goods and bads

 i'm really tired. today was a good day, i guess? work was successful with some exciting things to look forward to, and i took mr smear out for dinner because gd isn't feeling good and we found ourselves at alegria: the food and experience were both excellent.

it was my mom's birthday today! we're really excited about her coming her in the next couple of weeks, but hopefully next year we'll be able to celebrate the actual day with her here...

yesterday was pretty awful. work was mostly good, but on my way home i spoke to gd and she filled me in on a deeply disturbing event that she witnessed when she picked mr smear up from school - we're praying to all the gods that he's acting out because of all the unsettling immigration things, and not because of something more dramatic...

saturday was... complicated. we would have had a really nice day with urchin if it wasn't for mr smear constantly pushing boundaries and gd's shoes ripping her feet to shreds. we walked a lot. in the evening we drove through to our cousins for a lovely evening with the family.

the groom's father's toast included a story about dolphins having large clitorises. one of our cousins had a cold and when they gave him the cup of wine to saying a really long blessing, a drop of snot splashed into it.

...

okay, i'm off to bed now.

weak end to the week

 yesterday:

yesterday saw two advancements and two setbacks.

advancement 1: we got a water filter system installed which replaces bottled water and the kettle.

advancement 2: the handyman came in and fixed the kitchen cupboards. he also did the prep-work for the bathtub, which is going to be a story when he comes back for it.

setback 1: i deployed code (that had been tested and vetted) that broke our ci/cd pipelines. all of them. i was working from home and my team lead and i weren't as in-sync as i thought we were, because our head of r&d sent me urgent voice messages at one point. fortunately, i managed to figure out the issue and fix it... by the end of the day. not a great experience.

setback 2: mr smear and i had a fight in the evening that was ridiculous and horrible. gd declared our relationship toxic. things may have been much better today but i'm still heartbroken from the entire ordeal.

[setback 3: mr smear did something really naughty - not maliciously, but that's not the point - and has been given a suspension warning. jesus.]

today:

gd and i started our day with a group of parents talking about a programme for the next school year. i translated as much as i could while still following. our take-away from this morning, which we'd agreed on before the meeting, was that we really need to sign mr smear up to the aftercare / extra-mural activities.

my local credit card has been blocked, and my bank a) didn't inform me and b) has not been reachable. on sunday, i'll be going to find myself a new bank.

otherwise, we managed to find me some clothing, pick up our kid on time, unpack most of our books and arrange them on shelves, get gd's contact lenses just before the place closed, get kiddush wine (and beers and a couple of breezers), finish watching charlie and the chocolate factory, rest, watch some star trek tng, chill and have a pleasant entry into the shabbat.

mr smear has just gone to bed, we're about to continue watching ricky gervais' new special. i didn't know about it until someone i know posted that i should unfriend myself if i find it funny. i didn't laugh at the transcripted parts, but i do think he was completely on point. otherwise, there's some really hilarious material in there.

the big day

yesterday: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

we managed to get out on time with all our stuff, we didn't not forget to bring a towel. we navigated the buses and found the laboratory. we all got our blood samples taken, and mr smear handled it just great.

and then it was done.

an enormous relief washed over us as the unstoppable ball began rolling, in a couple of weeks our results will hit the courts, in another misrad hapnim, and as soon as mr smear is registered gd will get her citizenship status sorted out, and anyone who interferes at this point will be doing so illegally.

...

we celebrated by going out for a delicious lunch at a coffee shop on yehuda hamaccabi, then came home where i spent four hours playing around with testing until it was time to get ready for the wedding.

...

1. omg between the wedding gift and the babysitter, last night was expensive. and when we arrived and everyone wanted to know where mr smear was, i felt like a right idiot for not having asked about kids before.

2. neither gd nor myself realized that i didn't have any button shirts until half an hour before we left.

3. the drive there was fine, i'm very glad i made change by buying a coke on the way to the car because i needed it to get home.

4. the wedding was beautiful and fun and we had a great time!

...

we arrived home around midnight to find two big puddles left by the babysitter's dog. by the time we'd sorted that out and i'd showered and brushed me teeth and fallen into bed, it was pretty late.

...

i woke up this morning with a hangover. today's going to be a milder "big day" as the handyman's coming to fix our kitchen cabinets and we're getting a water filter installed.

sun-tues

we all made it on time to meet the lawyer at misrad hapnim on sunday morning, and we were lucky to land at a desk other than mrs professor quirrel's. still not a great experience, but much, much saner and we were able to at least apply for the visa extensions.

money well spent.

sunday evening we had a team barbeque to celebrate last quarter's achievements (which i was obviously not a part of), it was really nice!

i promised to go shopping with gd yesterday evening, not realizing that it was our company's board-game night, so that sucked a bit. i did, however, manage to get a great pair of summer shoe-sandals (it's what i was looking for, really, but i didn't actually expect to find them!).

over the course of sunday and monday i finally lost patience with the incompetents at the cargo company, they failed to inform me that while i spent two weeks trying to get my status sorted out to avoid paying the customs duties i was wracking up significant storage fees. so i ended up getting everything released for 1.5 times what i should have paid - which was stupidly expensive to begin with - and then to top it all off they refused to do the front-door delivery that we'd specifically paid for. it's very hard to be professional for my coworkers while being furious with fools. (i managed, but it was hard)

gd and i finally hashed out the leftover feelings from friday evening, and although the process wasn't pleasant i think we're in a much better place for it.

this morning our shipment was delivered and left outside our building, i managed to get 280kg up about 1200 stairs in just about an hour, at which point my watch showed me that i had almost reached half of my step goal: i briefly considered throwing it out the window.

work-wise this has been a great week. the highlights were receiving very high praise from my team lead yesterday and today being asked to take over a task as a favour because i'm now The Guy in the team who they trust to tool around with the CI/CD pipeline and git 'er done.

we're all nervous tonight because tomorrow is The Big Day. we're off at cock-fart to get our blood drawn so that they can finally sort out mr smear's population registry entry so that we can get on with our lives.

wish us luck!

the week and weekend in brief

it took me a day to breathe better, two to relax a bit (our lawyer helped).

for most of the week gd struggled with a terrible migraine and was effectively incapacitated.

i spent yet another week trying and failing to get hold of someone at customs to get them to release our personal effects without taxing the shit out of us. we're getting desperate enough that we might pay the tax just to get this over with, and that's another lovely few hundred dollars.

i started wednesday with a personal visit to misrad hapnim to sort out my id and passport, and the contrast in treatment was refreshing / jolting / insulting all at once. the woman who dealt with me was kind, helpful, caring, human. she sits no more than two metres away from the evil **** who's putting us through hell. afterwards, i joined my company at the AWS summit, instead of enjoying a few talks and checking things out i spent the entire day on my feet pitching and demoing. i won't lie, i kind of enjoyed it.

in the evening i took mr smear to his class treasure hunt in the park for lag b'omer. it was a very pleasant evening, he had a great time, and i ran into grootbek and we chatted for a while until my boy finally came back into view.

thursday morning was a mixed mess of work and bureaucracy, but i went into the office for a productive afternoon and finished the week on a good note.

friday: friday was a perfect day, right until dinner time. gd joined me after i dropped mr smear at school and we went into town for a haircut and to find stickers for our postbox and front door, and we made it back to the school just in time to pick him up again. i then took him for a walk and we ended up at the beach, with plenty of playing on the way, at the beach, and on the way back, and i even enjoyed a beer on the beach while waiting for him. we really had a lot of fun together, it was awesome.

we then had an incident at dinnertime that was caused by something really ridiculous, and we all had a horrible night after that.

i was still feeling raw for most of today, we spent most of it doing not much (although i had some good times with mr smear playing video games and watching fun videos) and we sadly missed out on my cousin's pre-wedding family gathering as well as a birthday party for a bunch of the kids in mr smear's class.

everyone's gone to bed already, i just needed to put this all down before i go myself. according to our lawyer we have everything we need, now we just need a bit of luck. praying and breathing. praying and breathing.

one abusive ****

gd actually called her a very rude name out loud because she was so mean to us, i've understood from nystire that in his family's experience this is really her thing.

so we made it this morning! we were on time, we did everything we were supposed to, and this abusive "religious" woman made our lives miserable until we left, frustrated and stressed out and devastated. now we have to go back again in a week accompanied by our lawyer - which will cost us a very pretty penny - and pray that we're able to avoid having to leave the country next month.

...

it's very hard to be focused on work with this shit rolling around my chest. i'm pretty sure i overshared with my coworkers today.

...

i'm tired.

trepidation 2 (double)

the good stuff:

a really nice day out with cm and his family, gd made it as well and we all had a good time.

the latest double-pager of the comics is done! i haven't got the final hi-res copy yet, but it's come out fantastically well and i'm excited to put it out there ^_^

the nerves:

i know what we have to do tomorrow, and i'm worried about getting there in time and about gd and mr smear getting there in time after me. i'm worried about landing on bad bureaucrats or not having everything we need. i know (intellectually) that everything should be fine, but i can't help being stressed.

additionally, we realized this afternoon that the massive mounted cupboards in the kitchen are coming off the wall - and have been doing so since before we moved in. there's SO much work to be done in this apartment...

friday morning breath

 i have Things To Do but i've been chilling the past hour or so and really feeling like i've needed to.

two stressors at the moment: first, the shipment of our personal goods is supposed to arrive tomorrow and figuring out (even with my mother's assistance) how to get it to clear customs has been horrible. second, i'm rather nervous about sunday morning, when we go to misrad hapnim to attempt to extend gd's and mr smear's tourist visas...

the new guy at work seems cool, but i'm having a hard time evaluating him. so far i've had to rescue his new macbook from being very close to bricked and he generally seems a bit... institutionalized (he's been working for a massive corporate for the last decade or two).

anyway, the past two days at work were wildly successful, my first "real work" PRs are opened and i discovered that visual studio code works beautifully when attached to a running docker container which simultaneously blew my mind and enabled me to work comfortably on my new m1 macbook architecture that doesn't play nicely with others.

also, i passed around a link to an older article i'd written about regex (after hearing that there'd recently been an incident due to a misunderstanding about a misbehaving regular expression) and my boss has asked me to write a piece about our product, which i'm actually quite keen to do ^_^

on the way to work yesterday i stopped in at a pharmacy hoping to quickly pick something up, but the pharmacist was nowhere to be found. after taking a number and calling out twice for assistance, i knocked on the glass - at that point he finally decided it was worth communicating with me, but instead of apologetic or understanding he was aggressively rude. that pushed me over the edge and i lost my temper, threw the queue number through the gap under the glass and stormed off - the cashier, who had witnessed this (along with a bunch of other people there), told me that i should be more patient... i was so disgusted and upset that i told her off about how patient i'd been and what terrible service they were providing, but it was only after i'd left that i realized i hadn't said anything about how rude the pharmacist had been and *that* got under my skin almost as much as the bad experience itself.

so i ate my feelings with an early breakfast in order to be able to focus on work, and the irritation has been rising occasionally since.

although my work day yesterday included two exciting successes, the highlight of my day was getting home and taking mr smear for a walk to get falafel. i miraculously managed to convince mr smear to tell me how his day went - he was super excited about the obstacle course they'd run - and we arrived before the place closed and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. it was a great evening with no "but"s, i had a goofy grin on my face for half of it and was filled with non-stop gratitude.

...

i spent my morning either being mindlessly entertained or performing minor upgrades for my side project. i'm super excited about the latest double-page that mr cat has produced, and i can't wait to put it online! i've also just started playing a new game we picked up recently, labyrinth city: pierre the maze detective, and it's really beautiful :)

...

i feel like i've achieved stuff, and i also feel like i need to lie down, so i'm gonna do that now.

busy

. dropping mr smear off at school

. getting in an hour of work

. arriving at ikea just after they opened

. a quick and painless ikea experience

. getting in to work in time for a "linkedin party" - good food, but a very awkward experience

. a positive and productive day

. accidentally mistaking someone else's dinner for mine

. going deep with my first (official) ticket and leaving with a strategy

. arriving just in time to wish mr smear a good night

. rotating wheels and arriving at habima with a few minutes to spare - seeing pg's mother and cm and a bunch of other familiar faces

. tehina ice cream flavour is my new favourite

. an easier and more fun route

. a pleasant bath and posting this and going to bed feeling pretty good

trepidation

today was a mixed-feelings kind of a day. the highlight was a failed walk with mr smear to find a pharmacy - the failure being that we didn't find a pharmacy, but the walk with him was nice.

i'm stressing about money, we're so deep in debt again it's ridiculous. and tomorrow morning we're off to buy chairs at ikea.

joy.

considering the amounts / types of foods i've been eating lately i will be concerned if i *don't* put some weight back on.

a successful start to the new week

 i was already excited enough by my achievement before leaving the office with a sense of having dropped a mic, but the other guys' enthusiasm for my win really took me over the top ^_^

that problem that i woke up in the middle of the night fretting over? we kind of solved it, but i managed to work around it in a way that'll make our dev environments better in the long run. my onboarding hasn't been as quick as i would have liked, but i feel really good about bringing in some value before i've even had a chance to look at the code itself.

...

saturday morning went mostly according to plan, and i picked up a car from ramat gan and drove us down to bitzaron for a lovely day with our friends (mr smear's friend from pre-primary school's family). his friend was a bit miserable and unfriendly, apparently in large part due to having a sprained arm in a cast, but he really got along well with her siblings and we all enjoyed each other's company, great food and a few drinks... and their five year old's utterings.

my goodness, this kid has the cutest israeli accent when he speaks english and one of the highlights of the day was me telling mr smear to say "excuse me" after burping loudly to which he responded "mah slicha?!" (what's this "excuse me" nonsense?!) 🤣

anyway, we had a great afternoon but eventually had to rush home to return the car, my cousin dropped off a prescription for mr smear (he's a paediatrician and mr smear and gd don't have medical insurance yet) and the watched most of the jack black version of gulliver's travels before hitting the hay.

this morning, after dropping mr smear off at school, i enjoyed a battle with the vehicle licensing bureau (they took my money to renew my license but have no record of me paying), and then walked to work for a busy / frustrating / ultimately fantastic day.

...

i'm anxious about applying to renew gd and mr smear's visas next week. i'm praying it all goes smoothly, and i'm excited about the prospect of their status being updated soon, possibly within the next two months. my neck has been giving me trouble and gd just gave me a neck / shoulder massage that's made me faint, so i'm going to bed now.

2am saturday morning

 there's something magical about deliberately not working on shabbat, but having my brain serve up a nightmare that demands making progress on the issue i was unable to solve on wednesday.

thanks, brain.

anyway, yom ha'atzmaut started off with the emotional discomfort left over from some unpleasantness the day before (gd and i had had a confusing fight about walking distances and her health while trying to find furniture the day before), and when we left (late) to pick up the car on the other side of the city we had another one that threatened to stop the day in its tracks (apparently, it was a bad call on my part to actually follow her explicit instructions from the previous day's fight). fortunately we managed to resolve it, but not without thoroughly disrupting our scheduled timeline...

i got on my blades, found the car, picked up gd and mr smear and drove straight into the traffic jam leaving tel aviv. so we were stuck in the car, mostly not moving, for at least half an hour, and it was miraculous that gd didn't have one of her usually perfectly mis-timed panic attacks...

... we finally arrived at ze germans' residence with much less time to hang than we'd have liked, but it was really great reconnecting, and the people i was specifically nervous about running into were there and everything was good. it was crazy how many kids we all have between us - and a few of the kids weren't even there, teenagers too old to spend the afternoon with their families - and both gd and mr smear had a blast.

we managed to get the car back to its spot just in time, i rollerbladed back home and the evening was spent relaxing (see the end of the post for the bit about the raspberry pi).

...

yesterday (friday) morning i dropped mr smear off at school and settled in to work, and gd convinced me to continue furniture hunting with her. we ended up a bit south of the central bus station looking at very nice but very expensive chairs that convinced me to give ikea another try (on condition that it's on a weekday morning). we hopped on a bus, split up on the way home and i arrived in time for a meeting with sailor that somehow started an hour earlier than i was invited for.

the meeting went really well, and i dropped out just as gd returned home and we needed to go pick up mr smear.

his "tom cruise" tooth, which he'd prematurely loosened a week before and had been "flapping in the breathe" for a couple of days (it was so distracted that it had become impossible to look at him *and* listen to him at the same time) finally came out! as i type this i realize that the tooth fairy hasn't done her job yet...

[the tooth fairy makes an appearance]

... anyway, we walked through to tel aviv proper, had a brilliant lunch of lafot at "the congress" (we've been here almost two months and they've never had those!) and then moseyed on over to the mongoose's, because they finally moved in this week - their renovations made a lot of sense and it's even nicer than when we slept on its floor!

on the way home we picked up a bunch of things for the house, and then i tried to use the last hour before shabbat productively but... meh. i was pleased to see that my final payment from my previous employer had arrived and between that and both gd and i being extended more canadian credit we're at least able to get through our "adjustment period" with a little more air to breathe. and this week my mother sent off our freight, so hopefully that'll arrive soon and in one piece - or, at least, the same number of pieces it left in - and our new lives will be coming together nicely.

[sets a reminder to start the process of renewing his family's visas]

...

on thursday evening i finally opened the box of my raspberry pi pico: mr smear definitely didn't have the patience for figuring out how to put it together, and his enthusiasm for me showing him the light flashing when i pressed the button lasted all of five seconds. it would have helped if the instructions had been clearer. last night, after friday night dinner, we watched an episode of battlebots and he was into that stuff. so much so that he threw a wobbly when i tried to get him washed and brushed for bed, he was literally falling asleep in my arms and then indignantly tried to convince us that he wasn't tired...

but i was tired. i didn't last more than a cup of tea longer than he did.

...

*sigh*

it's been an hour, i wonder if i'll be able to go back to sleep now.

bittersweet celebrations

after all our experiences trying to come home, i have some mixed feelings about independence day this year. by and large i'm proud of my people and my country and i'm *really* pleased to finally be back, but every time i hear someone talk about "a home for all jews" i think... it's *supposed* to be, but misrad hapnim isn't honouring that at all and we're either turning away thousands if not tens of thousands of jews, or frustrating them so much that they leave.

...

anyway. this first (short) week at work was mostly good, with minor but to-be-expected awkward moments every now and again. onboarding is a process, but i'm absolutely certain at this point that i'm in a really good place and working on really interesting technology.

...

yesterday was a bit complicated, but i managed to rent a van and pick up a table from urchin, and after a long and somewhat unpleasant walk we managed to find a temporary chair solution so we're all sitting at it right now.

this is good.

...

we're joining ze germans for their traditional independence day barbeque. i'm feeling a bit disconnected so i'm curious as to how things go down.