power moves and bird poos

i actually did go to bed, and i actually slept.

this morning started off well, i dropped mr smear off at school and then accompanied gd to the pharmacy.

on the way home, after introducing her a small supermarket that has some difficult-to-obtain things, i felt something heavy on my head and neck and shoulder.

a #$@&*%! CROW just pooped on me. the equivalent amount of poop to a small dog. a normal bird poop is horrible on the best of days, but i'm now feeling thoroughly disgusted and violated 🤮

thank god it wasn't far from home and that gd was around to help me clean up. EEEWWWWWWWWWWW.

it took at least twenty minutes to get the look of revulsion off my face. i went to the office, took the lizard corpse out of my coworker's cup and cleaned it (the cup), and overall had a pretty solid day. minus one incident with a coworker - clearly with good intentions - being dismissive of my concerns about whether something he'd offered me was vegan or vegetarian (he's a vegetarian) and convincing me something was vegan when in retrospect it most probably wasn't. i confronted him in private, he seems to understand why that's not okay and we seem to be cool.

...

mr smear's friend came over, after a long time that he hasn't been open to a visit from her. without going into detail, she unintentionally did something that was humiliating for her and that really upset mr smear. we had coached him on letting gd handle things, but as they walked into the apartment together he said something that gd was powerless to stop, and that we haven't stopped laughing about since:

"you might have been really embarrassed by what happened, but it was worse for us."

holy shit. more surprising is that she apparently just took it in stride, and they had a nice afternoon together.

...

when i got home, i helped mr smear with his preparation for a math test next week. mostly it went well, but there was a short struggle in the middle... the rest of the evening was fine until bedtime, when i was trying to put him to bed and he decided that being cool was over for the day. so that was upsetting, but a little later (before he'd fallen asleep) i did the thermian walk into his bedroom and he was too amused to protest me wishing him a good night :)

i had a meeting with dod. it went on a little too long - half an hour after i'd said it had gone on too long and that it was time to crash - but we have a real execution plan and agree on the strategy.

beep beep two

oh, wow! yesterday i forgot to mention something amazing - they've finally assigned a new therapist to mr smear, and we're meeting her early next week. this is a huge relief!

...

i went to bed late again, i did play some shadowrun but i also - finally! - managed to get my website working properly again. i learned some stuff.

getting up this morning was rough, but it was a pretty smooth morning. the scale reported 80kg for the second day in a row.

i took mr smear to school, and on the way back called dod and synced - he's had a hollywood-esque kafka-esque year or two, and when he started telling me some of the details that's he's uncovered recently it's looking like someone in the industry has somehow had him blackballed, and all he has to go on are suspicions and an investigation by a recruiter he knows.

wtaf.

anyway, as awful as his situation is, the combination of it with what i learned over the weekend means that he's in the perfect position to help me make one of my side projects profitable, and quickly, and if we can get that right we'll both be in a better place.

i rollerbladed to work, which was fine although my neck's been giving me trouble the past couple of days - i think it's got to do with the weight of my backpack and a bad strap configuration :/

the workday was good. three highlights:

1. there was generally a really good vibe in the office, it was fun.

2. we had an insane experience when i found a dead lizard on its back next to my desk. we then - as a team - spent the following five or ten minutes fighting over whether it was a real lizard or not. the poor lizard's corpse (i'm convinced it's real) suffered abuse at the hands of a coworker convinced that it wasn't real, and then ended up in an absent coworker's empty mug. the whole thing was just ridiculous.

3. after a lot of time spent troubleshooting my github user not being able to see a repository i definitely had permissions for, one of my coworker's suggested chatgpt. the first couple of suggestions weren't helpful, but the third? i'd never have considered it, and it saved the day!

here i'll note that there was a second attack on hezbollah this afternoon, in some ways even more robust than yesterday's. this is amazing.

it was darker than i would've liked by the time i left the office, but the rollerblade home was pleasant. the evening went well, although i literally started falling asleep while reading to mr smear and the sentences i was reading were blending with dream images...

the past couple of hours have been a blend of talking to my mom, watching random things, taking care of admin stuff, playing some inscryption, and reviewing my podcast feeds. i'm starting to feel like maybe i should skip doing anything further and just go to bed.

beep beep m*f*

 so... no, i didn't finish this. i just went around in circles, until eventually it was around midnight and i decided to stop, play some shadowrun: dragonfall (restarting from scratch, and re-learning everything the hard way), and get some sleep.

mr smear stayed home today, and i understand he was pretty cool the whole day. i feel like i got some stuff done this morning, but i honestly don't remember what. the work day was pretty good, although ended on a frustrating note because none of us can figure out why i don't have access to something that i clearly should have access to, and it's preventing me from doing my "one job".

in the late afternoon, all our phones began buzzing and ringing and vibrating as news and gruesome videos of the mysterious attack on hezbollah beepers hit all the media channels.

i called gd to let her know what was going on, and she reminded me of congresswoman neuman 😂

it was a pretty good evening.

i've now spent some more time trying to figure out this website nonsense, and i think i'm going to switch into shadowrun mode soon.

heavy steps into ai wonderland

 the last try was somewhat successful. i passed out quickly, and i guess i slept pretty well, but once everyone else was up at 6.30 i was forced to get up too (mainly because mr smear was moving slowly again).

the biggest part of the deployment was successful, but i ran into SPA issues with the distribution (again) and the documentation for cdk is useless. after much struggling, and a pleasant break to walk mr smear to school, i decided it was time for cursor/claude to step in.

i got a bunch of unhelpful bullshit that didn't actually do what i wanted. i felt strapped in to an emotional rollercoaster, and every deployment managed to raise the bar on how much disappointment i'd been feeling. i just wanted it to end, but i also want things to be kind of okay before starting on my paid work.

by the time i was done for the morning, it was 80% there - that's a thumbsuck and a half - because after enough prompting and complaining i finally got a suggestion that did something positive. now that my workday is over, we've had a good dinner and mr smear is in bed, i'm just about ready to see if i can get the result i actually wanted.

...

the workday was long. i'm on-call, but i'm not sure that means anything today (the one incident we had was taken care of by someone else behind my back, i don't even know who :P), and the morning began with a nonsense devops side-quest that didn't lead anywhere constructive.

i took mr smear to his hebrew tutor, it looks like he had a good day in general but he was apparently struggling with a runny nose during their session and he's still stuffy now, so i guess maybe he is sick after all...

who knows. whether he is, or whether he passes the threshold for staying back from school, it's really not clear. gd's convinced that keeping him home yesterday was a mistake, though.

i had a hard time focusing this afternoon, and at some point i crashed on the couch. i woke up a short while later, not just feeling groggy as hell, but convinced that there was some kind of tremor happening. according to the latest data there wasn't? anyway, i caffeined up and got some good work done, by dinner time i was quite satisfied with my progress.

...

right. let's see if i can finish this.

it gets worse

 it's past 3am, and i've been complete *done* for hours now. but i'm still going, because shit's been getting weirder. but the two biggest issues? 100% my fault, two awful mistakes and i can't even think of how i could've prevented making them.

ugh.

one last try before i go to bed. hopefully not miserably.

brain melting

 i've just spent the past few hours furiously trying to get my website back online, because CDK insists on cross-region certificate shenanigans and it's broken. now i'm desperately trying to get things back online by any means necessary, only it's not clear what could possibly do the trick (and i've tried, repeatedly, completely removing everything and starting from scratch).

this sucks.

the irony being, of course, that me touching my website at all was because i published an article i'm really proud of this morning before leaving for work, and it includes a sample app that i link to and i wanted to manage it properly :/

...

otherwise, it was a pretty standard day, i guess?

my neck and back have been giving me trouble, and i ran out of tissues, and my throat was scratchy (one of my coworkers complained about the same, another arrived having lost his voice after being properly sick on thursday, my boss was sneezing absurdly loudly and frequently).

i worked hard at finishing up my work, and i'm really happy with the results.

i was good about not drinking coffee/tea around meals, so that's good too.

the rare exception

 during our traditional fight about getting mr smear to leave the house yesterday, i explained to him that we always go outside, every day, with the only rare exceptions being when we're sick or injured, or the weather's too harsh.

well, today was just such a day. mr smear claims to be feeling sick, although i'm highly suspicious, but i definitely needed the rest. we spent most of the day playing videogames, or exploding kittens (irl), or watching galaxy quest (which we all thoroughly enjoyed) and the season 2 finale of the x-men series.

that scene in the season 2 finale of the x-men series when nicolas cage stepped in to play cyclops

aside from all that, with napping in between, i've spent a whole lot of time putting together an article on my experience using cursor to create a PWA. as i've dived deeper into the article - i'm now at a point where i'm trying to deploy the result so i can test it on an actual phone - i've learned more and become more convinced that the $20/month asking price for cursor is of far greater value that my copilot subscription. as in, i pitted them head-to-head and copilot's results were thoroughly underwhelming.

as the day progressed, i felt less bad. i'm still a little woozy, but i guess we'll see in the morning how i've fared.

on an unrelated note (or maybe it is related?): my test results showed low iron, and even though there's a chance it's not a problem* it's been bugging me for a long time now that i'm always consuming teas and coffees before and after meals, which interferes with iron absorption. my new plan is to completely avoid tea and coffee for the couple of hours surrounding lunch and dinner...

* according to what i've read, vegans usually have low iron stores, which is what's tested, but sufficient iron levels in the blood itself.

friday 13: rough around the edges

 i just got up an hour or two ago after ages spent impossibly uncomfortable in bed. too tired to be upright, and immediately feeling faint, like i was going to pass out, but also throw up and poop myself at any moment. it's been a while now, a mix of lie-down-flat time and toilet time, and i'm still feeling unstable but much, much better.

so this is happening.

i'm pretty sure a big part of it was eating too much for dinner, but i was feeling off all day, and i guess the past couple of days haven't been too good either. i think i might be sick?

...

the day began pretty well. gd joined me and mr smear on our walk to the school - she's been feeling cooped up, she's still sore but definitely doing better since her latest nerve block - and then we came home and settled in to watch stander. there's a problem with the video, so we ended up watching the first half of apocalypse now instead. this was mostly an outstanding experience, although at some point gd was upset by some animal abuse (there's a surprising amount in the film) and i made the mistake of confronting her about her dissonance on the topic*. i've been generally good about keeping my mouth shut on the topic, but i slipped this morning and it took us some time to recover :/

* she's not fully vegan, though she doesn't disagree that we all should be. in theory.

i picked up mr smear from school, and was pleased to hear that he'd had a good day.

i wasn't feeling too good - i've been having trouble with my neck, and i think something's been stuck on a nerve, so i lay down for a bit. before lying down, i'd tried to add mr smear's steam account to my family account, but had given up. at some point, he woke me up because it had rendered all the games unavailable.

i spent the next while trial-and-erroring my way to changing his account's country, which required setting up a VPN (again), and making a purchase with a canadian payment method. that last part proved complicated, because my canadian credit card's billing address isn't in israel. anyway, i eventually got it right, picked up a copy of dehumanized for less than a dollar, added his account to the family account, and we can now both play steam games at the same time.

score!

as evening approached, we had the same old fight with mr smear that we always do about going outside. i tried really hard to be gentle and make it a discussion, but that ultimately failed. we had some drama, but gd and i rallied and - although more harshly than either of us would have liked - managed to bring him around.

mr smear and i then walked to midtown in good spirits, he had some food and then played in the water installation for a while before we headed home. all in all, we had a really nice evening together.

everything was great until dinner time, when i began to fall apart, feeling suddenly and overwhelmingly tired.

...

it's taken me a while to write all this out, not least because i was playing the martian games in bloons: adventure time simultaneously. i died writing this last sentence :P

i hope i get some sleep soon.

enter the weekend

 yesterday:

picking up mr smear's new shoes on my way to work. in the afternoon, we had ridiculous drama because he couldn't get them on. unlike his previous shoes, these ones aren't velcro... they're slip-ons. i eventually managed to regain control of the situation, and ran him through drills until he got it right 🤦

i received a message from mr smear's teacher before noon, informing me that he wasn't playing ball :(

i had a one-on-one with my boss, and it looks like we're both happy with how things are going. so that's good.

i had brought leftovers to the office for lunch, and i had to leave early to take mr smear to mma, so i didn't join my teammates on their trek for lunch. what i didn't realize was that it was my coworker's birthday - the one who i've been in damage-control with regarding our relationship :/

he responded well to my apology, and things were really positive today, so i guess it's alright?

yesterday's work was exciting, i got a lot of stuff done and i was really happy with the outcome.

gd had had a rough time with mr smear since picking him up from school, but she managed to get a handle on it and his behavior for the rest of the afternoon was pretty good. including mma. on the bus home i asked if he wanted to do einstein puzzles with me, and he reminded me that he was being punished and didn't have privileges 😆

i tried to watch beverly hills cop 2 with gd after putting mr smear to bed, but i couldn't keep my eyes open.

today:

i didn't sleep particularly well, but it wasn't a bad night. this morning was a bit rough, but only because i couldn't drink coffee before my blood tests. i went over the results in the afternoon, and it looks like i'm mostly good, with a minor concern for (possibly, open to interpretation) b12, iron and dehydration...

gd and i went to the mall on the way back from the clinic, and we had a good hour chilling before i went to work.

i started the day by showing off yesterday's work to a teammate, and i picked up on a bug. i literally spent the entire day trying to figure out the cause and find a solution, it was really hard but it was great material for a new article or two :P

not only was mr smear more cooperative today, but for possibly the first time ever he actually did his homework in class like the rest of the kids! he was almost as excited as we were that he didn't have to do it at home :)

i tried joining gd for beverly hills cop 2 again, but passed out almost on contact with the couch. i realized towards the end of the film that a part of it was second-hand smoke, and i turned on the fan and moved upwind and woke up. i find that while the original movie aged surprisingly well, the sequel is only really entertaining if you're admiring just how shockingly amateur the writing was.

straightforward

 i picked up the package in one of the most gorgeously designed buildings in tel aviv (although some of its internals seem to be in a state of disrepair, and the doormen were only kind of helpful).

it was a pretty good workday, i tried using a notebook to keep myself focused during the weekly update and it seemed to help a bit.

by the end of the day, i'd managed to make some progress, but on the way home i realized that i'd left out something important...

anyway, the evening was pleasant, for the second night in a row i read from edith hamilton's mythology and we discussed the parallels with other things we're familiar with (in particular, hades' invisible cap, and pallas athena being born fully formed from zeus' head).

then gd and i settled in to watching the rest of the original beverly hills cop, which still holds up as an entertaining movie, even though it's a real showcase of eighties everything 😂

i've been a bit nervous about going to bed early tonight, so i've gotten a bunch of reading done (internet articles, really), but i am starting to feel sleepy.

humdrum or not

yesterday:

yesterday was a work-from-home day. it started off well - mr smear was fine. i legitimately enjoyed the work i was doing (first time in a while, especially after a few weeks of frontend) and made pretty good progress.

i picked mr smear up on time for his hebrew tutor, which, since she moved closer to the school, now means early. we literally sat on a corner and chatted for half an hour, which was really nice. once he was delivered, i found my "usual" coffee place was full so i walked to the next closest one. i got stuck into the work, and completely forgot that i wasn't right next door so arrived late to pick him up :P

we had about half an hour at home, and then i took him to his jiujitsu class (which went well). gd had packed his bag and forgotten his epipen, but i managed - after many attempts, and for the first time in months - to get his phone to purchase a bus ticket. on the way back, i figured out what appears to have been the problem this whole time: the old huawei's gps location is so completely off that the app refused to validate.

so hopefully that's resolved.

i ate a huge (early) dinner, did some chores, did a little bit more work, then walked to the school for the start-of-year establishment of ground rules with the parents. i realized that i don't know most of the parents - as in, i don't know their names, nor whose parents they are - even though we've all been in the same class for the past three years...

i struggled to here the teacher, but i got most of what she said and it looks like they're running things in a reasonably intelligent way; especially, surprisingly, how they're handling issues with mobile phones, whatsapp groups and online bullying. anyway, we'll see how things go.

i came home, laid out and discussed the rules with gd and mr smear, and bedtime went smoothly. including for me, because i passed out almost immediately afterwards and, for the most part, slept through until this morning.

i had dreams that included battling swarms of bees.

this morning so far:

gd's back feeling a better

hamas is playing more hostage negotiation games, proving netanyahu right (about the so-called "deal"). the only way we're going to come out on top is to stop playing the ignorant west's game of trying to negotiate; we need to understand that our hostages are lost, and we need to assert our dominance if we're going to have peace with our neighbors, or any security at all.

amusingly, netanyahu's trying to prevent israelis from seeing the new documentary that's just being screened in canada, and our courts said "nope" :)

mr smear walking into a pole after weeks of us warning him to look ahead: "i think i've learned my lesson now"

picking up a box-cutter blade on the sidewalk. wtf?!

gd unfriending rabbis who don't stand with israel (i should probably do that as well)

now i'm off to pick up a lunchbox that my mom sent via our capetonian hairdresser.

the false sense of security

 yesterday morning (it's the middle of the night already) was a bit less restful than i expected. after a solid week of mr smear playing ball in the mornings, he regressed, and then gd got upset, and then i rolled in to back her up and the whole situation got entirely out of hand.

so that was a shit start to the week.

...

unrelated, i'm about a kilo up, although apparently 1 or 2kgs is a standard fluctuation? it's a little discouraging.

...

so anyway, i left for work on a sour note. on the way, i stopped by the mental health clinic to inquire - literally - if we'd done something to offend them because it's been four months with no continuation or contact. the receptionist very kindly informed me that the guy who was going to take over left just when the handover was supposed to take place, and they've been unable to find a replacement :/

work was a bit awkward. the first task of the day turned out to be more complicated than my boss was happy with, and then we got hit with a complication on top of that - the customer documentation service we're using is poorly designed and very broken. at least i managed to document some workarounds for my teammates before my tasks got reprioritized.

the second task is a big one, and it took some digging and some assistance before it was clear what's actually expected of me, but i'm pretty sure i have a handle on it now. it was just as i decided that, that i discovered - by happy accident - a bug in our new release, and i caught it just in time for us not to have to re-release with a patch.

it turns out, using javascript's array flat() method inside a push() method with a spread operator can lead to call stack size being exceeded on large arrays... (so we used concat instead)

that wasn't fun to debug.

i walked home, buzzing somewhat. i strongly suspect that the two decaf coffees were to blame, but i prefer drinking those to too much chamomile tea. too much chamomile tea is boring.

i was listening to some really solid psytrance on the walk home, and between that and the buzzing i was literally bouncing for the last stretch, and as much as i was enjoying it i was also trying to keep it low-key but i did notice random strangers staring...

mr smear apparently had a decent day at school, and he'd been good throughout the afternoon. we had a quick chat when i got home that wasn't unpleasant, and the evening and bedtime went pretty smoothly. 

although i did eat more dinner than i should have, but i guess it was better than eating more dessert than i should have :P

...

after reading to mr smear, i watched some random videos on youtube and then went to bed pretty early, feeling stuffy and praying not to be sick. [sneezes - i really hope i'm not getting sick]

...

and then woke up around midnight, lay in bed restless for a while and then got up to stretch. inspired by a really shit playthrough video of inscryption, i continued my previous run in kaycee's mod - i've been trying to play the hydra deck, and i've been trying to do it without save scumming (although without any additional challenges set, either).

the hydra wasn't the most impressive card in my deck, but i'm really pleased to have finally done it! i think i can now say i've achieved everything i could want to out of the game ^_^

relaxed

 today was mostly very relaxed. not only did i get a good night's sleep, but i also had to take a couple of solid naps during the day as well. in the morning, i played some chrono trigger, and mr smear sat with me for some of the experience - it's really fun. i mean, i know that everyone knows it's really fun, but *i'm* enjoying it.

i mistakenly wished a cousin a happy birthday two days early in a group chat this morning, and another cousin teased me about it to the point of bullying. interestingly, i was reading some of worm this morning and i found myself in a similar unpleasant situation where challenging said bullying would only really cause harm to me and my relationships, so i did some dishes which helped me calm down.

aside from that, we continued a bit on our replay of rayman: legends. it's going pretty well so far, and as a family we're definitely playing together better.

we were smarter than in the past, and although we had a great experience watching the first x-men movie,  we didn't just assume that the sequel would be safe. according to parent reviews it isn't. so, in the early afternoon, we watched the mask instead. we all enjoyed it, and i'm pleased to report it's aged well :)

in the late afternoon, i went out for a walk with mr smear. some of the walk was pleasant, but it had a few intense moments - a couple of things happened that needed to be resolved with important conversations. so we had those conversations, and i feel like they went well, and i feel like the messages were received. i hope so, at least.

dinner was good (we watched a couple of episodes of brainchild, it's brilliant), although mr smear decided he was hungry again just before bedtime and ended up with a tummyache... otherwise, the evening went well.

i just had a chat with my mom, who amongst other stories (including the heartbreaking story of a cousin who got scammed) told me this cringer.

...

i'm still feeling amazed that thursday's workday ended so well, and that tomorrow morning i have relatively low-stress tasks to do. this is a nice feeling with which to start the week.

almost two year old me flying on a snow day

the following story is a retelling from my mother's version of events. i don't remember any of this, but the bit about what i was doing always leaves me cringing and mortified. there wasn't much anyone could do to stop this? i wasn't there, and it was apartheid south africa, but WTAF?!

on the 11th of september, 1981, it snowed in johannesburg. i was just shy of two years old, and was flying with my mother and my brother to johennesburg, with the flights all thrown into complete disarray due to the snow.

apparently, i was such a "busy" baby that the crew offered my brother the crew's jump seat so that he could enjoy some peace and quiet.

there was black family sitting in the seats in front of us. apparently, a large part of my "busy-ness" was standing up on the seat, and playing with their hair.

on the way off the airplane, someone approached my brother and told him "your little boy is really busy".

"that's my brother!"

beach ride

 yesterday was brilliant. i picked mr smear up from school, and we sat down to read bone: out of boneville in hebrew together (he's been reading the books alone, but not understanding all the individual words).

we spent the hotter parts of the afternoon quietly doing our own things. a little after 5pm, we started getting ready and took the bicycle and rollerblades out for a ride to the beach.

the weather was perfect, we had an excellent time at the beach. we left just as the sun was setting - a glorious sunset that blew even mr smear away - and the rode back home.

by the time we arrived, we were both exhausted, and hungry. after showering, we found that ark: survival evolved had installed - we'd enthusiastically watched its trailer earlier and discovered that i'd picked up a copy of it about four years ago - so mr smear sat down until kiddush to read through the introduction / guide.

we enjoyed a delicious dinner, and finished watching the first x-men movie. and then... everyone went to bed.

i'm still a bit in shock after sleeping through the entire night. life is okay.

sub-81 and stressing

 i woke up this morning with a bee in my bonnet, and checked our bank account. and discovered that although i went through the numbers with my mother, we still managed to miscalculate the amount i could transfer :/

*sigh*

anyway, in other news, it's the first friday in what feels like forever that mr smear is back at school, and we have the apartment to ourselves. so we're doing chores. of course. but i'm also finally sitting down and looking into app building again.

i've just realized that i'm under 81kg for the first time in 25 years, this is pretty amazing! and gratifying.

getting shit done

today:

a pretty good start to the day. a new exercise.

light rail to pick up gd's sewing machine.

anger with gd after realizing how heavy the machine is, because i kept letting her carry it to her lessons in south africa and believed her whenever she said "it's fine".

a couple of hours of work before heading out to pick up mr smear.

listening to a recommended podcast on the way home.

hungry, stopping at home for a banana, walking in after receiving a phone call, gd screaming and scaring the shit out of me.

picking up mr smear, a pleasant walk home, a good breakfast.

back to the office, sitting with my clearly-sick coworker until we finally all had epiphanies together separately.

a healthy happy hour (fruit salad?!), and a productive last hour to close another intense week.

leaving the office, calling gd and being reminded that i'd forgotten the sewing machine ("you don't sound like you're suffering...")

getting on the bus, getting stuck in traffic and having to take a detour around the protests.

trying to help gd in the kitchen (lemon explosion: she had a fight with the lemons and i think everyone lost)

x-men continued.

mr smear taking a long shower->bath, us using that time to close gd's credit card account. gd's mixed feelings about closing the account.

crashing early on the couch, getting up to post this, probably going to bed soon

(although with sore legs)

(to be fair, i *did* get in a lot more steps than usual today)

...

oh, i keep forgetting i'm on-call. i hope it stays quiet.

adventures in vpn-land

omg, that was insanely complicated: i just spent the last hour and a half trying to set my mother up with a google account that we could connect to our family account. everything about the process is ridiculous, not least of which being that our family accounts are all registered as canadian because that's how they were legitimately created, and we can't change that because we need access to the canadian play store in order to use canadian apps (like our banking apps).

firstly, google insists on phone verification when creating an account on the desktop, but wouldn't accept any of our valid, active phone numbers. after quite a struggle, i stumbled across a support answer that suggested creating the account from an android phone, where phone verification is optional.

excellent. i still can't believe that worked.

but then, once i had an account created i couldn't change its country. even after providing my canadian payment details, because that's based on the current IP address and not card issuer. i - tried - so - many - things...

eventually, i thought "bugger this", subscribed to and install a vpn on both my desktop and my mobile, set everything up for ontario (not quebec, which was somehow confused with romania?!), created a brand new account on my mobile, signed in on my desktop, and finally - FINALLY! - was able to hit the "join family" button.

i never thought i'd post an endorsement like this, but veepn was well worth the once-off $10 for the month. i've paid for vpn trials in the past and been very disappointed, but this was simple AF. if i actually needed a VPN long-term, i'd probably go for the cheaper plans, but it's good to know there's a viable option that doesn't suck.

openings, closings, and in-betweenings

yesterday:

after another good morning getting mr smear to school, i synced with my mom and made what i hope will be my last big forex transfer to canada.

although gd has been hurting, she gave me a haircut in anticipation of the important meeting that was scheduled for this evening. she wasn't happy with it, but it's definitely respectable enough that i've got nothing to be embarrassed about.

work was tough, but i finally got the job done. then i ran into performance issues, and spent the rest of the afternoon (and some of the evening) tweaking until it was good enough.

at 5pm i met gd and mr smear at the pain clinic for her nerve block appointment. as soon as she went in, i took mr smear for our "usual" falafel laffa. the food court - and ordering in particular - was an exercise in cultural anthropology. even the team working the counter were having a hard time with the group of seniors ahead of us weaving in and out between the rest of the customers sowing chaos. when we finally got our order, i asked the girl sitting behind us with her mother to take her shoes off the chair, which she didn't. halfway  through our meal, i looked up and saw - and then couldn't unsee - that almost everyone around us was chewing with their mouths grotesquely wide open.

so that happened.

regardless, mr smear and i enjoyed our meal together and we both ate a lot. after we got gd home, i walked to the cafe to pick her up a sandwich (and dessert), and the rest of the evening was pretty quiet.

today:

i got up a bit early this morning, with my neck still giving me some trouble. not a lot, but enough to be uncomfortable all day.

the day began with two Very Big Deals: the first, that after chasing down the canadian debt we generated migrating and getting settled for two and a half years, we finally were able to pay it off! we're not out of the woods yet - we owe my mother and our south african bank quite a lot of money - but it's a huge milestone and relief.

the meeting i was looking forward to in the evening? gco had forgotten about it and run into complications, so it had to be cancelled :(

the second Big Deal was a meeting with mr smear's teacher, principal and guidance counsillors. the first step to a corrective experience was that i made it very clear to the principal - twice, for two different aspects - where and why our last meeting went south, and she accepted it with a grace that really impressed me. the second was an actual discussion - much easier to have without gd, primarily because i didn't spend half the meeting translating. so it's a pity she couldn't make it, but it worked out for the best.

in short, mr smear has started the year on the right foot*, and we've received helpful advice, and he's going to be supported, and we're all feeling better about how he's handling.

* okay, not perfectly, as we learned later in the day, but definitely on the right foot.

my work day was a bit wonky. i fixed yesterday's code based on my boss' comments, partially at least, but i was supposed to be focused on a hugely important bug and it was a morning full of distractions (although the back-to-school sandwiches were very welcome). at lunchtime i walked to the school to pick up mr smear, walked him pleasantly back home, had a bit of a family fight when gd found out that he'd done something self-destructive that we've been warning him to stop doing, which i'm pleased to report i managed to diffuse pretty effectively.

i returned to work, right into a retrospective. afterwards a bunch of us went downstairs for coffee, where i bumped into one of my cousin's kids, who's just started working two floors up from us.

the rest of the workday was a mixed bag. by the time i left, i hadn't achieved what i needed to and i felt like my brain was melting out my ears...

i walked home, managed to rekindle the earlier fight, which we eventually seemed to have resolved, and dinner was great (we started watching the first x-men movie).

i've just put mr smear to bed - we're both really enjoying reading the goblet of fire so far - and we're about to call gd's canadian bank to ask them to close her account.

sky cry

 yesterday morning we learned that six of the hostages were executed. on our way out of the apartment, mr smear told me that he could smell rain coming.

"i PROMISE you it's not going to rain", i said.

on his way to school he informed me that it was the first time in his entire life that he was excited to go to school.

after dropping him off at his new class, i walked straight to the pain clinic to accompany gd to her appointment. the appointment was positive, and she's (amazingly) scheduled for a nerve block for tomorrow evening.

we left the hospital and went straight to the clinic to organize authorization. and that's when the skies opened. and they opened for a long time. and they opened *hard*. it bucketed down on us. and even as it raining down hard on us, the weather app continued to suggest a 2% chance of rain.

so mr smear was right, and we're taking it as a sign of the world's heartbreak.

we tried to walk home, but got trapped between rivers and had to call a taxi.

by the time i left for work - minutes after getting home - the weather was mostly back to normal.

work: another long, painful day dealing with frontend shenanigans. to my relief, my changes we merged by the evening, and i managed to push a fix for a mistake we'd missed before leaving the office.

in the evening, i had a meeting about a project, and it was way longer than anticipated. it was also considerably more productive than anticipated. additionally, i have a meeting with a VIP scheduled for wednesday evening 🤞

today:

i woke up from a weird series of dreams into a relatively subdued morning. the biggest issue of the day was the general strike and protests. i fully identify with the frustration and anguish that everyone's feeling, but i also feel confident that everything that's happening is just dancing to our enemies' tunes.

it took a while to get into work - partially because of an argument with some of ze germans about the situation - and shortly after i had to go pick mr smear up early from school. i made it home in time for a zoom meeting with the same guys i met with on thursday, this time they managed to resolve the issue (or at least give me a workaround while they acknowleged and promised to fix the bug). afterwards i uncovered a different bug, just as weird.

i hope i'm not the one who introduced it.

i took mr smear to his hebrew tutor, worked while i waited, then came home and dove in to the biggest ticket of the sprint that i've barely touched yet. i mean, i tried to, but i must've eaten (or drank) something that disagreed with me and i estimate that i spent about half the afternoon on the can. 

it was very frustrating.

the work i did get done is a move in the right direction, but everything about it is complicated and unpleasant or weird and broken. i'm not going into tomorrow with good vibes, but i do need to go in with a more professional tone than i've been expressing since i started working with css again.

it's been a weird evening, now i'm going to read to mr smear and try to figure out where my head's at.

...

oh! and i did some banking this morning. we're not in a good place, but i feel like we're in a better one than last month 🤞