the good and the bad

 i don't remember how well or poorly i slept on thursday night, but last night was alright... until about 4 or 5am, when my hips started hurting but i was too exhausted to physically get out of bed and try to sort myself out.

bigtalk and i actually had a conversation about sleeping yesterday, he suffers from PTSD and he takes ritalin for ADHD and he was proposing melatonin, when i told him some of my stories about treating my RLS-like issues he was mortified - there's no feeling quite like winning the victim olympics :/

...

i woke up to a message from my boss letting me know that he's initiating a process to let bigtalk go.

i feel bad for him, but it's a relief. it's also scary, because the longer the week's worn on the less predictable he's become, and he's a security expert, and i'm nervous that might be able to do a lot of damage once he finds out. so when i got up this morning and spent twenty minutes writing up a protocol for his "offboarding".

still...

i really like the guy, but if you put a gun to my head i wouldn't be able to make a call as to whether he's for real or not. i want to mentor him, but at the same time i don't feel he's capable of receiving advice that doesn't already fit into his very narrow view of our field.

...

mr smear and i accompanied gd to the pharmacy on our way to the office in the sweltering heat. we moved from airconditioner to airconditioner, we took the light rail, and we arrived to find my vegan avo bagel untouched. so mr smear had a solid breakfast (parenting score!) and thoroughly enjoyed it :)

...

the big effort of the day was trying to deploy with bigtalk's new system, and trying to fix it, and becoming more and more convinced that this was an incredibly bad idea. the deal-breaker for me - the final, tiny straw amongst a host of others - was discovering that all of his work wasn't even based on our original scripts and didn't account for some very important behavior.

for anyone who works with code, the above is real, and it's not even the worst part.

that all came to a head - me explaining to him that we weren't going to merge, and that we were going to park his PR and rebuild a solution piece by piece that can hopefully salvage it for parts - while mr smear (remarkably patiently) waited for me to go and get him some lunch. the ensuing argument was painful, and went on for about half an hour, with him continuing to try to convince us that we were making a mistake.

...

mr smear put together a good salad, and enthusiastically demolished it. later, at our happy hour, the two of us hovered over the vegan sushi platter. at first, i handled feeding him with chopsticks, but at some point i managed to convince him to give them a try. he followed the instructions, and within minutes he'd got the hang of it!!

i don't know which of us was more excited ^_^

i didn't really get to participate in the game hacking event because it was a thursday evening and i was busy breaking our test site with a new release candidate. it was the perfectly horrible ending to a perfectly horrible day (for me), but mr smear had overall had a great time and even participated along with the two guys who were doing the game dev (although he got them into trouble with chatgpt because one of his proposed ideas wasn't safe for work :P)

we came home pretty late, and found gd in a rough state - she's basically been bedridden since yesterday morning due to nerve pain in her back that's radiating into her chest :(

after getting mr smear into bed, i played some slay the spire and then went to bed (relatively) early myself.

meat popsicle

 i didn't get back to sleep for another hour or two, and even then i didn't sleep very well, although i was able to get up later than usual.

my mouth guard is starting to fall apart :/

i was really tired today. really tired. like, possibly coming down with something tired. i arrived at work for another full team meeting (although bigtalk wasn't around), and it went on for a couple of hours, so we missed the daily with the rest of the department.

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

then i rushed out to meet up with gco and co, we ended up at the top of the building and had to rent a meeting room to get going, which was surprisingly expensive. getting sorted out took us about half an hour in total, but the hour that followed was very interesting and constructive. all in all, i'm very glad we did it.

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

i made it back in time to help out a couple of guys with random things, and then went into another hour-long meeting. at least this time i had coffee and a slice of cake with me :P

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

at this point, i was falling apart and i made myself a fourth cup of coffee. i needed to sync with some coworkers on our priorities for the next few weeks, and that was when i learned that bigtalk wasn't working on what we were working on, which is absolutely insane. i was completely stunned, and i lost my temper in front of half the office, and my coworkers ushered me into a meeting room where i explained to them why i was so deeply affected. they heard me out, and they were very supportive.

...

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

i found another meeting room, and sat down to be interviewed for a talent spotlight. i was still very upset about bigtalk, and i spent the few minutes i needed to wait just trying to calm myself down and get into an appropriate headspace.

i wasn't prepared (they'd only sent me the questions this morning) so everything was off-the-cuff, but by the end i felt like we'd all had a good experience and they seemed happy with what they had. i felt relieved because it went a lot better than i could have planned, and i feel like the resulting story they have to work with is good.

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

the next couple of hours were me trying to get work done with providing support to others, and eventually i left the office having encountered confusing errors with bigtalk's changes.

on my way home, i spoke to the incoming manager and informed him that i've completely lost faith in bigtalk's ability to function in our organization, and i made an appointment with my boss on sunday (when i'm on vacation, but he isn't) to let him know that this experiment is over.

...

i got home wired and overwhelmed, and needed to vent the day's stories to gd before i was able to calm down enough to eat. we had a good dinner, we enjoyed two simpsons episodes, and mr smear's bedtime (after putting in a few additional minutes of work) was pretty smooth with more of the neverending story.

the rest of the evening has been peaceful, not least of which being completing a fun run of slay the spire, and i think i'm just about ready for bed. caffeine-allowing, of course...

crash

 i woke up early to go to the hygienist. the experience was less painful than i anticipated. apparently i need to use a softer brush.

i bussed (very actively enjoying my music) to work, where i made the regrettably awkward decision to not go for coffee with our CEO because i'd just been at the hygienist (like, i didn't have to buy anything).

my new coworker and i spent a good ten minutes troubleshooting the coffee machine, and i was shocked to discover that he'd been unwilling to toss the extra trial-and-error coffees so he was drinking them (O_o)

i spent a chunk of the day completing the 1am story, and for the most part it looks like i succeeded. and, for the first part, it looks like the work i was doing before i encountered that stuff was good. the central part of the work day was a meeting for our algo team that i'd initiated, which was generally productive. unfortunately, bigtalk kept suggesting solutions to problems nobody has, which was a bit awkward.

amusingly, i found myself unwittingly describing the act of connecting, enabling and disconnecting as "tune in, turn on, drop out". two people in the meeting laughed, for everyone else it went over their heads , which would have been fine but they demanded an explanation. fortunately that was only a little bit awkward and passed quickly enough :P

the salad group's salad was great. the post-salad leftover chocolate-and-peanut-butter cake was also great. i feel like i'm doing a pretty good job of getting others to help me with it.

the most important piece of the work was a bit intimidating, so as part of gearing up for it i made myself a non-caffeinated drink; the only one i could find that tasted good was a vanilla chamomile tea, and then all of a sudden (probably because drinking chamomile is my go-to i'm-going-to-bed-soon move) i felt really drowsy as the previous couple of days caught up with me all at once.

so i left early.

it was hot.

the tech ops guy called me as i was about to get home, already feeling faint, with more problems.

i was feeling faint, and in desperate need of a nap, but i was so sweaty from the ride home that i had to shower before i could nap. i napped to the first episode of hunter x hunter, and woke up to mr smear playing insanely difficult levels he configured for himself in spiderheck.

dinner was delicious. afterwards, while mr smear prepared for bed, i ran tech support for my mom whose old email address had suddenly stopped working. we eventually came right, but not without some big feelings. then i read some more of the neverending story to mr smear and gd, and then arsed around as an excuse to drink another chamomile before finally going to bed.

...

and then getting up at 3.30am after being restless for a fairly long while.

...

the incoming manager reached out to me for an update, and i found myself in the weird position of trying to explain to him that the situation with bigtalk isn't entirely straightforward. i think i have a pretty good handle on him, he's not a bad guy and his work - when he understands the requirements - is excellent. but his ability to understand the requirements is clouded by his ego and inexperience, and his second-languageness in both hebrew and english, and his attention disorder. while at present it's safe to say he's better off as a one-man show, it's not going to be good for him in the long run to not have proper mentorship.

1am

 wow. we figured out some important stuff, and then i proceeded on my own. i got a lot of stuff done. and i mostly succeeded.

drama flare

 oh. shit. it was such a ridiculously dramatic day (so far) that i didn't even remember having trouble sleeping last night :/

...

today was mr smear's last day at summer camp. i received not one, but two hilariously inappropriate animations from him. he made it through the summer camp, and in spite of his protests had a generally good time!

...

this morning was very stressful, primarily because although i started out relaxed and in good spirits, it soon became pressured, with the main source of pressure being an upgrade to brave that made online grocery shopping impossible. i left without completing the orders.

...

the day didn't begin well. we had a devops gathering with our incoming guys, and while some of it went well, some of it was a shit show and i ended up having to be the adult in the room (reigning in both bigtalk and the new manager). the new manager called me in to a private discussion afterwards, where he not only made it clear that bigtalk's not going to be around long but that the woman i had issues with a couple of weeks ago is a proper dolores umbridge...

... fuck me.

i then took the new guy in to a private meeting to explain that the tension we're experiencing is entirely out of the ordinary, and what precisely is bothering me. then i took bigtalk into a meeting, where i really had trouble keeping my cool but he responded in a surprisingly healthy way.

after lunch, i made him walk both me and the new guy through his code, and he did a pretty good job of convincing us that he hadn't gone totally off the rails like i'd thought. but what he's doing is irreversible, so we have to be very careful how we test it and how we roll it out.

...

i managed to grab hold of our UX guy to discuss some of my ideas from friday night, and when he'd heard me out he pulled me over to his computer and showed me that half of what i was talking about was already in the pipeline ^_^

he was impressed by my other suggestions, though, and i even managed to solve a weird design issue he's been experiencing along the way.

...

the rest of the afternoon was a bit messy, but i think i finally got a piece of work done that i've been trying to finish for a week already. which would be great, but deploying it took forever and then i ran into the same bizarre issues that a couple of the other devs have been loudly complaining about for the past few days. that really messed up my evening plans, and i ended up leaving the office way later than planned.

and after having succumbed to temptation and polished off another slice of the cake from thursday's happy hour. right before dinner.

...

dinner with the family (and the simpsons) was nice, mr smear's shower time was far too long and frustrating, and there were some bad vibes around bedtime caused by him actively not getting into bed, when i was prepping for two different meetings. at least things were a little calmer by the time i was ready to say good night.

...

my elevator pitch to our product chief seems to have gone down well, and again, there's a lot of convergence going on - i've been invited to get involved in two closely-related projects.

between meetings, this post. in a few minutes, troubleshooting with our canadian contractor.

a big bigtalk talk

 it's the middle of the night, i've just spent an hour or so playing slay the spire and minutescape (and leaving the following review for the latter):

after three hours, i don't know whether i recommend this or not. on the one hand, it feels like there's a story incoming, and it has a certain meditative quality to it (if i play late at night it's like a lullaby with achievements). on the other hand, i honestly can't tell whether i'm getting better or whether my improved times are just a combination of bonuses and luck, and it feels like a really, really slow grind either way.

otherwise, it's bothering that my eyes are still quite irritated after a week of the drops that i was given for five days.

...

after seeing mr smear off this morning, i went to the hospital where they printed out his most recent allergy test results, then took those to the clinic to request authorization. then i returned home, grabbed my gear and headed to the office. the morning was a hot mess, which included welcoming the new english devops, syncing with my boss*, arguing about scope with bigtalk in front of the new guy because he insists on not understanding how to work with others, and juggling a bunch of support requests from all over the place.

* about bigtalk, and my own plans. it was awkward to realize that he'd joined the meeting while on vacation in greece - i hadn't noticed he was on vacation, but he insisted on continuing because he knew that i wouldn't have set the meeting if it wasn't urgent and important - but we're clearly aligned on what's happening with bigtalk. and his feedback for me and my own intentions was very positive, so that was nice.

gd and i had a parental guidance session in the middle of the day, and it wasn't at all easy. mainly because we have very different ideas about screen time and socialization; i'm worried about undoing our progress with mr smear by fuzzying the boundaries, even while i don't think giving him more "holiday" is a bad thing.

i was surprised that he hadn't asked me for the next one piece volume today, until he sent a video he'd made in flipaclip which i'd forgotten i'd installed for him. i watched the video on my way to pick up lunch, and it was so well done - albeit eerily gen alpha - that i giggled helplessly the whole way out the building. i felt compelled to share it with some of my coworkers, which led to potentially bringing in another coworker to the game hacking fold :)

the next hour or two were more of the same from the morning, and then i left early to get my hair cut. i literally passed out in the chair while the hairdresser worked, and aside from one thing i needed him to fix it seemed to go well.

on the bus home i had to work to solve a weird networking issue, and a little bit when i arrived as well, but after taking the last tortit ice cream from the freezer (and having to share it with mr smear, who'd previously asserted that he didn't like it any more) and jumping in the shower, we had a great leftover dinner (more of gd's not-onigiri) and finished watching stargate (which we all thoroughly enjoyed).

i read some more of the neverending story to gd and mr smear after he finally got into bed, after which i soon passed out myself. and then woke up a couple of hours ago.

conditioning

 we went out for a ride, and ended up at the pipe track. well, at the kids musical playground next to it. mr smear entertained himself, i made the mistake of sitting down in the shade for a bit and my brain and body decided i was done for the day... the way back was good, we stopped for him to enjoy an ice cream, and the only issue i had was that my shoulder and neck started giving me shit during the last stretch... just like it did the last time we went out...

gd tried to make onigiri tonight, and it came out... not onigiri. but it was delicious, regardless, and we all tucked in and did quite a bit of damage (considering she'd made rather a lot of food). and we got started on watching stargate. mr smear's first time and he is loving it.

i continued reading the neverending story when he went to bed, although the swamps of sadness scene was dulled by the fact that our upstairs neighbors are psychopaths and were drilling and hammering until recently. i watched some random stuff and played another round of slay the spire, and now i'm going to crash early in the hopes that i'll be able to sleep and the expectation that i'll be up in the middle of the night to work through bigtalk's PR...

gods help me.

onigiri

 the clinic: learning that one of the receptionists' kids also has herpes in the eye. mr smear's paediatrician wasn't familiar with CRISPR but asked me to send her info. we're praying that someone will figure out how to remove herpes soon, and not just from a petri dish.

the bike shop: both bike shops were closed, so we tied up the bike and continued on to dizengoff. we returned later and were treated to a demonstration of the changing of the tube and addition of a new liner to protect it, which was fascinating.

japan month at dizengoff: mr smear was thoroughly amazed by the food, in particular the onigiri. that makes two of us - gd liked it, but isn't a fan of sweeter sushi rice so would rather make her own.

fine by me :P

some of yesterday afternoon was crashing, some of it was working, and some of it was reading and playing card games (uno and fluxx), and mr smear and i played a bunch of starcraft ii together. the evening was a pleasant shabbat evening (with pizza in honor of mr smear's birthday).

after putting mr smear to bed, i tried to get into cyberpunk 2077. i tried. but i had to repeat a section that really felt forced (perhaps you get more choices going forward, but i just felt locked in and bored), and the default controls don't make sense, and by the time i realized i was confused about how to set the controls up the way i'd like i was done, and i put in for a refund.

i played minutescape until it lulled me to sleep.

...

last night i had some really cool ideas for work, and i woke up in the middle of the night and had to get them written down (and book appointments with two of our founders, and book a few days off for long weekends), and then just did random things (including resuming a game of slay the spire) until mr smear woke up.

i tried to get back to sleep, but since then my lower back and butt have been really hurting me. i'm exhausted. emotionally, too, because i saw a message from our tech chief about bigtalk's PR and now i'm confident i need to share my new concerns with my boss tomorrow, which really doesn't feel good. i mean, i like the guy, and technically he's brilliant, but he clearly doesn't have enough experience with collaborative efforts.

we watched son of the white mare, which is fantastic and strange and wonderful, and i was surprised by how much gd and mr smear got into it as well - it feels more like something from a modern art gallery than a feature film.

i've been reading some more nightwood, it took a while to find its feet but i'm a quarter of the way through and things just started heating up.

my aunt's boyfriend rocked up a little while ago for a quick coffee, bearing gifts from my mom. mr smear was very excited in spite of gd almost spoiling the surprise yesterday (note to self: never tell her anything that's supposed to be a surprise, egads)

mr smear's playing spiderheck, i'm contemplating scrounging for some lunch, and then we're going to go out with the bike for a ride.

...

my eyes are feeling a bit better, but i still need the drops quite frequently :/

opportunity

 well, my shoulder's hurting this morning, but my eyes are feeling slightly less irritated and my teeth are feeling slightly less sensitive, so overall i guess i'm doing okay.

i'm feeling quite offended right now that putting money into mr smear and my shared compound account costs far more than we'll earn in compound interest over the next few years. i'm offended because crypto's been a big thing for so long already and it still doesn't make any sense for small players. and our physical banks don't have any incentive to compete.

mr smear just freaked out and dumped a really cool animation he made in flipaclip (after much struggling to determine that bluestacks still sucks and that flipaclip's pricing is extortion), but i got him to reattempt and learn what he should have done and he did. so at least one parenting win for the morning, not including him playing or singing iron maiden's two minutes to midnight every time he thinks something's going to be in two minutes :P

...

i walked into the office yesterday and sat down for a while with bigtalk to help him strategize. that was followed by a morning full of random shit, mostly frustrating, and i felt like my brain was melting (like i was maybe coming down with something, but in retrospect i think i was just tired and depressed).

the biggest downer was learning that bigtalk's definition of "fine-tuning" is completely out of sync with mine. he's been promising to deliver the Big Important Thing "today or tomorrow" since last week already and i'm just getting more and more frustrated.

the company retro was interesting, and i felt useful and needed. which makes me feel a bit weird about my position in the new org chart, where i'm just a devops and my "coach" is someone with less experience than me...

happy hour turning into an opportunity for a conversation about determining company culture (documentation and being remote-first), but that conversation led to someone even more important which was me determining the root cause for our algo team's difficulties and getting buy-in for my proposed solution from our de-facto tech chief.

and then i came home, without any issues with protestors (thankfully i don't have a car), and the evening was pleasant and we all went to bed pretty early. fortunately i was the only person who was awoken by the protestors flooding our neighborhood...

haunted birthday

 i've just been lying awake for a while unable to get back to sleep, with my brain running through a bunch of things from yesterday and unable to make sense of much.

first and foremost, our little boy turned ten yesterday! we've officially managed to keep him alive into the double digits, and his last year has been incredible in terms of how much he's matured and how well he's maturing. having said that, even yesterday he managed to cross some lines and that kind of put a damper on the way we ended the day.

second, work was ridiculous. it began with me arriving early so that i wouldn't have to rush to get to the office when the technician finally showed up, but then i received an email asking me to rate his service and i immediately started freaking out that he wasn't coming back had marked his job as complete.

it turned out, though, that a manager had decided to move his visit to a later slot. and not informed us. fortunately we managed to get them to switch the slot back, but WTAF? once he finally arrived, it took him and his partner an hour or two to get things working, but they refused to give us access to the controls without "proper" authorization... so that was a whole story. and once we did manage to get access back, we learned that we were in exactly the same situation as before i screwed everything up...

it took some fiddling and plenty of trial and error, but two of us eventually managed to get our internet working properly. and there was much rejoicing.

lunch was great, but i didn't realize that one of the founders' PA was in on the communal salad and i almost didn't leave her any :$

the afternoon was a series of distractions, the main one being the incoming devops manager and minion coming in for a chat. we sat for a very long time, and things were very positive, and i apparently sold them on our vision in a way they hadn't even considered before signing on :)

oh, and bigtalk hadn't come in to the office in the morning because he was feeling so shit about the choice of devops manager. which i didn't mention, and i'm waiting to hear how his sync with our boss goes this afternoon because i want to discuss it with the boss but i don't want to affect or influence their meeting.

i left a bit early because it was mr smear's birthday, and we had a bit of time at home before heading out to my cousin's farewell bash. it's an amazing rooftop venue in the heart of tel aviv, the company was great (he's made some very interesting friends, and another cousin's kid was there as well - the one who i advised a while back to follow his love interest to los angeles - and the food was great, and overall it was a very pleasant evening right until mr smear started making faces about the rest of summer camp :(

the way home was a mixed bag of parenting (he didn't something gross, and -

OH.

i got distracted by all the other details, i didn't write about something that's been haunting me since last night. on our way to the farewell dinner, there was a teenager on the bus. after asking him and his friend a couple of times to turn their music down, gd signed to me to let them be even though they were generally behaving antisocially (like shoes on the seats). but this one kid, he had a massive, disgusting pimple on the side of his nose. and a couple of stops before he got off, he started picking at it. and wiping his hands all over the bus. and as i became more and more disgusted, and didn't know how to even begin approaching this, he stopped a foot away from me, turned to face me, looked me dead in the eyes while aggressively ripping into the thing.

jesus fucking haploid christ.

i definitely should have handled that more aggressively, and my mind's been getting stuck on that revolting scenario on and off since.

break everything

 today was wildly not fun.

step 1: wake up after a sleepless, though somehow not unpleasant, night.

step 2: try to find a newspaper for mr smear's paper mache activity on the way to his shuttle. discover that there's no demand in our neighborhood for physical news, and walk quite far to pay for one. then quickly head home, pick up my bag for work and take a bus to the summer camp. getting out too early (about halfway there), but fortunately only having to wait a minute before the next line came to the rescue.

step 3: get to work early, become convinced to go to the print shop before the day gets really hot. but the day was already pretty hot. i had an awkward meeting with the guy, but eventually left with an understanding of what to expect. i don't quite know how confident i am, but i guess it's worth a shot?

step 4: the day began in good spirits, but we had networking issues. i tried to fix them, but instead took the entire office offline and would spend most of the next six hours trying to get things working again. including hunting for a "console cable" in our warehouse and in two stores, to no avail. we managed to borrow one from our neighbors, but we weren't able to figure out what to do once we finally connected. all the while, the tech support was less than useless.

the above included half an hour to an hour of a distressing discussion with bigtalk, who's upset that the incoming devops manager is technically less capable than him and that he's effectively demoted himself by signing on with us. it was a complicated conversation, and i hope my advice helps him.

also during the above, two of us went to the new sumsum and it's waaaay slicker than the other branches.

step 5: the (work) day ended with incessant random things, and me not getting my tasks done.

step 6: coming home to a much-needed gin & tonic, a decent leftovers meal, and the realization that mr smear's going to be ten years old tomorrow.

he was very excited about me buying volume 3 of one piece for him. they didn't end up doing the paper mache activity. his eye seems to be clearing up.

oh, yeah - my eyes have been driving me nuts since sunday. what i've been doing seemed to have stopped the infection, but i'm still anxious that something worse might be on the way...

step 7: reading more the neverending story to mr smear (and gd) at bedtime.

step 8: our security consultant - after i've been complaining about one of their unnecessary decisions that's been causing me to be locked out of our password manager - finally did something she should have done from the beginning and completely turned the terrible experience around.

...

it's almost midnight, and the technician's supposed to arrive at the office between 8 and 11 :/

double vision

 i slept pretty well, surprisingly, but i woke up with crusty eyes indicating an incoming eye infection. because things weren't stressful enough. we headed to the clinic early, where i got off on the wrong foot by taking two numbers instead of one, which offended the clerks. then gd decided we had enough time to go to the pharmacy, and it was only through sheer dumb luck that i overheard my number being called after mr smear's had already been missed.

the doctor examined him, did some complicated math, and prescribed pills instead of syrup which makes our lives much easier. and he prescribed me drops and a cream, which i'm about to use for the first time and i'm a bit nervous about it.

my eyes are really itching all of a sudden, please god don't let it be herpes :(

we came home, packed his bag, and all left together to catch a bus to the summer camp. we dropped him off, confirmed that the councillors understood the importance of getting him the medication on time, and then walked to the bus stop and caught the bus home / to the office.

the sync with the tech-ops manager seemed to go well. i really hope it did.

it was a weird day, lots of kids and a really sweet pug and odd jobs and a walk to see the new offices and a late lunch after a big department meeting. then a few more odd jobs and packing up our old offices before taking a few items across with my boss and being amazed by the new digs (the showers are particularly impressive).

i met up with gd and mr smear, introduced them to the pug, and then we (after washing our hands thoroughly because the pug is, to quote gd, a "stinky potato") walked to a hummusia for a big meal that i would've enjoyed as much as them if not for the intensely painful sensitivity of my new fillings.

otherwise it was a great evening.

we went past the mall to explore the harry potter store, sort out mr smear's phone, buy a new case for gd's phone (which she's promptly broken and is now my "new" case, i'm quite upset), and then rush (ha ha, wait forever at the bus stop while wondering who the protestors are yelling at) home to take meds and get ready for bed.

after putting mr smear to bed (with socks on his hands for the second night in a row), i did some work (about an hour and a half of it) and then watched youtube videos while playing minesweeper. and now it's midnight and i'm going to bed.

the good, the bad, the ugly

the good:

the swimming pool experience yesterday was just excellent. he followed instructions, and i came up with some new exercise ideas, and his swimming dramatically improved in front of my eyes. not only is his crawl technique significantly better, but he figured out how to get himself to the bottom of the deep end and we generally enjoyed our time together.

we both had a great time.

i napped well in the afternoon. in the early evening, we spent some time discovering bird flight simulators (such as birdz and aquila) - while the intention is to learn how to code them, i ended up feeling a bit overwhelmed...

while we were doing that, i installed starcraft ii (we're not really using our windows machine, so i was pleased to learn that it runs on a silicon mac!) and war thunder. the latter i tried out while mr smear was in the shower, but the former? mr smear and i have completed the tutorials and begun the campaign, with him playing each level first (and me kibbitzing) and me playing through after, and we're both having a blast!

we finished watching the boy and the heron during and after dinner, it's absolutely gorgeous and i was pleased that we all enjoyed it together.

i slept pretty well last night (until i was woken up by imagining the work conversations i need to have) and i napped a fair amount after everyone else got up.

more starcraft ii today, and we finally continued watching fantastic fungi which we started a few months ago. my late coworker had recommended it to me, and i was caught completely by surprise by the sudden shift in direction, and now it's too late for me to ask him what it is that made him recommend it to me. did i mention my opinions on terrence mckenna's food of the gods? or timothy leary's writings? did it have to do with veganism? or did he just happen to have seen it recently?

the bad:

on our way out to the swimming pool, we discovered that something broke the valve on his bike's front tire, so in addition to having to take the bus, we're going to need to get it fixed soon. that sucks.

my new filling is super-sensitive to cold. and it feels like i've been eating a lot of things that are much harder than expected - like the raisins in my muesli which are unusually small-rock-like.

i think my ingrown toenail isn't healing.

gd and i have unfriended some recently-added friends because they've gone from protesting the government to blaming us for the supposed famine in gaza and dressing their daughter in watermelon shirts. WTAF.

our afternoon walk this evening should have been good, but i left the house in a bad mood and returned in a bad mood.

the ugly:

as if the office politics from thursday weren't enough - they woke me up in the middle of the night and i never quite made it back to bed - while mr smear and i were at the swimming pool yesterday i noticed some redness around his eye.

it's herpes again. this time, there's a blister right on the edge near his tear duct, and i'm freaking out. and to make things more interesting, the timing couldn't be worse because now taking him to the doctor tomorrow and giving him his meds really interferes with his summer camp experience, which in my opinion is critical for him in terms of being a corrective normal-israeli-kid experience. (not to mention how expensive it is)

the tension

 my morning... did not go well. on the way to the office i talked to my mother about krybabie's wife whose been coerced into paying for and arranging an english police clearance for a child who was four months old when they left london, which makes my blood boil.

on the back of that, a couple of us spoke to lipgirl about the marketing lecture we'd been invited to on wednesday afternoon.

and then one of my coworkers dropped a bombshell - our tech ops manager is hiring someone to do a job that's essentially devops, in addition to "owning" the entire data pipel... nevermind the details. i tried to talk to her about it - this is after giving bigtalk a lecture about how we approach her - but she's a bit weird, and refused to talk face to face, and when i put everything in writing i tried to carefully step around the eggshells (and copied my text to my boss so he'd know what i said and how i said it), but i still managed to step on a landmine.

fuck.

so that happened. our boss has set up a meeting for the three of us on sunday, hopefully we'll resolve this.

it was a very busy day, with a few big meetings, but the end of it saw us quite successfully merging in the work from wednesday night and i got everyone excited about me interviewing the founders and first employees to start putting together our company origin story.

i happy-hour'ed a little too hard (from a sweets point of view), and i shouldn't have brought the knaffeh back home - i ended up being the only one to eat any.

about halfway through dinner one of my coworkers called me, and it took almost an hour to get him sorted out, by which time i was completely exhausted and had almost missed wishing mr smear a good night :(

the last thing that i recall from last night was a back-and-forth with a coworker who inexplicably refused to understand that the thing he did to solve a problem we didn't actually have breaks our deployments.

today so far:

i slept late, and relatively well. i've just finished my first coffee, helped mr smear enjoy his glow-in-the-dark lego that he just pulled out of somewhere forgotten, informed him that his bully's leaving the country before the new school year, and we're getting ready to roll our way to the swimming pool.

the hummus mistake

 yesterday:

i picked up the books on my way to the office, the original french version of asterix le gaulois along wiith roald dahl's dirty beasts).

it was a bit of a weird day, in that it was quite relaxed :P

the most important thing i did was sync with bigtalk about finishing his current task in time to demo it to the team this afternoon, and i really hope we're going to be ready.

a bunch of things made me get around to lunch quite late, and i got it into my head to cross the road and pick up hummus. and chips. and falafel. it was great, but i ate way too much (and that's without touching the pita), and when i started falling apart i decided to make a break for it and go home early.

i was almost home when my alarm went off reminding me of a meeting with our security providers. i died inside.

i arrived home, and immediately jumped onto the call, only to realize very quickly that it was a marketing lecture and i was trapped. i immediately shut off my video and spent the next hour barely holding on to consciousness. then i hit the bed for a proper nap.

i woke up in time for dinner, but i didn't eat anything, just joined mr smear in watching wish dragon, which turned out to be a great movie (mr smear shed a tear or two). the rest of the evening went pretty smoothly.

at 10pm, i jumped on a call i'd invited myself into for the test deployment of a feature that one of our contractors has been working on for about three months now. i'd intended to be there just to back-seat drive and make sure that nobody was engaging in deployment shenanigans while we're busy refactoring everything, but after a while it became clear that they were 100% dependent on me to get the job done.

two hours later, we'd successfully deployed and configured, and i was beyond ready to go to bed.

today so far:

aside from a fight (over video call) with mr smear about using his phone at summer camp, it's been a pretty relaxed morning so far. now i'm having an early breakfast and getting ready to face the day.

near misses

 i arrived just in time for my appointment, which started on time, and i felt attended to by the neurologist and validated (especially regarding the mild narcolepsy concern). the tests she did before referring me to a proper sleep doctor were fine, although i was a bit uncomfortable with the fact that she warned me that her foot nerve test would be ticklish and it wasn't.

she then handed me a referral and a prescription, i went downstairs to the pharmacy and barely had to wait before picking up the meds and walking out to hop on a bus.

...

the meds were pregabalin. what followed was gd freaking out (for hours) that i would take it regardless of her warnings (we've been having a long-running fight about trust issues that have nothing to do with me), and she sent me the following:

1. lucy thought her prescribed pain drug was safe

2. lyrica is another brand name for pregabalin

3. pregabalin side effects

hard pass.

...

the work day was alright, but a highlight was having the conversation with my boss and coming up with a couple of satisfying strategies. i'm still not sure what bigtalk is up to, i really hope he delivers something soon.

i left the office early to go to the dentist. on the way, the bus driver slammed on the brakes to narrowly avoid running over a child that had run across the street. i'd been facing the back with my headphones in so it took me a little while to figure out what had been going on, and a part of the drama was that one woman was yelling at the bus driver while he was still freaking out that he'd almost killed someone. before getting off i took the time to thank him for his quick response and to assure him that he didn't need to pay attention to people who don't know much about life.

the dentist experience was better than last week (same dentist), and i feel like he's done a good job. he's also reassured me that as things stand i don't really need to worry about root canals and crowns, which is an enormous relief.

on the bus ride home i had an awkward conversation with an american woman who were scarfing down a pizza; i asked them to please be careful because dairy allergies are a real thing and she responded sympathetically, but with an unexpected interrogation when i just wanted to move on to the back of the bus...

when i got home read a bit more of the neverending story with mr smear before dinner. dinner turned into a massive fight over my inability to not eat the food on my plate (which was too tough and chewy for my new filling) and then over my family bullying me about my mr. burns-level sensitivity to nail filing.

so that happened. by mr smear's (late) bedtime we were okay, at least. then i hopped into a meeting to coach a coworker on a deployment, which went on until almost midnight.

...

right, it's been a pretty relaxed morning (minus the trust thing over the meds again) and i'm off to pick up a mystery package (probably a book).

spokes in the wheel

i slept alright, but woke up enraged from a nightmare in which mr smear was at a birthday party and the other kids (along with the birthday kid's parents) uninvited him because he "wasn't a citizen".

but then that rage compounded as i opened my phone and saw an urgent message from one of our deployments that had been sent hours before, and they needed a password. "i'll help out", i thought to myself, but our password manager's mid-migration because we have an external security company that invented work but didn't ensure it was completed, and they made a decision to use an SSO that doesn't work properly.

by the time i finally managed to get into my account, i couldn't find the password i was looking for, and i wrote my boss, furious, to say that we need to take full control of our passwords from these clowns.

so that happened.

we all woke up a bit earlier than usual this morning, so until it was time to take mr smear to the shuttle bus i read some more of the neverending story to him. i was re-inspired because of this video about how "prophetic" the book is, but gd has an additional related story about how it helped her through some very dark times.

and now i'm off to see a neurologist about my sleep issues.

simple but stressed

 my eyes are blurry, but i've definitely levelled up in minesweeper. i've been listening to metal for the last hour or so and playing minesweeper and not really considering anything of value.

...

the workday was a bit weird. most of it was spent coaching a coworker and my boss through the installation process (my boss gave up once he understood how complicated the process still is), some of it was spent handling authorization issues. the highlight was an interview with a potential replacement for our late chief architect, who impressed the shit out of me and the other interviewer and we're hoping he'll be joining us soon.

i left the office a bit early, and mr smear joined me on a mission to pick up some more sophisticated decaf teas (pukka). the walk-and-talk was great and i'm very pleased with the results.

...

i feel like my greatest achievement today was getting mr smear back into the neverending story (it's been almost four years, i think he's *actually* ready for it now), reading it to him after bedtime. he had another good day at his dog training camp ^_^

fun day

the morning began well, i walked mr smear to his shuttle bus, then made my way to the office, arriving just in time to catch our shuttle up to sdot yam.

it was an absolutely gorgeous day. extremely hot, but not nearly as extreme as the previous couple of days, and we spent most of it in the shade. from a social point of view, it was a smashing success, both formally with the icebreakers and informally with incessant getting to know each other.

i hit the water with the stand-up paddleboards (coached by hagal sheli volunteers), and i had a lot of trouble initially (i almost lost my sunglasses at one point). when i moved away from the rocky area, though, i found it much easier and managed really well! unfortunately, by that point i was already feeling a combination of motion sickness, excess heat, and i think i might have swallowed a bit of a sea water. after we got back to shore i needed a break from the world (and a coke, and to lie down) before the nausea went away.

then i signed up for the ice bath. the preparation (breathing exercises) made me feel like this would be a good preparation for a tattoo session :P

i wasn't even halfway into the water when i was blindsided by just how difficult it was for me to get my breathing under control! it was only two minutes, but i struggled to open my eyes even when instructed because i was so focused on keeping my breathing regulated, and my legs hurt. but it was so hot outside, that after climbing out and warming up a little i had to ask if i could go in again.

the answer was a resounding no.

the rest of the afternoon was keeping hydrated, eating exotic crepes-like ice cream, and talking incessantly.

we left earlier than we expected, the bus ride home was very pleasant (i connected musically to one of our aussies), and when we returned to the office i got some advice from lipgirl and another coworker about apartment hunting before returning home.

mr smear and i enjoyed an early dinner, then took a bus to where his friend's staying to pick up his bike. the ride their was pleasant, we had to wait a little while so we took a short walk and talked a lot, and that was great.

the poor dog being dog-sat was too scared to come and say hi, and wasn't doing well in general. i talked about the apartment hunting and realized that my anxieties about leaving early are justified...

the way home was unpleasant. mr smear almost immediately got into a mode, he didn't want to push the bike and he felt it was "unfair" that i was walking alongside him and not doing all the work. this non-stop arguing culminated in me losing my temper in the middle of a bridge, and yelling at him about how we could make things "fair" (by me making him work hard whenever i work hard), which led to about five minutes of walking in silence.

and then sitting on a bench, and having a relaxed, rational conversation about how life isn't fair, though we have to try to make it fair, and that my job as his father is to prepare him for the world. the rest of the way home was pleasant conversation, and the rest of the evening went smoothly.

today so far: a nice morning, and a parental guidance session that was challenging but ultimately good. now i'm off to the office.

cold sweats

 i think i slept relatively well last night. i got up early, read the last of the five asterix books we have (asterix and the banquet, i was amazed by how many of the names i remembered), and had a few naps throughout the day.

we played rayman for a while, mostly it went great but we had some pretty bad feelings at one point due to a misunderstanding... it's hard to explain to a kid how some yelling is okay :/

we played uno for while, that was fun.

we watched some more deathnote. the past few episodes really haven't enjoyed the same level of writing and i'm beginning to find myself over it. i hope it resolves well, but where we are it's a confusing mess.

i took mr smear (bike and rollerblades) to his friend's temporary home, it was extremely hot but it went well. the last uphill before i got home wrecked me, however, and i entered our apartment feeling faint (my neck had been giving me trouble for most of the ride home).

after i cooled down, i cabbed to meet tahoma in his new apartment. it's an awesome apartment in an incredible location! he convinced me to consider looking for a new apartment now and finding a sublet for our current one, i spoke to gd and hopefully we'll be able to make this happen.

we had a pizza at the green cat, and then walked to cassata - a remarkably tel avivi place - for ice cream, before eventually walking to the eliphelet station where it took me three tries to get on the right train because the signage is so bad.

...

having not realized how late i'd been out, i was caught mid-dinner by mr smear informing me that he was ready to go home. for the first time, i arranged for a taxi to pick him up, and he got home fine, but he called me from inside the taxi to say "dad - do you remember how you told me about stranger danger? i'm feeling that right now" 😰

we're definitely going to have to have a talk in the morning 🤣

work off (art)

 work off art was amazing. i don't remember the last time i went to an exhibit and was blown away by almost all of it.

getting there went smoothly in spite of the already mounting temperature, but that was mostly a matter of luck in timing. and we had time to grab a coffee before going in.

on the way out, we sat at hummus ha'ben shel ha'suri for breakfast, which we all enjoyed, and then walked to the hospital complex where gd had an encounter with a disrespectful pharmacist* while i deliberated between reasonably-priced and comfortable sandals and unreasonably-priced but holy-shit-what-is-this-magic sandals. i ended up splurging and going with the latter, which i pray i don't regret.

* i'm proud to report that she held her own, and made her accountable to her coworkers

we picked up a traditional bread-and-salt gift for tahoma for tomorrow, then walked home humming and arguing over the exact tune of a specific bar towards the end of daft punk - instant crush (i was wrong).

after learning some of the history of the ac/dc back in black album and listening to it in its entirety while resting on the couch, i spent a good chunk of the afternoon making some progress with the language app i've been working on in fits and starts, discussing educational gaming with sailor, teaching mr smear how to play roblox snake properly, doing tons of dishes and watching two episodes of deathnote on the big screen.

gin & tonic & coffee (the latter separately) and getting ready for shabbat.

enter the weekend

thought for the morning: what we need is a modern-day roBEN yeHOODa to steal our kids' attention back from english tyrant tech by providing addictive hebrew games and localized tween/teen programming

yesterday:

it was a very relaxing morning, i feel like i got into weekend mode a little earlier than was safe :P

it was a very interesting work day, and almost entirely positive. not least of which being a conversation with an incoming devops who's making aliyah on monday, and a surprise visit by a guy who appears to be our incoming devops manager. and it turns out he's the one responsible for bringing in the star we interviewed a couple of weeks ago. we talked for a little while, and found really good alignment, and by the time he left he'd signed the contract, which is excellent ^_^

...

when i saw (we use google's family link) that mr smear was off the shuttle and on his way home, i gave him a call to ask how his day at summer camp had gone. "it was great!" warmed my heart, and then i had to laugh because he was extremely enthusiastic about how good the second meal had been 😆

it looks like he's making friends and having a really good time, i hope it continues like this.

...

in the afternoon our late chief architect's family came in for a demo of what we've been up to, and we had a happy hour (or two) in his honor.

...

i was amazed to learn that our office manager is one of the officers whose job is to inform families of wounded or killed soldiers. i accidentally overheard a part of a sentence that i wish i hadn't :(

...

i managed to get home in time for dinner and deathnote, and we spoke to my mom who seems to be getting better (but was very busy patient-zero-ing yesterday so i gave her shit about being irresponsible), and shower / bedtime was pleasant and smooth. i told mr smear how proud i am of him, and how happy i am for him, that he's matured so much over the course of the past year, and this experience is convincing me that if the art school places open up he'll actually be ready for it.

then i settled in to complete some work i needed to do for a couple of my teammates, and what followed was a series of broken deployments with me becoming progressively more sleepy until almost midnight, at which point i gave up and dragged myself off to bed.

today so far:

i slept so-so, but the last couple of hours weren't great. i got up, and after a while scrolled through my notifications, and then retried the deployment one last time with the intention of rolling back a version if it failed.

it succeeded.

mr smear's just gotten up a little while ago, i've got yesterday's main points written down, and today's big plan is going to an art exhibition (work off art) across from my old office and maybe helping tahoma and his husband move apartments.

(professional) ceasefire

 yesterday:

on my way out the door i messaged my boss, who called me back pretty quickly and i explained the situation. he was shocked by what i reported, but grateful that i was proposing taking care of it, and then we moved on to discussing an upcoming reorg. after he repeated the phrase "you can go where you like" three times i stopped him to ask "you mean within the company, right?"

"oh, come on..." ^_^

i got to work and invited bigtalk out for coffee. the walk to the coffee shop was enthusiastic shop talk, but we got serious once we had our drinks. i started by getting a good sense of where he's at, which thankfully appears to be very much aligned with where i am / we are, and when i got to the criticism and strategizing he seemed very positive and receptive.

so that happened.

...

at lunch, over a funny conversation about hebrew accents, i discovered that my israeli coworkers had never noticed that shlomo artzi's lehatzil otach contains bad english 🤣

...

aside from a meeting after lunch where i had to be very active and involved while actively falling asleep at my desk, and aside from the morning drama, it was a pretty relaxed day and i managed to sort out one of the tech ops issues during deployment.

i came home to find that mr smear had had another good day at summer camp (although apparently the second meal had been physically too hot to handle). we had a good dinner and watched another episode of deathnote, and the evening was basically everyone passing out quickly.

this morning so far:

i slept terribly, or barely slept. i took mr smear to the bus stop, which we had to evacuate quickly because some fuckers decided that it would be a good idea to install giant screens for advertisements facing into the goddamned bus stop. there's no way mr smear would have made it onto his bus if i hadn't been there 😡

since getting home, gd and i have watched a bunch of random interesting things, and now i'm getting ready to roll out.

aliyah update

 oh! i almost forgot, apparently someone i've been talking to managed to push the right buttons, because the jewish agency informed her yesterday that they're dropping the ridiculous new requirement and all she has to do is show up with a valid police clearance.

i'll believe this story is over when she has a visa in hand, but it's extremely encouraging!

parenting (at home and at work)

preying on my mind this morning: overhearing bigtalk (apparently) badmouthing our tech ops' manager to him while simultaneously making him feel unappreciated. i literally didn't know what to do at the time, and then later the topic came up (partially) when we were talking to our boss. now i feel like i have to take him for a walk and discuss what happened, and i feel like i need to talk to my boss about it first, and i don't want to do either of those things.

monday:

i dropped mr smear off at his therapist and proceeded to work. i presented my roadmap to a bunch of coworkers, with the sharpest feedback being how i hadn't made the timeline clear. after an inspirational quote from my boss (churchill's "plans are of little importance, but planning is essential") so in the middle of the night, i spent an hour or two making a gantt chart that was received very favorably (and with surprise that i actually did it properly, thanks free online gantt chart software!)

the largest / most important effort went into setting up an installation machine, which provided some really tricky challenges and i ended up leaving without understanding how to connect two very important dots.

yesterday:

the houthi attack in the early morning proved a very effective alarm for mr smear's first day of summer camp. it wasn't the smoothest morning, but we arrived at the bus stop on time for the shuttle - a pity that the shuttle was about forty minutes late. but that did give me an opportunity to get a coffee from the bakery on weizman, which turned into quite a weird experience (from the confused cashier when i asked about their alternative milks, to the barista who didn't understand that "barista" wasn't a brand, to the french people standing and talking while inappropriately blocking anyone who needed to get to the counter, to the barista having difficulty letting me know that my coffee was ready).

on the way to work i spoke to my mom, who sounded pretty bad (and by the evening would sound terrible). we both expressed gratitude that none of us got sick throughout her vacation here, which was a first. i'm a little concerned by her always insisting that she feels fine when she's obviously really sick - serious patient-zero vibes :/

it was a very busy work day, with a highlight and a lowlight. the lowlight was the incident i described above. the highlight was figuring out, after a couple of hours, the ridiculous process of getting the installation machine accounts sorted out and operational. just in time, too: we had two urgent installations yesterday, and if it wasn't for that machine the tech op and i would have had to spend the evening in the warehouse.

instead, i made it to my dentist appointment on time. i hadn't understood that the pain i was having was due to a new hole, so it was a standard filling that needed to be done. the procedure was very uncomfortable, and it was very sensitive last night, but it seems to be a good job.

on the way home (the bus didn't arrive, so i had to walk) i tested my connection to the installation machine, and the successful test meant that i could have dinner with my family (when the two hours were eventually over) and watch deathnote and, most importantly, grill mr smear about his first day in summer camp.

there were a few hiccups and funny stories, but overall it sounds like he's managing well and having new and interesting experiences ^_^

the installation went on until almost midnight, and ended in a weird failure. but as i was reporting the failure, we received news that the deployment has been delayed. tech ops was really bummed out, but then i reminded him that a) we just got more time just when we needed it and b) that we'd been able to work from home and hadn't been stuck in the warehouse all night.

today so far:

i feel much better since finishing the course of antibiotics yesterday afternoon, they were really making me tired. my new filling seems to be settling.

farewell

 i slept alright, i guess. aside from a couple of nightmares, and the terrifying thought that if something happened to my mom i'd have to make a choice between sorting out her affairs and not leaving israel for a country with an unreasonably high risk of bad things happening.

this morning was a bit of a mess, largely trying to figure out what to do about mr smear's therapy sessions and summer camp activities for the next few weeks.

my mom and i walked to the bank to move some money around, and picked up coffee and onion bagel to share (i've never seen anyone split a bagel in two so precisely with their hands before) before heading home to prepare for her flight.

we took the train to the airport, and managed to get her through the check-in process just as i needed to join a zoom meeting for work - the first ten minutes of which i spent frustratedly trying to get zoom to connect to my bluetooth headphones.

it was a long meeting, and while i'm glad i was understood i was embarrassed by my inability to communicate my thoughts clearly, and frustrated by a general sense of the meeting being about the wrong stuff.

and that it took exactly enough time to prevent me from being able to spend time with my mother during her last hour in tel aviv.

we sent her off, and made our way to the train, and returned back home, and the rest of the afternoon was relatively peaceful and easy. i've got one book left in the asterix omnibus we bought for mr smear, the comics are just as great as i remembered and they've really aged well.

but a little too quiet without my mom. mr smear's really sad she's left.

...

after dinner, we sat mr smear down and had a very big conversation about gd's history that was triggered by a weird thing he said the other day. there's no right time to tell a child that kind of thing, but there's definitely a wrong time (like when they've found stuff out for themselves, or worse - the hard way). i think it went as well as could be expected, but gd's clearly anxious that it was the wrong thing to do.

i guess we'll find out as we go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

...

tomorrow's back to work, after taking mr smear to his therapy session, and then managing the "handylady" who's coming to fix our curtain rail(s).

i really, really hope i manage to sleep tonight.

mission

 yesterday:

the surgeon advised me to return only as a last resort, and to book an appointment with a pedicurist instead.

my mom, mr smear and i took a very long walk to the beachfront and down to the shuk. we had a very serious talk about her making aliyah, and i hope she's processing it all because it was a big conversation and i think i managed to get across all the big points.

we took a bus home, then spent the next few hours resting.

in the late afternoon i picked up a car (which was a struggle, it was hot and the directions were shit) and we dropped off the watermelon at our cousins', then met up with them at the cemetery for a quick and personal memorial service.

we then returned to their place for a really nice friday night dinner. for the most part we all had a good time, including gd who'd been very uncomfortable the last couple of times. mr smear slipped back into his usual baby-hating habits, but was mostly good.

this morning:

this morning i discovered that my hip issues aren't necessarily caused by the bed. halfway through the night it got so bad that i left the couch and went to the bed, and slept better.

weird.

we had a pretty relaxed morning (i read asterix, and napped), and then we all went to the swimming pool. the lifeguard wasn't convinced that mr smear should be allowed in the deep end, but we were with him at all times and he made an effort to prove he actually could swim... but i think my mom and gd are right and that he needs proper lessons.

we were there for a couple of hours, we had a really good time, but it started falling apart as we prepared to leave when mr smear got angry with a baby for picking up gd's phone, and then messed around in the shower while i was waiting for him and while the clock was ticking on our car. and then when he finally came out i saw how badly he's scratched up his leg, and i lost patience.

and then, when i told gd that he was in trouble, she lost patience. so it wasn't pretty.

in spite of that, the rest of the afternoon went pretty smoothly (i think, i napped for most of it) and in the evening my mom took mr smear out for dinner and i took gd to south tel aviv for a dinner date. between the green cat pizza and a random hostel bar, we had a really good night ^_^

...

but we're all sad that my mom's leaving tomorrow.

payoff

tuesday night:

i finally managed to coax the deployment to succeed, but without a sense of success.

wednesday:

the day began with me learning that i hadn't been invited to the previous night's deployment debriefing, and i suspected that that was intentional on skippity's part to prevent me raising a bunch of issues he knew shouldn't have been. so i awkwardly gatecrashed, and took a number of opportunities to interrupt with my opinions.

it was entirely gratifying to get so much enthusiastic support from the other participants, and i felt really validated for jumping in because nobody else was saying what i was saying.

i had a potentially "final straw" moment with bigtalk, discovering once again that in spite of the extremely explicit ticket and discussion around it, he still hadn't followed the instructions. "you never said that!" he responded, at which point i showed him exactly how it was written in the ticket. "oh."

anyway, by the time the day was over, after a few more iterations, we considered his work ready to merge and we pulled the trigger. the first thing i did after he left was ask a couple of other devs to give it a try, and before i left i'd opened a PR for some minor improvements, but by and large we'd crossed the line and were ready to move on to the next thing.

which made me super nervous, because the next thing is the really hard thing.

gd and my mom made pastries with "chunk" fake meats for dinner. it's creepily close to a real meat experience.

yesterday:

the work day began with a pleasant conversation with skippity that made me feel like there were no hard feelings, and then i synced with bigtalk to make sure he understood what was required of him. i think it's understandable how skeptical i was feeling.

the day was overall pretty productive, with lots of noise (a fair amount of good noise) and a lot of me actively protecting bigtalk from distractions.

an hour before happy hour, bigtalk stood up and announced that he was done with his proof of concept.

i literally didn't believe him.

i sat next to him, he walked me through what he'd done and how he'd done it, and i was literally stunned, half disbelieving and half almost in tears (of joy and relief).

for me, the rest of the day was a celebration. i made sure that bigtalk understood what a big deal this is, and i discussed the implications with anyone who showed even the remotest interest, and i made sure that our boss was in on how things are going.

it feels like after a week (or few) of stress and suffering, we finally got a massive payoff.

i got home, walked with my mom and mr smear to the liquor store (rum and gin, and whiskey for a gift), and got home to another pastry dinner (everyone's really excited about vegan pastries, while mr smear is concerned about becoming chubby).

today:

gd's at her sewing lesson, we're off now to my surgeon appointment for my ingrown toenail while i feel like i'm recovering from a hard night of i-shouldn't-have-had-alcohol-with-my-antibiotics indigestion and fatigue.

but i feel good about how this week concluded. really, really good.

gimme an f

 yesterday:

the clinic told me i had to make a doctor's appointment, so i did. then i went to the pain clinic and got gd's appointment moved. then i walked through the sarona market to get to the office, stopping to pick up a coffee and help someone with a demo along the way, and picking up potato spice and two bottles of scorpion pepper sauce.

most of yesterday's work was shit, our security team's boss invented some really stupid manual work in the name of compliance and i spent half my day cloning vaults secret by secret.

in addition to that, i supported my teammates and realigned (again) with bigtalk.

i rushed out at 5.30pm, in time to get home and hear gd throwing a kitchen tantrum about mayonnaise. i went out for a walk with my mom and mr smear, and we ended up on a shopping mission for vegan mayonnaise with mixed success.

then we came home, had a really nice dinner, followed by a massive fight about the mayonnaise (okay, that's not fair - it was about what the mayonnaise represents, including the fact that gd is *really* not interested in being vegan and it's not just about eggs) and going to bed was a pretty bitter affair.

today:

and then i woke up around midnight in pain, and couldn't get it out of my head that i haven't had a decent night's sleep in years because gd refused to sleep in two separate beds when the only beds she can sleep in actively hurt me.

i spent the rest of the night on the couch, only some of which i slept through.

i had a bunch of stuff to do in the morning, some of which got done, and gd and i had a Talk and we've both got stuff to process.

then i went to the office and had a really difficult experience with bigtalk, who *still* hadn't understood what it was i expected from him. and when he did finally understand, he realized why i'd told him a week ago that it should have taken a few hours and he was over-engineering the solution.

with great pain, i took him aside and explained to him exactly what i wanted, finally got him to agree, then wrote out a particularly explicit ticket and made sure he understood what it's instructing him to do. then i began working on the next ticket, which we'll make sure to talk through before he begins.

oh, boy.

i was then sent on a hunt for a computer that doesn't exist to support a new surprise urgent installation, after which i had to leave to get the dentist for a first aid appointment.

the dentist took some x-rays, then showed me where both sides of my mouth have urgent filling issues. then i rushed off to get full imaging done (14 very uncomfortable plates), then i came home and had lunch, worked a little and then returned to the clinic for the ingrown toenail appointment. now i have two sets of antibiotics, a useless piece of cotton wool under my toenail (it's not the front edge of the toenail that's a problem), and another appointment to make.

on the way home i received a call from skippity, who's having trouble with a deployment and who's actively making things worse for himself and everyone he brings in to try and fix it.

at the same time, another deployment has been going wrong so i tried to take it over, but after more than two hours i'm at a loss as to where the real issue is and i'm struggling to really care.

and all throughout this i was supporting one of our external contractors. and having to push hard to get mr smear to do his reading homework with me.

i'm so over today.

bully for berlin!

 omg i forgot that on friday night we heard some excellent news - mr smear's main bully isn't going to be in his class any more! we haven't told him, and it's not the only bullying situation, but it's a relief nonetheless. in just-as-good news, his teacher from the last half a year is staying in spite of the pay cut, for which we're all very grateful.

and mr smear's on the waiting list for the art school. so... 🤞🙏

script flip

 i got up early later, made myself a coffee and walked it to the bus stop. shortly into the ride a man came in and sat down across from me with a smell that made it hard to breathe. he got off one stop before me.

i walked in, picked up my repaired computer (i haven't tested it yet), walked out, and caught the bus home. an easier ride.

i got home just in time to leave for work. i arrived at work just before bigtalk, and didn't have time to worry about talking to my boss before he made me feel like he'd been working hard all weekend, and he explained what had happened on thursday, and i no longer felt like that was the problem.

what followed, though, was a day that felt very long, a lot of it me trying to align him with the task requirements. it was the middle of the afternoon by the time i felt he'd understood the requirements, and by the end of the day he was pretty much done, albeit with an insane bug that i feel pretty confident his reliance on AI support was preventing him from resolving 🤦

someone else said it yesterday: AI makes you feel like you're getting things done faster, but you're actually not. my experience is that i feel like it's slowing me down on anything more interesting than a trivial solution.

aside from that, i babysat an external contractor's efforts to migrate his cloudformation to pulumi - it wasn't easy, but i am pretty confident that pulumi is the right choice after all.

as usual, at around 5.30/6pm urgent things began to fall apart. some of my coworkers have been complaining about ridiculous build times, and suddenly i started experiencing them too. instead of the usual minute or two, my build took 35 minutes, and its subsequent deploy broke on contact.

frustrated, as much by the build time as by not being able to have dinner with my family, i went to our warehouse to be on the same physical network as the machine i was deploying to, only to discover that one of my coworkers who has a tendency to skip important steps [skippity] moved the server from our installation desks that i set up last week to a power point connected to the lights, and the cleaning lady had finished up and turned off the lights just before my deployment started 🤦

you can't make this up.

i was furious.

while waiting for him to join me, i tried re-logging in to werf on a whim, and suddenly the build times dropped back to normal. it turns out that instead of throwing an error like it used to, it simply runs retry behavior repeatedly and then fails silently. so even when we thought it was eventually working, it wasn't 🤦

omfg.

after moving the installation back to a safe power point, i learned that skippity hadn't configured the router correctly and nothing would have worked anyway 🤦

finally, after a further half hour spent trying and failing to connect the machine through the router, i plugged in "directly" and began the deployment. that was when he stood up and announced that he had to go because his family would be upset with him... like mine wouldn't?

jesus, fuck.

anyway, i finally got the deployment done and went to pick up my bag. two of my bosses (founder and direct report) were still in, and i let them know what i'd just been through. i ended up having an open discussion with my direct report about bigtalk, we shared different concerns and i walked out feeling much better having said what needed to be said.

i came home, my mom prepared me an emergency gin and tonic and i at least got to say goodnight to mr smear.

...

it's demo day (no. 1), i've slept alright and i'm on my way to postpone gd's nerve block again and try and make an appointment for a surgeon for my ingrown toenail.

flag

 it's 4am and i've spent at least the last hour tossing and turning. the new devops guy's behavior is making me really uncomfortable and i don't know how to interpret his behavior; something feels off and i'm not sure how to confront him about it, or whether to report to my boss and let him worry about it.

he's officially been with us a week, although i feel like he's only really been available for two of the days, and when he was available he seemed to be distracted and digging his way into a corner. and the bit on thursday where he said he was coming in and just didn't show up without communicating anything is a red flag for me.

i think i need to pass this along.

...

i guess at least it wasn't physical discomfort keeping me up this time.

shifting gears

 yesterday:

we walked. we dropped off gd's sandals for repair, found the bike shop closed, and walked up the road to the next bike shop. we dropped off the bike, then walked to a small grocery store, then continued on to the big one, did an annoyingly long shop and carried it all home.

loop one.

we stopped for a bit, but the clock was ticking so we walked again, picking up gd's sandals, then grabbing a laffa for mr smear, picking up his bike and walking it home.

loop two.

the good news is he was very happy with the repair job.

the remainder of the afternoon was pretty quiet, with lots of napping and reading.

one of my upper teeth has been really, really hurting the past couple of days, and it's getting worse.

in the evening we all went to our friends for a delicious and very entertaining dinner. the conversations were all over the place, but i'm struck by how diametrically opposing our political views are becoming.

we came home very late and i slept surprisingly well.

today:

we got up pretty early, and ended up leaving around 10am for the kibbutz. gd and my mom prepared and brought all the food - there was plenty - and we had a very nice time visiting our kibbutz cousin and her daughter (who i haven't seen in many years, and suddenly looks so much like her dad), and an excellent time by the pool.

on the way home we stopped in netanya to see my cousin, for whom the move (and the leaving of her husband) is very new and overwhelming (and i also realized that the connection to one of my bosses is that he was her landlord, which is a whole story). she suddenly looks so much like her mom that my mom and i were both blown away.

gd was having a tough time by then, so we came home. it's been a very long day, mostly very enjoyable, and i think i'm going to crash soon.

after a gin and tonic, with my mother and i realizing that i've been joining her the past couple of days and it seems to be helping me sleep...

weekend vibes

 i eventually got to sleep after posting, and was rudely (and bitterly) awoken to a rocket alert. it was my mom's first time in the shelter, and we encountered some new neighbors for the first time.

getting back to sleep for an hour or two was hard, not least because mr smear decided this was a great opportunity to brush his teeth so he could get screen time earlier 🤦

i had a meeting with my insurance broker which was supposed to take ten minutes, but by the time we were done a full hour had passed and i needed to join our daily meeting from home. the first few minutes turned into a private sync between me and the new devops guy, who's giving me weird vibes. he seems really antisocial and i'm feeling like i can't get him to focus. he told me he was also coming in to the office, but he didn't :/

on my way to the office i was presented with an opportunity to speak to the guy who'd called the evening before and who i thought i'd offended, so we cleared the air before i got to work.

the work day was... interesting. it turned out the drama the night before was due to something i did that we all agreed should have worked, so i had to write a script to reset my change. most of my focus for the rest was on developer methodology, and i was pleased to be a part of a whole bunch of things coming together, as well as feeling like an authority in our organization.

there are days (like the day before) that i have to deal with a sense of imposter syndrome, so it's nice to have some balance to that.

the last couple of hours were busy, but not too intense, and included an interesting theological discussion with a religious contractor.

i came home to a full house - mr smear's friend was over for dinner. we all had a good experience, some interesting conversations in english and hebrew, and then we all took a walk to get him home and chat with his mother. on the way home gd expressed frustration with me sometimes speaking to her in hebrew, which i'm conflicted about.

the evening went smoothly, minus me discovering a problem with one of my toes that definitely needs a doctor (i hope it's just an ingrown nail).

while trying to help my mother with her iphone (i detest iphones now), i was convinced to finally - after three and a half years - update my country of residence in steam. i did so by purchasing minutescape, the testing of which cost me a pleasantly entertaining hour of my life.

and (pretty much) then i went to bed.

today so far:

i slept surprisingly well, dreamed long weird dreams, and this morning so far has been good. in addition to visiting our kibbutz cousin tomorrow, we're making a stop by a cousin i spoke to a couple of weeks ago (the one with lots of kids) and we're collectively supportively shocked to learn that she's finally left her husband.

right: shabbat!

a hard day's night

 i'm really struggling tonight, though i guess there's an upside in that i've spent the past hour or two working on the language project and the frontend is starting to take shape.

i walked to the pick-up location, which was about 200m from where google maps said it was. the detour was fascinating because i didn't realize how much residential development has been done on the other side of the train station from us, and the guys at the store were grateful to be notified about the map issue and for me updating it. i walked to the closest light rail station and headed to work.

i arrived, sweaty, to a birthday celebration followed by a day that was predominantly me trying hard to balance letting the new guy do his thing and me (micro)managing him into making his thing actually help us. and trying to do it in a way that didn't feel shitty.

for the most part, though, the level of stress was so much less than the previous days that i found myself with a long list of things to do but a weird sense of being lost.

at 5.30pm, i decided to put my outside shoes on and go home.

precisely at that moment, one of the new guys arrived in desperate need of help. i had no idea how to help him, so i left, but i felt really shitty about it.

i arrived home, handed mr smear his new roald dahl books and enjoyed him reading me a story, then we had dinner, which was interrupted by someone calling to ask me for help. i literally didn't understand who he was or what was going on, and then suddenly i felt myself crashing and i rushed to brush my teeth and climb into bed.

where i spent a good few hours not sleeping due to a combination of dark thoughts and lower back pain.

chicken

 yesterday was intense.

i made it just in time for the yoga class, which was tough but fluid. the instructor asked me for my favorite bird, catching me off guard, and after taking some time to give it some thought i responded with "chicken". hilarity ensued. towards the end, he demonstrated a movement (balancing on hands with knees tucked into the backs of arms) and i just couldn't figure it out; at one point i was convinced that i just had the wrong body shape. when he eventually found a way to explain it to me and i got it right, i was surprised by how little strain it was on my spine and was treated to applause by my coworkers :P

the morning could be best described as a series of surprise events - it took me more than half an hour before i was able to sneak off for a quick shower between meetings.

during the meeting before my big presentation, i kept trying and failing to build an image that was being delivered to me, and eventually tried restarting docker, only to see an update pending. it looks like docker may have finally fixed whatever they broke a couple of versions ago.

from there i rushed into my presentation. i joked about it being prophetic that i'd inserted a quote slide at the beginning that said "everything is broken", because between microsoft's rug-pull with vscode extensions and our mitigations for docker's bugs made an absolute mess of everything. in spite of that, though, we got through an hour and ten minutes and there seemed to be a lot of interest, surprise and appreciation 🤷

lipgirl's lunch idea worked out really well. "i helped" (i just squeezed lemon juice), but she and another coworker put together a huge plate of really good salad; it wasn't just a good idea for us, but it looks like we might have some more people joining in on this.

soon after lunch, i headed to the warehouse to help our tech support staff on their first installation. while there, i received a call from someone i once served with who's interviewing with us, and by the time we were done i think he was convinced that joining us is a pretty good idea. i also ended up on a diatribe with my coworkers, describing some of my tokyo takeaways.

it was around 4pm when we collectively realized that we had three deployments scheduled for the next morning and they had no idea how to do them. i should mention that on a day full of pressure, our new star devops was nowhere to be found - he was preoccupied with the farewell from his previous employer. after scrambling to make space on the desks, and beginning to get the installations going (the tech support kid hadn't yet learned not to skip steps, so we had a restart at one point), we then began the process of preparing the deployments and preparing his machine to perform them.

it - took - six - hours.

there was lots of complaining, lots of joking around, and a ridiculous incident where we detected a leak in the warehouse that almost took out some of our expensive and sensitive equipment. i could have just done everything myself and bailed early, but i'm no longer the only person who can do this stuff, we learned a lot, and the celebratory vibe before we shut everything down was very real.

i came home super late, did a mind-dump with my wife and mom, and then entered into a very difficult, tiring, but ultimately rewarding fight/discussion with gd.

today:

i eventually fell into bed around 2am, with a sore back and a mind all over the place. and then something happened shortly after i fell asleep that woke me up, and i don't know if i managed to get back to sleep after that.

it's been a relaxed morning so far, i'm about to go pick up a package on the way to work and hopefully it'll be a good day.

backwards

yesterday:

i got the vscode copilot to help me with i18n. it saved me a huge amount of effort, but got stuck on the translation json formatting...

we had a good parental guidance session.

on the way to the office i picked up the asterix omnibus and another of the french originals ^_^

we interviewed a devops who's currently stuck in thailand, and ended with such a great feeling that it put yesterday's interview in stark contrast and i've submitted my concerns to the boss.

lipgirl planned to do a build-your-own-salad thing, but the supplier said the food would only arrive between 3 and 6pm. a couple of us left for sumsum, everyone else ordered lunch, and by the time we returned the salad stuff had arrived :P

my boss tried and failed to help us set up workshop equipment, and later on, just as my team and i had decided to call it a day, one of our aussie madmen arrived and dragged us into a couple of hours of installations with beers. and boogie sabbath, which (aside from iron man) is becoming a thing for me.

apparently mr smear was a lot more compliant about homework yesterday than the day before.

i finally prepared my presentation after putting mr smear to bed.

i went to bed shortly after an unpleasant argument with a coworker about meeting scheduling...

today so far:

i didn't sleep very well, and i'm very nervous about my neck, especially as i want to join the yoga class this morning. i woke up to a quote for the dell repair and a failed attempt to do something with my health insurance that's led me to realize that i need to have a serious talk with my broker.

while brushing my teeth this morning i realized that the israeli mantra/prayer for resilience is "it'll be okay", and that my mother uses it just fine in south africa but has trouble applying it here.

her aliyah officer (or whatever) sent her an email denying that she'd demanded the documentation she'd demanded.

gotta go.

in the in-between moments

 the ice-cream mission went well, we met up with mongoose and his daughter and aside from a moment where i rescued her ice-cream cone from a tumble to the floor (we think she thought i was taking it from her) and a few "the usual" moments of mr smear crossing lines, we had a pretty good afternoon.

today:

i got a pretty good night's sleep, but woke up earlier than my early alarm to take the dell in for evaluation / repair. the trip to herzeliya and back was pretty quick, but finding the place once i was off the bus was a bit of a mission.

both ways i didn't use my phone, and having that time to process my thoughts felt good.

the half hour or so between getting back home and leaving for work were stressful as i tried to set up my macbook for mr smear to use during the day. everything went wrong until i figured out that i didn't need to do what apple wasn't letting me do (their UX really can stink sometimes), after which i still had quite a lot of configuration to do...

work was full of meetings and interviews, some more pleasant than others, but mostly alright. and overall it feels like the day was successful. taking friday's cholent for lunch was a jolly good idea. learning that thurday's conversation with the new product expert inspired her to consider game dev a real resource for our product was exciting ^_^

i was a bit irritable this evening, but it was generally a good evening nonetheless. after watching why everyone is cancelling their duolingo right now i made an effort to get back into the alternative i've been putting together, and moving to a different PC has taught me that there was some funky stuff going on with my windows copy.

much frustration later, i've fixed and patched and i'm pretty much ready to move forward again. and developing on a macbook is much more comfortable, even while i'm irritated at microsoft's enshittification of vscode (using the extension marketplace).

but now it's much later than i expected to go to bed.

doing the right things

 thursday:

on the way to work i realized that what i needed to do was defer the presentation and actually prepare it, so i did that. the work day was packed, but not particularly interesting; mostly grind on my part.

our second monthly game hacking session started off quite constructively, with conversations about what gaming can do and why it's relevant as a teaching tool. one of those conversations inspired me to pick up a copy of war made new on kindle and read the preface to my wife and mom, who found it just as fascinating as i did.

we made an effort to put together a version of tetris that i'd come up with, but after a couple of hours (disrupted by an intense twenty minutes of debugging a server undergoing testing) we were all yawning in turns and called it a night.

yesterday:

i slept pretty well, i think, but i woke up tired. like, really tired. but it was gd and my ten year anniversary! i booked us a table at meshek barzilay.

we began the day a bit late, with a mission to dizengoff to order mr smear's new prescription lenses and pick up vegan cholent and lunch (i wasn't hungry, but mr smear didn't like his pad thai), and then walk a bit to the nature store, and then come on home so i could rest for a few minutes and drink two coffees because i was completely broken and had to go to the memorial service for my late coworker.

i met up with lipgirl at the office and made myself yet another coffee, and we headed out to netanya, which turned out to be an insane two hour trip because the highways around herzliya were shut down for invisible construction. we were so late that we ended up having to skip the cemetary and head straight to the memorial lunch, where i ended up being the only person to speak on behalf of the company.

i'm nervous about public speaking in english on a good day, so getting up in front of a large gathering of strangers to stumble over what i hope gave a good impression of our experience of him.

lipgirl drove back, and we had an argument over the impact of demanding coalition governments, and i think (i hope) that i managed to win her over by the end of it.

either way, post extra-coffee/eulogy/argument i arrived home buzzing, at gd's behest managed to update our booking, and we pretty soon ordered a taxi and headed south for dinner. we arrived a bit early and took a short walk, and just as we were about to turn around ran into botchman! it was great seeing him, and particularly great seeing him looking well! (he's been dealing with some health issues over the past few years)

dinner was fantastic. the service was great, the atmosphere was great, and the food was amazing. we all had a really good time - really celebrating our anniversary - we enjoyed every mouthful, and by the time the bill came around i felt that it was absolutely justified. we walked a good way home, then ordered a cab and were treated to a really entertaining cabbie who's big into 70s and 80s music.

it was an absolutely wonderful way to mark ten (eleven) years.

today:

i got up early, but spent most of the day alternating between napping on the couch and reading a few pages of death note. at one point i tried to get up and found myself feeling faint, but i'm feeling better now. in addition to all the resting, gd and mr smear and i played a fair amount of rayman: legends, and right now we're making very serious plans to walk to the beach to find ice cream.