hyperviper is down

 "the faster the harder the louder the darker the better"

this time it *is* too dark, hyperviper, RIP. your stories will live on as legends (and, often, warnings to our children) and while i believe they're going to let you in upstairs, there're going to be some angels hiding behind the furniture when they do.

...

i haven't heard from hyperviper in a few months, the last real conversation i had with him was after a close friend of his passed away young. i'm still stunned by his passing this morning.

...

i don't understand how it's been an entire week with no posting, when it's been a really crazy week. oh, wait - i do have a suspicion about why i haven't posted. this week's story started on sunday morning. i dropped mr smear off at school, and then accompanied gd to the ER. well, to a weird barrier about 50 feet from the ER entrance. the hospital's waiting list for doing an allergy "challenge" is half a year and they won't do one for cannabis, so we followed our doc's unofficial instructions and administered it ourselves.

gd took a puff. i opened my laptop, trying to be productive. a couple of minutes passed, gd wasn't feeling anything and wanted to take another puff. i suggested she wait a few more minutes.

now, i don't know how long she actually waited, but she took another puff and then suddenly realized that she needed to sit down on a bench. we made it about five steps before she fell over (fortunately i managed to catch her). we tried again, didn't get very far. then a kind english-speaking religious man darted over to help us, and helped me get her onto the bench.

i tried to get her to lie down. at this point her eyes rolled in the back of her head, and her entire body was locked like when someone gets knocked out brutally in a fight. the kind man kept repeating that we needed an ambulance. then he suggested using a taxi. there was a taxi just pulling out of the bus stop we were at, and i flagged him down. we managed to get gd into the cab and the cab driver drove us through the barrier and dropped us off at the ER.

i've never had to find a wheelchair and wheel my wife around before, i had to work to prevent her from falling out of it.

triage. i knew i had to tell them the truth from the get-go. it was awkward, though.

blood tests. it's hard taking blood from someone who can't control their own body.

an ER ward bed.

gd was shaking, she could barely control her limbs. we (mostly i) told and retold the details to the various doctors and nurses in turns. they did an electrocardiogram.

gd started having a panic attack. while they went looking for an ativan, she managed to breathe herself out of it.

slowly, she began to feel better. slowly, we began to realize that it was entirely possible that we had rushed her to the ER because she was just really... REALLY stoned.

there was no anaphylaxis. there was no stroke or paralysis. gd was just fine, and much more sensitive to medical-grade cannabis than we could have expected.

...

it took forever to get out of there. we cabbed back home and i spent most of the day working where i could keep an eye on gd, checking every now and again that she was still breathing.

so... it's school holidays. most of this week, gd's been at home. i worked from home the first couple of days, from the office the rest. gd's been taking the occasional puff with the windows open, which is fine, but that last-one-before-bed puff after mr smear's been put to bed and it's too cold to leave the windows open? most nights this week i've gone to bed early feeling a bit stoned.

and i've been sleeping much better than i have in ages.

...

on sunday night, netanyahu fired gallant and our entire country erupted. on monday, he pulled back and postponed the judicial reform until after the passover holidays. so the story's not over, but everything feels calmer now and it's a huge relief. one sad thing in particular on monday morning sparked optimism, and that was the crestfallen face of one of my coworkers who's been a staunch bibi supporter until the firing. if he can see the cracks in bibi's facade, there's hope for our country yet.

to all the protestors: i'm very grateful to be proven wrong. even if it's only temporary, it's a real relief that the judicial reform has been put on hold for pesach.

it's just as big a relief that netanyahu has played his cards so brazenly that even his supporters are beginning to see through the cracks that he's willing to burn everything and everyone in pursuit of power and his will to stay out of prison.

bibi's not interested in the well-being of our nation or our country. he never has been.

i find it intriguing that he's been forced to capitulate to ben gvir, who's very quickly demonstrated both how power-hungry he is and how politically naive he is.

i just want to take this opportunity to say that this is precisely what's wrong with coalition governments. a coalition government is a group of political parties that, individually, did not get enough votes to rule, but that are now in a position to rule us anyway and can get away with pretty much whatever they want.

that's not very democratic. and it doesn't matter if it's a right-wing coalition or a left-wing one.

...

on sunday night we had the final round of my script. it was complicated, but ultimately successful.

on monday evening i had the weekly meeting with my boss. it began with an unpleasant surprise - he had accidentally tagged our CTO when asking if i was ready for the meeting, and i was suddenly sure that i was about to be let go... i had mentioned that i wanted to take a long weekend in lieu of the two fridays that i'd had to give up, and things got awkward. maybe it was just me. i hope it was just me. either way, there's no compensation for time during a crisis in a startup, and i guess i wasn't really expecting there to be. and he made a good point that nobody's watching the clock anyway. and that i'm just about to mark a full year with the company, at which point my options will vest, and then it'll be "my" company too. i explained (truthfully) that i wanted the company to succeed regardless. i remembered how grateful i am to have a job that i (mostly) enjoy, with people that i like. it was good motivation.

the rest of the week was a bit weird. i guess it's not even over yet. we've had a couple of surprising new issues with our ci/cd pipelines (which i'm responsible for), and we've been having trouble with costs. every time i fix one broken thing i discovered another, and it's been a long week trying to catch each falling domino before it hits another one...

...

mr smear has been generally cool and calm this week. we had an interesting breakthrough yesterday, as i waited with him outside the school for the gates to open. he opened up to me about a dynamic between him and a couple of the kids in his class that's really toxic, and he appears to have actually taken my advice. a part of the advice was "letting us in" and telling me and gd about what happens at school so that we can help him when he's struggling, and when i got home from the office in the evening he did just that. it looks like my advice helped him get out of a situation with the slow kid who harasses him a lot, and i'm hoping that this week's lesson will stick!

...

last night i watched bert kreischer: razzle dazzle, and it was hilarious. i convinced gd to watch it this morning, and she enjoyed it too. last night we watched most of hey big boy, and it's great in spite of my being familiar with some of the material.

i ditched work early this afternoon to grab a coffee with spot and his wife and "smaller" child. the kid's two and a half and bigger than an average four year old! it was a fun coffee, and getting a ride home was an amusing little adventure.

we're slowly making our way through season 5 of adventure time. mr smear is loving the bfg. we gave up on danny the champion of the world because as brilliant as i remember the book being, both mr smear and myself are uncomfortable with the heroics involving killing animals even if that's not really the point of the story... this week mr smear showed me a little booklet that he made, more of a pamphlet trying to convince others to not eat animals. it's evident that he's trying to be encouraging rather than forceful, which is heartwarming.

still tired

 and sore. my neck's been giving me a lot of trouble these past few days. my sinuses are okay right as i type this, but my nose has been mostly stuffed or running the past few days. it's all exhausting.

yesterday:

i left the script running after posting yesterday morning, dragged myself out of bed three or four hours later feeling groggy and borderline hallucinating. i woke up to find that it had crashed just as soon as i'd locked the screen (intentionally leaving the machine open and running), and it would take hours of running the script and keeping an eye on it before i finally had the data we needed.

it was a sad, busy morning.

the data was ready by the time we needed to pick mr smear up from school, and my plan was to get him home, deliver the emails, then head out for lunch with the mongoose and fam.

my chain of command had other plans.

we met up with the mongoose and co, and almost immediately i had to abandon them to find a bench to work on. it took almost two and a half hours before we were sure we were doing the right thing, and my batteries (my laptop, my phone, and my body) were almost drained by the time i pushed the button. the first run was going swimmingly right until the credentials expired - the production single-sign-on settings are for a very limited amount of time and the number of emails that needed to go out have multiplied significantly since the original script. the second run seemed to be good, but my bosses identified at least one mistake.

there was nothing i could do but wait until i got home to investigate. i rejoined everyone, picked up a cup of coffee, and enjoyed a pleasant walk home with my family, even stopping for an ice-cream along the way.

i figured out a way to investigate the errors, and was mortified to discover that i'd sent out about 1500 emails that shouldn't have been delivered. then i began debugging the script, and by the time i was done i'd realized two important things: first, that out of 3500+ emails, only less than 20 had been sent incorrectly.

i cannot overstate what a huge relief this is.

second, that it was an absolute miracle that it was such a small number of errors. in order to determine what *should* have gone out i ended up doing a significant refactor of the script, and i can now quite confidently say that the following dangerous mistakes were made:

1. i was really tired and we're all under time pressure
2. the scripts that were built with a simple requirement have become increasingly sophisticated / complicated on the fly, each time at the last minute
3. no reviews

because... reasons.

anyway, we finally got some reprieve yesterday evening. i was told to leave off and enjoy shabbat dinner with my family. i was worried that they literally meant just dinner, but shabbat is already over and i haven't heard anything.

today:

today was a good day. it began with a serious and seriously good gaming session with mr smear. we checked out the demo for space explore, which was awesome, and then we dived into space crew: legendary edition. it's like ftl, but 3D, and while the controls were tough to learn it was thoroughly satisfying getting through the tutorial. even more satisfying was mr smear agreeing to do the entire tutorial himself, not only getting the hang of it but also the satisfaction of it.

and then we opened geometry wars 3: dimensions evolved.

it's brutal. aside from genuinely having a blast both literally and figuratively, i was extremely impressed that mr smear pushed through in spite of the difficulty. we played together, or took turns with the story mode, and it was awesome.

in the early afternoon we went to a birthday party for a kid in his class. it was at the ninja pro course on the other side of bavli, so we ended up renting a car2go. it was overall an enjoyable afternoon, in spite of a couple of minor incidents, and it really lent some perspective watching mr smear interacting with the other kids and the others kids interacting with each other. there's work to be done, but he's doing fine. not great, but fine.

after getting home, gd and i watched some of the second episode of power slap, which is thoroughly entertaining and completely impossible for me to take seriously as a "sport". mr smear and i played some more geometry wars after he finished showering, then i put two of the latest comic pages onto the public website before dinner. we continued watching adventure time, and then it was mr smear's bedtime, and i've been faffing around since. now it's my bedtime. hopefully it'll be a quiet night and hopefully i'll get some rest.

too old for this shit

 tuesday: back on-call, rushing to make an appointment with the mental-wellness institute in person. 

being on-call with my backpack and having to make a real effort not to faint. that would last the whole day.

locating the build in an area of tel aviv i haven't been in since i left that's been heavily and impressively gentrified (around karlibach). i had everything i needed to register. i registered. now there's a five month waiting period before we can get an initial consultation.

holy shit.

then i fast-walked to meet up with gd and mr smear at the paediatrician. he didn't have an ear infection after all. and he was offended that the doctor had to examine him in a sensitive area (where he was complaining about the pain the day before).

i walked mr smear to school, then took a bus to work. it's a bus i never take, so gd and i were quite amused when she got on a few stops later.

it was an interesting workday. i got home later than planned, but having delivered something i was happy with.

yesterday (kind of):

another long, busy day in the office. the last few hours my stomache began to hurt. it's been iffy since. i've also been struggling with seasonal allergies for the first time in forever.

today (kind of):

protests again, so much so that mr smear's school day was upended (although i think he enjoyed that).

it was a long, weird day working from home. i got some things done, but nothing that felt like an achievement. around dinner time things got crazy, when i received completely new requirements for the scripts that have burned a lot of my personal and family time. it's bothering me that it's now just about 2am (3am, the clock's moving to summer time) and the only time today that i wasn't working was about half an hour playing video games with mr smear before dinner. i even worked through dinner.

...

i'm fucking tired. fucking mosquito. fucking script that i'm praying is doing its last run because we need to push the buttons in the morning, at the same time that i'm supposed to be helping gd with something sensitive and making sure we have groceries etc. for shabbat. i'm fucking tired.

ha, ha, it got worse

 we're calling it "chaos week" at work, and my personal life isn't feeling less chaotic.

friday:

i was very relieved that it was weekend. i commented as such on a few occasions, not knowing that i was shortly going to be eating those words.

gd and i did a big grocery shopping, which was heavier than usual and i wasn't feeling great. i felt shit, to be honest. and i was on a half a cup of coffee to boot.

then we picked up mr smear, and sat down with the teacher. we were pleasantly surprised to find her welcoming and appreciative of our (and the other parents') situation, and we officially had approval to let him bring food and snacks and no sneaking necessary.

so that was good.

then we got home. and i saw a message from my boss asking me "what's up?"

not the kind of "what's up?" i would appreciate on my weekend. it turned out that the scripts i'd manically built and run the day before needed an overhaul, with four hours to go. there went my friday afternoon. i managed it in six, and was still running the damned thing while my family waited for my to say kiddush.

that really sucked.

saturday:

i woke up tired, and spent the entire day feeling sick. except for the half hour or so that it took to decide to take mr smear to the beach - we quickly got ready, walked a few blocks, and realized that we were about to be hit by massive, grey rainclouds. we made it back home just before it began pouring. i spent the rest of the day either watching adventure time with my family or lying in bed feeling ill.

by the time i got into bed i was convinced that i wasn't going to be able to work yesterday.

yesterday:

positively, i woke up feeling alright. not great, mind, but functional. i had a bunch of things to take care of in the morning after dropping mr smear off at school in the light rain, but due to the rain decided to stay home.

good call.

it got much wetter.

yesterday was a weird day. it was bursts of working hard tempered with weird periods of downtime.

in the evening i went to pick up mr smear, and while we were leaving the school i got a call from my boss informed me that we were about to start working 24 hours in shifts for the next week. i told him i prefer the midnight - morning shifts. i felt my heart sinking while i said it. i mean, it's true, it's just that i don't wanna.

good thing, though, is that it means my on-call week is now being shared about the team when they're on shift, so that's good.

the evening was the evening, i went to bed tired and late, but not too late because i had a strong suspicion that i'd get a call in the night.

i wasn't wrong.

today:

so last night i ended up working about three hours in the middle of the night after a long day of work after working hard or being sick all weekend after a long, intense week.

i got up feeling pretty wrecked this morning. it didn't help that i'd seen an email in the middle of the night from mr smear's teacher informing me that he'd "gone on strike" yesterday. she'd moved a girl in his class to his table, a little girl who disgusts him because she doesn't wash her hands after eating, and he flat out refused to do anything he was supposed to until the teacher moved him. she's not going to move him, so he just sat and played with his pencil box the entire school day.

i'm equal parts mortified, amused, and almost proud. like, i'm embarrassed and proud at the same time. it's weird.

so this morning we had a family meeting before school, and he was not happy to have both of us explaining to him in no uncertain terms what happens to kids who grow up without learning how to play the social game. it would take the entire walk to school to (somewhat) calm him down, to find an analogy to help him understand that loving someone doesn't mean letting them do whatever they want. (i found one - if a puppy wants to walk into a busy road, do you save it?)

along the way, i crossed the road to talk to our neighbours who were kindly offering us a ride, and i signalled to him to walk on towards the pedestrian crossing. he misunderstood my signal and came rushing into the busy street, which is when i automatically found myself yelling "no... no... NO!" so that the whole neighbourhood must have jumped.

our neighbours awkwardly drove slowly right behind me until we got to the pedestrian crossing, with the people behind getting so frustrated that they angrily overtook at the crossing and almost wiped us out.

so that was a fun morning.

the mental wellness institute wasn't answering their phone today. i tried a bunch of times over a course of hours. no answer. bloody brilliant.

today was another day of hard graft, minus a short break to pick up mr smear early because he was crying with stomache pain. they couldn't see him at the clinic but booked an appointment for him in the morning, at which point he went to the toilet and then his tummy felt fine again.

*$#!ing kids, man. anyway, we need the appointment because he's still got an ear infection so it works out.

about two minutes before we arrived at the clinic i started feeling dizzy, sick and faint, and i suspect it was my heavy on-call backpack pushing on my nerves. it took me a little while to get back to normal after setting the bag down. fainting sucks.

gd did a grocery run while i did some snooping at the hospital's emergency unit to figure out how we're going to do our own private allergy test. we have a plan.

i got home with the heavy backpack and the shopping just in time for a meeting with my boss that never transpired. i managed to get through a productive afternoon, finally firing up the scripts (with a few last-minute modifications, of course) just as gd served dinner.

i'm bombed. i needed to get this all out before crashing. i'm very grateful to be off-call until 8am. and to all, a good night.

the dreams!

 i forgot about last night's dreams. nightmares, i mean.

the first dream i was trying to save my family from carjackers and kidnappers. my strategy was bad (in retrospect) but successful, only on the way home mr smear was driving on the freeway with me not yet in the car hanging on to an open door that was in the process of being ripped off backwards. when i finally managed to claw my way back into the car my family and the mongoose all tried to convince me that there was nothing wrong with driving on the freeway when one of the doors was still open.

the second dream ended with me trying to get massive fungus off my foot - like, a large mushroom was literally growing out of it - and ending up with literal holes and tunnels through my foot that i could see through. and there was a piece of my foot that i'd thought was part of the fungus but actually turned out to be a bionic plastic-mounted LED that was docked into my flesh.

...

that reminds me, i woke up last week with an odd expression repeating in my mind: "you might be able to catch pizza, but you won't keep up with my racing ketchup".

hello darkness, my old friend

 it's the middle of the night, and i passed out on the couch a little earlier, waking up to brush my teeth and go to bed and then realizing that i needed a shower, and then realizing that the celebratory beer after a few days of enthusiastically hitting the scorpion pepper hot sauce had joined forces to make it problematic for me to be horizontal without suffering from acid reflux. so here i am, quietly jotting down some notes on a particularly intense end to a particularly hectic week.

today was the first day that i was "pretty much okay" as far as the sinusitis thing has been. still not 100%, but basically okay. each day this week got a bit easier, but today was the first day i would have been willing to step back into the office and in retrospect i'm very glad i didn't.

...

work-wise, this week was weird. AWS made an unexpected change to a header format that took us by surprise and blew us and all our customers out the water. we've spent this week scrambling to band-aid and do damage control, and while i wasn't involved in these efforts (i'm on-call next week) i did feel the effects in that all of my work lost priority. it's very frustrating begging for code reviews on work that you're excited about and keen to see the back of.

that changed this morning, though. just after 11am i got pulled in to write a Very Important Program to compensate from one of our most central tools' inability to provide one of the services we're paying for. it involved working with a bunch of disparate parts i'm not familiar with, and i found myself under time pressure while my body and brain were both pulling in separate ways. aside from picking up mr smear from school, i didn't really have any breaks and the final stretch was very stressful as everyone was nervous about the task going smoothly and there were a couple of last minute changes required.

it was very satisfying and gratifying to push the button on what now feels like a decent and solid interim solution, seeing everything green and working better than expected. i have to press that button every day for the next few days, and i'm confident i've built it well enough to make that easy.

additionally, we had an incident last week with broken deployments that cost us a lot of money, and although broken deployments are very rare for us i managed to put in a neat little circuit breaker a couple of days ago. just in time for the next broken deployment, and it was a pleasure to see it working beautifully in the wild.

...

mr smear's been having an interesting week. physical health-wise it looks like he might be sporting an ear infection, so we're keeping an eye on him and hoping he has an easy night. mental health-wise we had an episode yesterday that was sad and frustrating, but also gave us a bit of insight into how he operates when he's upset. it was a huge relief to wake up to find him in a better place this morning.

we tried in november/december to organize a consultation with a child psychologist - in addition to him suffering two crazy parents, we've all been through a very stressful ordeal the past few years - and they never got back to me. i finally got hold of them this morning and they informed me that they hadn't ignored my previous email, that they'd issued us authorization on the same day and that we were supposed to be informed by our local clinic. i contacted the clinic and they claim they sent me an email to that effect, but i never received that email. also, i don't think any of that little circle makes much sense. whatever.

in another, much worse bureaucratic bungle: other parents have been complaining that their kids haven't been eating in the after-school program, i didn't even realize until this week that mr smear hadn't been either. this week we had a zoom session with the two women in charge of the food program for our district, and it was eye-opening. out of appreciation for the importance of children getting fed sufficiently every day, the requirements for the kids meals are painstakingly measured and enforced. these people are not messing about. unfortunately, while they very carefully select nutritious foods that meet the macronutrient requirements, they pay no attention to what the food actually tastes like. the women were not interested in hearing the parents' concerns, but i lucked into a rare opportunity yesterday when i picked mr smear up from school as the vegan meals are pre-packaged (like tv dinners) and one of the child-minders had taken to putting the ones he refuses (which is most of them) in the fridge. so i got to take a sample home.

the food tasted surprisingly good, but it was exceptionally, unpalatably dry and unseasoned. mr smear agreed. so we did an experiment, and i mixed a little ketchup in the sample i'd taken out and heated in the microwave. mr smear enjoyed it. mr smear enjoyed it so much that he insisted on putting ketchup in the still-cold container and ate it all up.

so our new plan is for him to sneak ketchup sachets in his bag so that he can enjoy the food. also, i've got an appointment to meet with his regular school teacher in the morning to "discuss" this nonsense about him not being allowed to bring granola bars to school. i was hoping to avoid a battle but one of mr smear's classmates is a little piece-of-shit snitch who ratted on him because he saw that mr smear had a granola bar on him a couple of days ago.

...

i think that's the most interesting stuff. otherwise, gd's still having a rough time, not sure what we're going to do about that...

i really haven't had bandwidth for anything extra this week. i need this weekend.

oh, and we've been watching adventure time over dinner. we're just entered season five. so far, it's glorious.

all over the place

 it's the middle of my third night with sinusitis, i'm tired and my face is tender and my nose is running constantly and i couldn't sleep so here i am writing in my journal.

wednesday:

the only thing i recall from wednesday is that my boss called me in to re-task me, which was a little sad considering i've been getting into a good groove. and mr smear seemed to be a bit feverish.

thursday:

gd wasn't sure whether to send mr smear to school or not, but the rule is "no fever: school" and we got him there. it's good i was working from home because a short while later i needed to pick him up. he seemed fine, so i strongly suspected that he was playing it up after two days at home.

i now know better.

thursday morning i discovered, during our morning meeting, that all the time i thought i was muting myself with my headset i was on full volume because my macbook doesn't think i intend to use my headset's microphone when i plug it in. i was mortified while thinking back to all the times i've muted myself to yell something to gd or mr smear, or cough, or fart... i'm still mortified.

i was also finally frustrated enough with my lack of slack notifications that i reached out to their support, and what i got back literally shocked me. it turns out that for many moons at least my macbook has silently been putting me into "do not disturb" mode with no indication as such. someone at apple signed off on a "feature" that blocks all my notifications during my work hours. what the actual fuck?

on thursday night there was another terror attack in dizengoff street.

friday:

mr smear seemed well enough to go on his school trip to the museum. apparently he found it boring, i'm not more curious to see for myself than before. i dropped him off a walked straight through to the train station, and took the train to rosh ha'ayin to meet a co-worker and get a ride to our company hike.

on the train i heard a crash, a soldier had fallen down the stairs with a heavy backpack on the other side of the car and she was sobbing and in pain. i made sure she was being taken care of before sitting down again, but it was heartbreaking - i hope it wasn't as bad as it sounded.

the ride to the camping spot was nice, we arrived and i was treated to a breakfast of wafers and orange juice and a story of how everyone's night went. there'd been an attempt at a terror attack in the middle of the night just a literal stone's throw from the campsite, nobody was armed and the only trained fighter was the only one to say "i'm out" and go home!

the hike itself was generally excellent, i was fortunate to be able to borrow a big hate because i would've gotten even more sunburned otherwise. my legs and hips had been feeling a bit stiff, which i attributed to the rollerblading on tuesday night, but at some point i started feeling a bit nervous about my right knee (the one that was operated on).

there were two small kids with us, and one of them decided that he wanted to go up over the train tracks rather than under them through the tunnel. this was fine until we had to come down from the tracks and it was steep and muddy, and that was where i discovered that my shoes had very poor grip. the trouble started with me tripping over a thick metal wire at the top and catching myself with my hand on a very sharp corner of the bridge (the rest of the surface was pretty smooth, so that was bad luck). everyone else made it down safely, some sliding but nothing crazy, but i lost my footing near the bottom and managed to launch myself over a bush and about a two meter drop onto rough stones.

i don't have any clue how i managed to turn myself around and not face-plant, but i'm still amazed by how gracefully i landed even if i did end up rather scratched and bruised. i had such an adrenaline spike that it was a while before i was certain that i hadn't really damaged anything...

we got a bit lost at one point, and the way back was pretty tough. the fact that both kids made it was amazing. the fact that their dad was brave enough to bring them by himself and could handle carrying the smaller one about half the hike was pretty damned impressive.

anywho, we ended the hike on a great note and went to a nearby italian restaurant to celebrate: the geppetto pizza bar in tzur hadassah. i wasn't very excited about their vegan options, and the waitress wasn't confident that they'd be willing to improvise - but they managed to put together a vegan cheese calzone for me that was absolutely heavenly!

i got a ride back to rabin square and walked home from there, very conscious of my legs and my step counter. i think i'd hit about 17000 at that point and i was grateful to get home and slide into the waiting hot bath.

it was good for my legs, but it was too hot for my blood pressure and i stayed in their a little too long, so i needed to lie under a fan and recover for a bit after i wobbled out and got dry.

mr smear and i helped gd bake the challah, and we had a really nice evening.

it was around bedtime when my throat started scratching.

saturday (yesterday, kind of):

i was sick. i was off-balance, felt like shit, headachey. i spent some of the morning playing video games - gd and i started getting into overcooked 2 - but for most of the day i was bedridden or couchridden. i did enjoy listening to absolute mad lads - kevin mitnick, but didn't really have bandwidth for much else. i was sure i'd be taking today (sunday) off.

sunday (today, kind of).

after a surprising amount of sleep for an unpleasant night with heavy sinuses, i got up feeling much better this morning. i walked mr smear to school, then accompanied gd to a doctor's appointment in ramat aviv. aside from a runny nose and slight cloudiness, i was fine.

i worked from home today, which helped. it wasn't an inspirational day, and one of my coworkers and i are having a bit of a disagreement about how i proceed so hopefully we'll be able to resolve that tomorrow (today, kind of).

gd went to the shuk today by herself, so color me impressed. in the evening we picked up mr smear from his animation chug and happened to walk past the street art group on the way out, and the woman running it was only to happy to fit him in to her monday session so we're all really excited for that!

dinnertime/showertime/bedtime was fine, but i needed to get into bed myself immediately after saying good night to mr smear (it's been like that for days), and i struggled to sleep until i eventually got up to post this. an hour or so ago? whatever. i'm just messed up enough to be having trouble sleeping, but not enough that i shouldn't (theoretically) be able to lie down and get some rest.

...

sunday / yesterday / today / whatever we celebrated our first year (back) in israel! i'm filled with gratitude, it's hard to believe we got through all that insanity, and then more insanity on top of that insanity, and here we are. through perseverance, amazing friends, a frightening amount of debt and sheer luck, here we are.

purim sameach!

yesterday (monday) began with a scare, during sunday's housecleaning labor it appears that i managed to tweak one or two things in my back and i spent the morning on the verge of a massive spasm. fortunately i managed to get mr smear to school without incident and gd smeared deep heat (bengay) and hammered me until everything softened up a bit. it continued to threaten for the rest of the day, but the threats were comparatively mild.

it was a busy workday. i enjoyed great successes with some sadness sandwiched in between, but sadly was unable to push my changes before the end of the day as one of my coworkers broke something important. i took today off for purim and i'm hoping they didn't push anything too interesting on my day off...

today was great! it started with a rough wakeup, but quickly smoothed out. gd assisted me with the remaining mold areas and we're pretty much complete, there are difficult-to-reach parts of the apartment (of our windows in particular) that look like nobody's cleaned them in eighteen years...

a cousin from england is here for a week and we bussed through to have brunch with her. we had a really nice time (and i ate far too much), it was all gravy until mr smear decided he was bored... no matter. we went past dizengoff center and stopped at the grocery store, we would have picked up a vegan burger for mr smear at the burger king but there was something wrong with their order systems.

once home, mr smear continued playing minecraft education edition while gd and i watched chris rock's new netflix special, which isn't very funny but is 100% on point and well worth watching.

afterwards, i took mr smear for a walk to and around the museum grounds. on the way we had a "tickle fight", something which had become a point of contention a long time ago (he would consistently use it at the worst possible times as an attention-grabbing device), and we've had enough of a break that i was finally able to relax my guard and we both enjoyed ourselves. we then had a special treat dinner on the way home - i picked up a laffa with salads at one shop and a packet of falafel balls at another, and we stuffed the falafel into the laffa for him while i ate a regular falafel pita. we got home in time to watch an episode of adventure time, and i ended up having time to read to him before heading out to join TAR purim.

it's been a decade...

the evening was fun, and was more of a reunion than anything else! i managed the route in my finn the human onesie with the hood over my eyes (some people managed it in outrageously complex costumes, so not much of an achievement), ending the evening with incredible vegan ice-cream from leggenda.

i've stretched, showered, and posted this, now to find out if i'm going to be able to sleep or not considering i needed a late coffee just to be able to get my blades on in the first place :P

i'm REALLY glad that i took today off. today was an awesome day.

the spring clean

 today was intense.

we've been having an issue with mold for the last while, and it seemed like we were winning until gd took some clothing out of our closet yesterday and was distraught to discover that it was covered in mold. so this morning, after i dropped mr smear at school dressed up as a creepy skeleton and apparently understanding that purim is not halloween and scaring the crap out of other kids isn't what today is about, gd and i set about getting rid of this horrible, shitty infestation.

it was heavy work, but between the two of us we'd organized everything we needed and by the end of the day it looks and feels and smells like we got the job done. there's a little bit left to do tomorrow, but this was a huge endeavor and we ended up having to throw some things out and clean and repack a lot of stuff...

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off the top of my head i don't recall what wednesday was about, but thursday was a long day that felt entirely unproductive until everything came together in the evening, and i ended the work week with a complex sense of a) satisfaction that i'd completed an important piece of the puzzle and b) anxiety from what i expected to be the final piece of the puzzle. today got off to a great start, in that i completed the next piece that had been worrying me, but although what i did worked there's something mysterious that appears to be interfering with me testing it.

one step at a time.

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the weekend was good, relatively relaxed. yesterday morning was all about me aligning my personal projects and mr smear playing minecraft educational edition, so in the afternoon i took him to the park to throw a frisbee around. we had fun, and he's getting pretty good! but at some point he got bored, and instead of telling me he was bored decided to troll me instead, which made for a bit of unpleasantness. fortunately we both cleared the air quite quickly and enjoyed a good walk back.

i'm reading danny, the champion of the world to mr smear and it's a book i'd completely forgotten reading, only something seemed very familiar in the first two paragraphs and then last night i came across a phrase that caused an *ah-HA* moment: when i was nine i decided that i wanted to be a "designing engineer" and as an adult i've always wondered where that particular combination of words could have come from - now, i know!

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gd and i have been watching everything everwhere all at once in bits and pieces, and so far it's surprisingly brilliant considering how much praise we've heard from "normal" types :P