endings and beginnings

 this past month has been ridiculous, and the past week more ridiculous than the rest. i burned through to 130% of my hours and yesterday, after a really nice farewell call with the department, i finally managed to deploy an almost-complete (one last bug, but my co-workers can handle it) version of the software.

it was an exciting and momentous occasion.

i've now (an hour or two ago) sent off my final invoice and am gearing up for a very busy first day with my new employer tomorrow.

...

mr smear's first week at school was mostly excellent! the highlight of the week was the moment his teacher explained to us that he has sport on tuesdays and fridays, because up until then we hadn't known that israeli schools operate six days a week.

holy shit.

otherwise, we prepped him for holocaust memorial day and apparently he behaved impeccably during the siren. unfortunately, he subsequently sat down and removed his sandals in order to smell his feet. not the most appropriate of follow-ups...

...

today was mostly good. i began it with housekeeping (physical and virtual) while listening to greta van fleet (this article on their trolling is fantastic). then mr smear and i took gd to meet urchin, the two of them went in one direction and mr smear and i headed off to find food because he was "famished". so i bought two decent-sized and delicious poké bowls, i finished mine and he barely touched his.

funny how he had plenty of space for the frozen yoghurt afterwards. and then complained dramatically to gd that he was "famished" again after we met up...

the only thing that wasn't nice was the sudden, painful gas in the evening that lasted an hour or two and made the walk home... unpleasant. i don't know what specifically it is that i ate that caused it, but it was most unwelcome.

anyway, we generally enjoyed our mission around town this afternoon and it was nice to be able to stroll around without any kind of time pressure!

...

now, to bed!

a little thing

i left something out from the "good" section earlier: there's something really powerful about being where you know you're meant to be. it feels *good*. i don't recall when last i really felt like this. 

the good and the bad

the good:

mr smear loved his first (actual) day in school, he made some friends and he demonstrated familiarity with the hebrew alphabet (that's thanks to gd). his teacher and the other kids are really cool and made a fantastic first impression.

and it was a bit *weird* coming home without him and working in quiet for a few hours.

we did find a proper supermarket next door to the school, and i broke my fast early today on a new vegan flavour of my favourite cereal of all time.

metal lords is pretty damned metal.

the frustrating:

losing my cool when being "helped" by a representative of the transport ministry; it was shitty and unprofessional service, but i was honestly more upset by the sheer stupidity of the design of their website forms.

we have mosquitoes in the apartment and they're real assholes.

both good and frustrating:

as i posted last night, i got hit with sdk bullshit when working directly with aws resources that didn't happen when working against localstack. i very luckily figured out where the problem was quickly even if it didn't actually make any sense, but it took a few hours to refactor everything to use lower-level calls.

then i made a change in one package not realizing that i was breaking something in another, and i needed them both to work and it took a least an hour or two of insane debugging efforts to put the pieces of the puzzle together. it was a long day, but getting everything running and successfully tested was rewarding and i'm keen to dive back in to the next thing tomorrow.

otherwise, it's my last week with the company and a bunch of "lasts" have been going well. and in general, i'm excited about starting my new gig next week and feeling pretty good about the state of the world. i guess it helps that i've managed to make up so many hours in the past couple of weeks.

first and last days

 the past week was dominated by my scrambling to complete my final project. it's stressful because i keep hitting walls and i get the feeling that my "replacement" (a coworker that i generally get along well with) really doesn't seem very invested in its success... not entirely unfamiliar, i'm reminded of my last team-lead role in montreal...

having said that, i am enjoying the work itself.

over the weekend we rented a car2go for the day and drove up to visit kibbutz cousin, her son and his daughters were there and we generally had a lovely day!

today we took mr smear to his new school, talked to the principal and counselor, then hung around with the teacher who's pretty much the school's answer to hagrid. the school feels kinda like a real-world analog to hogwarts, they're got a bunch of animals and an urban farming section that the kids are responsible for, a "junkyard", and plenty of facilities.

after that, i took a bus to the licensing bureau. i had to wait two weeks for the appointment, then more than an hour. i was falling asleep by the time my number was called, and i was out of there less than five minutes later with instructions for renewing my license that i'd discover later are impossible to follow :/

anyway, i've just spent four hours figuring out and coming up with a workaround for the fact that the C# aws sdk's dynamodb object persistence model manipulates datetime strings under the hood which breaks all our contracts :(

anyway. let's see how tomorrow goes!

to this year in tel aviv!

it's passover, and easter, and i'm working while everyone else is on vacation... this is fine.

my neck's in better shape since last week, but it's still not good and giving me a fair amount of trouble.

work last week was pressured but good, friday we took gd to get her nose ring "fixed" *again* and otherwise had a very nice day.

the biggest stress from last week was getting to our cousins' seder table on friday evening, of *course* all the car2go cars had been fully booked for the holidays months in advance... kc's parents picked us up and then we had additional drama because another family had been abandoned by the taxi driver they'd actually booked :/

anyway, everyone eventually made it and it was a blast. it was so great to spend an evening catching up with all the cousins, everyone had an amazing time and even mr smear enjoyed himself immensely ^_^

yesterday was recovery day, and today's... well... mr smear has been all over the place (now finally off screens after being banned from touching my macbook because he punched the screen in frustration).

*sigh*

going to bed with anger

not me, i'm going to bed with sadness. mr smear is full of anger, it's mostly directed at me and it's very unclear precisely over what.

... 

my neck is slightly better, but still bad enough that i was disfunctional for half the day and had to skip yet another rollerblading group. i managed to drive to and from the wedding last night, though, and it was lovely seeing the family!

turning over the stone

[started writing this as i got up, then got distracted] 

it's bad enough i just woke up from a horrible nightmare in which i went into impossible debt borrowing from the mafia and was still unable to take care of the things that brought me to borrow in the first place, but i messed up my neck while dreaming it. i can't look left and i need to drive tonight.

that nightmare is definitely a reflection of reality, in one month (tomorrow we'll have been here a month!) we've amassed way more debt than we did in many months when moving to cape town and are precariously close to maxing out our credit cards... at least the job i'm starting soon pays well enough to start reducing that debt, that's something i didn't have for years after moving to cape town...

i finally got in touch with the licensing bureau yesterday and learned that i can drive temporarily on my south african license, and this evening we'll be using car2go for the first time. i'm trying not to think about how much money this would have saved us over the course of the past few weeks :p

over the weekend - we had a generally quiet and relaxed shabbat - we met (and approved of) the babysitter and i put on my rollerblades and did a circuit for the first time since we arrived. i was out of breath when i got to habima, but otherwise it was good and i'm mostly impressed by all the new bike paths.

[resumed] 

we had a fun time meeting up with my old neighbor yesterday (even if mr smear was bored), and sammy called to catch up in the evening which was great! 

also great: we received a phone call from the municipality this morning, and mr smear is going to school after the holidays!! 

mr cat has finished the latest page of the graphic novel, our couch has arrived, our mattress is on the way, i'm slightly nervous about driving this evening. back to work. 

things are looking up but i need to sit down

 the sofa's being delivered on monday. as is the replacement mattress.

my feet hurt.

this has been a really crazy week, and it's amazing to me that it's thursday evening already.

...

on tuesday, around lunchtime, i had a chat with the CEO. it was a pleasant chat, and he told me a few things that made it clear that we're even more aligned than i believed. either that or he's a *really* great salesman. either way, i made a decision and signed on the dotted line(s), a little while later i saw that they'd signed the contract too, and gd says that my face literally changed colour and my freckles came back.

...

[breaking news - i passed out while posting this, then woke up to phone calls checking in because there's been a shooting in tel aviv. a cousin is locked in a restaurant while the police/army searches for the attackers. jesus.]

...

the rest of the day and the following day were filled with easy conversations with recruiters informing them that they could leave me alone now and hard conversations with the other companies, one of which was about to make me an offer that i could have waited for, but didn't. the VP that called me up has a bit of a speech impediment which made the conversation even more difficult...

but i'm really feeling confident that i've made the right call.

...

i'm trying really hard to have a good relationship with my son, the past couple of weeks have been hard on all of us and i've been forgetting to just let go of a whole bunch of things. i think today was better.

...

finally, we received an important update today from our lawyer: we officially have the court order we've been waiting for! it's going to take another ridiculously long time to get the blood tests done (the earliest we could book was the end of may), but at least things are finally moving.

hmm. i wonder if perhaps we wouldn't have better luck at a different lab. i'll check on sunday.

...

[damn, they still haven't caught the shooter(s) yet]

bad feelings

hoary sheet.

so aside from working frantically until after 1am this morning, i've (so far) done a ten-hour day and we've all only managed to go outside for a short while in the evening.

i have been having real trouble making up my mind, and i surprised myself by telling my potential boss that it'd be much easier to make a decision if the two offers weren't practically identical. now i've got a meeting with the CEO tomorrow at lunchtime and i guess i'll be making a choice at the end of it, one way or the other.

the relief is that it looks like i may have a third offer on the table by then, which will make things less stressful for me. but no matter what happens i'll still feel bad for at least one company that didn't get me when the market is feeling so worryingly dire.

...

i announced my leaving to the department this morning.

what day is it?

 this past week was absolutely nuts, even if i could write down all the highlights i'm sure i'd be missing important stuff.

• i don't even want to go to ikea again. we went at the worst possible time, thursday evening in rishon le'tzion, and it was horrific.
  at least mr smear got to ride on a real train.
• we still don't have furniture. but i have managed to pay rent / the real estate agent / legal fees on time.
• work has been good, but it's been hard making up hours. my phone now makes me nervous.
• i've now got two job offers that i'm excited about, but the mongoose is telling me things that i'm not convinced are correct and trying to decide whether these offers are good or not is a confusing mess.
  i have had some very interesting conversations, some of them with the wrong people.
  i've officially given notice on the last day before i would have been contractually obligated to continue for an additional month.
• i've been declining interviews for companies and one of them has been desperately trying to guilt me into coming in anyway. they even tried to convince me to come in during their "happy hour" for whiskey.
• we still don't have furniture.
• mr smear enjoyed two playdates with kids his own age on saturday, and they were wildly successful!
• mr smear has lost his second tooth in two weeks, the tooth fairy had to go out after bedtime to make change...
• we're still struggling to get mr smear into a school, but it does kinda feel like we're making progress.
• while our washing machine was disconnected we used a laundry service called "kvisi", and they destroyed four of gd's garments. then they took them back to fix them and they returned them even worse. then they called this evening to explain to us how we should be satisfied that they've done the best they could, and that they're willing to offer us a discount for the next time we use them. 
• summer is coming.