money down, head down

 gd and i went fridge shopping, and i ended up paying for a fridge. i'm a little confused by how the delivery of said fridge will work, so i guess i have to give them a call in the morning to figure it out...

we tried to sit down for a sandwich at landwer in azrieli center, the waitress took our order and promptly ignored it, so we ended up leaving behind two coffees and having to explicitly refuse the waitress a tip, as if she hadn't just screwed everything up.

we arrived at the school on time to pick mr smear up, his teacher indicated that there was something that needed to be discussed and that she'd call us, but she didn't, so i'm guessing it's not that big a deal?

i don't recall anything more interesting happening yesterday, although we did have some game time and i'm pretty sure i napped.

we began watching alien worlds on netflix yesterday, we've seen three of the episodes already. it's amazing.

this morning i managed to send off the script for page 30, publish page 29 publicly, and put together a response to an article on school shootings.

that was a bit much for me, so i need another nap.

emotion rollercoaster

how has it been a week?!

last friday:

aside from a short moment when i let the crazy crowds between the shuk and king george get to me, we had an absolutely brilliant day all round! we began the day marching with a couple of hundred others for earth day, mr smear and i carried signs and he held his proudly the entire way.

we then stopped at the landwer cafe on rothschild for a couple of sandwiches, which we all thoroughly enjoyed, then headed next door to lose ourselves sitting on the sidewalk eating leggenda's incredible vegan ice cream. we took a slow walk through nahalt binyamin, which gd and mr smear had never seen before, marvelling at the artwork on display - i'm leaving out the unpleasant business getting home from the shuk - and then had a really nice afternoon recovering from a lot of walking and enjoying.

last saturday:

i spent a good chunk of the day putting together the video for the return, and i'm very pleased with the results! i vaguely recall us doing something in the afternoon, but i could be confusing saturday and tuesday...

sunday:

worked from home. gd and i started the day at the pain clinic, where we received her first recommendation for medical marijuana. i thought i was going to be on-call, but our shifts have... shifted... and we're now monday to monday. at this point i don't even recall what i was working on.

monday:

a day in the office. my first on-call day this week. we noticed some suspicious alerts, and i began investigating. the only thing i found pointed to one of my colleagues commits from the day before, but when i asked him if there might be a connection he said "definitely not". i asked him to maybe just consider it a little, but he was adamant that his code wasn't to blame.

just then, my pager went off. over and over again, as usual. 47 times. three of us spent most of an hour trying to figure out where the fire was, until our main expert needed to leave us for what i presume was a Very Important Meeting.

despondent, i sat at my desk and began clutching at straws. after a few minutes, i found something that may or may not have been suspicious (what do i know? i'm familiar with exactly none of our solution because i've been pigeonholed as the ci/cd guy), and i asked my "it wasn't me" colleague if i was barking up the wrong tree.

"nope. you've nailed it."

he helped me revert the offending PR, and immediately our systems began to restabilize.

another colleague had merged the bad PR, and then fucked off for the day. our customers lost an hour of data, and i was forced to leave the office too late to pick up groceries.

but that's not all! that issue that had been worrying us? it came to a head just as i sat down to eat dinner, just as our country began the day of remembrance for our fallen soldiers. i was brought in to a call with a customer - my favorite, there's literally nothing i have to offer them because i'm not familiar with our solution - and learned that whatever had been alerting us during the day was minor for us, but was breaking our customers' functions.

we haven't even recovered yet from the last time that happened.

a short while later, our boss "identified by sight" the code that was doing the damage. did you guess it? it was the exact code that my colleague had refused to re-examine. so while it felt good to have identified the root cause myself, even with my limited understanding of our systems, it felt really shitty to have to skip dinner with my family, miss the live stream of the ceremony and spend my night - until about 1am on video calls with out CTO, my boss, and the expert who'd been helping me before - trying to get our customers back on track.

$#@!.

so anyway, that was awful.

tuesday:

gd and i started the day watching the recording of the evening's ceremony, and i was completely overwhelmed. i had to walk away and go wash dishes to calm down and get my head "in the game" for our morning meeting. it was a half day, and i spent it on hunting down and trying to fix a division by zero error in a piece of code that an ex-teammate wrote that was a shameful train wreck.

i was very relieved to be able to step out and let go after gd brought mr smear home, we took a bus to get haircuts. i drank too much coffee (gd asked for one, didn't like it, and i brilliantly decided i wasn't going to let it go to waste), gd did a pretty good job of guiding the poor dude with mr smear's hair (though she still had to fix it up when we got home), my haircut was, surprisingly, pretty good.

we stopped for a couple of good sandwiches at a vegan deli on the way home, and i went down for a nap before the evening's festivities.

gd wasn't up for going out, but i took mr smear to park hayarkon. just as soon as we got off the bus, i received a message from a coworker and, to my horror, realized that i'd left my laptop at home. i was on-call. there was a distinct possibility that we would have to turn around and go home. i was anxious and pre-emptively devastated.

fortunately, though, things were fine. some else answered the question, there were no emergencies, and mr smear and i had a fantastic time! he played with some kids he knows from school, and some old guy (famous israeli musician whose music i know but whose name i don't) expertly played excellent guitar and mr smear and i both thoroughly enjoyed it, we got to watch the "quiet" fireworks (just smaller and less of them, but still awesome), and then suddenly mr smear was so tired i *had* to take him home.

we had a great time there, and we had a great time getting back. mr smear made up an entire mythology surrounding the accidental spoonerism "foxious nart". it was a wonderful start to independence day.

aside from the pager going off around midnight. that was a bummer. fortunately, whatever the problem was seemed to auto-resolve. and i did get started watching uncut gems, which i'm most assuredly not enjoying in exactly the way the producers wanted.

wednesday:

wednesday was an absolutely gorgeous day. mr smear and i arrived a little early for the air show, and subsequently met up with some friends. he was more interested in playing in the sand that watching the show, with the other kids (and us) yelling his name and pointing enthusiastically at every pass, but that changed when the first f35 did its thing :)

the show was absolutely brilliant, and we had a lot of fun. we were there much longer than planned; on our way off the beach we got to witness two f35's dog-fighting, and that made it even harder to get out of there... for both of us :P

we had a little drama on the way to the car, mr smear was soaked and cold and was so busy demanding a shower that he slipped and scratched his knee... but we didn't have trouble when we stopped at home to pick up gd and get him dry, and we had a pleasant drive to ze germans.

the traditional independence day barbeque was really fun! we all had a good time, even if the last-on-the-shelf vegan stuff gd had picked up wasn't particularly enjoyable, and mr smear went from being heavily involved with the videogame crowd to being heavily involved in the swimming crowd.

it was really weird seeing all our kids splashing and fooling around in the pool, and imagining that fifteen / twenty years ago that was us!

anyway, we had a great afternoon, and with a bit of a struggle managed to extract mr smear and say our goodbyes and drive back to tel aviv.

getting mr smear into bed was easy. the hard part was not falling asleep myself. i was done.

yesterday:

i started my day off by installing alpha anywhere. it looks like the real deal, hopefully i'll get some play time in tomorrow :)

i worked from home yesterday. i spent most of it wrestling with bash scripts and working around the discomfort that aws recently introduced with s3 buckets. i ended up working pretty late, but i'd needed to find the solution...

i watched the first episode of parasyte, which was fun!

i know i slept last night, because i remembered fragments of some bizarre dreams, but not particularly well. i generally haven't slept well in a long time.

a long, long time.

today:

so far, so good. we're about to go shopping for a new refridgerator. gd's been complaining for a year about the small one we got, and even though we can't really afford more expenses it's way past time we were able to stock a fridge like a family of three... happy wife, happy life, am i right?

...

oh, shit! i received a really exciting email last night, promising a meeting within the next week. hopefully this will go how i'm dreaming it'll go.

our last of us

the last of us shares a vision of what the world could look like if cordyceps evolved to infect humans. we're currently struggling with ringworm, and i can't help but imagine what the world would look like if tinea corporis was impossible to treat.

...

i've been chatting with scrapper over the past couple of days, i'm sad to learn that he and his partner have experienced a similar fallout to me and pg since they landed in canada. traveling and trauma test one's relationship, emigrating definitely combines those two and the effect is greater than the sum of its parts...

...

i finally got back to the rollerblading group on tuesday night! i drank a cup of coffee before i left, had a good time, and got home feeling pretty good (aside from a blister on one of my feet). but then... i couldn't sleep. i was thoroughly wired. after a very long wednesday, i climbed into bed in the hopes of recovering and then... still couldn't sleep. not as bad as the previous night, but insufficient.

(in lemongrab's voice) unacceptable!

boy, was i looking forward to sleeping last night, but i spent most of it uncomfortable, hot or cold or imagining things that bother me...

...

speaking of which, since gd's been able to smoke cannabis she's been able to wean off a whole lot of her pain medications, and she's going through withdrawal symptoms. that sucks.

...

this week i was hyper-focused on work. i'm not happy about that, but i guess i'm not unhappy about that either. i did enjoy some successes, although quite a lot of frustration, too. i learned a lot about some of the more esoteric stuff i've been working with. it's definite progress.

i'm excited and nervous about the next week and month. assuming all goes well, my first options are scheduled to vest in the next ten days. assuming all goes well, those options will actually be worth something at some point.

...

mr smear has lost another tooth. he's generally doing okay, and we're learning to pick our battles, but there was an incident on wednesday with a particularly slow and violent kid that made him refuse to enter his classroom yesterday...

...

we're off soon to join an earth day march in an attempt to raise awareness for our need (as a species) to get off animal agriculture. we figure it's a good idea to take mr smear with us, hopefully this will be fun! 

never again, again

[posted this morning]

Never forget.

It's April 2023, and listening to testimonials from Holocaust survivors I find myself becoming more and more upset. The stories themselves, the horrors that were inflicted upon us, they're upsetting enough as it is.

But more upsetting than that, is that after the ordeals that we've been through to come home, both nationally and personally, I find that everything said during last night's speeches was nothing more than lip service. We are deep in the process of forgetting, not on a personal level, but on a state level.

We have forgotten that we returned to our home, that we built this state, that we defend our homeland, as a home and as a refuge and as a last resort for the Jewish people. We have forgotten, in the midst of yet another period of rising antisemitism, that we are fighting a never-ending war against the hatred of our people.

Why do I say "we have forgotten", when the country is in mourning today for the millions we lost?

I say "we have forgotten" because, over the past two decades, our state's attitude and approach to "aliyah" - immigration to our holy land - has changed. Dramatically. No longer is it sufficient to be Jewish, and to come in via the Law of Return. We are, in frightening numbers, turning away Jews looking for safe haven. We care less about an oleh's Jewishness and more about their observance and affiliations. We care less about an oleh's Jewishness and more about their documentation and police clearances from other countries. We care less about an oleh's Jewishness and more about whether we think they can make ends meet, or will be a burden on our society.

I want to take this opportunity, while we remember the Holocaust, and also next week when we remember our fallen soldiers and our independence, to remember why we're here, and to remember why we need to be here.

I want to take this opportunity to raise awareness in the general population that our governments and our institutions are failing us on what really matters most. That they've been failing us in ways that run a lot deeper than simple left/right politics, they've been failing us regardless of who has been in power.

Never forget. 

never again

after this evening's live stream of the annual holocaust memorial day ceremony at yad vashem, gd and i went through some of the testimonies on their youtube channel. i'm really glad that they're using tech to preserve and share, and that these stories are available to everyone.

...

i'm still not over the neck/shoulder thing, but rolling my shoulder forward is becoming a habit and it does seem to be helping.

the weekend was quiet for us, with gd and myself both struggling with nerve pain. we did take a walk to get ice-cream, though. too much ice cream. it was pretty decadent.

yesterday and today have been a bit weird. my tummy seems to be back to normal since this morning, and aside from the neck/shoulder thing wearing me down i'm feeling fine. yesterday was an iffy day at work, but today was pretty solid.

mr smear's understanding of boundaries and loss of privileges needs tweaking, but he seems to be freaking out less and calming down more easily lately.

almost there

 my neck/shoulder thing's still going, but much calmer. on the other hand, my stomache was doing a thing this morning and i - thinking i just needed to fart - almost pooped myself today while bussing home with my son and carrying a whole bunch of heavy grocery bags. fortunately there was no incident, but i wasn't sure until we got in to safety.

mr smear's back in school as of this morning, and i must admit that it's a bit of a relief.

an unlikely-looking mom from his class turned out to be a burner. i found myself referring to my heavy party days as "when i was a kid" and stopped, horrified, by what had just come out of my mouth.

i'm still mildly disturbed by it.

aside from  school drop-off and pick-up, and grocery shopping, i spent the majority of my day writing an article triggered by gd and myself agreeing to stop watching power slap: road to the title this morning. there're some people on that show who should be getting real help, not being encouraged to hurt themselves and others for something that really isn't a "sport". it's a game, certainly, with rules... but as hard as they may try to legitimize it i just cannot consider it "athleticism".

i don't know why writing that took so long. i guess the asides to look things up were more distracting and rabbit-holey than i thought.

speaking of which, i was today years old when i learned the original cherokee story of the two wolves.

all the nerves, continued

 tuesday was rough, even if it was just a half-day. yesterday was rough too, if slightly less rough than tuesday, and both days i was in a lot of pain and having difficulty focusing on anything. and it's exhausting.

i'm grateful that yesterday was a holiday. the biggest thing we did was watch adventure time and the economics of happiness. it goes nicely with why everyone is quitting their job to play call of duty.

today my neck and shoulder were somewhat better, but still not good. i think i've understood that my troubles (generally, not just the past few days) might be caused by how unsymmetrical my shoulders are, because my left one hangs back and all the attached muscles and ligaments are always sore and tender.... i don't know how to train it forward, but i'm going to try.

work was a bit weird today. i don't know if i'm making progress or not, but it feels like i'm moving forward even as the tests fail harder and harder.

we started getting into sackboy: a big adventure this evening. i've been thinking about getting a third controller for a while, i think now's the time.

all the nerves

 it's been quite a while since i had me some good ol' fashioned nerve pinch pain. this morning (so far) it's my left shoulder, yesterday was my lower back, and for about a week now my neck's been griefing me on and off.

every night i go to bed wondering how my sleeping positions will mess me up for the following day.

this kinda stinks.

at the same time, though, i got caught in the rain yesterday and *ran* home (okay, probably more of a brisk jog for most people) all the way from the train station, which is a just-less-than-a-mile-stone for me and my knee. i managed to clear the distance just as the thunderstorm lightened up and got home just as it resumed its fury, so luck was with me.

sunday saw me working from home, and also saw mr smear having an unexpectedly emotional day with disturbingly self-destructive behavior. it started with me trying to sort out a piano app after he "showed interest" (ie. begged me passionately) in a synthesizer, when i was trying to figure things out and i didn't select one of the genres he might have been interested in (neither of us know what genre it was, only that it had a lightning symbol). he decided that an appropriate punishment for me would be to throw every toy and book he has onto the floor, roughly. i was focused on my work for most of the day and i don't remember what else happened before dinner time, but at the end of dinner he wanted to watch an additional episode of adventure time and would not take "no" for an answer...

i guess i'm very grateful that i got an apology and good night wishes from him just before he went to sleep, and yesterday morning began wonderfully as he walked in on me playing pokémon and decided he wanted to play too. when i left for work he was still thoroughly engrossed.

i picked up a document for gd from the clinic on the way to work, and found myself staring at a green shredding bin with a pink plastic bag in it and the hebrew for "information security". "security" has the same letters as "watermelon", and i can't stop myself translating "information security" to "information watermelonation"...

yesterday was a long day in the office. everyone else was amused when i asked if there would be a selection of matzah on the breakfast tray, but i was disappointed to discover, when i walked into the kitchen area, that there was no tray at all :/

i've spent a considerable amount of time trying to find a solution to getting us and our friend's family to a nature party at the end of the month, i cannot believe how expensive it is and it's all revolving around the fact that it's shabbat and there's no public transport available :(

i'm still dealing with fallout today from the past week or so of ci/cd mayhem, but it's a half-day before the chag and i feel like we're pretty much stable again. my boss gave me admin rights on sunday, along with the uncle-ben speech about power and responsibility...

mr smear and i both had trouble going to sleep last night. neither of us had trouble waking up this morning, aside from the nerve pain which caused me to scarf down some matzah and take anti-inflammatories and have gd set my shoulder and neck on fire with deep heat...

home safe

 we just got in from a really nice day, both visits were really nice but also lasted longer than we'd budgeted for, and i was really nervous about getting back home before the streets were blocked for this evening's protests.

the anti-inflammatory i took this morning helped, and loads of caffeine helped. now i'm jittery :P

spring is here

i'm doing a little better today, but for most of the last week my neck and upper back have been sore and the nerve pinching has been causing me dizziness / faintness / distraction in addition to pain...

gd's been doing much, much better since we've discovered that she's not / no longer allergic to cannabis. as in, her quality of life has improved dramatically. this is very exciting, and we're praying it continues like this!

tuesday:

i barely remember tuesday at this point. one thing of note was that i discovered that i received a digital gift card from my employer for the holidays, and that i'd missed two others from last year because my inbox was out of control, so it looks like we're going to be doing some serious home shopping over the next week or two!

wednesday:

half-day, partially successful but the main work still hasn't gone through (in large part due to loads of flaky tests).

picking up mr smear and doing some last minute pre-chag shopping along the way, that distinct relaxed spring feeling of pesachness was in the air.

driving to our cousins in lapid for a more-relaxed-than-usual seder, it was a lovely dinner, we all ate too much, and mr smear even jumped in a couple of times and that was awesome.

i needed two caffeine sweets to get us home safely, we all passed out as soon as we got home.

thursday:

most of the day was spent indoors, between my neck and generally being tired i was feeling pretty wasted. i got in a bit of a nap, but then gd woke me up to tell me that one of mr smear's friends was at the park and asked if i could take him. one slugged coffee later, we walked to park hayarkon and met up with a couple of other kids in his class.

there were a couple of cool things that happened there. first, mr smear handled himself pretty well with a bunch of different kids, even if he didn't fully understand some of the games his friend was playing. then he tried one of the kids' scooters, and even though he wanted to give up at the first wobble, i convinced him to give it another try and he ended up going (slowly) round in circles for a while and gaining a bit of confidence.

and then he blew me away by asking to sleep over his friend's house.

he's never done that before, so this was a big deal for us, but we gave it a try and gd and i ended up having an impromptu date night and finally watched a couple of episodes of the last of us.

yesterday:

we woke up to a very quiet apartment. after a slow and easy morning, mr smear's friend's mom dropped him off along with her two kids, and the next part of the day was a full house that was mostly quite cool (both kids are very sweet so it was very low stress). we then took all three to a park close by where a bunch of class parents had set up a picnic/bar while the kids entertained themselves, and the weather was amazing, and a good time was had by all.

we went to drop off mr smear's friend at home and the two of them insisted on continuing the playdate, so after the poor mother was browbeaten by both her kids into letting that happen gd and i enjoyed a restful couple of hours before heading over to pick mr smear up.

all in all, it's been a very good couple of days.

today so far:

we're about to drive up north to visit our kibbutz cousin, and then see urchin on the way back. mr smear's been enjoying matzah for breakfast the last couple of days but he's now over it. i'm still sore but i think i'm going to be okay.

here we go!

appreciation

 today was a day in the office. it was mr smear's last day of not-school before the passover holidays, so he's now off for a week. an ex-coworker came to return her computer and brought us a huge bag of lego that her kids don't want any more. another co-worker got very emotional because she's the last man standing in her team while she's struggling with the "usual" immigrant blues.

the work itself today was a mixed bag. one thing that was really nice was receiving a voucher for a show as a token of appreciation for the burned hours during the recent crisis :)

i went to bed early after putting mr smear to bed late, but woke up an hour or two ago with bad indigestion. so i've been doing the pokémon online training, of course. i'm a little sad that they're stopping development on the online game, because i'm planning on picking up a starter kit for mr smear at some stage and one of the cooler features is being able to use codes from the physical cards to import them into your digital collection...

a slow sunday

 i don't know what happened to me, i'm guessing it's something i ate (not food poisoning... let's call it "triggering"), but *boy* am i glad i worked from home today. 

it was a long workday that was really just a continuation of the previous couple of workdays, primarily filled with lots of frustration with an urgent piece of work. and making slow and steady progress on something else on the side, but the frustration was the main theme. then, finally, after consulting with a coworker, i learned that the issue was a known one and had nothing to do with me.

so... a lot of wasted hours on this thing, then, that could've gone out last week when we desperately needed it.

anyway, metaphorically: after getting tails every single time for days on end, i finally hit a whole bunch of heads in a row this evening and was able to square away the central part of the current project before bedtime.

this was good.

...

in other news, gd was hilariously spaced out for most of today. in addition to a few funny encounters, this also led to her sending me to the school too early to pick up mr smear, which would have upset me more had it not been for the fact that i walked in on to his teacher struggling to discuss something important with him. not only was it an excellent opportunity to hear about an incident itself from a reliable witness, but i managed to establish a baseline with him and i *think* he understood me. it remains to be seen whether he can act accordingly, to be fair it's a hard ask for a seven year old to put up with the class mouth-breather / bully whose behavior annoys the crap out of him.

in spite of how disappointing jim jefferies turned out to be, he's said quite a few wise things, and his "hate doesn't beat hate" advice is something we're trying to teach our son. it's really good advice.

breathing easy

 we got to sleep in yesterday morning, and we achieved two things. the first was getting gd sorted out temporarily (we need to start going through the official channels this week) and the second was grocery shopping.

my neck was still messing with me (it's still giving me trouble, but yesterday was really bad) and i had to lie down quite a lot.

otherwise, there was a lot of joy in the apartment as a result of my deciding that mr smear was ready to play among us. even though it took a while to get set up - accounts and friends are really messed up, and there's no way for the two of us to play at the same time from different devices which just makes no sense at all - we had a blast taking turns!

this morning i felt better, and i got to sleep in a bit again. i began my day with the pokémon card game online. i gotta admit, i've been having more fun playing this than the magic the gathering game, i'm really excited by how simple and elegant the mechanics are! mr smear wasn't too keen from the get-go but he appeared to enjoy watching me play, so maybe when we have a little cash to spare i'll invest in a proper starter kit :)

so that's what i did this morning, while he played more among us and minecraft, and by lunchtime i was ready to go outside. it was a beautiful day! gd wasn't feeling up to it but mr smear came along without any fuss, and we strolled through to rabin square to chill by the fountains and the fish pond, then meandered through masaryk until we were hungry, then stopped to eat at may 6. the vegan options were great, and i was particularly proud of how mr smear handled himself eating in public (he's less messy than at home :P). we enjoyed our meals and had a good time!

then we took a slow stroll back the way we'd come, stopping a couple of playgrounds and picking up ice lollies on the way home.

i didn't realize how dehydrated i was until i got in to our apartment... anyway, we played some rayman: legends and then discovered that among us is available on the ps4, went through the whole sign-up ordeal (for nothing, it wouldn't merge our accounts) and then played until it was time to get ready for bed, at which point mr smear realized that he was, in fact, a bit hungry. anyway, we got through feeding and showering and brushing teeth without any issues, and the two of us had an interesting chat about dreams and meditation when i was supposed to be reading the bfg (mainly because the bfg said something very wrong about humans wasting time sleeping).

now i've played some more pokémon, and i'm just about ready for bed. this has been my first real weekend in a while, and it actually feels like i've relaxed and unwound a bit :)