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.