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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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!

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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.