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.