whew!

today:

a good start, we managed to get our boy to school sort of on time in spite of the fact that he was convinced he was too sick (he really wasn't), and i managed to figure out where one of the issues that broke my thursday is even if i don't yet understand what the issue is. that freed up my soul to pack away my work machine for the weekend. then we workshopped the framework for a poem together that was inspired by me watching dead prez - hip hop, kanye west's def poetry jam recital of self-conscious, and the digging the greats video about all falls down. it's just a beginning, but it's a really good beginning.

we then went to the shops, where i picked up a decent charger for my laptop and we did the groceries. i had just enough time to eat a sandwich at home, then went to the dentist.

what an enormous relief! we worked together and figured out that i was absolutely right, that the previous dentist had just gotten things very wrong. it turns out i have at least one cracked filling, and the intense pain is caused by cold hitting the surface of the filling, then spreading deep until it hits the crack. it was a fair amount of investigating, and my teeth hurt for a while afterwards, but i have an appointment (for a few weeks' time) and while it's not clear whether it'll be new fillings or a root canal, i'll take whatever relief i can get.

on my way home i spoke to my mom, and for the first time *really* lost my cool and let her know exactly what her delaying leaving south africa means to us. i feel sad for her, but we're far beyond any point of no return and it's just not viable for anyone to live there any more.

i ate, flipped an avocado slice straight into my keyboard (panic! but it looks like i took care of it), washed dishes, snacked, washed more dishes, and played mr smear's variation of goodcritters. i suddenly felt drowsy when he started setting up, and i passed out while he was trying to explain the rules to me - that was embarrassing. i came round and got the hang of it, and while there were a couple of points that demanded a bit of debate it was overall a pretty fun game!

i needed to crash afterwards, though. i rushed off to lie down, and a bit later mr smear came to "punish" me for not helping tidy up by tickling me. the tickling became a pillow fight became me getting the hiccups and suddenly needing to throw up, which i did, and now i'm just feeling tired. in spite of that, though, i'm feeling pretty good about today.

yesterday:

mr smear was too sick to go to school, and i was working from home. for the most part it was okay, though, although i had a pretty frustrating and very long workday. mostly due to test flakiness, and my efforts didn't seem to help very much.

in the afternoon we went to a book fair (they're everywhere this month) and picked up four exciting books, so last night i decided to read the hebrew translation of "the giving tree" to mr smear at bed time. we got as far as the boy taking the branches before mr smear couldn't take it any more, he just broke down in tears and we couldn't finish the reading. so i held him tight (while fighting uncontrollable nervous giggling), conceded, and switched to the incredibly beautiful the iron man: a children's story in five nights.

i then spent the rest of the night (well, until 1am or so at any rate), entertaining myself online, watching wonderful and surprising things like big oxygen and playing tales of the neon sea (what a gorgeous game!).

wednesday:

mr smear woke up with a nasty cough, but it didn't seem like we should keep him home. at 9.05am the therapist called to find out where we were, and we - were - mortified. i don't know why it didn't occur to me to ask for a video chat, but we scrambled to catch a bus and made it there with ten minutes left on our clock. fortunately, she managed to move her next appointment by fifteen minutes and that gave us just enough space for a very productive and insightful meeting!

some of the advice she gave us was contradictory, but it's a lot of grey-area no-right-answers kind of stuff and in the two days since i feel like all three of us are doing better.

it was a constructive day at work. and a pleasant evening. i continued playing around with my new npm package and i'm really happy with it for now.

in general, i've been deliberately going to bed very late for the last week or so, and i've been sleeping much better as a result. i hope this lasts. 

...

i just taught mr smear how to do a shift cypher, which was fun!