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.

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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.

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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.