not so successful

 friday's pool party was a raging failure in our book. gd and i were heartbroken to see mr smear sabotage any potential fun or friendship (although he did eventually play with a couple of kids in the pool towards the end). most of the parents were super awkward with us, too, although i did get into it with one mother who was asking about our travails and i really bummed her out.

in the evening we had an episode where i ended up "containing" mr smear, and it seemed to work. last night we had a similar incident and i tried it again, and it definitely didn't work.

this parenting shit is confusing and our story right now feels pretty tragic.

i had a long chat with scrapper yesterday, and he had a fair amount of criticism to share with me on the topic, i can't say that i disagree with any of it...

this evening gd was furious with me because we went to the school to pick up his books and i ran off with a coughing fit at the exact worst possible moment, and that somehow made her miss the opportunity to connect with the mother of a kid that mr smear *does* get along with.

...

up until today i was just as sick as before. long, difficult nights and extreme sinusitis and lots of coughing. gd, on the other hand, got progressively worse over the course of the weekend. i took yesterday (sunday) off and we ran a gauntlet of the maccabi health system, and it seemed as though they were making a real effort to convince us not to join them. the doctor she saw, an older ex-south african who either hated us or simply has an awful bedside manner, sent us off for PCR tests as well.

having learned my lesson, i passed and gd did it so that only one of us would really be in trouble if we had covid - the problem with the current system is that if i do the PCR test on my last day of covid and the test is positive, they count the isolation as if the PCR test was done on the first day which makes no sense whatsoever.

i had to stop working for an hour and go off to the pharmacy to get the result because their systems hadn't emailed them to us. at least the result was negative. and gd's been prescribed antibiotics which seem to be working, so that's good.

finally, while we expected gd to be covered by our family's healthcare within ten days from wednesday, we hadn't expected her to be covered by tomorrow, so that sms was very welcome!

...

i've been reading quite a few distressing articles about the encroaching climate apocalypse over the past couple of days, and i'm feeling like the only way forward for me personally is to bury my head in the sand and pray. and try to make the most out of however many manageable days we have left.

...

for the past couple of evenings i've been writing up our experiences from the past couple of years, which triggered this post about the state of south africa. i cannot tell you how grateful i am to have managed to get my family out of there, and i'm praying my mother, the rest of my family, friends, and anyone else who can gets out before becoming just another statistic.

...

i'm extremely anxious and frustrated at work. i've been assigned a great task but i have to do it with primitive (relative to what i'm used to, at least) tools and contexts that i'm not familiar with, and if i don't succeed by deadline then the project dies. i'm being tested here on something important and with everything else going on i'm feeling doomed right now. as if i didn't have enough on my plate.

...

over the past week we've managed to overcome quite a few hurdles.

one: it took many days and lots of frustration but we finally managed to hack our way around initiating a transfer from my mum's israeli bank account. i'm still stunned by the incredibly poor UX that managed to fail in almost every aspect of the procedure, it was almost as if it was designed badly on purpose.

two: last week i tried to contact my mobile phone operator to update my payment method, but i couldn't log in with any of my numbers. i tried contacting them on friday, but their whatsapp chat-bot only works during business hours. i tried again today and was unable to authenticate myself. just then i received an sms telling me to call the finance department because i owe them money, and the sms had a phone number! so i called the number up and we eventually got sorted.

they somehow had my first university email address, which hasn't been active since 2004. the address they had on file was from before my mother and i bought an apartment together in 2009 (which we're now deeply regretting having sold, but anyway). and here's the best part: they'd been charging my old israeli credit card attached to a bank account that i closed in 2013 and that had expired most of a decade ago. wtf?! none of that makes any sense!

...

i took a sudafed a short while ago (more "in case" than anything after the past two weeks), and i'm not certain if i'm going to stay awake much longer or not. if i do, though, it's going to be studying for tomorrow because this task is really messing me.