yesterday was better

i tried recording one of my poems yesterday, but i'm not particularly happy with the result. on the way to work, i stopped by the clinic prepared for a fight about covering our hospital visit, and was caught off guard by a lack of protest on their part. having said that, it's only the first round (the cover request needs to go through a committee or something) so i guess it's wait-and-see-time...

it was a productive work day, and relaxed. i struggled a bit with an overactive last-mile digestive system towards the end of the day which was uncomfortable. although i left the office later than i would have liked, it was due to helping out our on-call resolve something so i ended the day on a successful note.

amusingly, my boss was working with me on the final stretch and he witnessed copilot giving me a hand: all it takes is one good suggestion that saves time and increases confidence to make it worthwhile, and he's sold. even if its suggestions are often wrong, they're almost always useful. sometimes they're useful in that i can press tab and i'm done, and sometimes they're useful like a rubber duck.

the shopping experience on the way home was a bit frustrating, but still better than spending double or more money and carrying a small bit every day is certainly preferable to huge loads irregularly.

i was tired last night. gd and i couldn't agree on what to watch so we ended up restarting 2012's dredd, and i'm pleasantly surprised at how much sleep i got.

i had plans for this morning but i got distracted by a number of notifications on mastodon.

...

oops.

i got to enjoy it for half a day

 yesterday morning started really well, i Got Things Done, i Figured Things Out, and i Made Plans. then i went to work, spending a good chunk of my first couple of hours catching up or being distracted by my teammate's dog who's clearly decided we're each other's support animals.

we have three people in the office leaving soon, two of them having "kind of" been let go and the fact that it's only them working from the whole crew feels off somehow. and one of them's feeling slighted because an aspect of her job was covering for someone who hasn't been hired yet and they're still trying to hire that hypothetical person.

anyway, office drama aside: i was (noticeably) in good spirits, taking my time to dive deep on solving an unexpectedly difficult problem, when i was called in to a meeting with my boss (previously my team lead, that's a bit weird too). we were in the middle of refining what it is i'm supposed to be doing when gd called. i ignored the call, but then looked again a couple of minutes later and that was pretty much the end of the meeting: something had happened to mr smear's head and nobody could tell if he needed a doctor or a hospital.

i tried to finish the meeting but obviously that didn't work out, so i packed up and left and met gd and mr smear at the hospital. along the way i tried to find out what protocol we needed to observe from the medical insurance's point of view, but it was so difficult that i gave up after my third phone call.

with a little help we found the kid's emergency unit, then went through all the motions. the triage nurse was a bit horrible, but everyone else was great. eventually a doctor came to see him and decided he didn't need stitches, she checked him for signs of concussion/nerve damage and declared him fit and fine. but we didn't know if or when he'd ever had a tetanus shot, and for some reason it took them a long time to deliberate and eventually decide to administer one.

mr smear was not into it, but with the support of the nurse (after a quick search, my description of lockjaw wasn't particularly precise) he agreed that the vaccine + death by old age was preferable to the potential alternative and he calmed down. he barely felt the injection, which is a far sight better than *my* first tetanus shot - it was my first shot that i remember and i tensed, and the needle bent in my arm...

by the time we were finally able to leave i was exhausted. i'm still feeling exhausted, i think we all experienced a giant adrenaline dump. we did a quick emergency shopping and then walked home, and the evening was all about getting through the evening and getting into bed.

aside from a battle between gd and a rogue mosquito which i participated in for a while, that was the end of my first day back from staycation.

today's plan: to battle with the medical insurance and hopefully get yesterday's job done.

not as planned

 gd and i walked to the school to pick up mr smear yesterday evening, and on the way home we got caught in the heavy rain of a thunderstorm and mr smear and i returned home with soaked shoes.

mr smear's animation classwork is really cool, he's been heavily inspired by alan becker and he's nailing it!

i had some trouble sleeping last night, and polished off the telephony solution migration. i'm not sure how i managed to drag myself out of bed this morning.

or mr smear, for that matter.

OOOOOOH. i just remembered where i developed my thing about hating rain - israeli municipalities don't understand drainage and sewerage systems. we have approximately two drainage points in the 500m around our apartment, so as long as it was raining (well, drizzling by capetonian standards) every single road was completely flooded and there was no way to cross any of them without getting soaked shoes. everyone's cars parked on the main road had water most of the way up to their doors, and drivers couldn't pass us faster than walking pace without drenching the sidewalks.

mr smear is now at school with wet shoes because a) we didn't have galoshes for him (that's today's investment) and b) i expected it to keep on raining (as it had done all night) and not let up five minutes after i said goodbye.

in retrospect, i feel shitty because we should have just called it a "rain day" and kept him at home.

so that's how our day began. it got immediately better when i received an email from social security that our allergy stipend application had been approved, we need all the help we can get and this was a huge relief!

aside from a lot of reading (articles, not books) and watching random things (ultimate fighter season highlights), this morning passed by quickly. the air conditioners are finally starting to pump out hot air, which is awesome. then gd and i headed to the mall to look for shoes.

i hate malls. gd's not too fond of them either. we went through the entire mall (azrieli), every store with shoes, and eventually found a great pair, waterproof, to my taste, and not too expensive. but their credit card machine was offline. i'm still deeply disappointed.

we tried at a different mall (the hospital mall), and found stuff for mr smear but nothing for me. we ate laffot and had an altercation with a nasty old woman (gd did an amazing and hysterical impression of her to her face, i'm still conflicted but it *was* brilliant), then returned home where i soon passed out on the couch. she woke me up at ten minutes to pick-up time and i was a mess, and it was pouring outside.

we managed to book a car, drove to pick him up, i dropped them off at the mall and drove around while they got the shoes, picked them up and we all went home.

mr smear thinks he has worms. we don't.  🤦

anyway, it wasn't the best use of my last day off work but i guess everything's good. since last week i certainly feel a bit more rested, a bit less stressed. i've enjoyed a lot of nice times with my family. i've gotten shit done - and enjoyed doing it. i definitely needed this.

...

i've spent bits and pieces of the last day or two trying to get an s3-hosted website to work with my domain name. that'll open some doors when i get it all squared away, and allow me to shut the door on running an ubuntu instance, but it's taking a lot of reading and fiddling for something that really shouldn't be so hard.

leaps and bounds

thursday:

thursday began with a pleasant walk to school with mr smear culminating in a super-cute moment when, after ten minutes of waiting, the gates finally opened and all the kids ran towards their classrooms. i'm struggling to remember anything else from thursday.

like, anything.

friday:

friday was almost entirely about helping urchin and her mother move out of tel aviv. the van cost me a lot more than i was expecting, but they really needed help and it was great being able to step in and step up. it was even greater seeing that their new space is really good for them. it was sad seeing her drooly dog not well. helping out as a family - mr smear begrudgingly did his "boring" part by standing by the illegally parked van and looking out for traffic police - was great and the drives in both directions were very pleasant sing-alongs :)

yesterday:

yesterday was mostly superb, though there were some bad feelings all round in the evening. this was for a number of reasons - one of them being that somebody's been generally grumpy since stopping an anti-depressant, and somebody else is still learning that being rude or mean to a parent's face doesn't make for good feelings... but enough about the negative, the positive was REALLY positive. we finished the build of the beautiful lego set that the mongoose gifted mr smear when we first arrived in march, it's a ford mustang shelby gt 500 with pull-back action, not only were we super-excited by its looks and details, but the thing really motors and mr smear was jumping up and down for hours.

it was a great bonding experience and we were both thoroughly pleased with ourselves, for myself not least because there was an issue with the pull-back mechanism and i managed to hack together an effective solution using two of the leftover pieces.

i spent most of the day continuing to work on my telephone management solution, which i finally began migrating to serverless lambda / dynamodb components on friday. it took a lot of work (mainly debugging), but i finally have it functional and it's a huge relief to be one step closer to dropping my cloud "droplet" which demands a lot more maintenance than i'm comfortable with.

in the evening we watched snoopy come home, and it's amazing to me just how well that 1972 film has aged. mr smear was very upset towards the end, and i needed to explain to him (not for the first time) that good movies make us feel the things they want us to feel, and that's not always good feelings. i loved hearing the theme song ear-worm burrowing into him, it's a song i've had floating around in my own head since i watched it as a kid.

today:

it's a beautiful, cold, rainy, wintery day today. it's easier to appreciate indoors and warm. just like yesterday. i began the day positively, finishing up the phone management migration, then gd and i grabbed a coffee and did a big shopping run, and we've spent the subsequent hours just lazing around cozily.

now i'm actively ignoring a flurry of work messages (i go back online on tuesday), and i'm feeling inspired to put together another poetry video. and then i wrote that word and got distracted by seeing an image of a very grey-haired sandman in a neck-brace and wheelchair (recovering, thankfully) and now it's time to start moving out (in the pouring rain) to pick up mr smear from school.

...

i keep making tea because i need hot tea and then by the time i get to drinking it its cold...

holy holiday, batman!

i'm conflicted. on the one hand, i'm trying very hard to be on vacation. on the other hand, this is the opportunity to do All The Things! i've already put out another video, this one for the now-polished step away from the vehicle. i'm extremely pleased with how it's come out. i'm even more pleased now that i've configured the captions, which i must admit was a lot of work but very satisfying.

now i need to do the same for the musing video... but that's going to have to wait another day.

i worked sunday and monday, long days but generally good ones. i'm still amused that i was the only one in the office on monday night who knew the blessings for the candle-lighting, but not one of us remembered all the words to the first verse of ma'oz tzur...

yesterday morning gd and i went down to ozen hashlishi (after passing through dizengoff center and browsing comics and figurines) for a hipster breakfast and a browse through their enormous catalog of awesome media that we most certainly do not need. sailor came over for dinner, which was a bit of a failure from a food perspective but it's fun to be able to spend time with him again.

...

we're all still coughing. it's been weeks now. this is ridiculous.

we thought mr smear was sick yesterday, so we turned off our alarms and slept in. he picked up on this, which was unfortunate because we quickly realized he was fine and this "betrayal" started our day on a rather unpleasant note - not entirely his fault, to be fair - but we were extremely pleased to pick him up at the end of it and hear that he'd actually had a really good time.

this morning gd was more certain that we should keep him home, and by the time she regretted that decision it was far too late. in the grand scheme of things this worked out well, because in addition to starting our day with a couple of hours playing through the lego harry potter game together, i took him to the tel aviv art museum in the afternoon. he's been wary of galleries every since we encountered the butcher boys, and our tour began with him immediately whining to turn around and go back home...

my initial attempt to draw him in were almost a complete failure as we encountered a (legitimately) creepy doll statue, but after a couple of talks about practicing bravery and opening his eyes and heart and reassuring him constantly we started coming across installations that piqued his interest, we ended up have a really good time!

we'd both had enough at roughly the same time and i thought i'd get him an ice-cream on the way home, but he was more into a falafel so we split a particularly satisfying one (meaning i got the leftovers).

we all forgot about candle-lighting this evening because mr smear and i were invested in completing the artful escape. what a delightful game! i also cleaned up scrapper's bass guitar and amp (after gd had already taken care of the worst of it) and plugged them in, but i suspect that the guitar's battery is dead because i couldn't get a sound out of it with either of the two cables...

anyway, it was a good day.

breathing and crashing

 i'm still struggling at nights with the coughing and the post nasal drip. i'm tired.

but now i'm tired for an additional, positive reason; this morning, the mongoose woke me up with an invitation to join them for mushroom picking in the forest. while gd was unfortunately unable to join us due to a crushing headache, mr smear and i went along and we (mostly) enjoyed ourselves. mr smear got a bit whingey when the ice-cream truck showed up close enough that we could hear its eery tunes, and then a bit more when he thought that worms were going to fall from the trees because that's an actual thing that happened at his old school.

anyway, it was a really nice morning out in nature. i'm exhausted now and i think i need to lie down even after my second coffee...

ticking boxes

 this has been an intense week.

i'm still struggling with the post-nasal drip / horrible coughing. it's been relentless, for weeks. i'm so over this.

i didn't manage to get any rest on tuesday night, i just lay in bed miserably tired and wired until i had to get up in the morning. not wake up, mind, because i was still wired and didn't need any caffeine until wednesday afternoon - the trigger for that cup being desperation after an hour-long all-hands that i struggled to keep my eyes open for.

everyone left was in the office on wednesday, and the office had already taken on a completely different vibe. we're a tiny startup now, less than a company, and our department is now a team. it's a palpable difference, and it's bizarre.

yesterday, i was the only developer in the entire office for the first half of the day, and only a single coworker joined me for the second half. counting the product dude who's also a dev, there were three of us in the wide open open-space.

the morning hours were lonely.

my ex-team-lead-now-boss had forgotten that i have c# experience, so i volunteered to give him a hand with a .net bug-hunt and found myself with a new task. i'm not used to working with visual studio on a mac, which is weirdly different from the windows offering, and i'm not used to working on an x64 project with an arm64 computer, so it took a little while to get a handle on where everything is and running the tests.

it was late afternoon by the time i found *the* bug. which was just one amongst a bunch of others, but while i was trying to figure out what was broken and where (it actually looks like the code might be fine but the tests are badly-written) the product dude jumped in demanding that we release the fix urgently (on a thursday evening, which is a friday evening for the rest of the modern world) in time for a call with the complaining customer.

we assessed the risk, and pushed the button. and then i had to leave - taking some FOMO with me - to pick up training gear from scrapper before they leave for canada (tonight!). let me tell you, the update a bit later to say that we'd successfully solved the customers problem and delighted them with our performance was a fantastic start to the weekend!

also seeing scrapper and partner and picking up a whole box of awesome (if very dusty) stuff and just happening to be there when another friend of his explained that he'd take the bass guitar but wouldn't actually be able to do anything with it. so i returned home with a box of gear and comics and books, ate quickly, said goodnight to mr smear, and then went back for a guitar and amplifier and twenty minutes of tea and an interesting book club reading that i'd walked in on.

it was a great evening.

this morning began with an hour of yelling at idiots*, then i walked with gd to the clinic to make an urgent appointment (she's having trouble with a prescription) and picked up a couple of household items before coming back home, scarfing down breakfast and then heading out to the barber shop. it's not the best haircut, but it's fine.

* my cellphone company has been blocking my twilio messages, and when i asked them to remove the block they contacted twilio and informed them that i requested a block; our medical insurance company sent gd an sms with a link to their app, but the thing we were supposed to find in the app wasn't available because reasons

while gd and i were shopping, mr smear's teacher called us - mr smear was throwing a proper wobbly because they made latkes in class and the other kids were using eggs. we're trying to teach him to lead by example and take the soft approach, but it's hard not to empathize with a kid who understands just how evil the egg industry is.

...

finances: mistakes have been made, and we're trying to navigate the fallout. if we miraculously get through the next few weeks without surprises we'll be okay *knocks on wood* but we're in a really dicey position and we have to make dramatic changes. the good news is that after a couple of long and sensitive chats with gd, we have a plan and we think we can handle this.

the sad part is that we wouldn't be in this situation if it wasn't for the ridiculous levels of debt we incurred emigrating, we'd actually be doing just fine. i think i may have mentioned this before, but our income to expenses ratio is much better in tel aviv than in cape town because the economy here, while tough, is still far more reasonable than in south africa.

...

anyway, as crazy and rough and heartbreaking as this week was, i feel like i've taken care of the most important stuff. now to try to get the paintings hung before shabbat comes in.

all over the place

 i'm too tired to be vertical, too wired to be horizontal. i knew the 5.30pm coffee was both a good idea and a bad idea. also, i was totally right about there being a round two on the coughing/post nasal drip, it's horrible.

today was particularly interesting. it began with a very unpleasant goodbye after mr smear made it clear that he had no intention of participating in the class "project" - the teacher has been pairing up different kids for playdates to try to get them better integrated and he had to go to one of the two kids in class that he really can't stand. i managed to apply for the government allowance for kids with life-threatening allergies before heading to work, so that was another administrative load off. the work day was pretty good, all in all.

about an hour before my evening meeting with dod and co, one of my teammates announced that he'd just been fired. i literally didn't believe him at first, but soon after it became clear that we just got thoroughly reorganized and about half of our department just got dumped. i was finally over the reorg that just happened a few months ago, and as much of a relief as it is to have "made the cut" this is really, really horrible. my teammate? he's just announced that his wife is pregnant with their second kid and is currently renovating his new home, so not the best time...

... not that it's ever the best time...

on my way to the meeting i spoke to gd and was pleasantly surprised to hear that mr smear had cooperated, with no drama! later i'd learn that he actually had a really good time and i'm so pleased for him!

the meeting: i get it now. it's an amazing idea. it's elegant. i know what we have to do. the long-term prospect was attractive anyway, but is even more so considering the updated state of my current employment. now's the time for research and due diligence, and i'm excited.

...

the weekend was mostly good, although saturday night took a turn for the worse (gd's been having a rough time lately and i pushed a red button) we did get over the hump and the past few days have been easier for both of us as a result. on friday evening we went to mr smear's friend's family for a really nice dinner. a large chunk of saturday was spent playing around with midjourney, culminating in my releasing musing on sunday morning. i'm extremely proud of it! in the afternoon we walked to the beach, which on an almost-empty winter's day was absolutely lovely.

there was stuff i meant to post about regarding sunday and monday but whatever it was has been so dramatically overshadowed by the sandwiching days i simply can't recall right now...

oh! on sunday morning i got up around 3am and spent an hour or two writing up an outline for an app i'd discussed with a coworker on thursday morning. on sunday night i met with said coworker for the game hack thing, and we settled on building a different social app based on an idea i had just over a decade ago and i was pleased that he was so excited by it.

i think that's everything for now.

antsy positive

 it's a friday afternoon and i'm itching to *do* something, but i don't actually have any idea what it is i *want* to do. so my mind is jumping from vague intention to vague intention while i try and catch up on reading from the infinite reading lists while the kids behind me argue about how to spell things for a minecraft session and i try to get over this morning's revelation that my kid doesn't like babies "because they cry all the time".

the work-week ended on a good note. most of the week was a stressful mess of me vs the machine (in this case, our ci/cd setup), which culminated in a glorious moment yesterday afternoon when everything finally turned green and 

[posting interrupted by a massive tantrum caused by mr smear griefing his friend by renaming her virtual dog]

i was finally able to Push The Button. the rest of the day was spent slowly and methodically preparing a whole bunch of migration PRs and i got to leave early and enjoy a cider at the end of a long week.

i appear to be finally over the week and a half of post-nasal drip, though last night i was woken up by gd unconscious and coughing into my face so maybe i'll get to enjoy another round...

worse? or better?

 same pattern, two days later... it was so bad last night that i got up in the middle of it and ended up going back to bed so stupidly late that i still feel like i'm in dreamland.

the past couple of days have been a bit mad. work's been good, but family's been... complicated. sunday started off rough (mr smear not quite getting that being horrible to me won't make me nice to him), but by the evening things had settled and we'd worked it out. and then gd and i had a blowout just before his bedtime that was a real night-destroyer. let me just say, for the record, that winning an argument doesn't actually feel good if the process of getting to the bottom of things was horrifically unpleasant.

anyway, we seem to all be fine now.

after a week home sick, gd returned to the ulpan this week and had a big test yesterday - it looks like she's done pretty well and it's really helping her confidence! and she's back on duolingo in addition to her homework, so that's cool.

mr smear's biggest lesson lately is the (for him) revelation that the primary reason he's being sent to school is to learn how to interact with his peers and teachers. i hope it's helping. we're workshopping fears of the dark etc. too, and seem to be making progress.

on a totally different note, i introduced him to wikipedia last night and it totally blew his mind.

...

i said work's been good, but it's actually been excitingly positive. i've been slowly but surely coercing our CI/CD pipeline and bash scripts into better behavior and things are starting to gain traction and move faster.

finally, mr cat sent me all the edits and the last few pages are now looking much cleaner and crisper!

still coughing

 this has been ridiculous. every day i think i'm getting better, and every night i experience a sinus reset that sees me either coughing up constantly or feeling like i'm about to start a throat infection. i woke up at 5am "this morning" (saturday morning) and spent the subsequent hours playing the artful escape (which is absolutely stunning), until eventually i was exhausted enough to pass out for a bit but i still spent the afternoon feeling thoroughly worn out.

and here we are, after 12.30am, with me afraid to go to bed.

...

friday was more interesting than i would have liked. primarily because on my way to pick up mr smear from school i saw two messages that i'd missed warning me that our rent cheque was about to bounce if we didn't take immediate action, but considering it was a friday and already after cut-off there was already nothing i could do about it until tomorrow (later today).

and there's not much i can do about it. it turns out our "debit" cards aren't actually functioning as debit cards, and a whole bunch of money unexpectedly disappeared from our account when i was under the impression it had already been counted. that in addition to the fact that our credit card payments are entirely automatic and there's no choice in the matter of how or when we pay them, which is very different to how things work in south africa and canada.

in short, everything is wrong about how israeli credit cards work and it's hurting us. and it's hard not to be anxious about the consequences.

...

last night i explained hormones and puberty to my seven year old son and hilarity ensued. it was a lot simpler than i expected, but i think that's because i've got a pretty good understanding of how it all works...

another time round the sun

 (sung to the tune of "another one bites the dust")

hear i sit, starting to write this post at 6.20am on a friday morning, sitting in my onesie having sadly giving up on trying to sleep in favor of being vertical and coughing up green.

swell.

these past few days have been a whirlwind of positive crazy.

let's go backwards to tuesday.

i went to bed a few hours ago, having watched most of romesh ranganathan's the cynic and giggling hysterically.

that was after finally calling it a night, having spent my time after reading mr smear to bed early (for him, anyway) trying to reproduce a weird bug with my italian coworker and meeting online with potential partners for a particularly interesting little enterprise.

there was a lot that was very gratifying about successfully demonstrating that my code was working well despite my coworkers snarky suspicions to the contrary.

the meeting with my potential partners was also gratifying, but in a different way.

i brought home what remained of the birthday vegan mango cheesecake from the day before because mr smear had woken me up yesterday worried that we hadn't really celebrated my birthday because we (from his perspective) hadn't had any cake. we ate it together while he watched the end of how the grinch stole christmas, although he enjoyed just a small amount and then decided it was mine.

fine, i'll finish it.

yesterday was a really great day at work. i delivered something really impactful that i've been working on all week, i dived into golang code that's been untouched for (hi-tech time-scale) generations and uncovered something juicy, and generally enjoyed the peaceful wind-down to the end of the week.

in the morning, i received a mind-blowing email from my ex-team-lead: after i left, he went on parental leave. the combination of the two of us not being around demoralized the other two teammates, which was bad enough, but then the company decided to revoke certain employee "privileges" (being able to work 100% remotely) and both of them quickly found other employment. once my ex-team-lead returned to find that he needs to completely rebuild the team for what is a) his baby and b) a core component of the company's success, he became so demoralized that he's walking away too.

aside from feeling... not guilty, but at least partly responsible for how things have turned out, i feel like the leadership of this company which i thoroughly enjoyed contracting for for two years of my life has galloped full-tilt towards the trust thermocline and won a race to the bottom that they hadn't realized they'd even entered.

never mess with your employees. compensate them fairly and make them partners in your success.

another thing about yesterday morning was mr smear getting up early enough that we got to play hue before i took him to school, and hue is beautiful.

wednesday:

i didn't need to celebrate my birthday any more than i actually did. physically or virtually, i felt surrounded and supported by people i care about, i had a surprisingly lovely regular day at the office, a nice dinner + the rest of the seventh harry potter movie with my family, and i'm home in tel aviv for this one.

i am full of gratitude.

i've also decided, after hearing again about the effects of nostalgia on aging, that i'm going to start counting backwards. besides, my age is now equal to the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything which is the ASCII value of the asterisk character * which means "anything". so i'm just going to roll with "anything" as a permission slip to be well and feel good.

tuesday:

i don't recall too much about the actual day that was tuesday, but in the evening i joined spot and the mongoose near the beach and we sat a talked for ages. i then walked spot all the back to the bus from across the road from our apartment and finally went to bed.

that was exactly the moment when my throat started warning me that i was coming down with whatever this horrible post-nasal drip thing is. no, wait - looking back at my previous post, that was the moment when the looming throat infection stopped looming and launched a full-scale attack.

now that i think about it, i must have worked from home on tuesday. whatevs.

...

overall, this week was a good one. gd was upset about being too sick to go to ulpan, but she's at least learning to navigate the healthcare system and receiving treatment.

mr smear was mostly great, he's drawing really interesting things and we've had a lot of good conversations. while he's a bit damaged and struggling in some ways, he really is a good kid with a sharp mind. i mean, he's obsessed with demons (when he isn't terrified of his closet) and he can be super-naughty sometimes, but then he refuses to play the artful escape because there aren't any dialogue options for "i don't want to commit a crime" 🤣

...

oh! and mr cat has sent me all the edits, so i can publish them this week. things are looking amazing.