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 :/