastards we need if the air conditioners themselves need maintenance so they really have us by the balls. so that's an expensive lesson...

gearing up for another on-call

 i'm surprisingly relaxed about this coming week, even though the end of the week was stressed for the previous guy and my last one didn't go so well. and even though my legs have been giving me a lot of grief over the past few hours.

the end of my work week was generally positive. i'm not sure if it's enough to make up for the weeks before it, but i finally closed in on the end of the unpleasant project and even got a few hours in on the thing we've all really been wanting me to do.

so that was good.

otherwise, mr smear was feeling ill on thursday morning but seemed well enough to go to school, it was only when gd picked him up that we understood that he really should have stayed home (and me with him). so i felt a bit bad about that.

yesterday morning we went on a mission to pick up another phone (for me, this time). the model i wanted wasn't available, but we picked up an amazing persian breakfast which we ate at home and then i returned alone once it was. overall, the cellphone experience has been very positive!

<TMI WARNING> on the way home i stopped in to a grocery store to pick up an ice cream. i felt i deserved it. i usually don't have much flatulence during the day in spite of being a vegan, and when i do it almost never smells. but as i stood waiting for my turn to pay, an urgent ball of gas formed and i just had to let it out. it was silent, but so awful that i could barely breathe, the cashier gagged and, shocked, asked if it was me; i couldn't bring myself to admit to it, so i rolled my eyes while she desperately sprayed air freshener and her coworker laughingly suggested it might actually be her... i suspect he was just doing it for my benefit.
</TMI WARNING>

today was mostly an indoors day, with one mission to get coffee / lunch at timothy's, which was excellent except for gd and mr smear sitting on a bench that was utterly soaked and had had its warning sign ripped off by a previous sociopathic customer.

and we restarted a harry potter movie rewatch today. once a year seems a good amount of times.

...

i'm VERY excited by the progress with the sonnet comics this week.

...

i'm rather disappointed with the outcome of tuesday's elections, it must be said. i've been trying to keep the political situation out of mind but morbid curiosity occasionally gets the better of me. i pray the next couple of years won't be too different from normal, but i'm sad that my own people appear to be on a path to polarization / radicalization and i want it to stop.

election frenzy

i can't believe it's wednesday already! (well, technically speaking, of course)

gd's had a big night - not only did i finally pick up a new phone for her (or me, if she doesn't like it), but she's been accepted into an ulpan class and is super excited to be starting her first class tomorrow morning!

today was a big day: it was our first election since we landed and we both got to vote. the experience was pretty good, although it was marred by a little old woman who - looking pretty non-religious to me - stood behind me and asked me why my son and i are not always wearing a kippah, and then threatened that once things come right all the non-practising jews will be thrown out the country.

holy shit.

anyway, we had a long walk (too much for gd) looking for breakfast after voting, ending up at our "usual" falafel spot, and later in the day i took mr smear to the lego store where i was informed in no uncertain terms that there's nothing i can do about all the missing kit pieces other than order them online and wait a few months. at least the store was fun. then i dragged mr smear around while figuring out what phone to buy and where, and in all the time there we were surrounded by ridiculous crowds of loud and or costumed teenagers. the vibe was cool.

turns out the other big mall saw a fight break out that needed police intervention with tear gas. sheesh.

my work-week hasn't been going great, it's stressful and disappointing and demoralizing. hopefully it'll improve.

acceptance

 the mongoose said something to me today that struck a chord: not just that i need a holiday, but that after everything we've been through i actually need to stop planning on doing things and give myself a breather.

he's not wrong. absolutely not wrong.

having said that, it's approaching midnight and i've just fired off the next three pages of the comics script to the illustrator, and i'm quite fired up about it. not least because both my wife and my son think that the concept's really cool and none of us can wait to see how mr cat puts it together, and he's just promised me that he'll be starting very soon on the last page i sent him and the minor corrections to a couple of earlier ones.

...

today was a good day. i took mr smear to meet the mongoose and his partner for a walk in the park, and i spent a large part of the day being very grateful to be here, to be home, to be safe and secure and developing a sense of stability and "rightness" with the world. well, *my* world, at least, regardless of the dumpster fire humanity's facing right now...

mr smear had a fantastic time today as well, it was just a really nice day. less so for gd, but at least she got to stay in and rest. hopefully tomorrow will be better.

we finished watching the "live action" (yeah, right) remake of pinocchio, which was surprisingly good. gd and i played a bit of rayman after putting mr smear to bed, and i watched the expanse until i couldn't keep my eyes open any more. then i went to bed, but couldn't sleep, so i got up and worked on the script.

now i don't know what i'm going to do. and the beautiful thing is that i don't really feel it matters much.

lower

 i woke up yesterday morning really bugged by the shell behaviour from thursday that threw me off, and i set about writing up an article about it. in order to write the article, i put together a script to showcase the offending behaviour... and unlike on thursday, it worked the way it should have.

this sent me into a panicked "i have to test this in my work environment and fix everything before my code's reviewed" mode, so that's how i spent the next hour or two. i felt so dumb, having realized that whatever it was that hadn't worked must have been a combination of different things, and just as dumb for having done my testing in a suboptimal way.

and aside from the sheepishness, i felt completely burned out. i've been feeling this for a while - it's been years since i was enthusiastic enough about what i'm doing to care enough about "diving deep" and investing time. everything's always under artificial time pressure. very little of what i do is stuff that's actually exciting, most of it's made up of things that i inherit because nobody else wants anything to do with them either.

so that was how yesterday started.

mr smear had two playdates yesterday, the first was a rip-roaring success with an english speaking friend, and another a partial success with a hebrew-speaking one. i say "partial" because it started and ended well, and i was super proud hearing mr smear "breaking his teeth" and having mini-conversations in hebrew! but at some point the two of them were playing rayman: legends together and mr smear went into griefer mode, gd and i were mortified and had to get involved.

not cool.

...

yesterday was not october 31st, but our neighbourhood celebrated halloween anyway. gd took mr smear out trick-or-treating with some friends, and they had an amazing time right until one of the houses included two human jump-scares that absolutely terrified him. in the meanwhile, i stayed home, dressed up with two giant bowls of candy, but nobody came. not one person. i don't know if it's because our building is out of everyone's way, or because our neighbours closed the doors a couple of time - which was totally our fault for not warning everyone :(

i watched an episode or two of she-hulk while waiting. it's entertaining, but my gods: its feminism is about as subtle as a brick to the teeth and it really detracts from the experience.

...

this morning has been a gaming morning with mr smear. so far: limbo,  readyset heroes, thomas was alone, hollow night, and currently tron run/r. this ps plus subscription does have value. (it's also how we discovered the ffvii remake and the oddworld: new 'n' tasty! remake of abe's oddysee).

not the best, not the worst

 it's been a weird week.

work: the plan for monday failed abysmally, sending us back to plan a. it took a day to get that done, then another day to implement the feedback, and that left today to work on my primary project. except that needed something little done, and what should have taken no more than an hour ended up taking the rest of the bloody day, and even bit into my evening.

@!#$.

health-wise: i'm feeling... heavier. i've been planning on hitting the gym but i haven't done that yet, and i missed yet another rollerblading route this week. i've been stress-eating a lot, and walking less. so i'm not doing wonderfully in the self-care department.

family: we miss my mom, and we're stressed about her being in south africa. mr smear seems to be doing well, although it was a surprisingly big deal for him to get comfortable saying goodbye at the "hug and go" spot which is a whole 50-100m from the gate :P

gd's been crafting for halloween, which is apparently a big deal in our neighbourhood. and she's been listening to the audiobook edition of neverwhere, which is exciting!

otherwise, i've seen relatively little of my family this week which kinda sucks.

but overall, things seem pretty okay.

the crawl back

 omg i'm tired, but about an hour ago my brain decided to start playing a weird awake-but-dreaming form of the three cups magic trick with itself while my muscles torture me and it took me until now to actually get out of bed.

today... was a good day. my team lead is back, we're aligned, and i finished the day with an actual plan for the work i've been doing (it's kind of a long story about tests and mocking, i've been trying to make something work for a new use case when it shouldn't have been built in the first place).

there's something magical about feeling ready to do things in the evenings, making plans and such. it's definitely a sign that there's some stabilization and healing going on.

i mean, i guess at least i slept

i usually don't sleep very well, but last night i passed out after reading to mr smear and woke up this morning, and i don't recall there being much of the usual "not sleeping" going on throughout the night.

so that was good.

but i did have two consecutive nightmares just prior to 6am that were so awful that i jumped out of bed to get as far away from it as possible.

in the first, i was on a military base and we barely thwarted a night attack by what appeared to be a faction of our own side. there was a lot of bloodshed and, while i don't remember exactly who it was now, i ended up having to shoot someone i knew.

in the second, i was trapped in some little cottage somewhere with another couple of people, and we realized that this place was infested with horrifically oversized, hairy scorpions and crab-like spiders and other weird and dangerous creatures. i woke up in real life after having been woken up from a nap in the dream with one creature under my armpit and another biting into my hand, trying to get them off without flailing.

tiiiired

really tired. not sure why. gd as well.

thursday:

i didn't get to speak to the boss on wednesday, but i did have a "catch up" chat with HR on thursday that - for the most part - allayed my concerns. thursday was also helpful because i started off the day with a coffee with an old friend and pitched some of my ideas, between him and our angels (the mongoose and his girlfriend) there's a possibility of something actually going somewhere in the near future.

otherwise, thursday wasn't bad but it wasn't great either.

yesterday:

yesterday was a cool day. gd and i watched a bit of louis ck (we've bought all his specials and are slowly making our way through them), then dropped off her sewing machine downtown and i got a haircut. we then picked up mr smear and met up with urchin, walked through to jaffa (stopping for a delicious lunch) and thoroughly enjoyed our shuk experience. my wallet, not so much, but i do now have an adult witness to just how awful gd is at haggling... or how amazing she is for the seller.

anyway, it was lots of fun and we all had a great time.

when we got home i upgraded our playstation plus subscription and we spent the rest of the day checking out awesome things. hot wheels unleashed is our new favourite racer.

today:

aside from a mission to find vegan margarine, today was spent indoors resting because we were (and are) exhausted. in the afternoon mr smear started getting restless so i dragged myself off the couch and we went for a long and very pleasant walk, then came home to stuff ourselves with mom's sushi.

now it's bedtime. i'll probably crash. i hope i don't regret it because i've been concerned lately that i'm sleeping many hours poorly rather than few hours well.

concerns

the past few days were pretty good, overall, but yesterday a conflagration of events brought up some anxiety, and it looks like i'm going to need to have a chat with the boss today. i've been doing a pretty thankless job that nobody else wants to do, and i keep being told that i have exactly one responsibility while repeatedly getting fresh, urgent and unrelated tasks dumped on me. it's bad enough that my team lead seems to have forgotten that we agreed that how i handled my post-on-call week was reasonable, we're now talking about introducing performance management benchmarks and i have a feeling that they're going to put me at a distinct disadvantage.

i don't want to work in a place that makes me feel uncomfortable. i don't want to work in a place where i'm paid for a number of hours a week, given a mission and then consistently asked to do considerably more.

...

after delivering the dog on saturday, we had a lovely breakfast together and then rented a pedal boat for an hour. it was hard work, but fun!

sunday was a frustrating half-day, fortunately followed by another holiday (the last for a while). we spent a good chunk of monday with urchin, enjoying a walk-and-talk around the city and a big lunch.

yesterday, gd and i paid social security a visit and it feels like we've got everything sorted out!

gd has decided that she needed another piercing (septum), so that's a thing.

not the dogsitter

 we're about to take the dog to its owner's sister... we've had him since wednesday, and it was mostly a good experience, but on thursday evening he snapped at mr smear and then yesterday there were apparently two more incidents of aggression, so he's out.

this really sucks, because i took mr smear for two long walks with him yesterday and used the opportunity to train both him and the dog, and it felt like both of them were getting the hang of it and establishing their relationship in a positive way. aside from the three incidents, the two of them have been really cool together, but when gd spoke to the owner's sister last night she admitted that the dog had gone for her kid as well when he was younger so maybe it's not so out of character...

my favourite moment from yesterday was mr smear having a conversation with the dog in hebrew: "i only told you to stop when we crossed the street because i love you and don't want you to get killed" 🤣

gd felt horrible from thursday through to this morning, hopefully she's on the mend. i've been exhausted. aside from a few long walks yesterday it was mostly spent consuming media, gaming and napping. today seems like a nice day, maybe we'll go out. or maybe not. we'll see.

crushing - it

the IT part of the title is a private pun, suffice it to say that the past two days have been a lot longer than they should have been. the project i referred to in my previous post has been mostly great, but immediately raised a bunch of issues that needed resolving; i had intended to take today off after doing more than my fair share of hours this week, and it ended up being a half day, and a stressed one at that.

having said that, i did get to take gd and mr smear to the icon festival, where the two of them fought with fake swords and we had a great breakfast before gd felt ill and had to go home. mr smear and i wandered around all the stalls and saw some pretty crazy stuff.

we had fun.

in a surprise turn of events, we were surprised yesterday afternoon by a message asking us to dog-sit again. we agreed, on condition that we received details on what to do in case veterinary services are required, and we received our furry guest yesterday evening. so far things have been good, although we did have one incident of him snapping at mr smear - i made mr smear join us for a walk immediately afterwards and worked on training both him and the dog to re-establish their hierarchy. mr smear's developing a bit of confidence in giving commands, and the dog's starting to get the idea that he actually has to listen to him.

anyway, yesterday evening i sunk myself into final fantasy vii remake, it's absolutely amazing but it's certainly not appropriate for kids.

i spent this evening playing around with quicktime and obs studio for screen recording on a mac, the former i'm hating less and the latter i'm quite fond of.

anyway, i'm very glad tomorrow's friday.

winter is coming

 kind of. i mean, after a week of arguing with me about the weather gd acquiesced and put duvets on our beds yesterday. last night was too hot for me, but this evening i needed a nap and it was really good protection from the air-conditioner :P

today was a much longer work day than planned. i got up and dived in, planning on quitting early to go to the icon festival, but gd and mr smear's plans failed so that's been deferred to thursday and i worked straight through to the evening. which is why i needed the nap.

and now my back hurts a bit, but i really want to go rollerblading tonight so i'm going to risk it.

today i finally finished off a piece of work that has taken me many demoralizing weeks to get through; there're still some irritatingly weird things happening but at least i'm confident that the task is complete.

am i doing it right?

hint: probably not.

i've been restless, lately, and after a pleasant, meditative walk this evening i suspect that the primary reason is that i'm not used to dealing with life without the perpetually levels of anxiety and looming existential crises. i'm also noticing that i'm avoiding taking on any kind of additional stress lately, which includes not doing a bunch of things that i actually want to do. and quite a few things i need to, as well...

the half-day of work yesterday turned into a fair bit more than planned, but the outcome was pretty successful so i guess it was worth it.

today's holiday seemed needed. our financial situation is a little weird at the moment because our bank seems to have lost track of how much money we have or whether our remittance orders have been executed or not (this is not the first time for us, i went through a similar story a couple of years ago with a south african bank), but i splurged a bit on a month of playstation plus membership and the complete king's quest collection.

this morning we completed the first chapter of the console reboot of the king's quest series, and it is GLORIOUS! the interface is really well designed, the story is entertaining and the puzzles are clever enough to be a thought-provoking challenge but entirely solvable by a parent-child team :)

in addition to getting started on the second chapter, i got a taste of tetris effect: connected (beautiful) and played a little of the final fantasy vii remake, which my son insisted on playing a bit of and i'm not certain whether i'm being an awesome parent or a terrible one.

speaking of which, mr smear's behaviour has been trending very positively of late, it really does feel like he's maturing in a lot of ways.

...

we had a delicious dinner delivered this evening because gd's struggling with a headache, i went to bed quite early and then woke up a short while ago with indigestion / reflux.

a grain of sand

i read a post from sandman's mother last night, he was in a terrible motorcycle accident on friday night and they don't know yet just how damaged he is. i really hope he pulls through.

...

we had the relaxed shabbat i'd hoped for. we watched the second half of the "a hope in hell" episode of the sandman series, completed the 1500 piece puzzle we started on wednesday, and in the late afternoon i took mr smear to the beach and we had a really great time.

now i have a half-day at work, mr smear is off school for the next week so we neeeeed to find him things to do!

slow and steady

yom kippur itself went a bit differently than i expected... in a good way. it started with me "tuning in" to the online service, but i really wasn't feeling it and found myself consistently distracted. at some point i just thought "sod it" and grabbed a cup of coffee and settled in to the other traditional israeli way of spending yom kippur, on the couch with my family playing games and watching movies. for a little bit, only, because at some point i got it in my head to break out a 1500-piece puzzle and we're still going strong*.

* okay, we haven't touched it today because my legs and buttocks have been too sore from two days of up-and-down building of the puzzle on the floor.

in the evening went joined the rest of the neighbourhood hanging around outside the chabad service waiting for the final shofar, but as the first blast started a child started screaming next to us and then an ambulance went past with its siren on so all we really heard was an anticlimactic toot.

whatever.

it was a nice day. i really needed the downtime.

yesterday was a mostly positive day at work - although i worked from home again because i'm still not completely over this annoying cold - i completed the work and the boss and i revisited our ci/cd authentication procedures together, and aside from a minor deployment issue my main project for this year is pretty much ready to go!

today, legs and buttocks notwithstanding (nor notwithsitting, but that's beside the point), gd and i went on a failed curtain mission but enjoyed a nice coffee in a cool place in south tel aviv, and i enjoyed a laffa on the way to the school, and then picked up mr smear and spent the rest of the afternoon watching wile e. coyote and spirited away, and trying to give disney+ another chance.

we've just had some downtime reading dog man in hebrew, and i'm looking forward to a relaxed shabbat.

mon/tues

it's yom kippur, i'm trying to fast but i'm exhausted and still a bit "off" (somewhat dizzy) even though my nose situation has been relatively relaxed since yesterday.

sunday was a great day work-wise, yesterday was more of a mixed-bag. i managed to make good progress on my "primary" project - it's primary when there aren't fires to be put out - but then i was invited to a mystery which, after a couple of hours with three of our heads together turned out to be kinda my fault. when we finally understood the ridiculous nature of the problem, i cracked open a beer and started working on a fix... which may not have been the optimal way forward, but it was necessary. so two revisions and lots of testing later i finally managed to get it right, and i was done for the day.

i slept better last night than in a while, but that's only relative, and around 4am i walked into the kitchen to grab a cup of water and encountered a very large cockroach while i was unable to catch...

i was planning on going in to work this morning but as i opened the front door i felt dizzy, so it was another day working from home. which was fine. it was a productive day, and i enjoyed receiving a significant assist from github's copilot when writing my tests. like, a literally amazing assist, because i was having trouble with a mocking framework and it knew all the details the documentation had glossed over.

between that and the last couple of months of AI frenzy regarding image generation, i can't help thinking that we might be fast approaching the singularity...

i got to rest a bit this afternoon, lying on the couch or reading deadpool comics, and took mr smear out for a bit of exercise. then the two of us dived in to the costume quest series on amazon prime which is fantastic, accompanied by wolfing down large quantities of gd's home-made vegan sushi as the pre-fast meal.

and then, after a quick shave and shower, the sun set. i had a quick chat with horseman, then joined gd and mr smear who were enjoying the after-dark park experience with the rest of the neighbourhood. there's something utterly magnificent about relaxing with other parents amidst throngs of kids just doing their thing, a festival-like atmosphere, and for us in particular witnessing mr smear confidently hanging out and getting on nicely with the other kids.

i'm typing this while listening to the live sermon, and feeling an enormous sense of gratitude. may this coming year be better for us all in every respect. may each and all of us evolve and adapt and be better.

gmar hatima tova.

sat/sun

saturday:

successfully getting our phones sorted out and watching the original dumbo

a fair amount of game-time

a frustrating afternoon walk to nowhere

yesterday:

"urgent" flailing about bureaucracy, a call from the school coordinator telling me to hurry to set up a training session that our health services claim to know nothing about (that cost 1.5 hours on the phone)

successfully fixing a critical project

money stress with the credit card date surprise - fortunately our rent was paid before anything else happened

successful context juggling

a long but useful misrad klitah meeting

a pistachio ice cream break after not picking mr smear up from school (we weren't sure if he had his animation and film class or not)

lining up ducks before meeting the boss

a great relief clearing the air and tying up a bunch of loose threads

mr smear's teacher called to check in on the morning's shenanigans, i made it clear that i have experience with israeli bureaucracy and we ultimately agreed on two issues that need to be addressed

a chat with vfmp in lieu of a game night, but with both of us making horrible noises because he has covid in addition to a sick cat

...

about halfway through the night my runny nose stopped running. i'm still uncomfortably dealing with the fallout of four days of post-nasal drip but i was able to get some real sleep afterwards even if it doesn't make up for the deficit...

ill and demoralized

 i'm tired. and i'm sooooo over being sick again, even if it's a mild cold this time and not another round of covid. i think i've been sick more in the last few months than in the last few years, possibly since before covid, but at the same time i have been considerably more physically social than in a really long time too.

either way, i worked from home on thursday and it was mostly not great. having said that, i did manage to resolve the issues i needed to on one project and had my first customer-facing encounter, which went better than i anticipated (my initial hunch proved correct). for the other project, i eventually called it (putting it on hold), tried to implement an apparently trivial part of it as a favour for the boss and discovered that that might be the thing causing problems, so i'll test it again tomorrow and hope for the best.

in addition to the demoralizing nature of fighting a losing battle against a patchy and highly complex ci/cd system, i don't feel like i'm earning trust. it looks like i'm failing while i'm falling on other people's swords, and that's not good.

...

the reason i put down full price on will you snail was that in addition to it looking like great fun, we been watching jonas tyroller for a while and i felt this was a great way to say thank you. mr smear and i have now put in at least two hours into it, and i can honestly say it's brilliant, entertaining and so freaking hard that whoever wrote that "it puts obstacles in all the wrong places and doesn't challenge you enough" was clearly playing it on the easiest setting.

the past couple of days have seen quite a few hours sunk into gameplay, the three of us have completed rayman: legends (for the second time) and mr smear and i played brawlhalla as a team this morning (including capture the flag) and i must say it's definitely helping my mental state overall, in spite of the occasional outbursts. we're not always as cooperative as we need to be, but we're all consistently improving.

...

gd and i watched waltz with bashir yesterday. it was devastating. watching it was devastating, and according to the wikipedia article the movie barely touches on the atrocities that were committed. enabling the massacre was a thorough betrayal of our nation and everything we stand for, and while i'd learned a bit about the massacre before (it's a cautionary tale in the army) i now believe that we should be including its horrors in our holocaust memorials as a reminder of our failure to remember our own experiences and act accordingly.

...

page 25 is finally done! i'm about to make it publicly available, then i'll try to sort out the fact that my phone's still registered for the wrong country because it's a samsung and the account's country cannot be updated. morons.

less quiet

 well, that didn't last too long. yesterday morning mr smear was still too sick to go to school, and gd and i began the morning with a series of miscommunications that kick-started a no good, lousy, very bad day.

at the office, i resumed the soul-grinding task i've been stuck with the last few workdays, only to be whisked away to another task that had been stalled and it took me hours to find myself stuck without being able to debug my tests and then hours to get the damned debugging configured.

i wasn't feeling very positive when i stalked out the office around 6pm.

i picked up a beer on my way home, installed will you snail on the playstation. it helped. after putting mr smear to bed i had a bath, though not after a long conversation with gd, after which i slunk into bed emotionally exhausted.

at least i slept (relatively) well.

unfortunately, while mr smear is thankfully well enough to go back to school, gd and i woke up with scratchy throats and sickly feelings.

joy.

quiet time

> in five minutes we're leaving the apartment to find out if pre-booking a taxi was good enough to get us to our cousins on time for dinner.

it wasn't. and we finally understood that it's not that it's difficult to get a taxi on the big holidays, it's impossible because all of the drivers take the holidays off! it feels like there's a gap in the market for hiring foreign drivers, but maybe that's just us...

fortunately, our cousins were able and willing to pick us up and drop us off, and we had a really enjoyable evening with our family. we got to meet our newest cousin, who's super cute but pretty much slept the entire time, and we overheard mr smear actually speaking in hebrew to the kids his age and they all had a great time together, and we ate too much and talked a lot and it was an excellent way to usher in the new year.

monday afternoon we went over to friends for lunch (mr smear's friend's family that we had dinner with a while back), and that was also great fun, and we ate far too much, and met a few other people and talked a lot.

aside from that, things have been quiet and indoorsy. i invested a lot of time on both days trying to set up stable diffusion on my desktop machines, i managed to get it working this afternoon but the results were disappointing and the whole process was just as tedious as the uglier elements of my day job; it was work. maybe it is worth just putting down some cash on the more powerful / configurable public cloud offerings.

we also spent a lot of time gaming. it's been a pleasant, mellow couple of days. and we watched E.T. today, and mr smear loved it.

new year!

the last half of this year was tough, but much... much... MUCH better than the two years that came before it. my gods, we have lots to be grateful for. here's hoping and praying that the next year is an improvement all round.

handing over the dog yesterday wasn't as uncomfortable as we expected, although there was a lot of sadness before the handover; he obviously felt that something was up, because he did *not* want to go outside with me in the morning even though he definitely needed to go.

the rest of the day was spent trying out a bunch of the games that got a mention in the wowie jam 4! winners video (all the ones available on itch.io, at least), and after an hour or so that mr smear and i went out for a walk (and ice-cream) we got back into the godot tutorials. slow progress is still progress.

i hurt myself sleeping last night, i woke up this morning to find that breathing was painful.

no school today. half a workday that was *probably* more than half a day for me. minor progress.

afterwards, mr smear and i tried out the rest of the wowie jam 4! games.

that was the day.

in five minutes we're leaving the apartment to find out if pre-booking a taxi was good enough to get us to our cousins on time for dinner.

shana tova!

a sad, scratchy state of affairs

thursday was a horrible workday. i jumped from task to task and got zero satisfaction. the day ended on a sour note, with a repeat of a nonsensical failure that i thought i'd corrected for. not a great send-off for my team lead, who's taking a month's leave...

on thursday afternoon i walked my ex-coworkers dog home for a couple of weeks of dog-sitting. we've had him for a day and a half, now, and things have been mostly great (we love him!) although we have been concerned about his lack of socialization: he's four years old and terrified of most other dogs, though he's cool with humans big and small. we feel sad for him. this morning i managed to get him into the idea of being brushed, which went really well (we got rid of a few dreads along the way) until gd spotted a flea. i'd seen him scratch a couple of times but this was the first evidence we had.

so after picking up mr smear from school we took him to the pet store where they put ampoule drops on him, and we hoped that that would take care of things... but when we took him out later, he was suddenly walking uncomfortably and constantly sitting down, looking as if he might have worms, too. this was just too much to bear, and while we feel awful about this we really can't handle playing host to anything more than just a dog right now.

we feel awful for the dog, and awful for the dog's owner (who's on his honeymoon right after losing his job), but we've asked his brother to come and pick up the poor creature and we're hoping that everything works out for the best. this is a remarkably shit feeling, but as the saying goes: "not my circus, not my monkeys". or, "not my circus, not my fleas"...

gd's back's feeling much better since her nerve block on tuesday, though. that's something. and mr cat and i made good progress on the upcoming graphic novel page. it's also nice that aside from some good exercise today mr smear and i played through a ton of games from the honorary mentions segment of the AI collaboration game challenge and some of them are just brilliant.

...

i hate this feeling.

what a week

sunday:

i don't recall anything specific from sunday.

monday:

monday began with a total shift in work focus onto a project i'm completely unfamiliar with. in the afternoon we had an interdepartmental team-building exercise, which we not only won but apparently set a record for: nighthunt. it was great fun, we worked well together, and i definitely proved my value as part of the team's problem solving arsenal ^_^

in spite of the lack of vegan options, i enjoyed dinner + beer + coffee with the guys, although as much as i enjoyed the espresso it really messed with my sleep that night.

tuesday:

yesterday was a half day that started with a glass of dry red wine (a company toast for the new year), as i left early to accompany gd to the hospital for her nerve block and immediately became chief caretaker of mr smear for the next few hours. gd's experience was so dramatically better than her last nerve block it's shocking, because it demonstrates just how incompetent and unprofessional her "pain specialist" doctor actually is (she's taken to referring to him as a jewish dr mengele).

gd has been sore since, but it seems to be having a positive effect.

we ordered dinner from karnaf last night, and we won't be making that mistake again.

otherwise, we finished watching superman:

by and large, it surprisingly still holds up! creepy non-consensual kiss scenes notwithstanding - that warranted a conversation. the only things that *really* bother me are

a) the completely ridiculous notion that being exposed to kryptonite would somehow weaken a child born on that planet, or that a tiny quantity could somehow "undo" the effects of being in proximity to a sun that gives him his powers when they don't even fail him as he travels beneath the earth's crust

b) the going back in time shenanigans.

still fun, though!

mr smear and i both felt ill going to bed last night.

today:

it took me most of the day to start feeling better. mr smear says he's still not doing great but dammit he's going to school tomorrow.

aside from a lot of admin in the morning and a lot of admin after mr smear went to bed - an overwhelming amount - i spent most of the day deep into work in spite of the whirlwind going on around me. i feel like my biggest achievements so far this week involve getting linters to work.

a pretty good saturday

 well, it's about 1am on a sunday morning, i was tired earlier but i've decided i need to get back into the habit of hustling into the night.

not that i hustled very much, mind, but i did get the ball rolling.

i also found a bunch of ways to "clean my desk", because... that's what one does?

...

today was by and large a good day. fall guys is great, although players have been begging for years for local multiplayer and i'm stunned that they haven't made that available. we watched a fair bit of superman (the 1978 version), which has very slow pacing but is still good, and we played a bit of rayman: legends and king's quest. i took mr smear out for a couple of hours in the late afternoon, we headed to the beach and had a good time.

after reading to him (we're almost done with the magic pudding, and he's loving it as much as i am), gd and i (mostly me) persevered and struggled and completed the last few paintings of olympus maximus with all the achievements. that shit is hard. although we were certainly faster than our first time around.

then we (finally!) got through the second episode of the sandman. it is absolutely gorgeous.

wrecked, but here.

 was a wreck this past week. thoroughly exhausted, highly anxious. overwhelmed by bureaucracy / admin / the infinite number of things that i'm expected to deal with in addition to paid work just to make it through each day.

it doesn't feel like there's much relief.

thursday was a bit better than the previous couple of days, i managed to resolve an issue i'd been wrestling with and spent my afternoon improving test coverage and tidying up my tooling configuration. at least thursday ended on a positive note.

yesterday i went to endless roll to try and buy wheels and bearings for my rollerblades, and i now understand why everyone in the group recommends going literally anywhere else. i left in frustration after twenty or thirty minutes. gd and i were late picking up mr smear from school. when we got home, we played king's quest for a couple of hours and then drove to bat yam for a lovely afternoon on the beach with my coworkers.

a good time was enjoyed by all. mr smear was buried in the sand, he and gd made a kite and he flew it, we had fun in the water in spite of the lifeguards... it was a really great day.

this morning's been pretty good so far, too. mr smear spent some time developing drone intution with fpv freerider, mr smear and i have played some of the lord of the rings card game, which is really cool, and we're now about to give fall guys a chance.

also, mr cat's been making progress on page 25 of the comics and one of the panels has been proving tricky, i'm hoping my latest suggestion is viable.

processing

the saddest item is that there was a horrible road accident in our neighbourhood earlier that claimed at least one life.

...

i'm feeling wiped out. we're dog-sitting for my now ex-teammate (he's one of the people in the department hit by the layoffs) in preparation for our week looking after this wonderful animal while he goes on honeymoon (it was his wedding i went to recently). i just* got back from walking him, after walking home from a farewell event for a few others from the office, after an hour long lecture by mr smear's teacher (she's prepping all of us for the coming year), after a long and somewhat stressful day at work.

* probably half an hour ago, before i showered and couldn't decide if i was hungry or not.

we're in the middle of an "innovation", and i've teamed up with a couple of guys for a simple but interesting project, but i pushed code this morning that Broke Stuff and it took quite a few hours to put our fingers on what went wrong... otherwise, it was nice to receive public acknowledgement from the head of r&d, not least because i've been worried that i've pissed him off or something as he really hasn't had any time for me.

yesterday was wildly successful. surprisingly so. and then i capped it off by picking up tinker racers for the playstation - not only is it a really fun little game, but it was a great vehicle to get mr smear to practice "grit" and i convinced him to keep trying until he got the hang of it, after which point we both thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

...

i'm really struggling with all the bureaucracy and bills and admin.

...

i've had fall out boy's this ain't a scene, it's an arms race stuck in my head since yesterday evening, i don't remember if i used to enjoy it back in the day but i'm totally appreciating it now.

how much is psychological?

it's been a good weekend. i have experienced some anxiety for not getting much done, but i keep reminding myself that i'm allowed / in need of a weekend and it's okay.

it's okay.

thorsday was... uncomfortable. three of the people who were let go came in to the office, and i don't know who of all of us was more awkward. i spent the first half of the day planning work, the second beginning to execute, and finished off with a long phone call with an italian counterpart during the first half of which i thought my brain was going to bleed out my ears.

yesterday started off with two things: the first, me completing and publishing my parody lyrics to the everything is awesome song. the second, gd and i finally finished watching the third season of the boys.

omg it was brilliant. absolutely exquisite. i don't know why i found myself disengaged from some of the third season's episodes, perhaps the pacing was a bit off, but overall i've thoroughly enjoyed the series from start to finish. we even watched one of the animated spinoffs, the boys: diabolical, and it was great fun!

we picked up mr smear from school together, and he'd had a good couple of days in spite of his wednesday blowout. we were all excited by the extra-mural expo, so looking forward to this week's trial classes.

last night we finished watching the second tobey macguire spiderman movie, this morning we watched the third. i've never forgotten just how much i hated some of the scenes in the third one, but i didn't remember just how thoroughly rotten the entire trilogy is. in addition to the terrible over-acting, the only way the plot moves forward is by every single character in the movie being utterly stupid.

every.

single.

character.

maybe doc ock was a possible exception. maybe.

anyway, so after a nice couple of hours spent with new-friends neighbours at a kids' play area in the mall closest to us, we came home and watched spider-man: far from home, which was an excellent palate cleanser.

mr smear is now in bed, i'm trying to decide if i should hit the hay, continuing watching the new doctor strange movie or get some of the sandman in.

decisions, decisions. everything on my real to-do list is a tomorrow's me problem.