well, bully for us

wednesday:

a couple of weeks ago i mentioned that we were struggling with ringworm, and for more than a month it has been causing us all a lot of stress and unhappiness. so it was more than a relief on wednesday morning to get a second second opinion that it is most assuredly not ringworm. it's not infectious. it's actually, and this is the first time i've heard about this, a case of atopic dermatitus and there's a list of suspicious possible causes. basically, gd's developed another kind of allergic reaction.

immediately, i suspected that it was related to cannabis, but apparently the skin thing started before our recent adventure.

so that's an enormous relief.

on my way home from work, still heavily contemplating monday evening's revelation, i came up with a simple strategy for relating privileges to behavior in a positive way, and i was so excited to share it with gd that apparently i managed to say it in a disagreeable way. and then, although she later admitted that she didn't disagree with what i was proposing, she told me she didn't agree. and then i lost my temper, and we spent the next half hour or so having a massive fight.

i guess it's kind of understandable why mr smear gets so angry so quickly.

thursday:

thursday morning started off okay, right until i needed to take mr smear to school. he began fighting with me in the stairwell, and once we got outside i realized that i needed help. so i dragged him back upstairs so that gd could talk to him. she tried, gave up after a moment, and then told me he would calm down during the walk.

i know my son well enough to be certain that he would not be calming down on the way. he just stews and gets angrier.

we got about halfway when i managed to get him to take a breath and talk to me. things weren't good by the time we said goodbye, but they did seem reasonably less bad.

then i returned home to a new fight, or maybe it was a continuation of the previous night's fight. this time, though, we found resolution, at least.

i took my watch in to a different place for repair, and it was quick and painless. the watch is no longer water-resistant, but that's fine. it was a cheap watch (xiaomi huami amazfit BIP) that i picked up in july of 2018, and although the notifications are inconsistent, it's a decent digital watch with a step counter and heart-rate tracking that still only needs to be recharged every few weeks.

i returned home and settled in to work. i had something big and important that needed to be done.

about five minutes before our daily standup, the phone rang.

we rushed off to pick up mr smear, who had injured a (different) kid in his class by throwing a rock at his head.

we were devastated.

the teacher informed us that he seemed to be remorseful and feel guilty, and instructed us to be gentle with him.

we're trying.

let's just say that the rest of my workday was a little bit distracted. and a bunch of random and unexpected things began failing (and that's how we realized that the end-of-life deprecation phase date for .net 3.1 had come and gone).

at some point gd took mr smear out to go and do something, which is when the fridge was delivered. 

fortunately, that went pretty smoothly. though there was a moment when the movers thought that they wouldn't be able to get it through the door, but after removing the packaging and measuring twice and getting me to sign a waiver that i wouldn't blame them for any scratches they managed to get it to squeak through without any damage (or without ripping off the mezuzah, which they almost did with their initial attempt).

that big and important thing that needed to be done? it didn't get done.

one positive thing that did come out of this awful experience is that we managed to get a contact for a therapist from the school - which we'd asked for more than a year ago - so we have an appointment for next week and hopefully they'll be able to help us get back on track.

whatever "track" means, in our case. we just want him to learn how to enjoy his life and not be so angry and stressed all the time. us too.

we would have been more excited about turning on the new fridge in the evening if it hadn't been for the trauma of the day.

at bedtime, one of mr smear's friends called to assure him that he was still his friend. it was very sweet. very awkward, but very sweet.

yesterday:

mr smear ended thursday and began friday with a stuffy nose and a post-nasal drip, a great start for their school sports day in the park. gd accompanied him, and they ended up coming early, apparently it was just too hot (it was very hot yesterday) and a lot of families bailed.

the other delivery guys arrived to pick up the old fridge, which by this time had been defrosted and cleaned. although their manager had informed me that i couldn't ride in the cab with them, they didn't want to have to wait for me to bus to the destination so they asked me to jump in.

i don't speak any arabic (except for the borrow-words, and a phrase i learned in the army that should never be used unless i'm armed and under threat), so i didn't understand a word that was said when i wasn't being spoken to. i also had some trouble hearing what was said when i was being spoken to, but for the most part our conversation was good. the guys got a good laugh out of the fact that i could not, for the life of me, pronounce one of their names correctly :P

the destination was in a very odd neighbourhood, with no place to park that had access to the building, so that was a thing. but we found a way, and delivered the fridge, and i handed over the money, and we went our separate ways.

for all the stress that went into planning the deliveries, that worked out remarkably smoothly. and although the delivery cost was high (very high, considering the old fridge wasn't difficult for them to move), we're much happier having sent it to someone who needs it - to a lone soldier, particularly meaningful to me as an ex-lone-soldier - than to recycling.

i met up with gd and mr smear at abu ghosh for a laffa breakfast, i was hungry and i stuffed myself. we then did grocery shopping and returned home.

i was tired. it was hot.

in spite of that, i dragged myself out into the weird weather (it was hot, but somehow misty?) and walked to drone hacker's for a beer and a chat, we ended up talking for three hours and it still felt like we were halfway through a conversation.

i bumped into the older parents of one of mr smear's classmates on the way home (i didn't recognize the father, though he recognized me, and as usual i made it weird), and we ended up having a very animated and occasionally heated discussion about the unreasonable obstacles to making aliyah. the father, as a lawyer, made a very interesting bet - that he would represent us for free if the authorities tried to kick my mother out while trying to make aliyah from inside the country - which in the grand scheme of things feels like a bet worth taking but i couldn't possibly imagine my mother packing up and leaving without assurance that we'd sort everything out.

though... that's really what we did. it's crazy to think about it, but that's exactly what we did.

and here we are.

...

i managed to get tomorrow off, and i'm heading north to meet some people. no idea how this unfolds, but just having a point of contact in private aerospace is exciting in and of itself!