the aging process

 it's a saturday morning, our plans have fallen through, i've managed to get all of this week's posting for the sonnet comix project done, and i'm wondering if i should try getting into some game development lessons (the godot engine looks very interesting).

the work week ended on quite a dramatic note: not only did our VP of marketing "resign" very suddenly, but our dev team had to navigate a very hands-on product manager and his and our feelings when he sprung a ~20K line pull request on us. hilarity did not ensure. by thursday evening, just before i left, we'd managed to bring in the stuff we agreed on and hopefully we'll close this story tomorrow morning. everyone has learned some important lessons.

on wednesday evening, midway through the drama, i joined a couple of my teammates for drinks near kikar rabin. it was fun, and definitely out-of-the-ordinary for old-fart me. we had a very exciting discussion about doing some game development together!

our status here in israel is complicated and highly stressful at the moment, i'm praying that our insurance situation will be sorted out in the next couple of days but it looks like even mr smear won't have proper health cover until gd's status change in a few weeks' time.

yesterday, i joined my mom on a mission to a retirement complex next to the university. the apartments and the complex and everything seem like a really great deal! we then stopped for coffee on campus, and it really felt like "coming home" - i miss my studies...

my neck / shoulders / back have been in distress this week, i think i've been unconsciously slouching.

last night a cousin we've never met before came for dinner to say hi to my mom and we had a wonderful time catching up!

and speaking of cousins, we have a new one this week: wp's wife has given birth!

and now to (chill / learn) and enjoy our last day with my mom before she returns to south africa tonight.

shell shock

 i'm exhausted, highly stressed, partially relieved, generally confused.

1. my mom got covid last week - which is really sucky timing and is possibly my fault. i'd been over the symptoms for a couple of days before she arrived, but still... fortunately she managed to make the wedding on wednesday (she did an antigen test before we left), but we got her pcr result the next day and it was positive. also fortunate: that she just had a scratchy throat and was really tired for a few days, but nothing more serious.

2. the wedding was beautiful and great fun, but the friday night with the family after the wedding was particularly special: my cousin has barely spoken in his thirty years on this planet, and it seems like he was saving all his words for his speech. it was long, non-stop entertainment, hilarious and touching and brilliant.

3. on sunday gd and i stood for seven hours in misrad hapnim in an attempt to get her status updated. mrs professor quirrel demonstrated to me, in our first interaction of the day, that she's not malicious: she's literally too stupid to do her job or understand the consequences of her incompetence. fortunately, her manager took so long to get a response to her that she "had to leave", and we were passed on to her coworker who is competent and pleasant to deal with. gd now has extended permission to remain in the country and we have an appointment to update her status (and mr smear's, i was mistaken last week thinking that him getting an id number was sufficient) in about three weeks' time.

4. i'm really, really struggling with insurance and insurance brokers. in both countries. jesus. we have no medical insurance because... because the insurance people are making getting cover a lot more complicated than it should be (we started the process of getting insurance a week before the 12th, when my south african cover ended, and it's now two weeks later and they're asking us when we want the cover for).

5. we're really struggling with teachers' strikes and summer holiday planning. at least we've managed to get mr smear registered for summer school and aftercare, finally, but the rest is so damned confused and i'm outta bandwidth and gd doesn't understand hebrew.

6. my personal banker is a complete moron, and/or the banking system is broken.

7. our financial situation is a mess. we're really stretched thin.

8. work has been really intense, it's nice to earn a good salary but they're paying me to not have any kind of work/life balance (during "crunch" periods, at least) and of course, we have my first "crunch" in forever while my mother's visiting.

right, back to work.

my evening in a nutshell (there's a theme)

1. filling out forms for travel insurance that will cover us for everything except the things we might actually need it for

2. signing up to try out disney+ and spending far too long figuring out that their parental controls are completely broken. now trying to get a refund as we haven't watched anything yet.

3. submitting a request to reverse my payment for my license renewal because the license bureau still hasn't responded to my requests and is now sending me letters telling me i haven't paid

4. giving up on payoneer, who've been messing me around for a week or two - they won't let me add my israeli bank account even though all my details are correct and match my profile

5. moving my patreon payouts to paypal after remembering that i have an israeli paypal account from before i left. even though i've added my new phone number as my primary number, they won't let me remove my old number and they insist on sending security codes to the old one only so i can't add my new israeli bank account.

dreaming

i managed to get cat poop on the top of my foot and tried to find a functional bathroom in the giger-esque men's locker rooms to clean myself.

i was in a college dorm with a bunch of jewish friends when an ISIS-like terrorist group came in. i futilely tried to reason with them, but i knew they were going to attack and i did what i could to try and get everyone out. just as we found ourselves going head-to-head with them, a bunch of christian clowns (or something? some kind of performance troupe) unluckily found themselves between us and in the confusion the other two groups went one way and we went another.

a witch who kind of looked like bette midler was trying to come back to life but she needed to be kneaded into a kind of spaghetti and cooked into her original shape. her attempt was mostly succeeding just before i woke up.

mid-week madness

i've got to go to bed soon, this week has been ridiculous so far.

FIRST THINGS FIRST! as of this morning, my wife and son both appear in my population registry record and my son has his israeli id number! next stop, getting gd's status updated - we're hoping to make some progress on sunday morning.

my mom's been here with us since saturday morning, and it's been really great having her here ^_^

on sunday morning i went to the courts and managed to pick up copies of the judgement.

my bank situation's a real mess, i spent an hour yesterday morning with them figuring out how to send money, but a day later and it's now clear to me that i have no access to my credit card account or any human support, and i literally don't have access to my own money at this point :/

i've been over covid since friday, but it took me until today to get clearance certificates from the doctors.

work has been challenging and fun. we're gearing up for (an anticipated) re-org. my coworkers were really impressed by the voiceover i did for our hackathon presentation :)

wonder no more

good grief, that "exhaustion" from last week? we got covid. like, this week was really tough, and in retrospect i should probably have taken a sick day or two - i only realized this morning that i'm still in "contractor mode" because i've spent so long not getting paid for not working regardless of the reason.

gd and i have both spent the past week perpetually exhausted and frequently faint (not getting enough oxygen), but i've been powering through, in particular so as not to let my team down for my first company hackathon. we failed to demo, unfortunately, but we generated a lot of enthusiasm for our idea and we *did* actually get it to work at one point... i'm amused that so many people enjoyed my voiceover for our presentation :P

for me the biggest struggle this week was that aside from one night (wednesday night) i've barely been able to sleep. even last night, when i'm clearly done with the main symptoms. in the aftermath of the first time (and last time) i got covid i suffered weeks of sinusitis,  and it looks like this time around is much of the same :(

...

otherwise, two big events happened this week. the most important one happened yesterday: we finally received our judgement, the state officially recognizes that mr smear is my son! we're expecting him to be entered into the population registry within the next couple of weeks, and as soon as that's done gd can make aliyah and we can all have access to all the rights and services that we should have been entitled to half a year ago...

and there was much rejoicing ^_^

secondly, the past couple of weeks have been extremely financially strained and as of this morning i finally have money in my account. it's particularly comforting to know how much i can expect each month (the tax consultant wasn't kidding about them hitting me hard), and i'm finally in a position where i can make plans and budget and so on.

...

finally, mr cat has produced the latest couple of pages and i'm looking forward to posting them over the weekend. which for me, has already begun. and in the wee hours of tomorrow morning i'm off to pick up my mom from the airport! exciting times ^_^

halfway through the weekend

 right, so it's shavuot tonight, and i'm exceedingly grateful that we have a long weekend because this week *really* took it out of me. gd's been sick the past couple of days, and i'm not sure if i was sick myself or if i was just so thoroughly exhausted that i felt sick (i almost fainted last night). i've spent most of yesterday and today just resting, and trying to turn my brain off.

that hasn't been easy, but i can thank the boys (re-watching season 1), deadpool (re-reading volume 1) and a mindless mobile game called alien shooter for helping.

[pauses to play another round or two]

there are plenty of things to be stressed about, but i'm already feeling better for having rested and done a lot of nothing. mr smear has been taking an interest in the fitness videos i was watching (browney) and not only was inspired to do push-ups, but i took him out twice today and he was as excited to impress me with his outdoor gym efforts as i was!

we also played some command & conquer and don't starve together, which was great :)

between yesterday and today i managed to get one of my unifi network appliances hooked up, and my computers are finally able to connect properly which is a huge relief.

rough stuff

 yesterday afternoon was first heartwarming, then heartbreaking. i finished my work day on a good note, managing to get out of the office just in time to make it to my boy's first "performance" - his class did a dance for shavuot. he was great, we were super proud.

and then he had a run in with the kid he calls "his nemesis", and it was clear as day that he was the antagonist. and not just to that kid. i tried to find a good opportunity to apologize to the parents but they wouldn't make eye contact. when i told his teacher i was concerned, she told me this is a daily occurrence.

talk about letting the wind out of my sails.

so yesterday evening was ghastly for all of us.

...

i've spent my last two mornings dealing with insurance brokers, and tomorrow morning will be more of the same. also, we've pretty much hit our debt ceiling. that's really scary, but there's really nothing to be done until i get paid...

...

today seemed to be a bit better for him. for me, i spent all day bashing my head against a wall of dependency resolutions. i finally got things running - not working - at 5pm and desperately wanted to check in my changes and walk away... but it would take another hour / hour and a half to further disentangle the dependencies for the pre-commit hook that refused to let me do so.

i'm emotionally depleted at this point.

...

last night was a struggle, so i installed some mind-numbing games (bacterial takeover is one of them). this evening: same. although i did pick up the remastered command & conquer collection and i think mr smear is ready for them... i'm really looking forward to introducing him :)