the twist

 so... it's always tough getting mr smear out of bed. this morning, after trying the usual tactics, i grabbed him and pulled him towards the edge of the bed... and threw my own back out.

jesus, fuck.

i managed to get it to calm down a little, but it's been threatening all day.

it was a rainy day today, with - as usual - the heavens opening up just as mr smear and i arrived at the school. fortunately, i was armed with an umbrella and was wearing my new galoshes. i think it's the first rain day i've gone in to the office.

on the way to the office, i went to the hospital with gd to book appointments. it took a while, but it was relatively smooth.

it was a nice work day. very social. i learned a new trick and i think i'm mostly done implementing it.

i left work feeling very much done for the day. after getting home and relaxing a bit, i helped mr smear with his homework assignments (still going strong) and we watched a hunter x hunter episode and a little bit more of harry potter and the chamber of secrets.

now i'm trying to decide what i'm doing with the rest of my evening. my brain's all over the place, but not in a useful way...

turnaround

 the day started off wildly shit. i mishandled an issue with mr smear on the way to school and it escalated to the point where i had to bring him back home; every step of the way felt awful. and then apologize, after understanding that what i *should* have done from the very beginning was just let the shit go.

the rest of the day was pretty good, but that shit feeling of i'm-fucking-this-up stayed for a long time.

we all went to the hospital to make an appointment for gd, and failed to do that because there's no reception on sundays.

i helped mr smear with his homework this evening, and it went really well. like, for-reals math homework explaining division problems to him and getting him on track to solve them himself!

oh, look! it's raining. fortunately, i managed to finish painting around the windows this afternoon, so hopefully that's going to help with the mold problem we keep having... but i'm not holding my breath.

work was alright, i guess.

i can't believe i only have three days left. and tonight is my last on-call.

i had a chat with a coworker who's also finishing up on wednesday. turns out he's been in touch with a bunch of others who left, and we're all leaving for pretty much the same reasons...

i think it's bedtime. i'm feeling dysfunctional and i've been watching random shit on youtube for the past couple of hours. i must admit, i'm feeling quite relieved by this analysis from the tom nash report. i'm feeling a lot more at ease than i have since the ceasefire was announced. on the other hand, i'm both very grateful for each hostage returned, and heartbroken anew for each one, for different reasons. the story of avigail idan is so utterly ghoulish i just can't deal with it.

the boomerang

last night i got into marvel snap for a while. i don't know how i feel about it, not to say that it's not fun - it just feels a bit... empty.

...

i woke up this morning with a "poem" in my head that i turned into a meme i believe in but that i'm unable to share.

boomerang fu, on the other hand, is an awesome game. while i started today watching news videos that made me angry (western mainstream media seems to be predominantly comprised of ignorant idiots), i did get to spend a good while playing boomerang fu with my son and we had an amazing time.

i lay down and tried to continue reading diary of a wimpy kid, and was woken up a long while later by gd who was concerned i was in a bad position for my neck. i'm more concerned that i wasn't feeling sleepy before passing out... and even more concerned that until i said something, my son didn't realize that the protagonist is a character one should aspire to be the opposite of.

i shoved a bag of popcorn in the microwave (for the first time since we got here?), and we settled down to watch leo. i was expected standard adam sandler "meh" - i love a lot of his movies, but lately he's been... not great. while there were a couple of "ugh" moments, the majority of the movie was marvellously entertaining, both funny and well executed for its mission.

mr smear asked me to explain "genitals" to him, which i thought was interesting but he got "bored" pretty quickly :P

i don't feel like doing anything this afternoon/evening, and i'm pretty sure i don't have to. having said that, i'm a bit disappointed that i didn't get two coats of paint on all the windows yesterday, and because it's been a cloudy day i haven't felt confident enough that it wouldn't rain to continue.

the next phase

wednesday:

it was a zoom-school day for mr smear, and i decided to go into the new office for the first time. i started the day off on the wrong foot, i should have known better not to click "okay" on the software update when i was in a hurry. it broke halfway and caused trouble for mr smear when i was out, including for his therapy session which is still online because of the war :(

the new office is quite nice, but i think i'm extremely allergic to something near my station because from the moment i arrived my nose was both stuffy and running and i kept sneezing - but when i stood ten/fifteen meters away for our daily meeting it got better. it got so bad that i had to take an antihystimine off our new office manager, and that barely helped.

oddly enough, in spite of the allergic reaction i was so much more awake and focused all day! i now suspect that in addition to the office environment influencing my state of mind, i might be being affected by gd smoking in our bedroom, and smoking more than usual because of her anxiety. i think i'm been operating a little bit stoned for the past month or two. or perhaps it's something else, and it's just coincidental? because now that i think about it i was fine yesterday and today as well... hmm...

yesterday:

yesterday started off relatively well, because i finally figured out the should-have-been-solved problem i got stuck into the day before. but i couldn't continue with the task, because soon after that the pager went off, and i would spend the next hours - and then a couple more around 3am - dealing with a poorly designed mechanism that's supposed to protect us from traffic spikes but actually generates a vicious feedback loop. it's part of the same awful code i cleaned up a couple of months ago, written by an ex-teammate who i really like as a person, but whose competence i keep questioning every time i encounter his work :(

today:

today i painted the second half of the big window frame, and put a coat around a couple of other windows, too. we also went to a furniture store and bought a replacement queen-sized bed for the lumpy one that gd's been struggling on. 

gd's current struggle is extremely frustrating. we were at the pain clinic last week and she said nothing about it, although it's been a problem for months, and now all of a sudden it's terrible and urgent and we have to scramble to arrange surgery.

i swear, the universe thinks i'm super bored.

anyway, we got to the store pretty quickly, and mr smear made himself comfortable on one of the beds. fine. we told him we were going next door to look at something, and he ignored us, so we went, looked, and came back. and found him in tears, thinking we'd abandoned him.

good grief.

apparently he hadn't heard us after all. so that was dramatic... the old lady (it's a family business) offered him mentos if he would forgive us, then asked how many it would take.

"five".

that was funny enough by itself, but it became hysterical when he put one in his mouth and realized they were mint, and he hates mint 🤣

i had a work meeting when we got home due to my being on-call, fortunately it didn't take too long and i think i kinda helped.

the afternoon was painting, dishes, and then spending four hours glued to live streams of the hostage release, some of them boring, some of them infuriating. i'm not used to watching mainstream media, the "reporters" and "journalists" on a couple of channels (especially sky news) were appalling.

anyway, i'm glad some of our people are back, and hopeful that the rest of this "deal" goes smoothly. at least, after watching the latest al shifa tunnel videos and the tom nash report, i feel a little more reassured that things are going to work out for us. i mean, the ceasefire might have been a complete disaster if we hadn't managed to bring journalists into the serious tunnel complex, but we did, so i don't think it will be.

in order to facilitate gd sleeping on mr smear's bed - which is the only good bed we have until the new one arrives - we've put the three beds together in our room... mr smear's excited, and i'm worried about catching knees and elbows when i get into bed :/

it's all "a joke"

how did we get to wednesday??

...

i just found out about the temporary ceasefire, i'm conflicted, to be honest. i don't trust our government to know what's right in the best of times, least of all now when nobody knows what's right. i'm confident this is going to cost us more than we anticipate, but hopeful that we might at least get some of our hostages back...

what's going on in south africa is a joke. a really poor, unfunny joke, like the comedian would have enjoyed. there's scary anti-semitism, and i'm afraid for my family and community. at the same time, it's hard not to appreciate the irony of a government that's composed entirely of a bunch of criminals who are responsible for immense pain, suffering and death thinking that they're in a position to judge anyone else about anything. and they're wrong*. i mean, holy shit.

* not about netanyahu needing to be arrested, just not what they want him arrested for.

...

sunday/monday:

the boss is back, which is a bit of a relief. he finally sent an email to the company informing everyone that i'm out. one of my coworkers left me an incredible recommendation on linkedin.

after days and days of sisyphusian struggle to get the project i'm working on to a point where i could make the actual change, and days and days of building up anxiety because of how complicated the change itself was going to be to implement, i finally made the change. and it was almost no change - two lines of code and one of those was just removing an import. it seems too good to be true.

the other grind of a problem - that was the previous week's morbid mystery - still isn't resolved. it looks like it should be working, but i have no evidence and trying to gather such evidence is proving to be a massive ballache.

yesterday:

yesterday was shit. gd still sick, me feeling sick, another round of dealing with mold and winter hasn't even begun yet.

and a horrible fight in the afternoon; i'm still feeling sore about some of the things that were said.

at least the airconditioner in the living room worked. the other ones worked immediately, but the living room one played "hard to get" and it was only after about ten minutes, while i was recording a video to send to the technician, that it finally kicked in and did its job.

...

as far as on-calls go, my last one (!!!) so far hasn't been the worst. now to pray that typing that out doesn't call the attention of the evil eye...

the war that should not be

off the top of my head, the only thing that's given me any sense of achievement this week is writing and publishing Some Hope Amidst The Darkness: Perspectives From The Ground. i've spent a lot of time "discussing" things with acquaintences and strangers online, it's been exhausting.

work has been pretty miserable, but as i was discussing with my mom yesterday - i'm very lucky to have a job at all, under the circumstances, and my boo-hoo "hardships" are certainly a lot less than what most israelis are going through. i've got so much to be grateful for, not least of which being that my family  is intact.

tues/wed/thurs:

who knows. who cares?

yesterday:

i wrote all through thursday night until about 3am yesterday morning, crashed, woke up about six hours later and continued editing until i felt i could publish. or, at least, until gd advised me to just push the button and get it over with. then we walked to the vegan coffee shop nearby for coffee and sandwiches, then meandered home.

...

we had an unpleasant incident on the way home, from an unexpected source. mr smear suddenly complained about the hostage pictures everywhere, and gd and i were both upset by his initial responses to ours. we were initially quite angry, but i took a breath and tried to approach him with genuine curiosity, which led to a conversation, and an opportunity to do something that i wasn't sure i should do, but ended up proving effective without any apparent trauma: i asked him to imagine if it was him, or us, if he'd want everyone to not think about him (or us) quite so much. 

...

i spent most of yesterday anxiously online. "hasbara" - explaining what israel is doing and why we're doing it - is exhausting. it's thankless. it's anxiety-inducing. it's frustrating. and ultimately, it's demoralizing. it shouldn't be necessary to work hard to convince people of the truth.

combatting disinformation in the face of social media algorithms optimized to drive engagement feels like nothing more than farting into the wind.

this link is to a moment in a video where some journalists/pundits discuss how this is the first war where PR plays a decisive role. we've reached this disturbing point in technology and history where our tools combine with our lack of experience and critical thinking to render us susceptible to whatever's meme-able and goes viral, no matter how wrong, no matter how dumb.

...

i finally - for the first time in days - found bandwidth to play some more inscryption last night. this morning, mr smear wanted me to watch him play a scene from octodad. aside from the pride of watching my boy master something really hard, i don't remember the last time i laughed so much :)

troll tool

jesus, the exhaustion. the distraction. the demoralization.

work has been particularly shit the last couple of weeks, i've been working on stuff that i really don't care about and that every part makes less sense than the last. everything is broken, or not yet implemented, or not planned to be implemented, and it feels like everything i touch was just an ancient, mummified piece of shit that was just waiting for the slightest encouragement to collapse into a fecal dust cloud.

the internet has been particularly toxic over the last month, and on top of worrying about the hostages, and our soldiers, and the victims, and all the people who've been relocated away from the borders, and our own safety... it's very taxing. it's frightening how many "useful idiots" hamas has in its pocket, worse still when those useful idiots are celebrities with large followings or worse - jews.

arguing facts with people is just insane.

meanwhile, today i heard an interesting podcast episode that inspires a little hope in the potential for a saner future: neil lazarus talking to a west bank palestinian.

friday:

gd's jewelery part ii. mr smear and i accompanied her this time, and we ended up having a very nice morning out. we also discovered that the shoe store we saw adult galshoes in - katalina - is completely vegan! and full of cool stuff.

on the way home, we stopped at a supermarket to pick up a couple of things, and just as we finished paying the sirens went off. it turned out to be a good place to get caught in a rocket attack, and good timing, because we just walked through to the back and i enjoyed the baguette we'd bought.

saturday:

by the afternoon, i knew we needed to do something outside. i took mr smear for quite a walkabout, stopping in at dizengoff center to see what card tournaments were taking place (he wasn't too interested, and there was the distinct smell of unwashed teenagers), running into drone hacker on the way back and enjoying a chat, then at mr smear's direction picking up a big, healthy lunch at cafe easy that he just wolfed down. it was a good saturday afternoon experience.

by saturday night, we were freaking out about the smell from the airconditioner. i "did some research", and some of the results scared me, but one forum post include a report that leaving their airconditioner running for 24 hours on the highest fan speed had cleared the smell. i turned ours on on the highest speed, and prayed.

yesterday: 

i dropped mr smear off at school, then walked to the clinic and hospital and got a bunch of things sorted out.

because a frustrating workday wasn't bad enough, there had to be some bad news from sea point. a cousin of mine was on the scene, and it took place right across the road from my mom's apartment. on the one hand, i'm glad the police actually took action, but on the other... these people are mad, and rabidly antisemitic, and their government as a whole is cool with that.

we had a parents webinar around bedtime. insight: a talk from a psychologist who discussed how we process trauma and normalize bad situations. disappointment: while most of the parents are welcoming the 70-or-so kids rescued from the "gaza envelope", a couple were bizarrely and selfishly concerned about their children experiencing second-hand trauma by being exposed to kids who almost lost their lives mere weeks ago. jesus, fuck.

by last night, the smell from the airconditioner seemed to have disappeared, but i wasn't 100% confident so we left it running another night.

today:

by this morning we were convinced that the smell was gone, and turned the airconditioner off. i just tested it out a short while ago, and it seems to be good!

the day began with one downer - mr smear not feeling well - and one thing that got me majorly pissed off: our grocery store order from the day before hadn't arrived. then, after calling them for help and being put on hold by a representative for five minutes, the call was disconnected. then, i had to wait on hold for another fifteen minutes to get to another representative, by which stage i was livid. fortunately, the second representative was legitimately helpful. i'd been angry enough to look up taking them to small claims court, but not quite angry enough to want to put myself through such an admin-heavy process.

while doing the dishes this morning, i caught up with all of tom shapira's (hebrew) podcast about comics called the between-panels's podcast, and i warmly recommend it - fascinating stuff!

i might be very wrong, of course, but gd seems to be doing a lot better. she went out again today by herself.

mr smear's demonstrating a lot of behavior improvement. we had a moment today that traditionally would have become a nasty scene - he was supposed to be on a screen break, i left the room for a few minutes and when i came back i caught his red-handed - but the tension dissapated very quickly and a few minutes later he apologized. and that was the whole damned story. the rest of the day was pretty much good vibes.

aside from another rocket attack just before bedtime, but he's totally into bacterial takeover and big numbers now :P

i was so tired after putting him to bed that i crashed myself, then woke up a while later and was unable to sleep because i needed to a) get all this down and b) respond to people who are wrong on the internet.

god help us all.

another war week over

work:  today was a real struggle, i feel like i've spent most of the week hitting every possible snag, edge case and weirdness. the successes were limited.

gd and i dropped mr smear off at school this morning and then walked together to the clinic, then did some shopping and came home. unlike the last couple of days, i feel like i was relatively focused work-wise.

after picking mr smear up from school, gd put on a brave face and went through to her piercer to get her nose ring switched - i'm actually quite proud of her, under the circumstances, leaving the house by herself and taking the bus was a really big deal.

mr smear was pretty cool today, although bedtime shenanigans turned into bad feelings. not as bad as they could have been, though. i do sense improvement.

i returned to the orthopaedist, who could immediately see wear around my hips. that's troubling. so i have a referral for a joint specialist and i guess we'll see...

i'm tired, i'm contemplating going to bed soon. i did play some inscryption this evening, i'm enjoying it but i wasn't in the right mood.

i've expressed to gd my concern that her with her ptsd and lack of context should really be avoiding news in general. i suggested she'd be better off with cat videos, and she didn't disagree... everything is toxic right now, and i'm personally struggling with the "need to know" FOMO and sense of powerless despair that comes with it, even if the "knowledge" is always suspect at best.

odin-appropriate

 today's wodan's day, and considering the war/death/sacrificed eyeball thing i find it a perfect day to have blasted through the final boss i've been struggling with in inscryption.

SPOILER: i just got through the final battle of act i with the most ridiculously overpowered deck, and am finally in act ii! holy fuck, this is one of the most satisfying achievements ever and i know that the game's only just warming up.

what a freaking rush. 

...

i went to bed early-ish last night, abandoning gd in the living room after she'd had a fight with what she believes was a mosquito (she had surprisingly nasty reactions, apparently this is normal for her).

this morning started off with a visit from the air conditioner repair man, who checked out all the installations and determined that the stinky one needed a professional clean. i helped, it took a while, and while he thinks it's all good now we're still smelling the faint remnants of the ammonia smell that was worrying us a couple of days ago.

after he left, that was when i remembered to inform the landlords... in the evening they got back to me and only agreed to pay half, because they believe it's our fault for not cleaning the air conditioners. which we didn't realize we needed to do 🤦‍♂️

next up: our daily meeting, with our CTO informing all present that i'm leaving at the end of the month. there were raised eyebrows, followed by a couple of awkward moments, followed by a couple of touching messages.

i know it doesn't make sense to say goodbye just yet, so it doesn't actually mean anything, but i couldn't help noting who didn't send messages :P

around lunchtime, i booked a car and gd and mr smear joined me on a mission to drop off bags of old clothes for a donation drive. there was a free hour on the app, and we managed to drop off the clothing (the woman in charge was absolutely blown away by gd's eyelid tattoos), pick up nice bread and a bagel, draw cash for the cleaner, and return the car in time.

that onion bagel was delicious.

i spent the afternoon working uncomfortably while the cleaner cleaned, mr smear had another zoom session with his therapist, and i struggled both with the work and with distractions. at the end of the day, i made progress but i don't feel great about it.

in the late afternoon (which is feeling like evening now that everyone's clocks are wrong again) i went to get imaging done for my hips/pelvis/nether regions. it was quick, a little weird (the poses for them to get clear shots) and i walked away being grateful that at this stage the radiation to my boy parts probably won't make any difference to the world.

the evening was a mixed bag, mostly positive. mr smear's been pretty cool so far since last week's freak-out, even if he's testing boundaries like it's nobody's business... as usual...

it's getting late, i'm still excited by my earlier achievement with inscryption, and now i'm going to try to learn something blockchainy before going to bed.

mon-tues

difficult work days, and everything's a long, unpleasant slog made more unpleasant by the fact that i'm not interested, made far more unpleasant by the raging ignorance and rabid antisemitism floating around on all fronts. i don't think i've ever been this distracted in my life.

there've been less rocket attacks the past few days, but they seem to be getting more hardcore. less warning and more and louder explosions.

gd seems to be a little calmer, though still far from calm. we spent a good chunk of today cleaning the airconditioners in preparation for tomorrow's visit by the repairman, and it looks like she's hurt herself again.

i should have insisted on her not helping me.

i think we did a good job, but the grossness runs deep.

i suggested that mr smear give the stanley parable a try today, he was giggling hysterically for ages as he mercilessly trolled the narrator.

gd had spent the morning talking to a friend who's suicidal, and between that and something mr smear said (in jest) i was inspired to take him aside and discuss saturday's revelation about how life is just like a rogue-like video game, bringing it all together with the book i made for him. it was a good talk.

his math skills are progressing with prodigy, having a dashboard is awesome.

his reading skills are improving thanks to bone.

partially functional

 well, i was feeling a lot better and a lot more on top of things today than all of last week combined. i'm now pretty confident i was sick for at least some of it.

i had two sets of inspiration for two of my tickets this morning, and i completed a long, ugly slog of a job and reached an important milestone in the chaotic messy one.

then i jumped on a bus and headed to an orthopaedist, because i managed to get a same-day appointment when i called this morning. i've been given a referral for imaging for my hip flexors, and clear confirmation that nobody cares about my neck injury unless i'm asking for surgery.

i had a really hard time getting back into work after i returned home, eventually i just gave up.

i made progress in inscryption. and then i died again. but i made progress!

...

the war rages on. we had two rocket attacks tonight, one during dinner and one after mr smear was in bed - he was a dead weight, i had to carry him all the way down the stairs and then all the way back up again. the explosions were way louder than usual.

what's going on right now, globally, is legitimately terrifying. it's bad enough that we're fighting a zombie army on our borders with guns and rockets, but we're simultaneously fighting a war with an even larger zombie army on the social media front. and the most significant platform on that front is run by the CCP. there's a whole generation of young people who've been raised on the internet, who have barely any concept of history and no wiring for critical thinking.

the truth is screwed.

this is what we're really up against.

the pause

 yesterday:

we managed to go to the pharmacy and grocery store together with gd, which felt like an achievement. mr smear and i ate laffot for breakfast, and i bought him books five and six in diary of a wimpy kid series.

i played a fair amount of inscryption, but nothing that mr smear couldn't witness.

mr smear and i went for a walk in search of coffee mugs, and came home with coffee mugs and ice cream. we ate the ice cream watching hunter x hunter, and it was brilliant (vanilla halva flavor!).

i've eaten a lot of junk food this weekend. and this week. and it's showing...

i finally put together a request for our landlords to not increase our rent and ran it by firefighter, i'm going to send it tomorrow. it was initially a demand, rather than a request, i never can figure out which is appropriate...

today:

i made pages 31 and 32 publicly available today.

nystire and i went for a long-overdue beer and a walk.

i bought forbidden island on the ipad today, and mr smear and i played it. it's an amazing translation. and we won our first game! it was nerve-wrackingly close.

i had a long chat with horseman this afternoon, things turned philosophical (as usual) and i came up with an analogy of real life being just like rogue-like games.

my machine's now set up for me to experiment with qt, xamarin and android studio.

wtf wodan and thor days

 it is the end of thursday, the beginning of the weekend, and i'm pretty sure my thursday - from a work perspective - was an almost complete waste of time.

wednesday? wtf was wednesday? i was still struggling with the extreme exhaustion. otherwise, i don't remember much but i did actually get my main task accomplished. and we had a couple of rocket attacks.

...

on the one hand, things for us seem to be normalizing even though the entire country, the entire world is being plunged into madness. on the other, it's difficult not to read the news / social media and realize that the real world is suddenly much scarier and much more bizarre than it should be.

i'm scared for jews all over the world, in particular in south africa right now when the kids at the jewish school now have to hide their identities (incl. not wearing uniforms) for their security. and the stories coming out of the top western universities are extremely discouraging.

...

oh! yes. and something made me realize that i hadn't spoken to scrapper since the war broke out, so i messaged him and discovered that he just happened to be in israel and getting off at our train station. so he came in for a surprise visit (and a berating over not having told us he was here), while a lot of the subject matter was unhappy it was good to see him.

thursday? feeling much better, though still very tired and consistently unmotivated. i dropped mr smear off at school, paid a quick visit to the clinic to sort out some admin,

gd seems to be doing better.

mr smear was mostly fine, until we had an incident this afternoon. on the one hand, it was something ridiculous that i could have just let go of, but on the other - he was being extremely rude, far beyond the line, and we had to establish the boundary. things got heated and emotional, but i managed to pull him back (even while he was still angry) and after some time on his own he came out and everything was good.

i feel really bad for him, but in spite of how outrageously insane he can be i'm relieved that he's developing the ability to re-center. i also feel like i'm levelling up in how i handle these things. far from perfect, but definitely improving.

...

i've been playing a lot of inscryption. it's addictive, it's fun, it's infuriating. and according to scrapper's spoiler, the bit i'm struggling to get through that feels like it's closing in on the end of the game, is only just the beginning. that's insane.

flat

it is now (technically) wednesday. 

monday and tuesday: pure exhaustion, what feels like a solid combination of physical and emotional. a few rocket attacks, for some reason sounding a lot more aggressive - more rockets, louder. gd's still recovering so she can't go down to the bomb shelter, so it's me and mr smear downstairs while hoping that gd's safe enough in the stairwell.

at least she's got some company - our much older neighbor can't scramble downstairs very well either.

work has been frustrating, but whatever. mr smear's been a mixed bag in terms of behavior, but yesterday he went to a friend who lives close by and apparently he was just fine.

i've barely been getting anything done these days. i know i shouldn't be too hard on myself, but goddamn - i've got it relatively easy and i don't feel like i'm coping particularly well.

i guess two of the biggest sanity-restorers at the moment are inscryption and a family rewatch of hunter x hunter. also, mr smear reading pages from a hebrew-english dictionary the other day to avoid the homework i assigned him (he's really got to improve his reading), and today successfully reading two pages of the hebrew translation of bone: out from boneville which doesn't have nikud (vowels, kind of) and sports a non-trivial font.

prodigy's math game is also going well; we did have a moment the other day where he decided that it wasn't fair that it was forcing him to battle all the time, and i explained to him that most wars are between people who want to fight and people who don't want to fight, just like hamas and israel... war and rocket attacks give a kid a different perspective.

when we came up from the shelter two days ago he was very grateful to find his mother still alive.