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.