off and on again

or on and off again.

friday:

in the evening i walked through to scrapper's farewell. i ended up having some really interesting conversations in the kitchen and in retrospect i think i was the only person not high for them.

saturday:

bedtime was an explosion of unhappiness, triggered by an incident at the park. aside from that and gd feeling really sick, mr smear and i had enjoyed a really lovely day together that included a good frisbee session.

yesterday:

i wasn't feeling 100%, but i did go in to work. it was a day, i guess? i was stunned when i looked up to see how dark it had gotten by 5pm.

today:

i worked from home today after a long night with a looming throat infection - it was mostly fine during the day, and now it's started up again. i started the day by taking gd to the clinic to get her reassigned to a new doctor because her experiences so far with the previous one have been pretty awful.

i made good progress at work, and things generally feel positive with my team lead.

spider-man: no way home is a beautiful way to tie up the existing franchises and pull an into the spider-verse.

spot's grandmother's just passed away, which makes me sad.

one foot in front of the other

wed: vaccine failure and a report about mr smear getting along with the other kids, not cooperating with the sports teacher, being too disgusted by snails to be in the same room as them, and making good progress with his reading and writing.

mr smear's "friends" being warned away from him? we're not sure that's what happened, but we're concerned

dod's proposal

two days of intense juggling at work

gd coming down with a cold

today so far: getting caught in the rain after dropping mr smear off at school, making page 26 public

what a long, strange week it's been

 i finally had my performance review yesterday, and it was mostly positive. after all my discomfort and anxiety the past while, it turns out we didn't have a trust problem, just a communication problem. and we've now identified it and we're working on it.

it's an enormous relief.

on sunday evening i went off to a reunion of the last unit i served in, but i arrived to discover that i hadn't registered properly and they wouldn't let me in. so the half hour i spent waiting for nystire to rock up felt eerily like the last six months of my service... he was good enough to skip the thing and join me for a walk and a drink, it was nice catching up properly (it's different without the kids).

one of my coworkers and i then spent an hour or so playing around with a gamemaker tutorial, and we learned some interesting things! i've subsequently spent the last couple of days rebuilding it and polishing it for mr smear, it's been a great learning experience and lots of fun ^_^

work has been... busy. an insane amount of juggling, but for a good cause.

last night was, i think, the first time i've headed out to the rollerblading group feeling solid. i was feeling quite dry when i arrived, though, and picked up an iced-coffee, which i suspect helped - but the second half of the 25km was still a fitness struggle and i finally got home with big blisters. on the flip side, it was a really, really fun route!

i haven't slept much, but what sleep i did get was good. i've got a bunch of stuff to take care of this morning, not least of which being that i need to make sure mr smear actually gets his flu vaccine...

it's not my party but i'll sulk if i want to

 wednesday was rough, my neck was hurting all day after sleeping badly and by late afternoon i was starting to have headaches and needed to get out of there.

wednesday night i seemed to have gotten my pillows right again (and marked them, this time), and so thursday was much better. i ended the week on a very positive note, super excited by getting the thing i wanted to work working.

yesterday morning i made the mistake of enthusiastically setting up a test for the thing i got working on thursday. setting it up took a lot of effort and time, testing it was hard, and the ultimate failure sucked. not an optimal way to spend a friday.

we did, however, manage to get the bathtub's drain unclogged.

in the late afternoon i took mr smear for a walk down to the marina, we had a really good time.

this morning started with dragon's quest builders 2. i cannot praise this game highly enough! it's what happens when final fantasy meets minecraft, and i was thrilled at how invested mr smear was in reading all the text. and playing the game, which is exquisite. and the music was so lovely that i ended up passing out behind him on the couch for a while.

that gave me more than a couple of hours of "me time". then we all headed out to the birthday party. gd's neck has been in spasm since she got up this morning, so she bailed a few minutes out of the house, and mr smear and i had a nice walk to the trampolines. we arrived in time to verify that my registration earlier this week was valid, and after i installed a dice app on my phone we played an oversized game of snakes and ladders.

so far, so good.

the party started off well, but some kid told him that only one kid per trampoline was allowed and he walked out of the fun area to sulk.

i don't know how to deal with the incredible sulk. i tried supportive, i tried manipulative, i tried coercive. i failed. over and over. every time i almost succeeded, i failed. eventually, many lifetimes later, i managed to convince him to come give it one more try and then we arrived at the gate to realize that he'd been so upset he'd ripped off and thrown away the bracelet so we weren't allowed in anymore.

genius.

at least there was a whole vegan pizza just for us and he got his own private dessert in lieu of cake, and then end of the party was positive.

i mean, mostly. i'm not taking him alone to a party ever again. it was heartbreaking and horrible.

over the hump day

it's raining right now and i need to go to the office... like, really raining heavily as i type this and it's beautiful and warm and cosy inside.

yesterday was a pretty good day work-wise, but i was completely buggered by the afternoon and it was tough keeping my eyes open. then i caffeined up for the office game night and had a good time, making it home just in time to say goodnight to mr smear.

i slept horribly.

i've managed to get a couple of admin items squared away this morning, and now i'm going to do some dishes and be off!

dishing it out

 we're two days in and this isn't a bad week so far.

work-wise, iffy but trending positive. the week started sour with my team lead "taking me off the project", but this morning i got him on board with letting me close it out and so far mostly good. i also managed to deliver something everyone is excited about, in spite of losing most of yesterday to writing up last week's incidents...

mr smear was still at home today, although i suspect he should've been back at school already. he really likes chilling at home. i guess i should be grateful he's feeling safe and secure.

i managed to upgrade the mobile app on saturday night! expo's new system is a little weird, but good enough, and it felt good to do something with the project.

this evening i met up with scrapper for frisbee. we did play a little, but we also did a very basic old-people's workout at the park gym and we caught up on a ton of stuff. it was fun.

finally - doing the dishes has been a big deal for both of us. it's like a forced meditation for me, and a huge break for gd. i wish i'd thought of this before.

...

i had a revelation a couple of days ago, and it's that as high as the cost of living in tel aviv may be, it's not actually as expensive to live here as it was for us in cape town. of the three cities i've lived in in the past decade, cape town is by far the most expensive.

economics are weird.

last night on-call

 yesterday ended on a much better note, although mr smear was still fiery hot and i lost the argument about him sleeping in his own bed - until the early hours of the morning, when gd eventually lost it (after i'd spent the night receiving kicks to the nether regions and elbows to the eyes) and he left ours.

today was a recovery day. i don't know why i hadn't thought of it before, but gd *hates* doing dishes and i kind of enjoy it, so the other day i offered to take over and since yesterday it's been my responsibility. everyone's happier with this arranged, so that's cool. and the few times i did it today were... meditative.

otherwise, we spent the whole day indoors, quietly watching things or playing games. the only constructive thing i did was give feedback to mr cat, who was understandably unhappy with me realizing that the background needed a big change after producing what he thought was the final draft...

it's better, though.

i guess the other thing i did today was play around with the brave browser, which is now basically a thin skin for chrome with better privacy stuff and generally improved performance because of it. i now warmly recommend it, not least because i didn't have to give anything up - all my extensions work very nicely and the profile system is exactly the same.

not quite the weekend i was hoping for

 the past few days haven't been all bad. but they haven't been particular good, either.

tuesday and wednesday were a continuation of the deep dive into unhandled promise rejections in aws lambdas, which was not fun but did produce some interesting learnings.

tuesday and wednesday i worked from home after i found myself having a coughing fit five minutes before entering the office, i seem to have picked up from mr smear. who has subsequently gone on to become really sick with something else - he's been spiking a high fever since yesterday and we're keeping a close eye on him.

gd reported that the two of them got their bloodwork analyzed recently and the results were excellent, so that's encouraging. vegan ftw.

unfortunately, by the time i was ready to head back into the office on thursday my team lead was off sick. i'm being reminded of "optics", because he's never around to see the successes but i have to report to him whenever i have trouble. this is not boding well. especially because i was feeling much more confident by thursday and getting all sorts of little things squared away. i'm sure he was or will be around for my recorded knowledge share which i'd been too overwhelmed to prepare for, and i feel like i made an ass of myself.

...

by the time dinner arrived (at the office) yesterday i was utterly *done*. but i really wanted to go support my teammate at his improv competition. i'd ordered a meal from four one six, and was thoroughly impressed by their vegan shwarma, but their portions are so big i had to stash the remains (about half of it, even after significantly overeating) in the fridge. then we left.

we hadn't made it to the bus stop across the road before our support team got hold of me, asking me about something i was unfamiliar with. fortunately one of the coworkers with me could help, so i passed on a suggestion from him, and from that point until we walked out of the improv competition things were calm. i got to have a drink, and a beer, and enjoy the entire show without being paged, and the show was brilliant - most of it, anyway, there was one team i found a bit tiring - but we generally had an excellent time. our coworker's team won the evening, and our coworker definitely stole the show - he was quick, and he was hilarious!

after congratulating the team, i opened my phone to find that the support agent hadn't quite understood the instructions. so i clarified - but having no experience, i worried that i might simply be giving bad advice. so when i got home, after a quick shower, i sat down and began tinkering. if i got home around 11pm, and i went to bed around 1.30am, i can say that most of that time was spent diving deep into lambda logging.

finally satisfied that i knew what i was talking about and had tested all the possibilities, i squished into the bed next to a furnace - mr smear has been too uncomfortable to sleep in his own bed, apparently - and because he was overheating we were sleeping with the aircon on.

conditions were less than ideal.

...

and then woke up to the pager alarm at 4.40am. i spent the next hour and a half bleary-eyed, trying desperately to figure out where the fire was and unable to reach any of the team leads nor our department head. this is not the first time. and i felt especially guilty trying to contact these guys at stupid o'clock in the morning when one was sick and the other having just had beer with me before continuing on for more drinks with the other.

and then, all of a sudden, the metric returned to normal.

it had been a false alarm the entire time.

stunned, i climbed back into bed.

stunned, i woke up fifteen minutes later to another page.

a different one. after an hour and a half unable to find the fire, it also auto-resolved.

it had been another false alarm.

i crawled back into bed.

...

and woke up about three hours later to urgent messages from our support team asking me to investigate and then join a call with a super-important client.

being on-call for my employer is awful. it's ugly. and it makes me feel things like "i hate my life". i'm building resentment at every incident. i don't want this, and i don't think i'm being paid enough for this.

another coworker came to the rescue, fortunately, and a little while later i was ready to take a bus to the office to rescue my dinner leftovers.

...

which had been turfed by the cleaning staff.

...

the rest of the day has been recovery, and a fair amount of silent prayer that the rest of the weekend will be quieter. and i posted a haiku i was inspired to write yesterday. you're welcome. i don't know where i'm going to find the energy to upgrade the mobile app for my side-project, which has been neglected so long that it's no longer supported :/

...

we've been making great progress on the sonnet comics front. so that's good.

pray for me.

so far, not amazing

 my sunday didn't begin so well, it started with the beginnings of a sniffle and a sore throat which has gotten progressively worse. thanks, mr smear. as the day progressed i became more disheartened, i'm very unhappy with having to babysit a highly complex solution that's full of components on fire, and the more i looked into things the less certain i became of what was relevant and what wasn't.

after a long day, i came home, watched an episode of pokémon indigo league (we've finally agreed that we can put aside the animal cruelty and exploitation and give the series another chance) and finished watching the chamber of secrets. almost immediately after putting mr smear to bed, while i was trying to decide whether to chance going to bed myself, my pager went off.

i had neither the knowledge nor the permissions to deal with the issue, so my team lead put me in touch with another team lead and the two of us worked on the thing (i bore witness, at least) until around 11pm. and then i crashed.

to be woken yesterday morning at 4.40am. again, no knowledge or permissions, and i woke up my team lead and we spent the next couple of hours on a call. we ended the call on an unpleasant note, and i couldn't get back to sleep.

frustrated, and with so much frustration having accumulated, and full of bad feelings, i started updating my resume and am considering putting feelers out.

i tried to have a conversation with my team lead when we were both in the office, but it would take all day to get an opportunity to speak to him privately. during that time, i got paged for two further incidents that i still don't know anything about.

we finally had it out in the evening, and while i have no way of knowing whether things went "well" or not i think we both did some airing of grievances and went a long way to clearing the air. i certainly feel like we're more aligned than before, and we haven't spoken properly in months which i suggested might be the cause of the drift.

he took over my night shift and told me to go home and clear my head, which i think i've managed to do. hopefully things will improve.

...

i'm shocked that the aircon people charged us NIS 500 for two remote controls that cost at most 100 each, where the main cost was apparently the "call out fees" for delivering said remotes. i wouldn't have paid, but these are the bastards we need if the air conditioners themselves need maintenance so they really have us by the balls. so that's an expensive lesson...

gearing up for another on-call

 i'm surprisingly relaxed about this coming week, even though the end of the week was stressed for the previous guy and my last one didn't go so well. and even though my legs have been giving me a lot of grief over the past few hours.

the end of my work week was generally positive. i'm not sure if it's enough to make up for the weeks before it, but i finally closed in on the end of the unpleasant project and even got a few hours in on the thing we've all really been wanting me to do.

so that was good.

otherwise, mr smear was feeling ill on thursday morning but seemed well enough to go to school, it was only when gd picked him up that we understood that he really should have stayed home (and me with him). so i felt a bit bad about that.

yesterday morning we went on a mission to pick up another phone (for me, this time). the model i wanted wasn't available, but we picked up an amazing persian breakfast which we ate at home and then i returned alone once it was. overall, the cellphone experience has been very positive!

<TMI WARNING> on the way home i stopped in to a grocery store to pick up an ice cream. i felt i deserved it. i usually don't have much flatulence during the day in spite of being a vegan, and when i do it almost never smells. but as i stood waiting for my turn to pay, an urgent ball of gas formed and i just had to let it out. it was silent, but so awful that i could barely breathe, the cashier gagged and, shocked, asked if it was me; i couldn't bring myself to admit to it, so i rolled my eyes while she desperately sprayed air freshener and her coworker laughingly suggested it might actually be her... i suspect he was just doing it for my benefit.
</TMI WARNING>

today was mostly an indoors day, with one mission to get coffee / lunch at timothy's, which was excellent except for gd and mr smear sitting on a bench that was utterly soaked and had had its warning sign ripped off by a previous sociopathic customer.

and we restarted a harry potter movie rewatch today. once a year seems a good amount of times.

...

i'm VERY excited by the progress with the sonnet comics this week.

...

i'm rather disappointed with the outcome of tuesday's elections, it must be said. i've been trying to keep the political situation out of mind but morbid curiosity occasionally gets the better of me. i pray the next couple of years won't be too different from normal, but i'm sad that my own people appear to be on a path to polarization / radicalization and i want it to stop.

election frenzy

i can't believe it's wednesday already! (well, technically speaking, of course)

gd's had a big night - not only did i finally pick up a new phone for her (or me, if she doesn't like it), but she's been accepted into an ulpan class and is super excited to be starting her first class tomorrow morning!

today was a big day: it was our first election since we landed and we both got to vote. the experience was pretty good, although it was marred by a little old woman who - looking pretty non-religious to me - stood behind me and asked me why my son and i are not always wearing a kippah, and then threatened that once things come right all the non-practising jews will be thrown out the country.

holy shit.

anyway, we had a long walk (too much for gd) looking for breakfast after voting, ending up at our "usual" falafel spot, and later in the day i took mr smear to the lego store where i was informed in no uncertain terms that there's nothing i can do about all the missing kit pieces other than order them online and wait a few months. at least the store was fun. then i dragged mr smear around while figuring out what phone to buy and where, and in all the time there we were surrounded by ridiculous crowds of loud and or costumed teenagers. the vibe was cool.

turns out the other big mall saw a fight break out that needed police intervention with tear gas. sheesh.

my work-week hasn't been going great, it's stressful and disappointing and demoralizing. hopefully it'll improve.