pulling teeth

 the past twenty minutes have all been about gd losing her shit because her nonsensical dental plan's off the rails and she's scared she won't be able to eat solid food for the next month or two.

@$#!.

today's been a quiet, wintery, indoorsy day. we had another missile attack in the middle of the night, which struck in south tel aviv, and i wasn't able to get back to sleep after that. it was an awful night, and i spent a lot of the day on the couch napping.

i've finally uninstalled bloons: adventure time. after 500+ hours, most of which was grinding for zero payoff (the character resources mechanic is broken).

we watched the secret of NIMH, which has really held up well.

it took me most of the day to get through the dishes.

i've barely had the capacity to do anything interesting or functional. so it's been all about watching house and reading bits of mona lisa overdrive on the new kindle.

calm through the storm

 around 3.30am i was awoken by what sounded like combat aircraft flying overhead. it turned out to be very dramatic thunder, and the storm that ensued continued until noon. mr smear tried to weasle his way out of school again, but aside from it being friday (their electives day) i think he enjoyed splashing to school in his galoshes as much as i did.

i took care of the emergency shopping on the way home, gd and i finished watching the original beetlejuice in preparation for its sequel and i took care of some more of the dishes.

gd went to her dental appointment, which once again turned out to be different to what we expected. i picked mr smear up from school while it bucketed down (i got really irritated with the other parents jostling me with their umbrellas while i was waiting at the gate), then mr smear and i made it to the bus stop just in time.

we arrived at the dental clinic just as gd came out, and it took a little while and a lot of confusion to get an understanding of what the rest of the plan is. then we walked to the hummusia and gd watched while we ate an enormous, delicious breakfast. we then picked up hers to go, which she was able to eat by the time we got home.

aside from us finally cleaning the apartment, the rest of the afternoon was very chilled, shadowrun: hong kong and napping.

we had a great dinner (the simpsons stealing cable*), mr smear just went to bed, gd is on her way to bed, and i might very well be doing so myself soon.

* my son to me: i do honor you! just barely enough to satisfy the fifth commandment.

i'm feeling much more relaxed today than i have in a while.

the sufganya

 today was completely insane.

it began around 2.40am, where the missile alert sirens sounded, and we all struggled to get out and into the shelter, barely making it before the booms. i didn't realize until the afternoon that a school building near nystire was destroyed. mr smear couldn't get back to sleep after that, so i stayed with him... uncomfortably... for a couple of hours until i was reasonably sure he was actually going to sleep.

...

1. same wakeup pattern, but this time i was feeling completely broken, and no screen time for me either. i read desolation jones and we listened to music, and it was nice.

2. mr smear was complaining that he didn't feel well enough to go to school. he agreed to abide by the outcome determined by the thermometer. the thermometer suggested he was a bit warm, and so he stayed home. having reviewed his math homework dashboard, i'm satisfied that he's at or above his grade level, and apparently he did his other extra homework well, too.

3. on my way to the mall i received a call about a job. everything was sounding good, but before i agreed to come in to meet them i made sure that they could afford me. they can't, so... oh, well.

4. i'm glad i did a little research last night on kindles. i walked into the store, bought the right model (the basic 11th gen, the only one they had) at the right price (in ten instalments), and the experience was quick and painless. and then, for the cherry on top, i managed to pick up a bunch of soy yoghurts while they've been sold out everywhere for weeks.

5. my manager came in sick and coughing. again. it's really, really grating my cheese.

6. we had an all-hands today, which affirmed that the situation isn't dire. in honor of chanukah being next week, we had sufganyot. the ceo assumed that the one i got was vegan, and i took a chance - expecting it to maybe have egg, not dairy.

it was made with $#@!ing dairy butter.

that was around 11.30 this morning, and my stomache's only just started settling a couple of hours ago. for the first few hours after i had headaches and was really, really tired... so tired, in fact, that during an important conversation i fell asleep a couple of times and even dreamed. my coworkers found it hilarious that i tried to participate in the conversation when i woke up, even if i did have something to contribute :P

7. before the dairy took effect, i at least managed to finish my lunch. i'd walked past the hummusia on my way to work and just the memory of the smell made it a must.

8. in spite of everything, i managed to get the job i've been working on done by the end of the day.

9. i came home, just in time for a chat with an HR rep about another gig. it went well.

10. dinner was late, but we managed to squeeze in a simpsons episode before the new 8pm cut-off. dinner was ratatouille, gd's first attempt, and it was great. 

i can't explain why, but gd had informed me that a friend of hers wanted to lend us a hand financially, and i was inspired to do grace after the meal.

overall, the bedtime routine part of the evening went smoothly.

11. a two hour conversation with gd's friend, the conversation was all over the place but we graciously accepted the offer of help and he sent it to us in the form of some bitcoin. now i have to figure out how to withdraw that bitcoin into our bank account so that i can use it to pay off some debt...

12. that was just before midnight, when i realized that our sink was an absolute mess and in danger of triggering a blocked drain. i angrily un-jenga'ed everything and got the drain guard back in place, then sat down with my tea to post this.

i have a new kindle, and it's already set up. i think i'm going to read a bit before going to bed.

two steps

yesterday:

the work day was pretty bland.

i joined my boss for a walk for our one-on-one, and i asked some tough questions about where we're at. we're going to have an all-hands tomorrow so he didn't want to say too much, but he did a pretty good job of assuring me that we're not in a bad place.

the interview in the evening went pretty well, although signing off was really awkward so i've no idea if i made a good impression or not.

watching the simpsons as a family is therapeutic. it's also highly relevant, as we saw the results of marge getting itchy and scratchy declawed and then this morning i saw the real-life results of a 21-day cellphone ban.

today:

the morning started off alright - three mornings in a row with mr smear responsible for getting himself organized before panic time, and three mornings that were much calmer than usual - and after dropping him off at school i continued on to the post office to pick up socks and a beard trimmer.

then i accompanied gd to her dental appointment, and found a nice coffee shop (lebowski, which used to be movie-ing) to wait for her at. her appointment turned out to be quite different / less dramatic than we'd been told, they just took an imprint for the tooth that's due to be extracted so she'll be able to wear a retainer with a temporary replacement while they prepare for the real work.

i got some decent work done today, ran into another cousin working in the building on the way out to lunch with my coworkers, and by and large it was quite a relaxed one. having said that, by the time i left the office i was feeling wiped out and i still had a parents' screentime workshop at the school at 8pm.

ugh.

so we had a nice, early dinner together before i left. the evening was... well, some of it was interesting, and some of it was inspiring, but a lot of it was a slog and by 9.15 i just wanted to get the hell out of there. when she pulled out cards for a "last activity" at 9.35 i fuck-that'd and noped on out.

gd and i had a conversation about all the things that came up, and we're both going to make an effort to modify our screen habits, particularly around mr smear. this is going to be an interesting experiment, but i don't think it's going to be hard - i just need to pick up an e-ink ebook reader as quickly as possible.

...

jason pargin's review of deadpool & wolverine just blew my mind.

the slap

 well, shit.

it was a bit of an annoying work day, and i didn't get too much done. in the middle of it, i got a phone call from mr smear complaining that he'd been waiting at the gate for half an hour, which was entirely my fault because i told his teacher that his tutor session was cancelled but forgot to tell him 🤦‍♂️

to be fair, though, the reason it took him half an hour to call me was because he was playing games on his phone...

[source]

[source]

the interview went... not great. the experience was fine, but they weren't happy with my coding exercise and called it before the architecture section. i very much appreciated their directness and their not-wasting-anyone's-time-iness, but it does sting... especially considering that i felt i did pretty well.

not amazing, but well. which is obviously why they called it.

anyway, it's been a mixed emotion evening - mr smear's doing his usual, nothing extraordinary but annoying - and i'm just done with the day. i feel like watching the simpsons as a family is healthy.

i have another interview tomorrow. maybe it'll be better.

coasting

 i think i just slept about ten hours. my neck and shoulder were giving me a lot of trouble yesterday evening, with pain radiating into my left hand, and between than and being "regularly" tired i just crashed on the couch after wishing mr smear a good night, only waking up due to gd watching something loud and action-packed and slowly dragging myself to bed.

yesterday:

i learned that our devops guy is leaving too, we're down to three devs (and two chiefs). for the most part it was another unfulfilling day fiddling with dune analytics, and then trying to ascertain whether the data i was getting back was any good.

at least gd was well enough to take mr smear to his therapy session. and we finally secured her cannabis license! so it was a big day for her.

i had a chat with mr smear's "music teacher" at school, and he thinks that mr smear playing a piece from beethoven's ode to joy at the chanukah ceremony next week is a good idea. fine, whatevs. i've set mr smear up with simply piano on his phone and good luck to them 🫡

today:

another day of mr smear sleeping in, mostly calm. and today's a work-from-home day. i have a Very Serious Interview this afternoon and i'm not feeling as well-prepared as i probably should be. a part of me wants to cancel, i'm honestly not sure what would hurt my reputation more...

slowdown

 it's sunday morning and i'm about to leave for work, but i needed to get this down. i didn't really prep for tomorrow's interview, but i definitely and desperately needed to rest. gd and i are convinced that we've both had covid. she seems to finally be getting better.

friday:

i had a chat with swordschool in the morning, but i was still in recovery mode and my brain felt like it was melting into a puddle. but he had a great idea about gamifying something and i was happy to be able to contribute somehow.

we started watching the original beetlegeuse movie, then picked mr smear up from school and bussed to dizengoff center, where we ordered mr smear's new lens prescription (that we should've done more than a month ago) and picked up a new phone for him (an entry level samsung).

so not exactly a cheap day.

the hummusia was packed with a long line so we ended up at a franchise coffee shop eating mediocre vegan sandwiches, and the rest of the day was resting, snacking, and gaming.

i started getting into shadowrun: hong kong and it's really good so far. i'm liking a lot of the added mechanics, but i think they might have been a bit overwhelming if i hadn't recently played the first two games.

yesterday:

yesterday really felt like a recovery day. i didn't feel as ridiculously tired all day as i've been for the last week or so, although when i walked up the stairs after dropping mr smear off at his friend i almost fainted and had to lie on my back with my knees up for a few minutes in order to reset.

i was a bit irritable over the course of the day, part of it being because i decided to implement a feature with my phone control solution and it took ages to figure out something that should have been really trivial to understand, but it was overall a good, restful day.

the plan was to take mr smear out on his bike in the afternoon, but his friend called and it was a no-brainer for all of us that that was a better idea :P

i accompanied him on the walks there and back, but for the most part he was on his own and it seems like he handled himself and the afternoon really well.

...

i'm slowly reading through the honest truth about dishonesty, and the chapter on how effective lobbying and pharma rep manipulation is is simply appalling. this is stuff everyone should know.

the recovery

i didn't sleep particularly well last night, but i did sleep better than the night before.

this morning didn't get off to a great start, mr smear's been slowing down with waking up again and it gets under everyone's (specifically gd's) nerves. but the walk to school was good, at least. the walk back was a bit tense, though, because we had a traffic jam throughout our neighborhood and all the drivers were being assholes.

it was a slower morning compared to the rest of the week, i did a little bit of housekeeping and got gd started on stander while i did some work on my telephony project.

the office was remarkably quiet this morning. my two achievements before i returned home for lunch were taking a tiny step towards working with dune analytics (a hot mess of a platform in terms of UX and documentation - and possibly data - but with lots of potential), and coaching a coworker on the dos and don'ts of getting tattoos (along with some personal opinions thrown in for good measure).

i arrived home just in time to accompany gd to pick mr smear up from school, and i begrudgingly did so even though i was tired and just wanted to rest a few minutes :/

everything was going fine until we were almost home, when mr smear decided (again) that he didn't want to go to mma. unfortunately for him, that's not negotiable right now, and we double-teamed him pretty well. i had lunch while he calmed down with a book, then did some work while he practiced on the keyboard before we left for his jiujitsu class.

the way there was pleasant, i grabbed a coffee on the way, and we arrived on time for class. he gave me some shit about putting on his belt, but i handled it, and then i watched him bow out of the warmup and had to give him a "pep talk". from there he did well, things went smoothly for a while and he was even enjoying himself, until suddenly he was "injured".

in his defense, his ankle / heel / whatever might have legitimately been hurting, but i believe he was hamming it up. his foot looked fine to me, but his coach was concerned, so after getting him to "test it out" (he couldn't touch the floor without wincing... apparently...) we got our stuff together and he hopped out holding onto my arm on our way to the doctor.

i informed him, very clearly, that if he's legitimately injured he'll get all the care and sympathy he needs, but if the doctor doesn't find anything wrong with him there'll be hell to pay.

miraculously, his foot began healing within seconds, and by the time we got to the street he was perfectly fine 🤦

at least we didn't have to go through the emergency doctor routine, i guess 🤷

the rest of the evening went much better, i got a tiny bit more work done (although i'm not sure it's of much value) and after putting mr smear to bed early, gd and i settled in to watch the rest of stander, or at least get most of the way through before gd passed out.

at the same time, i'd managed to lock out mr smear's phone completely because a band in the middle of his touchscreen stopped working, and once that happens there's really nothing you can do. so i factory reset the phone, and after about an hour of google/android/huawei shenanigans finally managed to reinstall it and get it functioning well enough that he can use it to communicate and ride the bus until we get him a new phone.

i can't believe we're going to have to get him a new phone 🤦

anyway, it's been a long day, it's been an exceptionally long week, and i think i'm going to bed soon.

winning the battle

soon after posting, i fielded a call from a recruiter but shut him down immediately when i heard the name of the company he wanted to put me forward for. no gambling (including forex and crypto schemes), no marketing. it felt weirdly good to do that, and i wonder if he'll bring me anything good in the future :P

...

it was a rough morning, and i had a hard time getting anything productive done. i had a sync with my boss once i had a better idea of what i needed to be doing, only to discover that i didn't have a good idea at all. and our conversation went on longer than i'd expected, and i was getting stressed about being late for the school meeting...

... i made it on time for the school meeting. but, as usual, the principal was being disrespectful so i had to stand and wait outside for five minutes, even though i'd had to wait a month for the meeting and was taking off work for it. by the time i walked in, i was boiling - not just because of the waiting, mind, but because of everything mr smear's been through, and all the things i was planning on saying and expecting them to say back.

i was vibrating with the anticipation, but ready for war.

...

i walked out of there still vibrating, but with a sense of victory. there're things i said that made it very clear how indecent and negligent they've been, and how disgusting his bully's parent is, but i still managed to preserve a veneer of adult reasonableness and i was pleased to walk out of there with a feeling that everyone, even the principal, was on board with the plan to move mr smear to a different class. now it's just a matter of getting it done quickly but smoothly as possible.

i hope the amount i fought for him today makes up for the times i didn't (out of naivety and ignorance) fight for him before. i hope that wherever he ends up, he makes the most of the fresh start.

...

i came home, scarfed down a quick lunch, then caught the bus to work.

the afternoon was tough, and dreary, and it took a while before i understood precisely what my next steps need to be; not fun at all, but at least i have a direction now.

i did some quick shopping on the way home, we had a nice dinner (with more of the simpsons, mr smear's claim of "inappropriate" is now confusing me), and a smooth bedtime. now... i don't know. it would be nice to get a good night's sleep.

overtired

i now strongly suspect i'm sick, but most of the cause of my suspicion is that i've been so ridiculously tired that i've been dysfunctional, and additional coffee hasn't been helping at all.

yesterday:

the first order of business was fixing my phone control app's sms handling, which went smoothly. then i had a constructive chat with an HR person, and i say "constructive" because we discussed money and it was a heartfelt "nope" on the money.

i went to the office for a slow work morning, then rushed off to pick up mr smear after lunch because gd still wasn't handling with her coughing. i left the office three minutes before the bus was scheduled to arrive, which was good because the bus arrived three minutes early :/

as we got to the school stop and i was about to step off the bus, i heard a THUNK as a drunk old man collapsed face down on his way into it. i was nervous about touching him, but i helped another guy get him onto a seat and a doctor who happened to be on the bus attempting to check him out while someone else called for an ambulance.

i made a point of not using my hands for the five minutes it took to get to a coffee shop where i could OCD (surgeon-style) wash my hands, and thank them by buying a coffee.

i arrived just on time to the school gate, where i had an awkward conversation with the mother of the kid mr smear occasionally torments, but mr smear himself was nowhere to be found. after i'd waited long enough, i called him and learned that he'd had no intention of coming out because he was already on his way to his friend's place, and hadn't thought to inform us of his plans.

so... i was really happy he was going to spend time with his friend, but also pissed because i hadn't had to leave the office after all :/

on my way home, an old woman threw her cigarette out the car window and it almost struck me. her pitiful apology was not enough, and i fumed all the way home before realizing that what i should have done was thrown the cigarette back into her open window.

i made it home in time for an interesting demo, but at some point i found myself struggling to stay awake. i returned to work still desperately in need of a nap, had myself an extra coffee (the "slippery slope" coffee), but still was barely able to keep my eyes open. everything i was working on blended into a weird daydream until i realized that i wasn't achieving anything and decided it was time to go home.

i made it all the way out the building before realizing i'd left my sunglasses in my office, only to get back to my office and remember that i'd actually left them at home :(

i walked home in a weird state between wired and tired, then tried and failed* to nap a bit before dinner. we watched a couple more episodes of the simpsons over dinner, which mr smear has decided isn't so appropriate. then we all went to bed early.

* i did read a little bit of the honest truth about dishonesty, which is off to an excellent start.

i didn't sleep very well at all. i'm still tired. i'm working from home this morning because i have a meeting with the "school team" in a few hours... i hope i get this right.

next steps

 "work from home". today, noooot so much.

i did catch up on a little sleep last night, with some epic dreams that slipped away pretty much the moment i opened my eyes. i was still quite tired, though. the morning started off alright, i got mr smear to school in good spirits*, and was planning on heading to the clinic to support gd at her doctor's appointment when my phone reminded me that i had an upcoming interview.

* on the way, mr smear informed me that he doesn't like his singing voice so much (he has a great singing voice!), so he decided he wanted to play beethoven's 9th symphony at the school's chanukah ceremony in two weeks' time and could i please print the sheet music for him. while i was picking my jaw up off the floor and making a note to myself to take care of the printing, i stepped on a small, squishy piece of dog poo.

the interview went pretty well, i think, and i'm a lot more interested in what they're doing than i thought i would be. at the same time, the company i interviewed with poorly yesterday evening scheduled an in-person interview for next week, so 🤞

i also managed to sort out the payment for gd's cannabis license, but only after realizing that they didn't send a broken link, rather that my relay software splits form data on the equals signs and breaks links. so i'm going to have to fix that, and fast...

i tried to get some work done, but i was tired and distracted. just as i was trying to rest my eyes for a few minutes before leaving, gd began another coughing fit. a little less rough than we're used to, but still rough, and so far *tfu tfu* it looks like the new meds and saline nebulizing are helping.

i picked mr smear up and took him to his hebrew tutor, got a bit of work done, and brought him back home, to both of our excitement discovering along the way that tapuchips are making salt and vinegar flavor now ^_^

while i did get some work done during the afternoon, it was rather a messy mixture of work, random distractions and helping gd herd mr smear - he spent most of it on his keyboard, which was great but not conducive to high levels of concentration on my side of the table.

the new, uhhh, play therapist? showed up in the evening, she's very sweet. we all introduced ourselves and talked for a bit while mr smear got over his shyness, then we had a very serious drawing competition, and then i got a final bit of work done before evacuating the living room and helping gd with the dishes.

good dinner and the simpsons, a rushed bedtime ritual but not unpleasant, and when gd went to bed i played through another section of shadowrun returns. oh! i finished count zero yesterday**, and i'm now taking a break from the sprawl trilogy to check out the honest truth about dishonesty. so far, so good.

** what was particularly interesting about the re-read was just how relevant it remains in spite of some of its anachronisms, and just how much it has influenced so much other literature (including video games) that i've loved. count zero still holds up, it's a brilliant story executed exquisitely. i felt that the tying up of loose ends felt a bit rushed, but the ideas were exciting and i really enjoyed the adventure alongside the characters.

oh! it's quite late. i guess i should probably go to bed.

interview with a zombie

 today was tough. complicated. all over the place.

[trigger warning on bathroom stuff?] i didn't get nearly enough sleep, but not just because i stayed up late for shadowrun returns, but because i spent the next hour or so feeling like i urgently needed the toilet with nothing moving. that went on pretty much all night until i left for the office in the morning.

...

gd wasn't feeling better after all, and she's still not feeling better. the occasional coughing fit is still intense and scary and she's feeling properly sick again. i think i might be sick too. and might have been, too. i don't know. it's hard to say when i could just be handling stress and a lack of sleep.

...

i took mr smear to school, we'd had a decent morning and he got there in pretty good spirits. we had a parental guidance session with his therapist over zoom, which felt pretty good right until it was over, at which point i received an sms from mr smear's teacher informing us that he'd consistently refused to cooperate with anyone all morning :/

so that fucked us up.

...

afterwards, i received a call from the cannabis licensing people, to inform me again that they weren't happy with the recommendation. i told the woman i was speaking to that the problem isn't with our application, but with their process, and if it's not clear enough to her as a human being that our request is valid then she needs to send me a precise template for the doctor that he can fill it in to spec.

she consulted with someone else, and then agreed to authorize the request anyway.

sheesh.

...

i barely had time to sync with my boss and manager before i had to leave to help get mr smear to his therapy session. i didn't mean to walk all the way home, but i was very grateful to my mom for lending an ear to me venting furiously on the way there.

my avo/toast/kala namak/tabasco lunch was so good that it wasn't completely ruined by the difficult conversation i had with mr smear while chewing on it, trying to understand where he's coming from and make him understand that he's undermining my efforts to help him out of his awful situation.

as i was crouching behind the kitchen wall when the two of them entered our apartment, he didn't realize i was home. so i heard him tell gd that seeing as he's nine, he'd really like to take the bus to his therapist by himself. it was immediately obvious to me that this was an attempt to avoid having to discuss the morning's shenanigans with me along the way, which i may have found a little funnier than i should have.

but i did offer to let him lead the way. what followed was a pleasant, but awkward journey, and although he needs a little coaching he's kinda doing okay.

i returned to the cinemateque to work, and actually got something done. then i picked up mr smear and let him lead the way home.

step 1. get lost

step 2. guess and walk the wrong way

step 3. listen to dad and open up a navigation app on your phone

step 4. look only at the map, not at your surroundings, even if following the map leads you to almost walk into a giant pillar.

step 5. (surprisingly) listen to dad when he suggests that the light rail will be a faster way home than waiting for a bus across the street

step 6. successfully navigate home using the app even though you're literally across the road from the apartment you've been living in for 2.5 years already. also, make sure to walk very, very slowly whenever dad stops bugging you to move it because he's got to get back to his office.

...

as soon as he was on the same block as our apartment i spun around and caught the first bus back to the office. i was supposed to have called the woman from the municipality half an hour earlier, and i had half an hour to get to the office before the "happy hour" that they'd rescheduled so that i could make it.

i hopped on a bus with a broken back door. at the next stop, the driver stopped the bus, turned off the engine and walked outside to call for help.

a stop with no mobile reception.

it took three calls to finally be able to speak to her, but once i got started telling her what mr smear has been going through she was invested, and although she doesn't have the authority to intervene directly she really made me feel heard, and gave me helpful advice for dealing with the school team in our meeting on wednesday. and now she's in, so she wants updates :P

our happy hour was scheduled for 4pm. after pacing around the base of our building for the duration of the call, it was around 4.40pm when i finally sent up my apologies and raced upstairs for the tail end of it :P

...

the vegan offering was good this time, and i was strong - i left some for my family and brought it home with me. they enjoyed it too :)

...

i got a tiny little bit of work done, then realized that it was so late that i needed to move quickly to get back home in time for my interview with a VP R&D.

i was wired. i was overwhelmed and feeling a bit dizzy from the entire day. and i'd had zero time to prepare. sooo... it didn't go great, although apparently it was a total loss either. i guess we'll see, but i definitely can't show up without prep work again.

the rest of the evening went pretty well, in spite of gd having a coughing fit at the table during which she slammed something down hard and that made me jump and hit the handle of a very sharp knife that went flying in mr smear's general direction (O_o)

it's been an insane day. the rest of the week's looking pretty crazy already. here goes nothing...

assemble!

 so, i introduced my boy to the avengers today. it was AWESOME. pure joy ^_^

the only thing that didn't spark joy was gd having another coughing fit just at the end of the movie :(

but she does seem to be feeling better overall.

oh, and we've been watching the simpsons from its first season, and really enjoying it.

it was a weird day. the weather wasn't great, so mr smear and i stayed indoors except for a short walk around the neigborhood. i spent most of it (i believe) playing shadowrun returns, and that's the reason i'm writing this post after 1am when i should have been in bed hours ago...

i didn't actually want to be on screens the whole day, but there wasn't anything i felt like doing that wasn't on a computer (including count zero, and i'm loving how much shadowrun is just lifted directly from gibson's sprawl trilogy). 

but anyway.

shadowrun returns is every bit as brilliant - and surprising - as i remembered.

i'm a bit nervous about what tomorrow will bring, between my current work and the job hunt and the school stuff. i'm also a bit nervous about going to bed because my mattress (+topper) and i aren't vibing.

...

i'm also feeling quite disturbed by the fact that fursan al-aqsa exists and is allowed to be published on steam.

breathing (a little bit better)

 yesterday was much, much calmer. gd did have a coughing fit, while urchin was visiting, but for the most part seems to be doing better. we postponed our dinner plans because she wasn't feeling fit enough for it, and aside from a shopping mission in the morning, the day was pretty much urchin visiting followed by us watching iron man and captain america in preparation for the avengers, both of which had mr smear literally jumping up and down. 

even though it was *really* later by the time we finished the second movie :P

i also had a positive encounter with a headhunter, and a nice long chat with horseman.

...

i didn't sleep very well last night - my mattress topper isn't really helping and my hips are sore - but when i did i had some mad dreams, including one in which a small chunk of my left hand got ripped out. the weather yesterday and today so far is surprisingly and pleasantly warm.

almost better

gd's taking all the meds, but it's hard to say if her situation's improving. we hope it is. as sad as it is how scared mr smear's been, it's really comforting how he's been so supportive and caring.

...

after dropping mr smear off at school this morning, i continued on to the pharmacy and then tried to get our details sorted out in the medical aid systems. everything seemed fine on their end, and they asked me to bring them proof. so this afternoon, when i took mr smear to his hygienist appointment, i checked with them and discovered that everything's just fine, but because mr smear's first name is unusual people just assume he has a double-barreled family name and skip ahead to his middle names instead :P

i was bored at work today, so while i made some boy-scout changes to the proof-of-concept i've put together i published an article on the topic :P

and i had a "demo" with a sales agent for an API we might use, all the poor guy wanted was to understand our use-case and i wasn't prepared to tell him anything.

other than that, i contacted a woman at the municipality about mr smear's school situation. after a back-and-forth she agreed to speak to me early next week, so that seems positive.

we finished watching my neighbor totoro at dinner, and i was pleased that mr smear - in spite of his repeated assertions that it's not his favorite miyazaki movie - agreed that it's a great movie in its own right. i was thinking about it a lot today, i really think my favorite thing about it is that it's not so much the story, or the magic, but rather how real the characters and settings feel. it's absolutely wonderful stuff and the story is just icing on the cake.

i read some more of the magic pudding to mr smear at bedtime. with everything that's been going on this week i've been able to spend some real quality time with him, and most of it has been us having fun together. i'm extremely grateful.

crash and burn and crash again

 i'm feeling pretty cooked. the meeting last night went on a lot longer than planned, some of which was good, but most of which was me completely and utterly failing to communicate the idea to the point where sailor - who's supposed to be on our side of the table - was thoroughly convinced that it's a bad idea.

i cannot begin to describe how disappointed and frustrated i am about that.

for the rest of the night, when i wasn't sleeping, i was feeling shit about it. all throughout today, the group and i have been having arguments about the meeting on whatsapp, which has been very draining.

...

this morning started off alright, gd was feeling a bit better. i was supposed to have another interview but they canceled at the last minute, and i was supposed to have a scheduled demo but they canceled too. so it was a pretty easy morning, really, and the work day started off pretty smoothly*.

* for me, at least. my boss spilled coffee all over my manager's fancy keyboard and killed it.

halfway through the morning i received a phone call asking if we could bring mr smear in to the dentist this afternoon. gd picked him up from school - that was when her coughing fits began again - and i took him to the dental clinic. i was grateful when i left the office that my manager seemed happy with the fact that i'd done pretty much everything i had to do for the day.

the dentist was really uncool with me, but she was great with him, so i sucked it up and let her do her thing. he seems to be okay.

we walked all the way home, by which time we found gd really struggling. as soon as we got all the groceries unpacked we hopped in a taxi and went to the bikur-rofeh, and mr smear spent most of our visit drawing. the visit started off well, but when the arab pulmonary specialist pronounced something that gd disagreed with (that she's been having asthma attacks) and she exploded in a fit of rage and i had to physically restrain her to prevent her from storming out while i tried to smooth things over with the keenly offended doctor.

jesus fucking christ.

we were there for a while, and i managed to convince gd to apologize, and he calmed down and returned to being professional, and gd received treatment and he was really cool with us. i don't know for sure if he's right, but we've got a plan that makes sense and if it doesn't work out we'll have useful data.

afterwards, we walked around looking for somewhere to eat but couldn't find anything. we continued on to azrieli and ate vegan shwarma at the food court, which mr smear and i really enjoyed, and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that i stuffed myself and then stuffed myself some more.

we came home, got mr smear showered and toothbrushed and into bed, and i'm now finishing my second cup of tea and am planning on following suit.

what an exhausting week (so far). the more it goes on the more i wonder if i'm not actually sick.

some peace?

 i mean, i'm feeling thoroughly cooked but i have another meeting with gco and sailor at 9pm.

today began alright, until just before leaving to take mr smear to school when i got into a ridiculous and very intense argument with gco. that set the tone and drained my energy for the day before it had even begun, even if we did resolve it (apparently) amicably.

[my thumbnail's got split skin that's bleeding and hurting and driving me crazy. i suspect it's from it being dry skin season]

i had another first encounter with a different company this morning, and it went *much* better than yesterday's.

gd and i were all good this morning, although she's still suffering intensely. i had to leave work at noon to pick mr smear up from school because she couldn't handle it. not only did that work out because i remembered that he had geometry (actual geometry :P) homework, and i also got to see today's artwork which was very cool (especially his stick figure renditions of one piece characters).

the work day went well, overall, and i managed to leave with a surprisingly strong sense of satisfaction.

now for dinner and a meeting :P

further down

 well, dinner was pretty cool - we finished watching wall-e for the umpteenth time, and enjoyed the pizza - but after mr smear went to bed gd had a coughing fit that led to a long and unpleasant fight. which was eventually resolved, but not without both of us exhausted and feeling burned out.

godsforbid we should have some peace.

maybe tomorrow will be better. 

i might be coming down with something

i don't feel sick, i feel wired, but i feel like i might be in a holding pattern with a bug or virus waiting to land. then again, it might just be general fatigue, physical and/or mental. it certainly doesn't help that i've been having trouble sleeping the past few nights, nor that there've been a lot of incidents of emotional stress, both ups and downs.

...

getting mr smear to school this morning was good, but then i got a message from his teacher that he wasn't cooperating in geometry. and he wasn't: he was insisting that drawing pixel art of a circle was geometry.

jesus, fuck 🤦

hopefully that was the only incident. while gd was at the doctor getting prescribed more antibiotics and meds because she's got a full-blown lung infection in addition to what looks like a virus, i was at home doing online chores (like reapplying for her cannabis license), juggling a bunch of recruiters, and trying to get something productive done.

it almost feels like the most productive thing i got done today was snacking a lot :P

i picked mr smear up from school, brought him home to switch bags, then took him to his therapy session. i headed to the cinemateque for a coffee and to work, the barista was curious about my tattoos and i ended up on a tear about the injustice of how shakespeare's sonnets are taught when her initial complaint was that she hates the sonnet form. i hurriedly scribbed sonnetcomix.com on a piece of paper, grabbed my coffee and hid behind my laptop :P

i picked mr smear up and we took the light rail home, where i got some work done but i also crashed and burned in a chat with a recruiter about expectations (which i'm still feeling a bit gross about). then gd needed help with the washing machine, and got angry with me because she thought i'd broken it while i was trying to help, and that made a pretty gross feeling too :/

anyway, my son's sitting across from me and playing beautiful melodies on the keyboard, and i've managed to complete a piece of work that wasn't trivial at all, and gd's making pizza for dinner, and i think i'm done trying to be an adult for the rest of the day.

replay

 it's been a long day, i'm exhausted but also a bit wired.

getting mr smear to school went smoothly, but then gd and i had a fight about her being triggered by something and we both handled it badly. we eventually sorted ourselves out, but not without setting a shit tone for the morning.

on the way to the office i stopped by the pain clinic, and was fortunate to find gd's doctor in his office. he sorted us out with the updated documents pretty quickly, so tomorrow morning i'll restart the application.

i'm glad i got my work done today, because it was in spite of the fact that i had to pick mr smear up from school because gd wasn't feeling up for it, then bussed to shuk hacarmel to meet me team there for my own birthday lunch and enjoy an amazing frena, then took a slow walk to get an artisanal coffee (picking up a really expensive but really good mango-granadilla-pomegranate fruit shake along the way), then returned to the office just in time for a birthday "happy hour" (the vegan crepes weren't great, but it was a nice sentiment).

i spoke to a couple of my coworkers today about the pivot situation, including my manager. on the one hand, i'm going to explore my options and see what's going on, but on the other, i'm not unhappy where i am and there's a chance we'll figure ourselves out and do something interesting. so no (immediate) stress.

i left the office around 6pm, and arrived home with barely enough time to settle before a 7pm meeting with a man who i'm describing as "an ice-cold caraffe of lemonade in the middle of the desert". the rest of the evening's been mostly about following up on that meeting and it's both exciting and tiring.

...

i wrote an article over a month ago on medium that's really got traction over the past few days, it's quite an experience!

...

i think i might be too tired to play shadowrun returns, which is a bit disappointing. i'm really enjoying it, and it's amazing to me that while everything feels familiar, i barely remember any details!

44

as i begin this post, gd's having another coughing fit. earlier, it got so bad that she was crying, and thought she was literally dying, so i made some frantic phone calls to make sure we'd be able to go to the emergency ward while mr smear tried to help...

... it was hard to get him to go to bed, because he was going through an emotional rollercoaster and needed to be convinced that his mommy would be okay :(

yesterday:

after taking mr smear to school, gd and i did some shopping. i picked him up, we came home to switch backpacks, and then i took him to the comic store on levontin (dying lake) to browse. very cool stuff, hopefully they'll be able to miraculously get hold of some calvin & hobbes for us.

we took the light rail back home, and the rest of the afternoon was pretty chilled.

we finished the day with pretty decent homemade pizza and howl's moving castle. after putting mr smear to bed i installed shadowrun: hong kong, but not remembering much of shadowrun returns i decided to continue my restart of that instead.

today:

i woke up this morning before anyone else, and returned to shadowrun returns while simultaneously fielding birthday phone calls, and that's pretty much my morning up until downtime. mr smear's new friend (!) called him and invited him over, so i walked him over, expecting to drop him off and come home. instead, his friend's mother awkwardly invited me in, and while we talked her husband arrived, and we ended up having a really good time while our kids played :)

it was difficult to get mr smear out of there, both the kids were making it difficult which was cool, and then we came home to the drama.

*sigh*

at least we had a break between the coughing fits and bedtime for mr smear to shower and watch the rest of howl's moving castle.

also cool was that in spite of the yom kippur incident, mr smear's other new friend wants to see him and we've been invited to his family for next friday night.

now i'm just praying that gd will be able to get some sleep and that i'll be able to as well.

loaded

i can't believe it's the weekend, but it couldn't come soon enough. i spent most of the week feeling utterly shit, but so far this evening's been better.

...

 the morning started off relatively peacefully, and i got mr smear to school in pretty good spirits. then i came home, picked up my bag, and accompanied gd to the clinic, because she's in a bad way and had lost all hearing in one ear. we were there for a while, and she saw a doctor (who was assisted by the horrible doctor she'd first seen, but who was playing nice), and while that was happening a recruiter phoned me and i couldn't take the call.

i'm not particularly stressed about that, while i'm not thrilled about what we're doing i don't feel like i'm in a bad place and in a rush to get out. i'm kinda treating this as an exploration for now.

anyway, gd's got antibiotics and severe instructions to never use q-tips again, and i at least managed to sort out the authorization request for her next nerve block. it was only after arriving at the office that i realized that in all the morning's excitement, i'd completely forgotten that i needed to go past the pain clinic to get a new recommendation for her cannabis license :/

the work day was a slow starter, but after two days of research i started putting together an actual strategy. then everyone decided to go to tamir for lunch on the spur of the moment, so i grabbed my little bottle of vinegar and joined them.

good falafel, lots of food. i was amused that the coworker who's leaving - today was supposed to be his last day, but the bosses convinced him to stay on another month - tried my salt & vinegar chips and was surprised to find that he quite enjoyed them :)

i got a little bit done before walking home to pick mr smear up and take him to his jiujitsu class, which was a good opportunity to chat with my mom. tomorrow's the last day on one of her contracts, and while i'm sad that she's stressed about the lower income, i'm glad she won't be working for such a disrespectful employer any longer.

apparently mr smear handled his bully well today. i really hope he's told us the truth.

i barely got any work done during his class, partially because i was chatting with another dad, and partially because i was observing him being decidedly uncooperative. not cool.

we had a good talk on the bus ride home, i got a little more work done, and then i had a really constructive meeting with gco, sailor and co. to discuss running an impact fund. after putting mr smear to bed, i played some crying suns (normal difficulty, i was killed by a sector boss), and took care of a bunch of random things, and tried to do something constructive with some personal projects, and now it's midnight and i'm probably going to turn in soon.

i'm really getting into count zero now.

another day, another wtf

mr smear this morning:

1. thank god he asked gd before sending a message telling his new friend off because "it's rude to message people at 7.30am" 🤦

2. on the way to school: "dad, it's when you hit puberty that you're supposed to hate your parents, right?" 

"looks like you got a headstart" 

"yeah, i really don't like my teachers"

this isn't the first time i've suspected him of being a high-functioning autistic, but the past couple of days there've been a bunch of things about his behavior and his statements that really make me wonder... for example, on sunday his therapist told me that he was very uncomfortable with her drawing of a martian apocalypse being fiery because there's no oxygen on mars...

that said, he's very calvin (from calvin & hobbes) in a lot of ways.

...

i spent a good chunk of my morning at the clinic, literally for nothing. i had a nice half hour at home between that and heading to the office, and then our CEO called me in for a one-on-one and we talked about how i'm feeling about the pivot and what it means.

i'm still not excited by what we're planning on doing. just disappointed; not in the company or our product, but in our failure to find our place in the market. between that and the weather being miserable and me not having slept well last night, i had a hard time getting anything done today and not falling asleep at my desk.

...

the people responsible for taking over gd's cannabis license are being awfully pedantic and petty, so after a couple of phone calls i managed to get the pain clinic receptionist to agree to let me come in tomorrow to ask the doctor to rewrite his recommendation. we're getting down to the wire...

...

gd was feeling too sick to take mr smear to mma today, so i did that. on the bus ride there i learned that he'd had another not-good day at school, and we've had a number of follow-up chats that i *hope* have landed. who knows? maybe we'll have the same conversation tomorrow as well :/

at least he got his head right for the class. i think that's the first mma class i've seen him in in which his teacher didn't shout at him once, he got to work, he made an effort, and he kept up a positive attitude. he enjoyed the class, he did pretty well in some things, and i was really impressed.

i'd been walking around in my rain boots for nothing the whole day, except the way home when it finally rained. mr smear loves being out in the rain, which is fun to see :)

the evening went smoothly, we talked a lot about anti-bully strategy, and i had some positive interactions with recruiters. i'm not sure now if i'm going to go to bed, or try to do something constructive. it probably doesn't matter...

pivot

 fuuuuuuuuck. in addition to everything else that's been going on, our bosses announced this morning that we're beginning an "exploration" before pivoting. or possibly being absorbed by a different company. i spent half the day trying to come up with viable things for us to do, the other half despondent because i'm not interested in the direction we're headed, and i'm not keen on job hunting, and i'm surprisingly emotional not about the great work we've done that's going in the bin - that's part of the risk of working in a startup - but about four weeks of horrible work in particular that i've been detesting that's going in the bin.

what a shit-show.

i started contacting recruiters this evening.

at least mr smear had an "okay" day today. gd and i were both feeling a lot of feels this morning (on top of her being sick), and because i didn't have energy to argue with her i encouraged her to send her concerns to the therapist directly instead.

i had a long chat with dod before i started work, and he's still unemployed and really struggling. i feel bad because i want to get something off the ground anyway and he could really help me, but with everything else going on i've had zero bandwidth for anything.

i'm really tired. do i ever mention being tired?

circling the drain

jesus h. f. christ.

today's report from the teacher, after a morning with a "doesn't-give-a-fuck" nine year old, described multiple instances of mr smear being verbally abusive and violent with kids in his class, and ripping up another kid's drawing, the same kid he threw a rock at a year and a half ago. and, when looking that up, i discovered that this isn't the first time he's torn up his artwork, either. he remembers the rock incident, he doesn't remember the torn artwork.

this is literally in-fucking-sane.

gd and i confronted him and made it abundantly clear to him that in addition to his behavior being unacceptable and gross and disappointing, it's also going to directly affect his chances of leaving the school. it was at that point that he finally seemed sufficiently contrite (and apparently embarrassed) that we left him alone for a while.

once he'd calmed down, i had a talk with him, and gd joined in, about how he can't change what he's done but he can change how he behaves tomorrow. in fits and starts, the rest of the afternoon went better, but goddamn i'm not sure if we're getting through to him at all.

yesterday:

yesterday was cold and wet. gd was sick. i went to our parental guidance meeting alone, and i feel it was constructive - in part because i think the therapist is beginning to understand the scope of the issues. i went to the office for an hour or two, then caught the bus to pick mr smear up from school and take him to his therapy session. i sat and worked in the shitty aroma coffee shop, then picked him up and we caught a bus back home.

i worked hard yesterday, for zero results.

today:

today was very cold, and threatened to be a lot wetter than it was.

i woke up early from a strangely comforting dream including badger and hyperviper. up until then i think i slept pretty well. oh, and i'm making slow progress through count zero, but it's really been off-and-on.

the walk to school this morning could have been worse, considering how things had been before we left. i replaced the water filter, which became somewhat dramatic and required a call for technical support, and did some other minor chores, and then tried to continue my ticket.

i worked hard today, for almost zero results.

it looks like the "product" we're using is broken somehow, so i've created an issue and hopefully i'll get something useful in return.

i picked mr smear up from school, took him to his hebrew lesson, and sat down outside a different coffee shop because they had a toilet and didn't have a bad attitude. so much for being "my new place".

at least i got something constructive (something else) done while i was there.

the afternoon was mostly overshadowed by the bad report, i'm not sure how much real work i managed to get through but i was making an effort while simultaneously making sure that mr smear was doing what he was supposed to...

i haven't not been emotionally drained in more than a week. i'm tired.

oranges and clementines

 well, we did it. we got up on time, left on time, and arrived at kfar neter on time for the picking of the fruits. overall it was a great experience, the weather was gorgeous, and we spent an hour milling around, picking fruit, and occasionally, very briefly, chatting to class parents we like. we left just as everyone starting gathering and drinking, not only because gd and i were feeling awkward about mingling with the parents socially but also because mr smear was ready to go too.

the drive there was cool, but the drive back was tense, primarily because at some point i missed a turn and waze got thoroughly stuck, and i ended up having to drive almost all the way back to ra'anana before i could turn the car around, and between gd's initial panic (which, in her defense, she got over pretty quickly) and plenty of people driving dangerously around us, i was in a bit of a mood.

the rest of the afternoon was mostly peaceful, minus a blowout over mr smear having been antisocial with his new friend yesterday, and while gd started feeling proper sick (after a couple of days just being snotty and headache-y) i was just extremely tired. although, before i forget, i was surprisingly wired before we left. i hope i'm not coming down with anything.

we all watched the princess bride together, with mr smear enjoying it thoroughly in spite of himself (he was quite the reflection of fred savage throughout), and we started watching men in black: international at dinner, and he asked me to read the magic pudding to him at bedtime. otherwise, i played a fair bit of crying suns and did a lot of dishes.

the freshly-squeezed freshly-picked clementine juice is amazing.

...

my lower back's still hurting.

...

i've been thinking a lot today about the "sanctioning", in particular about mr smear's behavior leading up to the bully's father threatening him with it. mr smear had been effectively trying to "sanction" the bully, and we'd been actively trying to get him to stop doing it. now i'm wondering if i'm gaslighting myself by turning the "conversation" (the imaginary conversation i'm having in my head) upside down.

jesus christ, parenting is hard.

pinching

my sciatica's been acting up again. and i'm tired. it's been real. and tomorrow morning we have to be up early for a class outing to pick oranges and clementines...

yesterday:

gd started feeling really sick with a sinus thing, so i took mr smear to jiujitsu. which worked out, because halfway through things got dramatic and i had to give him a proper coach's talk.

the work day wasn't fun, nor particularly productive. and my manager did something that bothered me, and between that and two of our stars bailing on us i'm beginning to feel some empathy for the guy who's in his last week.

today:

my mom's examination went well, and she's got the all-clear from her doctor. i really hope she watches the movies anyway.

...

i added the following to my bloons: adventure time review today after getting all of the achievements: 

FINAL FINAL UPDATE: At 500+ hours, I realize I have a problem. I've unlocked all the achievements, a third of my characters are at level 10, and I'm still performing the ritual of the daily quests, but at this point I don't know why I'm still doing it. Every day I'm offended anew that I'm still getting character resources that I no longer need, which, considering the grind to get even a single character to level 10, is simply unfair.

I wonder if I'll be strong enough one day to just quit.

...

i've spent most of the day just feeling burned out and playing lots of crying suns. while mr smear was at school gd and i did some shopping, in the afternoon mr smear arranged a playdate with his new friend, some of which was cool, and some of which made us concerned that he's going to push another kid away by doing stuff he thinks is funny but that others don't.

we'll see, i guess.

while that was happening, our friends came over for coffee and we had a heavy talk about the bullying situation. i hope that wasn't a mistake. i don't think it was, but it certainly didn't make for a good vibe and their reaction was a little less supportive than i was expecting.

we finished watching the third men in black a short while ago, it's even better than i remembered.

...

mr smear has been having nightmares about chucky. he's having trouble going to sleep because he's thinking about chucky. i've no idea how he discovered chucky, but we now suspect that he saw that gd was watching it on her netflix account :/

the (slip) knot

 "i push my fingers into my eyes..."

i need to breathe out this rage, slow my fight response, and get ready to face the day. last night on my way home i was plagued with fantasies about how to deal with mr smear's bully and his parents, some of which involved things that would most certainly get me imprisoned. eventually, i settled on composing a farewell to the class parents and publishing it as an open letter, which i guess is becoming a thing for me, but after gd and i just talked about i think the best way forward is to post it privately to the parents' group, give it to the school team, and then if any of them decides to share it then the blowout will be on them, not us.

there were things in the letter that i put together that gd hadn't even realized was going on, and she's been angry enough without those details.

i'm torn between rage at the situation, at the bully parents, and the bullies, and a deep pride in my son and how he's been handling all this. and gratitude and admiration for his friend, who has been no less than an angel in disguise.

...

tuesday:

the past couple of days have been intense, and it's been difficult to Get Stuff Done. tuesday was all about managing gd's anxiety before her dental appointment, which ultimately turned out to be a planning session for the series of upcoming treatments. honestly, the receptionist explained the plan to me no less than three times, and even wrote down a summary in illegible handwriting, and i still haven't a clue what's going on. what i do know is that we were able to separate the costs into two phases, and each phase can be made in installments, so it's an enormous cost but we can get through it.

after the dentist, we went to hummus ashkara and "opened a table". it was a really good experience.

yesterday:

tuesday and yesterday's workdays were hard. and long. and full of discomfort. my manager and i had a talk, and while he understood the concern i raised about our team culture (a couple of us had had a pretty serious disagreement on sunday evening, things were mostly respectful but still uncomfortable), he made a good point that in some things i need to remember: "when in rome..."

then yesterday, one of the "big boys" in the team announced that he's leaving, hot on the heels of the other one, apparently because he disliked the bosses' choice of manager promotion. what's really got me gobsmacked is that he doesn't have anywhere to go, no specific plans, he just decided he was done and that's it. during a time when the hi-tech job market is a complete shit-show.

the man's got balls, i'll give him that. and the loss of the two of them is definitely going to hurt.

...

after a nice dinner completing the second men in black film and getting mr smear into bed, i sat down and churned out the letter. then i played some crying suns until my eyes started to shut, and then i read a few paragraphs of count zero before turning in for the night.

today so far:

i guess - i'm afraid to type it - i've been sleeping relatively well lately, when i've been able to. we had a pretty good morning, but after dropping mr smear off at school and getting home i read the letter to gd and that's what set off all the feelings again. but the letter's done, and i've posted this now, so i'm feeling calmer and i'm ready to do a mold sweep and airconditioner clean and then head back to the office.

...

my mom's in the hospital already, i really hope her day goes smoothly.

enter the wet season

what. a. day.

i dropped mr smear off at school with the usual pep talk, and it began raining just as soon as we said goodbye, as it almost always does when it rains. fortunately it was brief, and i had an umbrella, and i made it home pretty dry.

gd and i moved everything out the way for the delivery. the poor guy who wanted our old machine was upset that we couldn't wait, and i was upset that he couldn't make the arrangements in the (unreasonable) amount of time he'd been given. so that was a sad experience for all parties.

the delivery guys eventually arrived, and boy, did they charge us. but, to their credit, they handled everything from A to Z and left us with a combo washing machine/dryer ready for its first run. so far, so good 🤞

shortly after a bit of a breakthrough - i've been doing annoying work this sprint so far, and with all the distractions it's been harder to do the shitty things than usual - i picked mr smear up from school and took him to his math tutor. it began pouring down on our way there, and it was a joy to see him tooling around and enjoying the rain while we waited.

my usual coffee spot was washed out, so i went to a bakery and sat inside, warm and cozy, free wifi, nursing a really good latte that was significantly cheaper than the other place. i've think i've found my new place.

by the time i was ready to pick mr smear up, it had been bucketing down for a while and i struggled to get there without getting my feet wet.

it was wellington boot weather, and we were in our sneakers.

i made it just on time, mostly not soaked, but when crossing the next road with him we both stepped right into a deep puddle :(

the afternoon was a cross between me eating and snacking, trying to get work done, and being entertained by mr smear doing his keyboard practice.

and then his homeroom teacher called me.

...

it was such an emotional call that i had a hard time not crying on at least three occasions. it turns out the woman i wrote to yesterday wasn't the right address at all, but she did forward those messages to her and that saved a lot of time. it was a massively affirming to hear her confide that mr smear's class is a known problem case, and that the school's experience with the problem parents is the same as ours.

we don't have to prove anything to anyone.

it was also hugely affirming to hear that up until these past two weeks, during which mr smear has been making a concerted effort to improve his record, she'd been worried that he had an undiagnosed learning difficulty; but now, two weeks into him actively participating, it's clear to her as well that his only issue has ever been a motivational one.

i'm so freaking proud of my boy.

i asked her for her help in understanding the process of moving him to a different school, and while she's not happy that we want him / he wants to move to a different class in the interim, she's on the same page and is willing to do what she can. i think i made it pretty clear to her how appreciated she is personally, even while i expressed how little faith we have in the school as a whole.

...

i barely got any work done after that.

...

after dinner and most of the second men in black movie, but before mr smear went to sleep, my mom called to inform me that she's going to be hospitalized on thursday while they do some testing, it looks like the cholesterol problem she's been maintaining is starting to get worse.

her diet's been better than western standard, but still quite far from plant-based, and i really, really hope i can help her shift it further towards healthy. i sent her links to food choices and what the health, and i'm praying that she actually gives them a chance.

...

our conversation was interrupted by a rocket attack, which caught us out completely - mr smear and i only arrived at the shelter just as we heard the unusually loud explosions. we had a full shelter and it was raining, which was oddly cozy.

...

i'm tired, but overall i feel pretty good about how today went. tomorrow's the day gd's been afraid her - she has her dental appointment in the evening - so i'm praying that everything goes smoothly 🙏

eating (us up inside)

 yesterday:

after a night filled with anxiety and running through conversations and arguments in my head - i had to get up on multiple occasions to just try and calm the storm, but for the most part i couldn't sleep no matter how exhausted i was - i woke up yesterday morning and immediately got to work contacting his homeroom teacher and their "integration teacher" (whatever that title means).

i ended up writing a small wall of text during the day, both to the "integration teacher" and mr smear's therapist, because they didn't have time to actually talk, and i think i conveyed pretty much everything. i have a meeting scheduled with his homeroom teacher this afternoon, hopefully it'll be constructive.

at the same time, i spent a fair amount of time yesterday trying to arrange for someone to pick up our old washing machine, but it ultimately turned out to be too complicated. there really needs to be a service for this sort of thing.

work itself was a long day trying to understand the mysterious failures we saw on thursday, but which have presented themselves entirely differently. it's been driving us all nuts.

...

ultimately, when i got home and interrogated mr smear i learned that he'd had himself a pretty good day. that was a huge relief. and i believe it's in large part due to the idea of him working to get out of the school, and the conversations we've been having in which we've made it abundantly clear that we understand what he's going through and that we're on his side.

...

last night we finished re-watching spider-man: no way home, and we disconnected and wiped down the washing machine. i expect this morning is going to be complicated, i'm relieved that it's a monday and that i'm working from home for it.

...

in other anxiety news, gd's been diving down a despair spiral worrying about tomorrow's dental work. it's really hard to confront someone else's demons and *feel* supportive and not confrontational at the same time. i've made it clear that with all her hypnotherapy training, i expect her to *immediately* prioritize either finding a way to treat herself, or finding a therapist, to deal specifically with a stress response issue she's been suffering from since childhood that really messes with her - it's a big part of the reason she's been struggling to eat for the last couple of weeks and it's really scary.

...

speaking of unintentional weight loss, i'm still struggling with intentional weight loss, along with accumulated financial losses. it doesn't help that our friday evening plans were cancelled last-minute leading to us eating an expensive meal in a restaurant right after we just dropped a couple of thousands shekels on a new washer/dryer and before a day of car rental, and that left our freezer with three tubs of delicious vegan ice-cream in it. it doesn't help that mr smear left saturday's birthday party early after we bought two large bags of marshmallows and two slabs of dark chocolate,

we're being as careful as we can be to ration these desserts. as careful as we can be.

taxi driver

 i'm angry. as in, boiling over. like, raging.

mr smear went to a birthday party, and by his report things were awkward, but fine. i wasn't there because i was giving sailor a ride to the airport, but gd told me that a couple of other parents noticed that things weren't right; one of them told her that they'd ask their daughter for more information, the other that her son often comes home and reports that he tried to help mr smear, but couldn't.

so the "cherem", or "sanction", that his antagonist's bitch father threatened me about wasn't just a threat for a moment, but rather a long-term threat. which explains the laser tag incident, and why mr smear has been reluctant to go outside during breaks.

i get it now. and i'm furious. i really, really want to slap the shit out of both the parents and the child.

...

not only did i take sailor to the airport, but also mr smear's friend and her dad to the hospital - hairline fracture after falling off the monkey bars :(

otherwise, it's been a quiet afternoon and mr smear's been cool, both having accepted his punishment from earlierand in generally cooperating.

...

please god let us get mr smear into the art school 🙏

queues

thursday:

i've been meaning to post this since thursday evening, now i'm confident i've forgotten some interesting things... most of the day was spent managing a couple of rabbitmq queues, i really didn't get much done otherwise, and i was very happy to get out of the office and into the weekend.

of course, i'm on-call today :P

yesterday:

gd and i went looking for a tumbledryer. we were standing there on the showroom floor, struggling to figure out how we could make it work, both physically and financially, because there's no way to put it on top of our washing machine (which travels) and no space anywhere else in the apartment, when the floor manager asked if he couldn't interest us in a combo washer/dryer.

which costs the same as a dryer, and takes up the same amount of space. i don't know how we never encountered a combo machine before, but holy shit it would have saved us so much headache and money and apartment space if we had! so it's being delivered on monday, and hopefully we'll find someone to take our current machine off our hands before then.

we did some grocery shopping, and ran into my previous team lead / department head on the way, which was cool.

we came home to drop everything off, then went to pick up mr smear and his friend. the afternoon was them playing their games, me playing crying suns (i've been doing a lot of that, lately), and then downtime / naptime for everyone once his friend left.

we were supposed to go with sailor to friends for dinner, but they literally cancelled at the last minute. so we ended up going to a vegan restaurant in neve tzedek, and the experience was mostly great.

i say mostly, because mr smear choked on a kebab and gd had to perform the heimlich manoever on him. let's just say that it was an emotional, scary experience for everyone.

it was also somewhat corrective, for me. i was thinking about my parenting a lot over the course of the past week, and i had a chance to put what i've learned into practice, and it helped.

we came back home, sailor hung around for a while to chat, and then we all said goodnight.

today so far:

i had some trouble sleeping, and got up pretty early. then everyone else followed suit, and we began the day watching the tyson vs paul fights. i mean, we watched taylor vs serrano, which was an absolutely infuriating insult to everyone. then we watched tyson vs paul.

now, i know that it was extremely unlikely that tyson would win, but i hoped for it anyway. and the fact that he went all eight rounds? the man is 58, that in itself is amazing. i found the way they ended the fight quite heartwarming, and some of mike's post-fight interview was hilarious.

now i've taken care of a huge pile of dishes, and we just had an explosion with mr smear being uncooperative about logging off his game, and on that sour note, i'm off to take sailor to the airport.

flaming walnuts

missed from yesterday: the walnut story. mr smear *hates* walnuts, but if he hasn't had pancakes (with ground flaxseed) then it's the next best source of omega-3. the other day he had the bright idea of putting chocolate syrup on the walnut, which was wildly successful. yesterday, when i offered him walnuts with chocolate syrup, he said no, and asked me to put a single drop of the jalapeno hot sauce on one of them for him to try.

let me be clear: mr smear experimenting with food is new, and absolutely thrilling for me. so i carefully put a single drop on a walnut, and he loved it! so he asked me to pour the hot sauce on all the walnuts. liberally.

and he ate the shit out of it 🤯

today:

it was a pretty calm morning. i left for work early so that i could have a chat with astute and discuss the politics surrounding the war. it was supposed to be half an hour, but an additional hour flew past before i realized that i needed to go back to my office.

an electrician came to our apartment while i was on that call, and was unable to get mr smear's bedroom light to behave badly. of course. so he tightened things up and hopefully it'll be fine now. that cost a whole lot of money we didn't need to spend... i didn't even try to get our landlords to pay the bill (but i did make sure they knew about it).

it was an odd sort of workday, punctuated by a mission to tamir for falafel and salt 'n vinegar chips, and again for vegan bourekas.

i got home with barely enough time to shower before joining a webinar with bijan kian, which was very interesting.

i'm tired, and i'm probably going to bed shortly.

testing

 the biggest news of the day was my mother meeting with representatives of the jewish agency to go through her documents again. unfortunately, it wasn't the final meeting, but it does look like she's made good progress and i'm very pleased that she spoke some hard truths to the reps that needed to be said.

hopefully she'll be sorted within the next couple of months. that would be nice. her story's going on four years already.

...

today got an angry start, part of it gd and mr smear (he's still a slow starter), part of it gd and one of our frying pans. so, after accompanying mr smear to school, gd and i went shopping. we picked up two frying pans, and a couple more soft blankets for our couch because winter's coming, and a couple of organizers to try and sort out our living room nightmare of piles of books and drawn-on pages and documents all over the place.

no vegan marshmallows for the birthday party mr smear's going to on saturday.

...

on my way to work i was suddenly overcome by some heavy memories of me being too hard on a much younger mr smear. it doesn't help that i thought i was doing right by him, i know now how messed up my behavior was and i'm sure that's going to haunt me for the rest of my life.

...

work today was all about writing and running tests. it was mostly good, minus a rocket attack and needing to fart while we were all waiting in the stairwell, and a bit of a fight with my boss which i definitely could have handled better.

i'm not sure if it helped that i was proved right by the end of it :P

i headed to the supermarket on my way home to see if i could find vegan marshmallows, and i'm getting the feeling they're off the shelves everywhere all of a sudden. i hunted through the entire mall until i eventually got to a candy store that had, while not the marshmallows i was looking for, a pretty good alternative from haribo. i'm not 100% sure if it's vegan, but at least it doesn't have fish, dairy or eggs in it...

they also had a giant bag of katjes that says "vegan" on it. so i bought that as well ^_^

i picked up a few umbrellas on the way to the bus stop, and the rest of the evening's been pretty good so far. putting mr smear to bed was a little bumpy, but we didn't escalate and i'm feeling pretty good about how the day went.

doing, and not doing

 i slept pretty well last night, but not enough. after taking mr smear to school, i continued on to the post office to pick up the palm rest sticker for my dell laptop. it was a beautiful morning, and i would have appreciated it had gd and i not been fighting over whether mr smear had lice or not 😣

anyway, we got through it quickly, at least.

i applied some more spackle on a spot i'd missed yesterday, and made some good progress with the silicone tube in spite of the fact that it's designed for one of those gun thingies and now the skin on my hand's peeling as a consequence :P

i called the number of the organization that's supposed to take over gd's cannabis licensing, which was just like a canadian government organization: a whole bunch of telephone menus, only to be directed to their website instead. anyway, i uploaded everything and i hope it's good enough.

i discovered that the sticker i'd bought was the wrong one, the ali express format confused me and i ended up purchasing a similar-but-different product. fortunately, i managed to cut out what i needed and it fits pretty well, and i don't really care if it's incomplete - it does the job.

work-wise, i think it's safe to say that i got practically nothing of value done this morning. i was quite hungry and i snacked a lot. i did do quite a bit while waiting for mr smear's hebrew lesson - oh! he drew a pretty cool pixel art hand today, we're quite proud ^_^

we're also extremely proud, and literally amazed, that he figured out part of wolfmother - pyramid by himself on the keyboard, entirely from memory because we haven't heard any wolfmother in aaaaaages 🤯

i did a fair amount of work in the afternoon, kinda making up for the slow morning, and then received a suspicious-looking message that i had a package waiting for me at a postal point in dizengoff center that i'd never heard of. i tried calling, but the number wasn't connected, and the message had come with a warning that they'd only hold the package for two business days, so on the off-chance that it was real (no way i was clicking on the url-shortened link) i decided to head down and see what was going on.

it was raining. i noped the fuck back home and waited until things looked dryer, getting some more work done in the meanwhile.

when it was dark already, i tried again. i made it there without a hitch (although something in the bus made my skin crawl), and i found the postal store. i explained my issues to the woman at the desk, who promptly disappeared. i struggled to find my package, and ask for assistance. the only person working at that point was a sharp-faced woman who assured me she'd help me in just a minute. then two teenagers came in, and she turned to them.

i asked her why i wasn't being helped. she told me, "they're kids". i was utterly dumbstruck for a moment, then tried to get her to explain why they get priority, but zero fucks were given on her side and on mine, i had to keep it together to not lose my goddamned mind. it was a while after i left the store before i started to cool off.

jesus.

anyway, i picked up a new pixel art sketch book (just a nice sketch book with squares) for mr smear now that he understands what i was trying to achieve the last time (when gd tried to inspire him with some examples, and he decided her drawings were cooler than his so he refused to use it), so that's cool.

i tried to come home but it was raining again, i then spent twenty minutes or so hunting for an umbrella that didn't suck and also didn't cost too much money. i ended up leaving without finding one, and fortunately made it home during a break in the clouds.

we watched about half of pixels during dinner, some of which is awkward, but most of it is hilarious, especially for a nine year-old...

and now it's bedtime. i'm a bit disappointed that mr smear didn't want to continue reading the magic pudding tonight, and then gd wasn't interested in it either :/

norms

 why am i awake so late? i've been soooo tired lately...

getting mr smear to school was fine, and i actually put a layer of spackle over where i cleared the peeling crud off mr smear's walls, as well as put in the first line of polyfill around the cupboard in our passageway.

so that was good.

gd and i arrived a bit late for our parental guidance session because the bus we were waiting for disappeared. it felt like a good sessions.

getting gd onto a bus to get to the dentist for another first aid meeting - she's been so scared to crack her other tooth that she's lost 2kg in just a week, which is distressing - took so long that i ended up quite late for work.

it was a pretty productive day, i guess, and my cousin's kid has just moved into an office on our floor and that's both cool and awkward at the same time :P

i left late, and was really pressured for time because i had to go to a lecture at mr smear's school that i was dreading. mr smear informed me that he had not, in fact, had another perfect day, but in retrospect it doesn't seem like such a big deal. then again, i've only heard his side of the story...

the lecture was about setting norms for tech use across the school, and i initially presumed that the school would be interfering with parents' choices. this immediately put me on the defensive because i don't trust anyone with those sorts of intentions to also be operating in an evidence-based manner. by the end of it, though, i was convinced not only that this initiative is well-informed, but that they have an approach that really does make sense.

assuming the prinicipal doesn't screw it up.

gd and i watched some pantheon, which was brilliant, and i've played some crying suns, and i'm now pretty sure that i'm ready for bed.

...

i've been battling with a mosquito for the last hour or two, it's infuriating.

quiet

 it was a very quiet day, aside from gd and mr smear being visited by friends. oh, and a false alarm of a "hostile aircraft intrusion" that sent us all running to the shelter.

i guess it was nice to catch up with the neighbors.

the rollercoaster intensified

 thursday:

thursday started off well, and i'm pleased to say that mr smear received another glowing report in the afternoon about how well he behaved!

confirmed: it's not that he can't cooperate and get the job done. it's that he lacks the proper motivation. you don't need to medicate a child and potentially handicap them into order to get them to comply. speaking of which, i think chatgpt was lying to me when it said it would process the PDF i uploaded and get back to me, but in the meanwhile, i got it to translate chapter by chapter and compiled it myself.

so i just checked in with the PDF production:

omg, chatgpt is even worse than a real human! 🤣

work was alright, it was harder to implement my boss's feedback than i'd anticipated but i'd made good headway by the time i left. along the way, we had a frontend emergency in production and it was really nice to be able to figure it out and fix it quickly.

i was disappointed to learn that the art school we want to enroll mr smear in is in such high demand that it works on a lottery system, so even if he does everything perfectly he might still not be able to get in...

yesterday:

waking up to news of the pogrom in amsterdam. and the horrific online shit-show that followed. of course the jihadists can justify it. of course. of course the police didn't intervene. of course.

our enemies have always liked to compare us to vermin. we're the one "protected group" that the woke don't care to protect.

just a head's up though: when us "rats" start fleeing, it means your ship is sinking.

gd's been taking things really, really hard.

otherwise, it was a quiet day, continuously punctuated by that anxiety.

i woke up from the following dream: i left my bag on a train after a post-lecture lecture in which everyone around me couldn't see me, only gd in a swimsuit instead.

panicked about losing my computer, i tried to understand what to do while whoever had it easily unlocked it and was messing with my company. i got a call from a threatening encoded voice but it didn't say anything helpful, i called my boss, and he told me he'd been receiving the same calls. 

i tried to brush my teeth in an outside sink but this homeless-looking mime wanted toothpaste. he did something weird with the toothpaste and i got angry with him, as in a almost clocked him, and gd got between us to stop me from getting into trouble.

all of a sudden he stopped his performance and took me to show me that he'd somehow managed to retrieve my computer. i helplessly and humbly expressed my gratitude, and asked him, incredulously, "how?!"

he took me to a secret spot on the hill about the square, dug up and opened a container, introducing me to a giant flea that he appeared to regard as a pet.

we had some drama when picking up mr smear from school because we thought he'd lost his pencil case - that would be the second time in a few months, and it's a really expensive thing to replace - but it was a huge relief to discover that his teacher had found it and put it in his locker...

we did some cleaning in the afternoon. at some point, mr smear cut up a mango by himself for the very first time. also, i soaked some dried pineapple (unsweetend) in lemon juice and it was a surprisingly good experience.

sailor came over for dinner. it was an enjoyable evening, we ate too much and it was great, and we even had coffee afterwards, in part because i didn't want to fall asleep too early, again.

but i totally fell asleep too early, again. not even the caffeine could stop it.

today so far:

we all slept in this morning, and it's a beautiful, beautiful day so far. mr smear's still snotty and coughing, i think we're going to take it pretty easy on ourselves after such an insane week.

more rollercoaster

 i think i slept well last night. i'm already beginning to nod off now, but i wanna post this and drink a cup of chamomile before hitting the hay.

...

the US election took up the majority of my brain-space this morning:

omg i never thought i'd feel so relieved to hear a US election result, and especially to see trump returning to the white house. america, you and the free world just dodged, not a bullet, but an RPG.

i expect all the UN ambassadors from their anti-west totalitarian regimes must be feeling deeply disappointed right now. i don't know how much trump will get done over the next four years, but at least this gives us a window to take down the ayatollahs and make peace in the middle east an actual possibility.

assuming *we* don't manage to screw this up, of course. best of luck to us all 🫡

i was a little distracted still by the election noise when i got to work, but i managed to find my groove. a couple of new companies have moved in to our floor, so it's much brighter and more welcoming.

...

everything was fine until lunch. on my way to joining my coworkers, i received a call from mr smear's class assistant - he was having a very scary asthma attack, and he'd apparently told her he didn't have his pump. in retrospect, i think he misunderstood the questions, but i told her it was in his bag and immediately alerted gd that she'd need to hurry to the school.

then another panicked call - she couldn't figure out which pump to use.

so i called gd, also panicking, and she told me, and i called back and told her. also, i told her it should take a few minutes to work.

more panic, because it didn't working. at this point i was sitting at the table, staring into the distance, praying for my son and thinking about a guy a couple of years ahead of me in school, one of my youth movement councillors, who just suddenly died in his sleep one night from an asthma attack.

fortunately, i got a call soon afterwards informing me that it did seem to be working, and that his coughing fit was calming down, and he was able to breathe between coughs.

holy shit, that was terrifying. truly terrifying.

...

i was still unsettled an hour later, when i went to go and make myself a cup of turkish coffee. i poured the boiling water into the glass, and heard a *crack*. some of the coffee was seeping onto the counter. nystire has a thing about cups cracking due to temperature differences, so, relieved that it hadn't been worse, i took a step back and pulled out my phone to take a photo for him

just as i did that, the glass exploded. i was fortunately just out of range, so aside from the shock i only had to worry about cleaning up the mess (how did the coffee get under the counter ledge??), find a safe way to dispose of all the shards, and then making myself a much safer mug of instant coffee.

...

i was - understandably, i think - restless for the remainder of the work day. at least i feel like i got a couple of important things done.

at some point in the afternoon i received another report from mr smear's teacher: apparently, he's understood the mission. today was a really good day for him, asthma attack notwithstanding, and he was cooperative and worked well!

i did some quick shopping on the way home, mainly for toilet paper but gd's really scared about her other fragile tooth cracking so i picked her up some soya yoghurts and desserts. puddings. or, in our family's parlance, pudignes.

anyhoo, i came home, hugged my son tightly (to his chagrine, he was playing minecraft online), and overall the evening went smoothly. and gd made her delicious new cottage pie recipe (mushrooms and leaks and beans), and we watched some x-men, and then it was bedtime for mr smear.

i, on the other hand, spent the last couple of hours doing another run of kaycee's mod, and then working on using notebooklm and chatgpt to produce a useful summary booklet for anatomy of an epidemic and translate it into hebrew. i don't understand why the translation of the 12 pages would take hours, but that's what i was told so i'm hanging in. i also discovered that you can (now) prompt notebooklm when generating an audio discussion, and that's really powerful!