getting real-er

or, at least, it feels like it.

this is not an easy time.

this morning a motorcycle accelerated for a long time on the nearby highway, and mr smear yelled and jumped off the toilet in a panic. it's even harder seeing him affected...

today was an odd sort of a day, but also fairly standard too. gd and mr smear went to the pool that they discovered on an outing with my mom before she went back to south africa, and although gd's foot started hurting so badly they had to come back in a taxi, mr smear's swimming's getting stronger and he was having a great time.

my work day was pretty good. i had a good opportunity to apologize to my coworker in front of our boss, and i seized it, and i feel that smoothed things over. lunch was excellent - i had my usual salad, but i also ordered fries with the team so i could do the salt and vinegar thing (apparently one of my coworkers has been silently wondering for months what the heck i've been keeping in the plastic bottle on my desk).

i made progress on the big ticket i'm working on.

because of gd's foot, i had to take mr smear to mma today. all in all everything went well, both in getting there and back, and in the class itself. on the way home we went past the supermarket and i picked up a bunch of stuff, and for the first time mr smear actually helped me carry things home.

after watching some harry potter (we're on the sixth film), and reading some harry potter (we're on the fourth book), i settled in to complete a new medium article for the first time in a while, and in order to do so made the changes i described to our work repo (so... that was a personal-time contribution/favor). i'm very happy with the results.

war anxiety is stabilizing at extremely-high / wtaf-is-going-on-levels. life is feeling pretty surreal right now. we're making plans to go to the shuk tomorrow, but we're also waiting for the sirens to go off at any moment...

...

so, i've just completed challenge level 12 in kaycee's mod. with an AMAZING deck + totem. an infinite bee/ant generating machine. and i have to admit - i'd read about the final final boss, but there's an angle here (at the beginning of the run) that i really didn't anticipate and i'm not sure how to process it.