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.