more small miracles

 i spent a good chunk of today on the couch, alternating between napping and reading dixon and wenzel's graphic novel adaptation of the hobbit. it's beautiful.

i got brought in to a drawing competition with my wife and son at some point, which was interesting.

mr smear spent a couple of hours played besiege, which we agreed to allow because he was getting all up in the physics and engineering. we regretted that decision when we saw the levels of blood and gore he was producing :/

but then later he saw me watching a video on programming and jumped in to human resource machine, and made it through quite a few levels before it was time to drag him out on his bicycle.

firstly, there was a lot less dragging required. secondly, he had a great time, except for a minor accident in which he didn't get too hurt and for which he was treated to his first grape fanta. all in all, it was a good trip ^_^

there was one incident which could have gone badly, but he demonstrated a pleasantly surprising emotional maturity that i don't think i've seen in him before, and we ended up with a quick and positive resolution.

we arrived home shortly before the post-passover pizzas, just in time to have a quick shower and enjoy the dinner while watching the season finale of baking impossible. what a great show!

...

i put too much garlic sauce on my pizza.

small miracles

 saturday:

i managed to drag mr smear out on the bike, which ended up awesome - he "remembered" that he actually enjoys riding his bicycle, and now that the puncture and gears have been repaired it was much more fun for him :)

we finished watching american splendor, and it's really as great as everyone said it was. what an inspirational film! and it answered a bunch of questions i had from reading our movie year.

yesterday:

one of ze germans decided to bring his family to tel aviv yesterday morning, so a whole bunch of us rocked up and had a great walk about! it's very rare to be able to get my family out of the house spontaneously and quickly, so that in itself was amazing, and when mr smear was being relatively antisocial (he was actually pretty cool most of the time) he found a quiet seat to read the copy of naruto that scrapper gave us years ago, and he's really digging it ^_^

we left the group in search of breakfast, and finding pesach-friendly vegan food was quite a mission. we eventually settled on hummus abu dabi, which was just fantastic. we all ate too much, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

the afternoon was pretty chilled, and although there was some unpleasantness surrounding mr smear getting his homework done he did eventually get through it before sundown. i had to re-learn long division in order to teach it to him, which i must admit was kinda fun :P

netflix's baking impossible is a really great show. after getting mr smear into bed, gd and i watched an episode of the boys to remind ourselves (the warmup to the 3rd season finale), and then the first episode of invincible because neither of us really remember much.

...

gd and i both slept badly last night, for different reasons. i've now spent two nights on the couch again. this mattress topper is not doing the trick :(

...

my first on-call with my new employer is over, and it was fine. now i've got a proper day off for the holiday, and tomorrow's back to "normal".

...

oh, i tried to watch the mgmt - kids video with mr smear this morning, and that was a really bad idea. i don't know how i'd forgotten just how scary it is, and here i was trying to show him how scary it wasn't :(

collapsing

 well, the municipality doesn't do anything about threatening cats, nor the spca. but we did eventually learn that the cat does, in fact, belong to our shitty neighbors upstairs who fucking knew that it had gotten out when they left but decided to just fuck off and leave us to deal with it.

pieces of shit.

...

ultimately, i'm still feeling sore (emotionally) from thursday evening, and i don't have the energy to dig deeper than that. i'm also feeling sore physically, and my chest still isn't right, and i've spent a good chunk of today resting and then getting up feeling as tired as when i lay down. am i sick? or depressed? who can say?

...

so we eventually left the apartment yesterday and made our way to the shuk, with the intention of picking up a hat for mr smear. by the time we found decent hats the right size, he'd decided that he didn't want a new hat. so we got on a bus home, then did some grocery shopping and picked up some juices along the way.

the big fight of the day was mr smear getting his homework done before sundown, because he'd decided that it was third grade math and he's only capable of 2nd grade math, even though he's in the third grade. he finally got through a single page before sundown.

i don't have energy for this shit.

he decided this afternoon that he wanted to do more of it. i managed to help him through it, but not without a fair amount of frustration.

god damn.

...

we watched a bit of american splendor last night, but i passed out on the couch. i've been reading more of it, both mediums are really good.

...

when i wasn't resting today, i published the hi-res dedication pages of the comics, and i tried to make the website theme nicer before giving up. i did a little work on the next podcast episode, too. now i'm going to rest a bit more before taking mr smear out somewhere.

...

today i've decided that from now on, i'm referring to halva as "dry ice-cream".

herding cat

 it was a shitty morning to begin with, after a rough night, and we woke up to a cat (stray / our upstairs neighbors, it's anyone's guess) crying in the stairwell. gd opened the door to take a look, which was a big mistake as it launched itself past her and it took us a good five / ten minutes to get it out, but not without it clambering all over our couch and bed and leaving me with a nice red welt on my wrist.

gd's deathly allergic to cats, and she started breaking out with something even though it didn't touch her. i began getting chesty. so we both took antihystamines and i've called the municipality in the hopes they can make it possible for us to leave our apartment safely.

this sucks.

precipice

 i went to bed tired and full of shit feelings after a very long day, and then an impossible-to-reconfigure alarm woke me up and i've been having trouble calming down since. not to mention that i think i'm developing eczema again.

there're so many different sources of stress to choose from.

the biggest item of the day was me taking mr smear to his jiujitsu class in the afternoon, and mr smear flat-out refusing to participate. this led to a massive same-old-fight with gd that has nothing to do with mr smear's story.

as for mr smear, i've had a lot of insightful discussions with him since we left the gym, and it looks like we're going to have to find (a/some) alternatives to mma. which makes me sad, because mma really has been the perfect answer to a bunch of different requirements: self-defense, self-confidence, discipline physical exercise, affordability and the ability for gd (at least most of the time) to be able to take him.

fuck.

i'm so tired of things being relentlessly hard.

...

my work day was frustrating. i made extremely slow progress on my own tasks, although i have plenty on my plate. i did not finish the day with any sense of satisfaction, but i did shut my laptop with a solid sense of not having done enough hours due to distractions beyond my control.

seder

 we got to the car on time, but as we did so i began to feel like i might need to pee shortly, so after inspecting for damage and connecting my phone i stopped across the road from our apartment and made it to our bathroom just as it became an emergency.

i was worried that that was going to be a feature of our drive - an hour or so on the road - but fortunately that was it.

the evening was a bit surreal. it was wonderful and comforting to have most of the family together, even though kc's brother-n-law had been called up for reserve duty so we only saw him briefly via video chat. kc's two week-old and kc's sister's two month old were both there, and it was quite special to meet them. mr smear was being aggressively / unpleasantly shy and awkward, though he did participate in the singing of ma nishtanah and very enthusiastically joined his cousins on the hunt for the afikoman before it had even been hidden.

he was weird about the "prize" - he didn't want to take the twenty shekels from kc's dad - but yesterday he informed me that it was because he felt that it was unfair to him 😂

he also got angry with a little girl for "stealing", even though he had no real evidence that that's what had taken place.

the seder itself was mostly "the usual" for that side of the family, very loud and fun, but we made space both physically and emotionally for the hostages, even singing along to habayita (which triggered a fair amount of tears around the room).

the drive home was a bit mad, it was long, with heavy traffic and scary drivers on the road, but we made it to tel aviv safely and got home around 1.30am after dropping off the lady who'd helped in the kitchen.

yesterday:

i didn't sleep well, and i was exhausted and lazy for most of the day. i finally got mr smear's phone account sorted out in the morning, at least. in the afternoon, we went out for a walk to the park by the beach, which began with ice cream, ended with chips, and its middle was full of whining because mr smear wanted a sandwich and it's passover, where a) we don't do bread and b) passover bread is horrible.

anyway.

i bumped into an old friend at the park with some friends of his, and i was very awkward. or they were. maybe we all were. oh, well...

at dinner we watched more of the magic prank show, which is just amazing.

after putting mr smear to bed - after he very proudly called my mom from his own phone to say good night - gd and i watched another fallout episode.

today:

i slept much better, but started off the day all wrong. otherwise, it was a pretty good morning, but very hot; we're experiencing a heat wave right now, and it was an oven-like 37 degrees this afternoon with more of the same promised for tomrorow. the work day was good, but a bit weird. the thing i'm thinking about a lot is that a few of us had a particularly heated debate the other day, and after diving a bit deeper today i discovered that two of us were decidedly wrong - an apology is in order to the third, but he's on vacation for a week.

it was nigh impossible to find lunch today, it bothers me that the salad places are all closed down for passover. so i ended up getting hummus from an arab place, which turned out to be the best hummus in the area by far. after waiting twenty minutes in the line in the extreme heat, i ordered something that turned out to be with meat in it, and i was embarrassed and disappointed. i had planned to just take it out of my dish and give it to my teammates, but in the end we discovered that it wasn't meat after all, just really nicely-made fava beans :P

the wework management provided matzah and chocolate spreads, but nothing vegan, so one of them disappeared into their storeroom and returned with a whole slab of panda chocolate for me ^_^

at dinner we finished watching the magic prank show, and after getting mr smear into bed we watched the season finale of the fallout series. holy shit, they really did an amazing job and we both thoroughly enjoyed it! i'm really pleased that gd can now appreciate a world i've been so captivated by for over two decades ^_^

iran's cave

 this morning i made the mistake of opening instagram and scrolling down my feed. each post was more demoralizing than the last, and this is after filtering out so many accounts that are spewing antisemitism and blatant lies about us, the war, and our history.

i don't know which is worse: terrorist regimes trying to destroy us, or the useful idiots supporting them, or the cautious walking-on-egg-shells they're being met with. or maybe it's none of those three. maybe it's seeing clueless jews serving as mouthpieces for their enemies and speaking against their own people.

either way, i'm grateful to be here, the one place on earth where jews are allowed to be jews, and where as jews we are able to defend ourselves. where the answer to "should our hostages be freed" is obvious and unequivocal. where we don't have to defend singing a national anthem that calls for us being a free nation in our own country of origin.

we're pushing further and further into a future of fake news, and deepfakes, and twisted narratives and propaganda engines the likes of which even george orwell couldn't possibly have imagined back when he wrote 1984.

2 + 2 = 5

if this past six months has taught us nothing else, i hope we learn from it that western civilization is in terrible danger of losing its mind, and its heart. i hope that the world will collectively take steps to pull itself out of the endless sea of quicksand that our media and social media platforms have become.  i hope our children don't wake up in a dystopian future controlled by radical ideologies in which it's impossible to know what's real and what's not.

the sim

i'm tired, i'm sore, and we're leaving in an hour to drive for an hour or two to our cousins' seder. i've just had four cups of water after realizing that the only liquid i'd consumed today was black coffee. ugh.

firstly, today was a huge day for us and mr smear: i've bought him a sim card, and given him my huawei, and he now has his own phone. well, shit.

secondly, it was a big morning in the mall, and then when we finally got home my mom called to ask us to take some chocolates as well. i walked to the chocolatier (cardinal) on ibn gvirol, amazing vegan stuff but no hechsher. i walked back to leonidas, nothing gift-like that was vegan. i then walked all the way to max brenner, arrived before they closed and finding a couple of items that reasonably fit the criteria for a gift.

i returned home with sore legs and 10.5K steps on my watch. i tried resting, but found that hard to do with mr smear very noisily playing among us and gd struggling with our old iron that almost destroyed her shirt (fortunately our neighbors could help us out with theirs).

oh! she very successfully made potatoes in the oven today. she's now rather embarrassed that she's been ovening wrong all these years, but we're very glad we don't have to buy a new one just yet.

...

gd and i had a very difficult conversation this morning, one that lots of jews are having right now: how do we celebrate our freedom, when we have up to 129 hostages still trapped in gaza?

limbo

yesterday:

i didn't sleep very well. at all. then i got up and published an article on how ridiculous the facetime reactions are (well, that they're enabled automatically and affect all video call apps), which i only realized was a thing while chatting with my mom before dinner.

after hours of doing not much, i found a couple of interesting games available via our playstation plus subscription, and i didn't realize until we were on our way to the park that mr smear preferred walking because he believed that it would take longer than cycling, and he didn't want to come home before the downloads were complete.

wtaf.

then he made it weirder by getting upset with me for suggesting that next time we take the bikes we take a frisbee as well, because he thinks that's too complicated.

eh?!?

anyway, most of the walk was nice, and he very enthusiastically (ahem) dived in to dave the diver when we returned. and then minecraft legends when it was ready.

the generally good vibe was brought to a screeching halt in the evening when the oven tripped the board, and then we heard a small explosion when we tried again (and it tripped the board again). our landlords are garbage. they're refused to fix the plumbing until it bursts again. we're concerned we might have damp behind the kitchen cupboards.

...

my mom bought him an activity book (tricky puzzles) ages ago, i think for when we flew here, and he never showed much interest in it until now. now he's thoroughly enjoying it, and it reminds me of how much i enjoyed those things when i was a kid.

gd and i watched another episode of fallout, then hit the hay.

today:

i didn't sleep well, but i did sleep a bit better.

the last day of fight camp, getting out of bed went relatively smoothly but then we made the mistake of rewarding his cooperation by letting him play a game. and then he refused to stop playing without a fight.

goddamn.

by the time i got him into the gym, i felt like i deserved a medal. perhaps two.

anyway, i made sure he was fine (apparently it wasn't a great day, but whatever) and then returned home, did some work and waited for the oven repair guy. he was great, at least, and gd's going to test the oven tomorrow morning and we'll see if we need to buy a new one or not. if we don't, though, we've at least learned that the "turbo" setting she's been using for the past year is probably the reason the oven hasn't been cooking things properly.

we both went to azrieli and then i said goodbye and continued on to work. it was an interesting workday, both socially and work-wise, and overall i feel pretty good about it.

i came home, we had dinner, put mr smear to bed, and watched some more fallout. i should probably go to bed soon.

...

i'm very grateful we have the day off tomorrow.

ai gone wild

my favorite part of this is that these images will now be fed into the next generation of ai models... i was explaining the concept of a golem to mr smear earlier, a thing that follows your instructions but can't understand your intentions, and he responded "so chatgpt and dall-e are golems, then?"

abso-freaking-lutely.

speeding up before applying the brakes

 so... i didn't just feel that inspiration and go to bed... i ended up starting the original fallout game and realized about halfway through clearing out a cave full of radscorpions that it was 2am already...

whoops :$

the day started really well in spite of waking up from a bizarre and disturbing dream about cartoon depravity. i woke mr smear up, explained the expression "the carrot and the stick" (which already got him in a good space because that's how you ride pigs in minecraft), and informed him that the stick was no screen-time if he didn't participate in the fight camp and the carrot was a homework-free afternoon doing whatever he wants if he did.

he did. and not only did he, but gd quietly called me after picking him up at the end to tell me he'd said he had an amazing day! he wouldn't say anything other than "it was okay" when i eventually got home, but that's just how he rolls...

between dropping him off at fight camp and getting to the office, i spoke to dod who's not just interested in a project i've been cooking up for about a decade now, but who presented an interesting re-focus that makes it much more likely to get off the ground. he (digitally) introduced me to someone he knows who's in the industry i've been dreaming about disrupting, and i'm excited to see if we can push this forward ^_^

the work day itself was manic. by the time we'd safely tested my previous evening's fixes it was already thursday afternoon, which is a not-good time to deploy to production. the deployment was a bit tricky, though it went smoothly, but it took hours of general disarray to be confident that the patch had been deployed safely and successfully.

for our weekly end-of-week happy hour, i convinced my team to order from mr donuts. four vegan donuts and one not (i feel confident they got it on principle), and everyone agreed that a) they were great and b) the not-vegan option was the least successful :P

i ended up leaving the office late again because i wanted to finish up our first official runbook.

it was a pretty peaceful evening (arguments over what to watch during dinner notwithstanding, mr smear doesn't like giving us a turn to choose and we wanted to continue with baking impossible). i was soooo tired after putting mr smear to bed, but we started watching a little more fallout and then stopped when i passed out on the couch.

today:

i didn't sleep well, but i did sleep. i woke up with a sore neck and shoulder, which followed me around all morning. it's still not great but it's much better, at least.

i began the day trying to figure out what the attack on iran means - i still don't know, to be honest - and wondering if ze germans are going to get together or not while SxS is in town. after a quick breakfast, we took the bike - i mean, mr smear walked his bike alongside us - to be repaired, and i had a coffee while gd and mr smear enjoyed sandwiches at cafe eva. the woman i asked for a chair was extremely rude to me, in english - "take the chair and GO!" - and i think she thought we were tourists. what an asshole!

afterwards, we hopped on a bus to the ichilov mall, where i figured out our next steps in getting mr smear a cellphone and we did a grocery shopping. then we walked home, dropped gd and the groceries off, and mr smear and i walked back to the bike repair shop.

eighty shekels for a new tire, gears examined and a new rear brake. nice :)

we picked up a really nice wine for our cousins' seder on monday evening, and we came home for a lazy afternoon. mr smear's been human fall flat-ing, i've almost cleared my daily quests in bloons adventure time, and i even killed all those damned radscorpions before doing most of the dishes so that gd could bake a challah in time for shabbat.

so far, it's been a good day.

unusually me

yesterday:

a very positive start to the day, getting mr smear to his fight camp on time.

mostly meetings, with me forcing a retrospective that felt appreciated by most of the team. a good start to sorting out potential on-call rotation issues. very little time for my own work.

leaving the office early and coming home for an early meal with my family before heading south.

efrat gosh in levontin 7 with tahoma - an interesting catch-up, a very intimate performance that really blew me away, as i was simultaneously quite emotional about being in a show in levontin 7 for the first time in about twelve years.

getting home late, showering and snacking even later.

today:

3am mistakenly looking at facebook and seeing a post recommending that a tel aviv family consider relocating to cape town, finally going back to bed an hour and a half later

rough and rushed wakeup, but mr smear being pretty cool

a really good chat with his instructor when dropping him off

a surprising conversation with gd about spirituality.

meeting up with my cousin's kid for coffee to discuss career options, a sudden and dramatic plot twist into a romantic adventure story

arriving late for work, being dropped into an unfamiliar production issue for a customer. an emotional rollercoaster of an afternoon, with gd getting on the wrong bus and picking up mr smear late, and mr smear continuing his struggle to get out of the fight camp, and me getting lost trying to figure out all the pieces of the work puzzle, and then getting news that my nephew just received his british ancestral visa and is finally able to join his mother and sister in london, and then hours trying to decipher truly pathetic documentation (google's envoy) and figuring things out with trial and error (with the AI assistance being the opposite of helpful), finally being inspired to ask a different question and hitting the jackpot, then a loooooot of debugging implementing the solution and eventually leaving the office late, but in time to eat with my family, and feeling exquisitely exhultant.

the evening was great until bedtime, i tried to have a conversation with mr smear and it went south (for no obvious reason), and then gd and i watched the third episode of the new fallout series. it's full of fan service, even if i feel like the pacing's a bit slow it's really inspired me to get back into it.

power play

 so far, the fallout series doesn't suck, which is actually very high praise. having said that, i was too tired last night to watch much of it. we woke up in the morning, having prepared for the attack - eight hours knowing that rockets are coming your way is a very long time. but then it was morning, and we woke up to see videos of rockets being shot down.

and then read that iran was saying that was it. and everyone discouraging us from retaliating. wtaf is going on?!

anyway. mr smear's mma camp was still cancelled and we were all confused, so i ended up working from home while he spent most of his day playing valheim. it was a long, tough day, but i ultimately enjoyed some success. in the evening, mr smear and i accompanied gd to the clinc, then we did some grocery shopping.

it was a good evening.

gd had to leave early this morning for an emergency dentist appointment, and we were confident that there wasn't going to be an mma camp today.

we were wrong.

i'm feeling particularly proud of myself for - with gd's guidance over the phone - getting mr smear's gear ready, and for convincing mr smear to eat toast with peanut butter on it, and for getting him out the door in generally good spirits and good time. we only found out the camp was happening around 8pm, and i managed to get him in the door before 9.30, brief his jiujitsu instructor on using the epipen, and see him join the class.

leaving him there felt like a big deal. like his first day at school. 4-5 hours on his own dealing with a "new" framework.

and then i was off to the office.

i'm really, really glad i didn't work from home. the only other person in the office was the one person i needed to interface with, and between the two of us i made great progress on my tickets. i didn't finish them (and our sprint ended today), but i made great progress that i'm satisfied with. additionally, the CEO messaged me in the morning to ask for something else and i delivered it with a really good feeling. and our CTO, who's been missing in action for a couple of days, posted a photo of him and his wife with their newborn. that's two in a week, but the fourth in four months - it feels like we have a baby boom going on :)

all-in-all, it was a good day.

mr smear had a mostly-good first day on the fight camp, although the last few minutes didn't go so well (he apparently got kicked a few times after pairing up with someone he'd been advised not to). while that did suck, he handled his emotions much better than we would have expected and the rest of the day went smoother than either of us would have anticipated. in addition to that, it provided an opening for a really good bedtime conversation. at some point i described to him what i went through after being fired from my first job in montréal, and how mma helped me get through a very difficult period of my life, and he very sincerely wished that i hadn't gone to canada and experienced all those things. to which i replied: "but then i wouldn't have met your mother, and you wouldn't exist. and if i had to go through all that in order to get you, i'd do it again in a heartbeat."

...

i can't post it (i don't have permission), but gd sent me a picture that he drew called "israel killing hamas", in among us style and it's excellent ^_^

looming threats

 well, we've been on alert since yesterday, worrying about whether iran's going to attack us outright. tomorrow's the first day of the passover school holidays, and we were all excited about mr smear going to his first week-long mma camp but the first two days have now been pushed to next week and we're hoping that things will go back to "normal" by tuesday...

... gd's been freaking out about the potential escalation, it's been a really hard six months for her.

thanks, nystire, for sending me the fallout intros earlier. at least it has great memories attached :P

...

yesterday:

mr smear did indeed finish his homework before school! i dropped him off, came back home and tried to work. it was a very, very frustrating couple of hours i put in during the day, very unproductive, and i'll be complaining to my teammates tomorrow and try to figure out a way to make our testing make a little more sense.

otherwise, i did very little productive yesterday. i was exhausted. my chest was still full of green gunk.

aside from picking up mr smear from school and doing a very quick shopping, and then another one later, and a lot of dishes... we watched groundhog day, and a bit of testament: the story of moses, and mr smear and i played rubber bandits together which was a lot of fun.

i was particularly proud of mr smear joining in (to a degree) when i made kiddush ^_^

today:

concerned about potential rocket attacks, we spent most of the beautiful day indoors. i rested some more - unintentionally passing out while watching more testament, and the first episode of star trek: the next generation, but the biggest thing today was purchasing valheim for mr smear and encouraging/helping him whenever he got stuck. it's early access, and it's not easy to get into, but he's having an absolute blast and i'm so pleased to see him demonstrating grit and accepting the idea that each play isn't to win, but to learn how to win.

i managed to get him to come out for a walk in the afternoon - gd wasn't feeling safe, physically or emotionally, and we stopped for an excellent ice-cream and had really interesting conversations along the way.

i'm particularly proud of myself for leveraging the new-game enthusiasm to get him to shower before dinner :)

i'm still reading the prisoner of azkaban at bedtime, and we discussed why the book has so much more in it than the movie. i told him about american splendor, but then realized that using h.p. lovecraft's writing as an example would be even better. he's very familiar with c is for cthulu, after all, it's still one of our favourite books. i explained how just seeing cthulu would drive a person mad, and the impossible dimensionality of r'lyeh, and he went to bed very excited about his plans to draw funny cthulu images in the morning.

i'm so proud.

now that we know he'll be home for the next two days, i've set up the windows machine so he can play valheim without me (i'm very relieved that i was able to get into his steam account, it had steam guard configured on an old phone), and gd and i are about to take a look at the fallout series on amazon prime.

please don't suck.

post-proc

tues:

most of tuesday is too far away to remember.

mr smear and i having a reasonably good time accompanying gd to the hospital for her nerve block, and doing our usual laffa dinner.

gd's nerve block going well, but her being kicked out to the waiting room by an ignorant nurse

high-stress on arrival, trying to keep gd from interfering with her own recovery and mr smear going from uncooperative to downright nasty

a really shitty bedtime followed by a really shitty evening - otherwise pleasant, but ended with a literal poke in the eye when things were finally feeling calmer

yesterday:

interesting spring rain start to the day, gd feeling surprisingly good

a very intense day, our first release of the tool i've been working on

picking mr smear up from school and taking him to the therapist

afternoon tummy troubles, suspecting the barrista oat milk

dropping mr smear off at home, returning to the office for an hour or two

arriving home just in time for dinner after bumping into an old teammate

another rough bedtime and bad feelings

falling asleep on the couch

today:

moving to the bed at 3.30am

a better morning, "hot mama takes smooshy poo to school", gd starting to hurt again

fetching half the pharmacy

pod coffee

trying to help move stuck military equipment

losing an hour to forgetting to connect through my phone

the excitment of mr smear passing his first jiujitsu grading and being given a grey belt

finding and reporting an abandoned kitten, mr smear running off to sob while i tried to help

scrapper surprise, with a challenging conversation

putting mr smear to bed after a pretty good day

exhausted. brushing teeth and showering cost me, but i really needed to get this all down. i need to help mr smear finish his homework tomorrow morning, and i need to make up some work hours once he's in school. i'm stressing about a million things that need doing and i'm trying and failing to avoid thinking about the geopolitical situation.

gods help us all.

opposite of blues / pre-procedure

i managed to sleep on my mattress topper the whole night last night. mr smear was pretty cool this morning. we left on time to get him to the school's annual race in memory of the kid who was run over and killed four and a half years ago on yom kippur.

on the way there, we hopped on a bus that was absolutely packed, and after getting to the middle and finding a place to stand i realized that i needed to go back to the driver to scan mr smear's card. i squeezed all the way there, and as i raised my hand to scan the card i bumped against a railing and the card flew out of my hands, seemingly in slow motion, right across the driver and into the space between his console and the windscreen.

good lord.

he stopped at the next stop, and made an incredible effort to retrieve the card... and he did, and it still seems miraculous. very grateful and embarrassed, i took the card and tried to swipe it. that was the point at which he informed me that the machine was broken.

...

i got him to his class just on time, put sunscreen on him for the first time in forever, and then walked around, feeling offended that there wasn't any coffee for the parents. but then i realized that there weren't a lot of other parents hanging around, so i found his homeroom teacher and she informed me that not only was i free to go, but encouraged to do so too, and that the kids would be bussed back to the school after the race.

win!!!

i was so busy saying goodbye to mr smear while returning his bus card to its right place, that by the time i was too far away to turn back i realized that i had no idea what i'd done with it (i just checked now, it's where it should be).

i came home, and struggled a bit to get into my work (i had a number of tasks on my plate and plenty of opportunities for distraction). i started to find my feet a little while before heading out to pick up mr smear and take him to his hebrew tutor, and we had time for a good chat on the way. and i filed a report to the municipality concerning the infestation of mosquitoes that were feasting on us.

i found a nice little bakery/coffee shop close by, and enjoyed an excitingly productive cup of coffee. then i picked him up, receiving a good report on his progress, and we picked up a couple of groceries on the way home, including a special pesach treat.

"dad? can we have that when we get home? you know, to celebrate buying it?"

genius.

so we did, although i'm the only one who ended up really enjoying it :P (it was far too sweet for gd, and mr smear decided he wasn't into them after his third one)

the remainder of the afternoon can be summarized as a series of successes, with lots of intensity in between. by the time i signed off, i had just enough time to play a game of bloons adventure time, do the dishes, and play some lego harry potter with mr smear before dinner. i honestly don't even know which year we're playing right now :P

we've just had a brief but intense electric storm, which i wasn't expecting. last night there was a crazy storm in cape town, my mom showed us the back gate of her building falling off :S

mr smear went to bed much later than he should have, and the same for me. i barely had it in me to brush my teeth and shower, and now i'm sitting with a cup of cinnamon tea, which i may or may not finish before going to bed.

...

tomorrow gd's undergoing another nerve block. not a moment too soon, as she's been really struggling since yesterday. this next week's going to be... i hope it's going to be okay.

who knows?

 a not-unpleasant start to the week. aside from waking up in pain halfway through the night and having to sleep on the couch again, and mr smear's ridiculous relating of rinsing toothpaste to post-nasal drip on the way to school, i had a pleasant morning, got a few things done, and left for work.

my fellow montreal coworker's wife gave birth this morning ^_^

the network issues i was dreading were resolved - for me at least - though one of my coworkers is still stuck with them. my morning was spent in mechanical turkish fashion, make a change, stare for five minutes, make a change, stare for five minutes, but eventually it seemed good enough to push. i had a good lunch with the team, but it was interrupted by a call from gd informing me that she's hurt and couldn't take mr smear to his first mma class in months...

so i had a coffee, then scrambled to pick up mr smear, take him to his class, and work from there. on the way, i saw a picture from kc's husband showing him in the hospital with their newborn third daughter! her sister just gave birth a few months ago, so these are positively exciting times for the family.

i had just enough time to get a big, urgent thing done, and it helped that i had the presence of mind to put in earphones the moment the other parents began trooping in.

mr smear was not impressed by his training partner, because he apparently hadn't been taking it seriously. i re-explained to him why he's there and that we trust his trainers, and i was inspired to take a gamble and use that conversation to lead into informing him that he's going to the pesach vacation training camp whether he likes it or not.

having buttered him up with a big bag of chips along the way, of course ;)

he took it well, which was a huge relief. we had an enjoyable ride home, and then i got some more work done until i just couldn't concentrate any more.

mr smear did his homework (?!?), and then we had some time before dinner so we got into doors: paradox that i'd picked up on epic free games (when it was free). what a great game!

we resumed watching minions: the rise of gru, then it was brush-teeth-and-bedtime. i was going to continue reading the prisoner of azkaban, but we somehow got into a riveting conversation about different cultures and ideologies and i blew his mind describing certain japanese characteristics (he was upset by their idea of obligation, which was great because i could explain to him that they'd be upset by his).

...

i'm disturbed by the new prison-tech scam. but i was already disturbed by america's modern slavery program anyway. it's really sad and disappointing.

...

the news about us (mostly) pulling out of gaza - which i heard of because my brother updated me - is probably going to garner a lot of dissenting opinions. from what i can tell so far, we're not done, just changing tactics, and it's anyone's guess what implications this is going to have regionally and globally.

pool day

 it was a regular saturday morning, we played games and i stop-started doing something in preparation for a project (i created a facebook group), and then nystire got in touch and invited us to join them at the beach.

we were planning on taking the bike out anyway, so why not combine the two?

the bike ride to the beach began with the discovery that the back tire has a puncture. i'm really glad we figured that out before we left the building. very soon, mr smear decided he didn't want to ride, and started walking his bike instead.

it took forever to get to a kiosk, where i bribed him to get back on the bike with an ice lollie. but he had to finish the ice lollie first. omg.

the rest of the way to the beach was pretty good - just a lot of little stops along the way - but by the time we arrived nystire and co had just left.

it was a beautiful day, so i suggested we go to the beach anyway, but he wasn't interested. he was, however, interested in getting chips. we went to mike's place, the first time i've been there since just before my 31st birthday.

the vegan burger was good, the bucket of chips was satisfactory and they were kind enough to provide a serving of vinegar, and we enjoyed the meal together. the best part of the visit, though, was him showing an interest in the pool table!

today i taught my son to play pool, and he enjoyed himself and started to get the hang of it by the end. he actually decided that he was happier getting to clear the table after losing than he would have been winning >D

i made a big mistake on the way home by putting my rollerblades back on, because he walked almost the entire distance. and then, in addition to the puncture, the chain came off when we got to dizengoff circle. twice. i treated myself to a coffee after getting most of the grease off my hands, and then we continued the excruciatingly long not-ride home.

i showered immediately, synced with my mom, and then we tried to watch the original mary poppins movie (i'd read an interesting analysis of it in the morning, and i was kinda enjoying it by the time my family decided to nix it and move on). we watched a breakdown of virtual insanity, and then we all laughed hysterically at james acaster not lying. and then we gave the amazing digital circus a try.

it's pretty good.

i was inspired to play portal, and made some good progress before beginning to wonder if i was going to get motion sickness in spite of wearing my glasses to play. which i did because i'm wondering if it helps, if perhaps a part of the motion sickness isn't to do with my eyes operating at completely different distances.

dinner, gd getting mr smear showered and toothbrushed, and now i'm going to say goodnight.

definitely could have gone worse

 we just got home after a lovely evening. mr smear insisted on telling everyone who would listen that he was there against his will, and he refused to eat. eventually, though, he got bored enough to play a bit and be a lot more social than we were anticipating.

as for the adults, we met a very interesting couple and it feels like we're all friends now.

friday

 i slept alright, until mr smear woke me up because he'd lost his duvet. it was a pretty good start to the day. i dropped mr smear off at school, where he was really proud of himself for crossing the road safely when the crossing guards weren't at their posts.

gd and i had a pretty good morning, and i had a good chat with my mother about her aliyah expo experience. then we left for the mall, then returned to give our neighbor his drill back, then turned around again. we had a nice breakfast together, then rushed to the pharmacy and do the grocery shopping (while i chatted with swordschool), bailing when we realized that we were properly late to pick up mr smear. i dropped the groceries at our building entrance then literally ran all the way to the school the pick him up.

after cooling down, i had a long chat with sailor, did the dishes, then resumed my chat with swordschool while capturing the martian throne in bloons adventure time. then i showered, cut a toenail too short with a new nailclipper, rested a bit, and now we're off to friends for dinner.

looming

yesterday:

i slept pretty well. there was some unpleasantness in the morning, though we got over it. i'm very happy that i was in good enough shape to rollerblade to work, but i'm a bit concerned about one of the clips on my new blades.

the work day was full of mixed feelings: a lot of stress due to a new release with some issues, but a lot of satisfaction completing two big tasks and learning a lot of small but important things along the way.

twin peaks is interesting and entertaining, but it's also a phenomenally effective sedative.

today:

i slept pretty well again. otherwise, i should mention that today began with a lot of stress, and a lot of the day could be described by the phrase "everything is broken".

i was responsible for waking up mr smear this morning, and it went better than yesterday. he didn't move particularly quickly, but quickly enough that i had time to help him revise for his geometry test. which he aced, so we're all feeling good about it.

i rushed off to work early this morning in order to be able to accompany gd to a social security appointment regarding upskilling assistance, it was an interesting meeting and i'm very curious to hear what the "vocational doctor" has to say.

on the way there, everyone in tel aviv's GPS went haywire, so that was messy. and iran's threatening to attack us, so that's... fun.

some of the work day was good, but some of it was very frustrating. the happy-hour vegan "crêpes" wasn't good, but the whiskey made up for it. i got a good amount of grocery shopping done on the way home, which will make tomorrow's pre-shabbat run much easier.

now to play some more bloons adventure time on my way to bed.

who's the motherflippin'?

monday:

another night waking up in pain in the middle to move to the couch.

well, i'm pleased to report that mr smear did, in fact, complete his homework - both for sunday and monday - but it wasn't without some extra-added encouragement. i worked from home, and i'm still amused that my ex-montreal coworker had to answer the door in the middle of a video call and decided that *that* was the appropriate time to put pants on 🤣

aside from a visit to the hospital and clinic to sort out authorization for gd's nerve block next week, i didn't get out the house. i was surprised when my coworker signed off at 7.30, because i had no idea it was so late...

funny moments: mr smear bashing his foot on the couch leg (not funny), then yelling "i need a break!" in exactly gd's usual tone. also, mr smear becoming very frustrated with a boss in the prodigy math game, arguing with me when i suggested that he might want to change tactics, finally winning and - in joyful celebration - repeatedly yelling "I'M THE MOTHERFLIPPING!" 🤣

(technically) yesterday:

another night waking up in pain in the middle to move to the couch.

today was a difficult wakeup (again), but once mr smear got going it was fine. gd and i enjoyed a peaceful start to the day, and at the office i managed to solve two big problems (both with github actions) before home-time in spite of a lengthy work meeting as well as a parent-guidance session in the middle.

it felt really nice to leave the office before dark, and in really pleasant weather.

mr smear was good for homework again (yay!), and so the evening was mostly relaxing (and watching is it cak3? over dinner). i read a bit more of the prisoner of azkaban to mr smear at bedtime,  then put on my new blades and headed out to join the group for the first time in at least half a year (between winter and the war...)

it was a relaxed route, and really nice (aside from a few points where we went through construction or the nasty bricks we call ackershtein), but it was hard on my body and i went from parched and dehydrated by the time we finally got a break directly to having had too much fruit juice and sugar from the ice-lollie.

anyway, i had a great time and i'm really happy i went. i've been home for an hour now, i'm good-sore, i'm showered, and i'm ready for bed.

now to see what the damned mosquito that's been bothering gd all night is up to.