acceptance

 the mongoose said something to me today that struck a chord: not just that i need a holiday, but that after everything we've been through i actually need to stop planning on doing things and give myself a breather.

he's not wrong. absolutely not wrong.

having said that, it's approaching midnight and i've just fired off the next three pages of the comics script to the illustrator, and i'm quite fired up about it. not least because both my wife and my son think that the concept's really cool and none of us can wait to see how mr cat puts it together, and he's just promised me that he'll be starting very soon on the last page i sent him and the minor corrections to a couple of earlier ones.

...

today was a good day. i took mr smear to meet the mongoose and his partner for a walk in the park, and i spent a large part of the day being very grateful to be here, to be home, to be safe and secure and developing a sense of stability and "rightness" with the world. well, *my* world, at least, regardless of the dumpster fire humanity's facing right now...

mr smear had a fantastic time today as well, it was just a really nice day. less so for gd, but at least she got to stay in and rest. hopefully tomorrow will be better.

we finished watching the "live action" (yeah, right) remake of pinocchio, which was surprisingly good. gd and i played a bit of rayman after putting mr smear to bed, and i watched the expanse until i couldn't keep my eyes open any more. then i went to bed, but couldn't sleep, so i got up and worked on the script.

now i don't know what i'm going to do. and the beautiful thing is that i don't really feel it matters much.

lower

 i woke up yesterday morning really bugged by the shell behaviour from thursday that threw me off, and i set about writing up an article about it. in order to write the article, i put together a script to showcase the offending behaviour... and unlike on thursday, it worked the way it should have.

this sent me into a panicked "i have to test this in my work environment and fix everything before my code's reviewed" mode, so that's how i spent the next hour or two. i felt so dumb, having realized that whatever it was that hadn't worked must have been a combination of different things, and just as dumb for having done my testing in a suboptimal way.

and aside from the sheepishness, i felt completely burned out. i've been feeling this for a while - it's been years since i was enthusiastic enough about what i'm doing to care enough about "diving deep" and investing time. everything's always under artificial time pressure. very little of what i do is stuff that's actually exciting, most of it's made up of things that i inherit because nobody else wants anything to do with them either.

so that was how yesterday started.

mr smear had two playdates yesterday, the first was a rip-roaring success with an english speaking friend, and another a partial success with a hebrew-speaking one. i say "partial" because it started and ended well, and i was super proud hearing mr smear "breaking his teeth" and having mini-conversations in hebrew! but at some point the two of them were playing rayman: legends together and mr smear went into griefer mode, gd and i were mortified and had to get involved.

not cool.

...

yesterday was not october 31st, but our neighbourhood celebrated halloween anyway. gd took mr smear out trick-or-treating with some friends, and they had an amazing time right until one of the houses included two human jump-scares that absolutely terrified him. in the meanwhile, i stayed home, dressed up with two giant bowls of candy, but nobody came. not one person. i don't know if it's because our building is out of everyone's way, or because our neighbours closed the doors a couple of time - which was totally our fault for not warning everyone :(

i watched an episode or two of she-hulk while waiting. it's entertaining, but my gods: its feminism is about as subtle as a brick to the teeth and it really detracts from the experience.

...

this morning has been a gaming morning with mr smear. so far: limbo,  readyset heroes, thomas was alone, hollow night, and currently tron run/r. this ps plus subscription does have value. (it's also how we discovered the ffvii remake and the oddworld: new 'n' tasty! remake of abe's oddysee).

not the best, not the worst

 it's been a weird week.

work: the plan for monday failed abysmally, sending us back to plan a. it took a day to get that done, then another day to implement the feedback, and that left today to work on my primary project. except that needed something little done, and what should have taken no more than an hour ended up taking the rest of the bloody day, and even bit into my evening.

@!#$.

health-wise: i'm feeling... heavier. i've been planning on hitting the gym but i haven't done that yet, and i missed yet another rollerblading route this week. i've been stress-eating a lot, and walking less. so i'm not doing wonderfully in the self-care department.

family: we miss my mom, and we're stressed about her being in south africa. mr smear seems to be doing well, although it was a surprisingly big deal for him to get comfortable saying goodbye at the "hug and go" spot which is a whole 50-100m from the gate :P

gd's been crafting for halloween, which is apparently a big deal in our neighbourhood. and she's been listening to the audiobook edition of neverwhere, which is exciting!

otherwise, i've seen relatively little of my family this week which kinda sucks.

but overall, things seem pretty okay.

the crawl back

 omg i'm tired, but about an hour ago my brain decided to start playing a weird awake-but-dreaming form of the three cups magic trick with itself while my muscles torture me and it took me until now to actually get out of bed.

today... was a good day. my team lead is back, we're aligned, and i finished the day with an actual plan for the work i've been doing (it's kind of a long story about tests and mocking, i've been trying to make something work for a new use case when it shouldn't have been built in the first place).

there's something magical about feeling ready to do things in the evenings, making plans and such. it's definitely a sign that there's some stabilization and healing going on.

i mean, i guess at least i slept

i usually don't sleep very well, but last night i passed out after reading to mr smear and woke up this morning, and i don't recall there being much of the usual "not sleeping" going on throughout the night.

so that was good.

but i did have two consecutive nightmares just prior to 6am that were so awful that i jumped out of bed to get as far away from it as possible.

in the first, i was on a military base and we barely thwarted a night attack by what appeared to be a faction of our own side. there was a lot of bloodshed and, while i don't remember exactly who it was now, i ended up having to shoot someone i knew.

in the second, i was trapped in some little cottage somewhere with another couple of people, and we realized that this place was infested with horrifically oversized, hairy scorpions and crab-like spiders and other weird and dangerous creatures. i woke up in real life after having been woken up from a nap in the dream with one creature under my armpit and another biting into my hand, trying to get them off without flailing.

tiiiired

really tired. not sure why. gd as well.

thursday:

i didn't get to speak to the boss on wednesday, but i did have a "catch up" chat with HR on thursday that - for the most part - allayed my concerns. thursday was also helpful because i started off the day with a coffee with an old friend and pitched some of my ideas, between him and our angels (the mongoose and his girlfriend) there's a possibility of something actually going somewhere in the near future.

otherwise, thursday wasn't bad but it wasn't great either.

yesterday:

yesterday was a cool day. gd and i watched a bit of louis ck (we've bought all his specials and are slowly making our way through them), then dropped off her sewing machine downtown and i got a haircut. we then picked up mr smear and met up with urchin, walked through to jaffa (stopping for a delicious lunch) and thoroughly enjoyed our shuk experience. my wallet, not so much, but i do now have an adult witness to just how awful gd is at haggling... or how amazing she is for the seller.

anyway, it was lots of fun and we all had a great time.

when we got home i upgraded our playstation plus subscription and we spent the rest of the day checking out awesome things. hot wheels unleashed is our new favourite racer.

today:

aside from a mission to find vegan margarine, today was spent indoors resting because we were (and are) exhausted. in the afternoon mr smear started getting restless so i dragged myself off the couch and we went for a long and very pleasant walk, then came home to stuff ourselves with mom's sushi.

now it's bedtime. i'll probably crash. i hope i don't regret it because i've been concerned lately that i'm sleeping many hours poorly rather than few hours well.

concerns

the past few days were pretty good, overall, but yesterday a conflagration of events brought up some anxiety, and it looks like i'm going to need to have a chat with the boss today. i've been doing a pretty thankless job that nobody else wants to do, and i keep being told that i have exactly one responsibility while repeatedly getting fresh, urgent and unrelated tasks dumped on me. it's bad enough that my team lead seems to have forgotten that we agreed that how i handled my post-on-call week was reasonable, we're now talking about introducing performance management benchmarks and i have a feeling that they're going to put me at a distinct disadvantage.

i don't want to work in a place that makes me feel uncomfortable. i don't want to work in a place where i'm paid for a number of hours a week, given a mission and then consistently asked to do considerably more.

...

after delivering the dog on saturday, we had a lovely breakfast together and then rented a pedal boat for an hour. it was hard work, but fun!

sunday was a frustrating half-day, fortunately followed by another holiday (the last for a while). we spent a good chunk of monday with urchin, enjoying a walk-and-talk around the city and a big lunch.

yesterday, gd and i paid social security a visit and it feels like we've got everything sorted out!

gd has decided that she needed another piercing (septum), so that's a thing.

not the dogsitter

 we're about to take the dog to its owner's sister... we've had him since wednesday, and it was mostly a good experience, but on thursday evening he snapped at mr smear and then yesterday there were apparently two more incidents of aggression, so he's out.

this really sucks, because i took mr smear for two long walks with him yesterday and used the opportunity to train both him and the dog, and it felt like both of them were getting the hang of it and establishing their relationship in a positive way. aside from the three incidents, the two of them have been really cool together, but when gd spoke to the owner's sister last night she admitted that the dog had gone for her kid as well when he was younger so maybe it's not so out of character...

my favourite moment from yesterday was mr smear having a conversation with the dog in hebrew: "i only told you to stop when we crossed the street because i love you and don't want you to get killed" 🤣

gd felt horrible from thursday through to this morning, hopefully she's on the mend. i've been exhausted. aside from a few long walks yesterday it was mostly spent consuming media, gaming and napping. today seems like a nice day, maybe we'll go out. or maybe not. we'll see.

crushing - it

the IT part of the title is a private pun, suffice it to say that the past two days have been a lot longer than they should have been. the project i referred to in my previous post has been mostly great, but immediately raised a bunch of issues that needed resolving; i had intended to take today off after doing more than my fair share of hours this week, and it ended up being a half day, and a stressed one at that.

having said that, i did get to take gd and mr smear to the icon festival, where the two of them fought with fake swords and we had a great breakfast before gd felt ill and had to go home. mr smear and i wandered around all the stalls and saw some pretty crazy stuff.

we had fun.

in a surprise turn of events, we were surprised yesterday afternoon by a message asking us to dog-sit again. we agreed, on condition that we received details on what to do in case veterinary services are required, and we received our furry guest yesterday evening. so far things have been good, although we did have one incident of him snapping at mr smear - i made mr smear join us for a walk immediately afterwards and worked on training both him and the dog to re-establish their hierarchy. mr smear's developing a bit of confidence in giving commands, and the dog's starting to get the idea that he actually has to listen to him.

anyway, yesterday evening i sunk myself into final fantasy vii remake, it's absolutely amazing but it's certainly not appropriate for kids.

i spent this evening playing around with quicktime and obs studio for screen recording on a mac, the former i'm hating less and the latter i'm quite fond of.

anyway, i'm very glad tomorrow's friday.

winter is coming

 kind of. i mean, after a week of arguing with me about the weather gd acquiesced and put duvets on our beds yesterday. last night was too hot for me, but this evening i needed a nap and it was really good protection from the air-conditioner :P

today was a much longer work day than planned. i got up and dived in, planning on quitting early to go to the icon festival, but gd and mr smear's plans failed so that's been deferred to thursday and i worked straight through to the evening. which is why i needed the nap.

and now my back hurts a bit, but i really want to go rollerblading tonight so i'm going to risk it.

today i finally finished off a piece of work that has taken me many demoralizing weeks to get through; there're still some irritatingly weird things happening but at least i'm confident that the task is complete.

am i doing it right?

hint: probably not.

i've been restless, lately, and after a pleasant, meditative walk this evening i suspect that the primary reason is that i'm not used to dealing with life without the perpetually levels of anxiety and looming existential crises. i'm also noticing that i'm avoiding taking on any kind of additional stress lately, which includes not doing a bunch of things that i actually want to do. and quite a few things i need to, as well...

the half-day of work yesterday turned into a fair bit more than planned, but the outcome was pretty successful so i guess it was worth it.

today's holiday seemed needed. our financial situation is a little weird at the moment because our bank seems to have lost track of how much money we have or whether our remittance orders have been executed or not (this is not the first time for us, i went through a similar story a couple of years ago with a south african bank), but i splurged a bit on a month of playstation plus membership and the complete king's quest collection.

this morning we completed the first chapter of the console reboot of the king's quest series, and it is GLORIOUS! the interface is really well designed, the story is entertaining and the puzzles are clever enough to be a thought-provoking challenge but entirely solvable by a parent-child team :)

in addition to getting started on the second chapter, i got a taste of tetris effect: connected (beautiful) and played a little of the final fantasy vii remake, which my son insisted on playing a bit of and i'm not certain whether i'm being an awesome parent or a terrible one.

speaking of which, mr smear's behaviour has been trending very positively of late, it really does feel like he's maturing in a lot of ways.

...

we had a delicious dinner delivered this evening because gd's struggling with a headache, i went to bed quite early and then woke up a short while ago with indigestion / reflux.

a grain of sand

i read a post from sandman's mother last night, he was in a terrible motorcycle accident on friday night and they don't know yet just how damaged he is. i really hope he pulls through.

...

we had the relaxed shabbat i'd hoped for. we watched the second half of the "a hope in hell" episode of the sandman series, completed the 1500 piece puzzle we started on wednesday, and in the late afternoon i took mr smear to the beach and we had a really great time.

now i have a half-day at work, mr smear is off school for the next week so we neeeeed to find him things to do!

slow and steady

yom kippur itself went a bit differently than i expected... in a good way. it started with me "tuning in" to the online service, but i really wasn't feeling it and found myself consistently distracted. at some point i just thought "sod it" and grabbed a cup of coffee and settled in to the other traditional israeli way of spending yom kippur, on the couch with my family playing games and watching movies. for a little bit, only, because at some point i got it in my head to break out a 1500-piece puzzle and we're still going strong*.

* okay, we haven't touched it today because my legs and buttocks have been too sore from two days of up-and-down building of the puzzle on the floor.

in the evening went joined the rest of the neighbourhood hanging around outside the chabad service waiting for the final shofar, but as the first blast started a child started screaming next to us and then an ambulance went past with its siren on so all we really heard was an anticlimactic toot.

whatever.

it was a nice day. i really needed the downtime.

yesterday was a mostly positive day at work - although i worked from home again because i'm still not completely over this annoying cold - i completed the work and the boss and i revisited our ci/cd authentication procedures together, and aside from a minor deployment issue my main project for this year is pretty much ready to go!

today, legs and buttocks notwithstanding (nor notwithsitting, but that's beside the point), gd and i went on a failed curtain mission but enjoyed a nice coffee in a cool place in south tel aviv, and i enjoyed a laffa on the way to the school, and then picked up mr smear and spent the rest of the afternoon watching wile e. coyote and spirited away, and trying to give disney+ another chance.

we've just had some downtime reading dog man in hebrew, and i'm looking forward to a relaxed shabbat.

mon/tues

it's yom kippur, i'm trying to fast but i'm exhausted and still a bit "off" (somewhat dizzy) even though my nose situation has been relatively relaxed since yesterday.

sunday was a great day work-wise, yesterday was more of a mixed-bag. i managed to make good progress on my "primary" project - it's primary when there aren't fires to be put out - but then i was invited to a mystery which, after a couple of hours with three of our heads together turned out to be kinda my fault. when we finally understood the ridiculous nature of the problem, i cracked open a beer and started working on a fix... which may not have been the optimal way forward, but it was necessary. so two revisions and lots of testing later i finally managed to get it right, and i was done for the day.

i slept better last night than in a while, but that's only relative, and around 4am i walked into the kitchen to grab a cup of water and encountered a very large cockroach while i was unable to catch...

i was planning on going in to work this morning but as i opened the front door i felt dizzy, so it was another day working from home. which was fine. it was a productive day, and i enjoyed receiving a significant assist from github's copilot when writing my tests. like, a literally amazing assist, because i was having trouble with a mocking framework and it knew all the details the documentation had glossed over.

between that and the last couple of months of AI frenzy regarding image generation, i can't help thinking that we might be fast approaching the singularity...

i got to rest a bit this afternoon, lying on the couch or reading deadpool comics, and took mr smear out for a bit of exercise. then the two of us dived in to the costume quest series on amazon prime which is fantastic, accompanied by wolfing down large quantities of gd's home-made vegan sushi as the pre-fast meal.

and then, after a quick shave and shower, the sun set. i had a quick chat with horseman, then joined gd and mr smear who were enjoying the after-dark park experience with the rest of the neighbourhood. there's something utterly magnificent about relaxing with other parents amidst throngs of kids just doing their thing, a festival-like atmosphere, and for us in particular witnessing mr smear confidently hanging out and getting on nicely with the other kids.

i'm typing this while listening to the live sermon, and feeling an enormous sense of gratitude. may this coming year be better for us all in every respect. may each and all of us evolve and adapt and be better.

gmar hatima tova.

sat/sun

saturday:

successfully getting our phones sorted out and watching the original dumbo

a fair amount of game-time

a frustrating afternoon walk to nowhere

yesterday:

"urgent" flailing about bureaucracy, a call from the school coordinator telling me to hurry to set up a training session that our health services claim to know nothing about (that cost 1.5 hours on the phone)

successfully fixing a critical project

money stress with the credit card date surprise - fortunately our rent was paid before anything else happened

successful context juggling

a long but useful misrad klitah meeting

a pistachio ice cream break after not picking mr smear up from school (we weren't sure if he had his animation and film class or not)

lining up ducks before meeting the boss

a great relief clearing the air and tying up a bunch of loose threads

mr smear's teacher called to check in on the morning's shenanigans, i made it clear that i have experience with israeli bureaucracy and we ultimately agreed on two issues that need to be addressed

a chat with vfmp in lieu of a game night, but with both of us making horrible noises because he has covid in addition to a sick cat

...

about halfway through the night my runny nose stopped running. i'm still uncomfortably dealing with the fallout of four days of post-nasal drip but i was able to get some real sleep afterwards even if it doesn't make up for the deficit...

ill and demoralized

 i'm tired. and i'm sooooo over being sick again, even if it's a mild cold this time and not another round of covid. i think i've been sick more in the last few months than in the last few years, possibly since before covid, but at the same time i have been considerably more physically social than in a really long time too.

either way, i worked from home on thursday and it was mostly not great. having said that, i did manage to resolve the issues i needed to on one project and had my first customer-facing encounter, which went better than i anticipated (my initial hunch proved correct). for the other project, i eventually called it (putting it on hold), tried to implement an apparently trivial part of it as a favour for the boss and discovered that that might be the thing causing problems, so i'll test it again tomorrow and hope for the best.

in addition to the demoralizing nature of fighting a losing battle against a patchy and highly complex ci/cd system, i don't feel like i'm earning trust. it looks like i'm failing while i'm falling on other people's swords, and that's not good.

...

the reason i put down full price on will you snail was that in addition to it looking like great fun, we been watching jonas tyroller for a while and i felt this was a great way to say thank you. mr smear and i have now put in at least two hours into it, and i can honestly say it's brilliant, entertaining and so freaking hard that whoever wrote that "it puts obstacles in all the wrong places and doesn't challenge you enough" was clearly playing it on the easiest setting.

the past couple of days have seen quite a few hours sunk into gameplay, the three of us have completed rayman: legends (for the second time) and mr smear and i played brawlhalla as a team this morning (including capture the flag) and i must say it's definitely helping my mental state overall, in spite of the occasional outbursts. we're not always as cooperative as we need to be, but we're all consistently improving.

...

gd and i watched waltz with bashir yesterday. it was devastating. watching it was devastating, and according to the wikipedia article the movie barely touches on the atrocities that were committed. enabling the massacre was a thorough betrayal of our nation and everything we stand for, and while i'd learned a bit about the massacre before (it's a cautionary tale in the army) i now believe that we should be including its horrors in our holocaust memorials as a reminder of our failure to remember our own experiences and act accordingly.

...

page 25 is finally done! i'm about to make it publicly available, then i'll try to sort out the fact that my phone's still registered for the wrong country because it's a samsung and the account's country cannot be updated. morons.