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...