breaking the cycle

 it was the first real weekend in three weekends, though i was really, really tired last by yesterday afternoon. i think that's just because i'm working really hard these days.

i slept awfully and far from enough on what remained of thursday night, woke up yesterday and took mr smear to school, and then shortly afterwards gd dragged me to the mall to do some shopping. i was starting to feel worn down by the time we returned home, and was relieved to have half an hour to myself before picking up mr smear when he called to say that the juggling teacher was MIA. again.

*sigh*

i convinced him to calm down and just wait by the gate, and once the school day was officially over i picked him up and brought him home to change bags before we all headed out to the ayalon mall for purim costume shopping. after some bus shenanigans - waiting almost half an hour before giving up - we grabbed a rental and were there in no time.

we couldn't find a costume mr smear wanted, but we did find him a fake executioner's axe.

which he can't take to school because since october 7th, no costume weapons allowed :/

anyway, i dropped them off at home and returned the car and returned home, and napped hard, and took a hot bath, and then it was dinner time, by the end of which i was literally passing out at the table.

today:

mr smear and i got up around the same time, and i restarted buddy simulator 1984 which he'd begun last night. we had a great time together, but some of the events were quite disturbing and he had trouble going to sleep tonight...

the game's ESRB rating being for teens is... appropriate. i'm only a little way in and i'm first and foremost impressed by the use of lazy writing to disguise a very carefully crafted experience. secondly, what begins slightly creepy is only becoming creepier.

son of a *****, i'm in.

we had a bit of a fight about him coming out with me today... as usual. but he did, and once he was out he was great. we paid our friends a visit for a while - it was only supposed to be a quick stop to drop off the extra calvin & hobbes books and a hand-me-down onesie - but mr smear and their kids were having a good time and then we got into some conversations. eventually, it was time to go and they asked if they could join us, so we all headed out together on our bikes, through the park to the port.

we began at a playground, with mr smear uninterested in using the facilities and deliberately sunning his "herpes eye" (wtaf?!), and afterwards we biked through the port (big mistake) until the crowds proved too much and then we took a quick detour to get to babylon park. as we turned off the main stretch, right after two large women had just walked right in front of us while mr smear's temper was reaching boiling point, he angrily yelled something to the effect of "i HATE that obese people existing is a thing!" [laughs and dies inside simultaneously]

babylon park was a great idea, except that about 45 seconds in mr smear's friend burst into angry tears because her father wouldn't pay for her to use one of the gambling machines. that tantrum went on for a long time, while mr smear played some cool games (he's surprisingly good at the shooting games and he's getting good at the motorcycle ones too), and mr smear and her little brother and i played air hockey, and generally had a good go.

they left before we did, but when we decided we were done we found them still outside, with her refusing to leave. she agreed to go home with us (although we didn't agree to that :P), and we were almost out of the park when mr smear stopped and i had an opportunity to give her a talk about how her dad was protecting her from herself... it seemed to have landed, but she still didn't want to ride home with him so we all split up and i made sure she got home before mr smear and i came home ourselves.

overall, i'm really pleased with mr smear's attitude today and the two of us got exercise and sunshine and had a good time together, and i feel like i parented well even with the other kids. we had a good evening, with a less insane episode of delicious in dungeon, followed by a good chat with my mom and big sister (who's just arrived in cape town and is staying with her for a week).

and then it was bedtime, and the remaining half of an episode of monk that i'd fallen asleep during, and then comforting mr smear, and now... it's late, and we're about to lose an hour of sleep to the clock moving forward.

[checks]

why the fuck did anyone say that the clocks would be moving forward today? it's another few weeks.

either way, i'm tired and i hope i get a good night's sleep.

a hard end to the week

[the jackals are at it again, it's become an all-night thing that starts really early in the evenings. i just caught a glimpse of one of them patrolling our building's garden.]

i'm in-between sleeps, and i can sum up today with a solid "ugh".

the morning was good. it was the first time in a long time that i didn't feel anything hanging over my head. i even played a little of one of the games i picked up yesterday while enjoying an early breakfast (i usually fast until noon), the path. so far, cool concept.

the work day wasn't easy. nobody had time for the PRs i worked on last night, although one guy made a very interesting suggestion which i'll probably look into over the weekend. lunch was delicious (green thai curry) but i ate too much, and the entire afternoon my stomache felt uncomfortable. i made some progress, but nothing that felt meaningful, and the most significant conversation i had (security posture and strategy) had good results, but some of it took place during happy hour when i was legit tipsy and some of it dragged and caused me leave the office late while i was deliberately trying to leave earlier.

and speaking of happy hour, one of our bosses was entertaining a colored-hair liberal and oh my god i'm praying that that's not a new hire. i really don't want to work with people who constantly feel the need to educate everyone on their political ideologies... i can't stop thinking how in the animal world, bright colors are a warning sign to others :/

...

coming home was flustering. i left the office in a rush - "escaped", more like - and immediately caught a bus that would take me home. the buses stop much closer to home than the light rail. but as i got on the bus, i realized that i'd left my computer on my desk. i got off at the next stop, and judged that it would be quicker to walk to the light rail than to an opposing bus stop, and i quickly returned to the office to pick up my laptop and awkwardly repeat my weekend wishes to my coworkers.

and that's when i made the mistake of trying to catch another bus home, because i waited forever (and even took two buses, hoping the stop further down would see a higher frequency), and by the time i eventually got home it was clear that walking the entire distance would have been faster. even though the light rail adds an extra ten minutes of walking, it's by far the fastest way to travel on average.

...

the evening went well, although we watched episode 17 of delicious in dungeon while eating and the level of violence was entirely unexpected. we actually had to check in with mr smear to see if he was okay, and have a talk about whether it was appropriate or not. i'm honestly not sure whether we should continue.

...

but at least he went to bed without drama, and when i was brushing my teeth i was amused to hear him singing himself to sleep :)

...

just as we were settling in for the night / weekend, my boss called me up, apologizing repeatedly for bothering me but informing me that we have a surprise installation. i don't think he was too pleased that i don't know more than he does about how to do the old installations (i've been working on the new ones), but i assured him that i'm happy to assist and then contacted my lead to make sure that he knows that i'm available if he needs anything.

i tried watching an episode of monk after that, but i fell asleep on the couch instead, woken occasionally by work messages though thankfully none of them needed any action.

...

my nose was still giving me trouble all day, this evening i wondered if sick didn't transition into hayfever... but i took antihistamines and it's been a couple of hours with no results so i don't think it's that.

...

i'm seeing antisemitic anti-israel propaganda being floated by members of our cape town congregation and it's distressing. and we're still reeling from the impact of the deceitful "documentary" winning an oscar. it's disgusting and demoralizing.

the good place

i think i slept okay last night, but i was a bit too warm under the duvet (spring is coming). my sinus situation seems a bit better, but it's still not great. i don't know what this means, but whatever it is it's been going on a ridiculously long time now and i'm quite over it.

i know mr smear can get himself to school now, but i quite enjoy walking with him. on my way home, i picked up some stuff from the grocery store. then i ran into one of the parents - i still don't know his name, but it's way too late to ask - and we had a quick chat during which i learned that he works in an adjacent field to mine, which was interesting.

[i've just spent about half an hour trying to find out his name on facebook and linkedin, and i've got nothing to show for it]

once i was back home and mr smear was at school, i discussed last night's shenanigans and gd and i are in sync about how it went down.

i saw that my coworkers were all busy for a lot of the night, and i made a point of enabling work notifications around the clock because i feel bad that i wasn't online for them. i fiddled around with my cibus card, and managed to write up some stuff for ze german, before leaving for the office. it felt good to get that off my to-do list.

the work day was busy, and pleasantly successful. my lead blew my mind describing how he worked around the bugs we'd been seeing - our code was fine, the tools we're using have some issues.

lunch was amazing (pasta via's "mythological vegan").

in addition to achieving another milestone on the project i'm working on, i've just (like, an hour ago) finished up two pieces of "side quest" work. it's fair to say that the lion's share of the work i did today was implemented by AI, and most of that was pretty good and only needed some minor tweaks.

mr smear's class went on a field trip today, and on the bus ride back he FA'd with his phone and FO'd when his teacher confiscated it. he was very, very upset - hopefully he'll learn from the experience :P

i came home "on time" today (for the first time this week, i believe) and helped mr smear with his homework. in general it was a great evening, and my absolute favorite part of it was during shower / toothbrushing time with the three of us singing along at the top of our lungs to kiss' i was made for lovin' you and queen's bohemian rhapsody.

mr smear went to bed without any drama, and then gd and i enjoyed another episode of monk before she went to bed and i got back to business.

relative

it's all relative. gd woke up at 4am freaking out about something and waited until i woke up to confront me with it. so our day began with a very intense talk about relationship stuff, some of which was very hard, but which ultimately ended up in a good place.

and then, on my way to work, i realized that i'd said something untrue. irrelevant, but still untrue. so when i finally got home, after a very long, very intense day, i told her and sparked a new round of freak out that also took a long and difficult argument to get through.

but we got through it, and we seem to be good, and the rest of the evening was fine.

...

well, it was fine until mr smear started being very aggressively scared of the dark. i'm grateful that gd went to bed and let me handle it, because although it took about an hour to get through, mr smear and i both went through some important steps together and he eventually turned in with a relatively calm vibe.

parenting is hard.

...

taking mr smear to school this morning was pleasant, gd and i had a good morning before i left for work. i stopped on the way to the office to pick up a bunch of meds at the pharmacy - half an hour of my life just waiting in a queue for the only pharmacist on duty - and taking those meds when i arrived but still struggling with being snotty all day :/

work today was, as i said, long and intense. i fixed an important typo that our AI copilot had propagated throughout our codebase, i participated in an important meeting and i feel like i contributed, i completed two important pieces of work, and at the very end of the day established that something we thought was working was, in fact, completely broken.

my lead was a bit distressed just before i left, we kind of agreed to figure everything out in the morning. and one of our coworkers was shocked when i couldn't help him with something in kubernetes, i wonder if i shouldn't take him aside tomorrow and explain that i'm still new to all this :P

i had stuff i wanted to do this evening but i've been... distracted. i think i'm going to go to bed soon.

the FO part

it's the middle of the night, i got up to transition from couch to bed and i just had to get this down first.

it's been a day.

...

i slept about half the night last night, which is half the night more than i expected to be able to sleep. around 6am i jumped out of bed in a combination of fear and rage, and the first thing i did as soon as i was able was to sit down with mr smear and review his report of what happened the previous day. i got him to demonstrate what he experienced, and i understood exactly what happened.

i sent an update to his teacher, and i wrote that i'm beginning to understand that they're listening more to the bullies than to the victims, and that mr smear isn't merely inventing things to be afraid of.

i was supposed to have a call with my doctor this morning about my sleep issues, but gd and i were in such a state that i missed it and had to reschedule. she had just raised a really good point - everything we're going through is precisely what everyone the world over is trying to call attention to: we all say "no bullying" and "no violence", but when it's right in front of us we want to believe that it's not happening right until it's too late and there's an injury or worse.

i called the anti-bullying org we spoke to a few weeks ago, and the councillor assured me that they would speak to the school, but also gave me advice about how to help mr smear directly. which was reassuring, because it's stuff that we're already doing as much as we can.

after trying to write (and arguing about) the right message in french to yesterday's bully's mother (because then gd and her could communicate in mother tongue) for a while, i took over and sent the following:

hi ___, i hope you're all well

we are aware that [your son] and [mr smear] are not getting along, but recently [your son] has been more focused on him and yesterday he threatened him with violence. we would really appreciate it if you could talk to him before things get out of hand 🙏

so... let me tell you that it was a very pleasant surprise when she responded in a way that made it clear that she would be dealing with this. 

i updated mr smear's therapist right before entering my office, and tried to focus on my work.

...

it was a really nice morning, weather-wise. i went to work without a sweater and i was comfortable. hello, march!

the new guy and i got a tour of the "warehouse" this morning. on exiting the warehouse, our guide let our a loud fart and i immediately responded with a "bless you", and i spent the next couple of minutes being amused that the other guys were being cool about it too 🤣

it was a productive morning, and i merged my first complete PR by lunchtime.

...

lunch began socially, but was immediately interrupted with full-scale drama. with everything else that's been going on, gd and i had forgotten that mr smear needed to leave school early today for a rescheduled appointment with his therapist, and so i needed to get the message to him even though he's not allowed to use his phone. at the same time, gd needed to drop her lunch and rush to the school because the security guard wouldn't let him out without a parent.

what happened next was a total clusterfuck.

mr smear got the message, but by the time gd arrived at the school he'd been let out without supervision and had disappeared. we use family link to keep track of him, and that was when we discovered that he'd left his phone at home this morning 🤦

gd was in pain (her legs are hurting a lot) and in a flat panic, and i sent her to check if he'd gone to his tutor by mistake while i packed up my lunch and got ready to rent a vehicle to go searching the streets for him.

i was putting on my shoes when she called to say she'd found him - he had indeed gone to his tutor's.

jesus fucking christ.

i was a shell of a man by the time i got back to the lunch table, trying to process what had just happened and follow the conversations and be sociable when demanded of me.

holy shit.

anyway.

...

follow-up drama: gd dropped him off at his therapist - on time - but then got lost trying to take a bus somewhere after i'd told her to take a taxi. at this point she was so upset that she didn't want to go to her therapist, but i convinced her that of all the times to skip a therapy appointment, this was NOT the time. i'm very glad she listened.

...

i picked mr smear up from his appointment and talked to him about what we'd all been through. i took him to my office, where one of my coworkers immediately jumped on the opportunity to show him some of our toys, which was really cool! right until he got into trouble for flying a drone in the office, but mr smear got a drone's eye view of our workstations before that happened and he definitely enjoyed it :)

overall, having him in the office was a positive experience even though we weren't prepared for it and he spent (in my opinion) way too much time on the phones (although i did get him to switch from games to reading by the end). and he even helped me a little with setting up one of the computers :)

the rest of my work day was setting up a computer that we'd thought was DOA, completing the first iteration of the scripts i've been working on and finally testing them out before handing over the remainder of the deployment to my lead. it was a real deployment that needs to be installed soon, and although it didn't go smoothly, i proved myself up to the challenge and i felt appreciated afterwards.

my lead and i drove each other crazy for a little bit, too, but it felt good-natured and we got everything working in the end.

i really do feel like i'm where i need to be.

...

mr smear and i had a pleasant time getting home, with him leading for the most part. we got home just in time for dinner and a delicious in dungeon episode, and a long chat with my mom while eating too much dessert* that i truly feel i deserved.

* not just salted oreos, but salted oreos with vegan marshmallows squished on top

...

between getting mr smear into bed and falling asleep watching another episode of monk, i had a long chat with mr smear's homeroom teacher and it was quite reassuring. when interrogated, the bully admitted to what he did and he received a very stern warning. additionally, it sounds like my message to the principal and contact from the org i spoke to have lit a fire under their asses, and it looks like the school's going to be taking additional measures to ensure the kids' safety.

we'll see, of course, but it's encouraging nonetheless.

...

it's been a day.

parents vs the school vs the bullies

 holy fuck. today was a mostly positive day, but it's been overshadowed by mr smear's bullying situation and i can't stop fretting and second-guessing how we're handling it (or how we've been handling it).

parenting is fucking hard.

so in today's entry in the bullying saga, one of the kids who was harrassing mr smear on friday tried to kick a football to his face. fortunately mr smear managed to dodge, but the fact that there was no staff around when they know there's a violence issue just blows my mind.

i wrote a letter to the new principal to warn her that from this point onwards, if any kid hurts my child physically we're going straight to the police. tomorrow morning we're going to send the same warning to the bully's mother (in french, because she's french so it's easier for gd to "connect").

*heavy sigh*

this is so fucked up. and i keep thinking of the kind of fuckery we saw in the series black space.

...

the above kinda takes the wind outta my sails, but i'll try to express how good today was anyway. i mean, it started shitty, with a fight with mr smear because he didn't understand that i didn't understand that his mouth was in pain from waiting for me to wash my hands when he hadn't finished brushing my teeth. we got through that, but it was unpleasant, and then on the way to school he started whining (as usual) that he was too sick to go (his cough has mostly gone, so i don't know if he was putting on a show or coughing for real at the time).

but it was the class party to say farewell to their homeroom teacher, so he couldn't miss it.

it also ended on a shitty note (separate from the bullying stuff) because he didn't want to do his homework, also as usual. but gd and i both threatened him, and yelled at him, and then yelled and threatened that if he doesn't learn how to learn and cooperate he not going to be able to do any of the crazy stuff he wants to do, and he eventually - sulkily - got through it.

brilliantly, i might add. learning math in a different language is hard, and when he stops fighting he's actually really good with the material. it would just be a lot easier for everyone if we didn't need to go through a shit ceremony every day.

parenting is fucking hard.

...

right, now i can finally talk about the good stuff. i've hit a kind of internal reset button, and i've got my mind around where i am and what i need to do. and what i need to do is work hard, and extra. that... that feels different.

lesson one: being amongst the earliest in the office in the morning means that the coffee machine doesn't coffee because it's not warmed up.

i had a meeting with my boss and lead, and both of them seemed happy with what i'm doing and how i'm doing it, which was very reassuring. i had a 1-on-1 with the woman who sits next to me, and aside from getting a handle on what she's about she was very appreciative of my approach to things, which was very reassuring.

over lunch i learned the ages of some of my coworkers, and one of them may have been slightly offended by me referring to them as "children"... but by the end of the day i was pretty sure we're cool. partially because i passed on the earworm for dumb ways to die which someone else had given me earlier.

i made really good progress, and i ended the day essentially having achieved my stated goal for the day. amongst other things. that felt really good. not least of which because the article i published two days ago proved crucial to understanding the problem i needed to solve 🤘

...

oh, and today i came up with a programming dad joke in hebrew that i'm particularly proud of:

אם אתה דופק את הקומפיילר, זה אומר שאתה מהדרפאקר?

...

i'm tired, but i've watched a fun episode of monk with gd and i'm going to try to make some script magic before going to bed. god knows if i'll be able to sleep tonight anyway.

...

while trying to publish this post, i received a message from mr smear's teacher, who claims that this is just another case of mr smear misinterpreting an "accident".

not today.

hacking

 last night i began a throat thing, possibly an infection, and i've been struggling since. i spent a lot of today resting, and i'm praying i'll be okay by tomorrow. and tomorrow morning is going to be early and complicated regardless of how i'm feeling.

it's bothering me that i've been sick pretty much every weekend for the last month.

otherwise, it was a day of inscryption (with mr smear on the ps4), and a heck of a lot of fiddling with powershell and devcontainers to get cdktf working on my windows machine. and gd and i rewatched yesterday's episode of monk after we finally got mr smear to go to sleep - he appears to be nursing a fever himself :(

everyone's going on about zelenskyy's brutal "talk" with trump and vance yesterday, but i'm just suspicious. nothing anyone is doing is making much sense these days...

dust in, dust out

the jackals are howling again - they've been a lot more brazen the past few days, and they've been going at it at all hours. also, very confrontational with dogs being walked even during daylight (O_o)

should we be worried about mr smear?

yesterday:

yesterday began with a fight - kind of the usual - between gd and mr smear about getting out of bed. and then mr smear stayed home again, i tried to take him to school but he threw up just outside the gate (ewww!) and so we turned around and walked back home, stopping on a bench for a good talk.

oh, yeah - and a handyman came in to clean up the underside of our kitchen sink, which entailed us clearing out, cleaning and repacking everything while simultaneously getting mr smear ready for school. the fun part was using sealant on a lifted edge of the sink :P

i started my word day cleaning the dust off everything after the workers were supposed to be done, but within a very short while it was clear that they were far from done, and all of our belongings and our lungs were coated with yet another layer of dust that i'm praying doesn't include asbestos.

it was a frustrating day of tweaking kubernetes installations and annoying the guy i'm reporting to, who was working remotely which made it feel worse. but i was also involved in some product discussions and i feel like i contributed.

eventually i hit partial success, just in time to interview another coworker and dig in to the all-hands / happy hour treats.

i didn't have another "nap attack" episode yesterday, but i did make an appointment to discuss them with my doctor.

as has become standard practice, i came home and sat with mr smear for his maths and reading. unfortunately, he got frustrated with how i explained a word to him and gd - who'd been holding on to the morning's grievance, amongst other things - completely lost it.

the day ended with a different kind of fight, or family meeting, or family meeting with lots of yelling, but it feels like we got through to mr smear and gd expressed some stuff that's obviously been hurting her for a long time. as she said - sometimes it's only when you start to heal from something that you really begin to realize the depths of the trauma.

anyway, it wasn't a fun experience for anyone but i feel like we all were in a better place by the time mr smear left the table to brush his teeth and climb into bed.

...

i passed out watching monk, dragged myself to bed when gd went, and slept fitfully through the night, dreaming a lot of very realistic dreams about returning to the army.

today:

this time mr smear actually went to school, and i went in after him to find someone to help me understand why it was so hard for him to get to his friday juggling classes. eventually i got some hints, and i sent them to mr smear on whatsapp, and i returned home.

gd went to her sewing class, and i spent much of my morning trying to do something constructive* while my stomache did flips for no apparent reason. or maybe it's related to the fact that i seem to be coming down with something - i don't think my sinuses and throat are going haywire just from the dust exposure.

* i surprised myself by actually succeeding, i published an article about apt-key being deprecated

until i received a phone call from mr smear, telling me that he'd been in a classroom by himself (he hadn't seen / had chosen not to see my messages) and was accosted by two of the bullies in his class. understanding the worst, i managed to get him to go to his juggling class in spite of how furious i was with him for giving anyone an opportunity to hurt him (not as furious as i was with the bullies, and not that i was blaming him, which i explained to him later), and on my way to the school to pick him up i consulted with my mom about whether it makes sense to go to the police when the school's clearly not willing or able to protect our children.

i think that's exactly what i'm going to do from now on.

fortunately, when i sat him down and got the details out of him it turned out that the bullying was only harassment, not assault, which was a huge relief. and aside from that incident it appears that he actually had a pretty good day.

we walked home, and the two bullies were walking across the road from us. i awkwardly gave them angry side-eye, which they noticed, with my tongue between my teeth. in retrospect, i handled that wrong and i should have been giving them an evil smile instead.

next time.

mr smear switched bags* and we caught a bus to azrieli to meet up with gd and buy underwear. and snacks. oh! on the way back from dropping mr smear off at school this morning i picked up a couple of things, one of which being pistachio-covered cashews. which seems ridiculous, but even more ridiculous is how much like cookies it tastes.

* one day, we pray, he's not going to need to carry an epipen around with him wherever he goes

the rest of the afternoon has been pretty quiet, only slightly interrupted by a call with ze german who i've been trying to help... it's not that i don't want to help him, but i'm completely out of bandwidth while he doesn't really have anyone else for what i'm assisting him with.

...

i've spent a lot of time these past couple of weeks trying to get my head around what i'm doing for work, who i'm working with, what the expectations are. it's been a difficult time personally, but i feel like i'm going to need to start opening the throttle and doing a lot more than my nine-to-five. it's also been made clear that i'm expected to go on-site occasionally, which i've assured gd won't be unsafe even though i'm not entirely confident that that's true.

...

politically it was a difficult week, or couple of weeks. between the stories (and eulogy) from the recently released hostages to the amount of disinformation online - specifically mastodon and vimeo, which make it impossible to report.

the dusting

 i feel like i managed to clear a lot off my plate the past couple of days, which has made me a lot less anxious. having said that, my morning plans were thoroughly disrupted when gd instructed me to go on an urgent pharmacy run right before my dentist appointment...

mr smear woke up still coughing his bad cough, so he stayed home again today. we're really hoping he'll be going back to school tomorrow, both because it's effectively his last day with his teacher before she goes on maternity leave, and because i really need to work from home and i don't really feel comfortable doing that when he's around.

on the way to the pharmacy, i crossed the same intersection that i'd had trouble with yesterday, and two cars - one a taxi - didn't stop. i think i need to make more noise about this.

fortunately, the wait for the pharmacy was unusually short. i made it home in time to pick up my bag and hop on a bus to the dentist.

while i was waiting, my number was called for a different room, so i launched myself across the offices thinking that they'd changed my room and that someone else was taking my turn. instead, it turned out that their system uses duplicate numbers, which i complained is confusing. the receptionists don't see anything wrong with that :/

i didn't really appreciate the dentist's sense of humor, nor did his assistant, but whatever. the experience overall wasn't unpleasant, he removed a mark on my reconstructed incisor and assured me that the nerve pain i occasionally experience isn't actually from the tooth's filling, but rather from the exposed root and gum.

great.

...

the bus to work got stuck in traffic and had to take a detour. i walked into the office that was practically empty because all the smart people were working from home. i worked really hard until i was finally able to take a late lunch - i found a good falafel place close by - and then returned late for a very important meeting that i hadn't realized was in my calendar.

my suspicion of narcolepsy yesterday was strengthened by another attack during that meeting. i need to get myself evaluated.

by the end of the afternoon, it was clear to me that we should have been strongly discouraged from coming to the office while the renovation is taking place, and that all of our desks should have been covered in plastic before they began. what an absolute shit-show. i hope i didn't ingest any asbestos. i'm always nervous about that because that's ultimately what killed my father, and i've been exposed a number of times.

...

i came home just after gd left for her acupuncturist, who's apparently excellent. i did a little work in between helping mr smear with a maths exercise he was struggling with, and while we had one of our usual arguments about him restarting it whenever he made a mistake, we both communicated much better than usual and he eventually heard me out and tried it my way. with a little twist of his own: it's an exercise that requires the child to have a good handle on multiplication tables, and when he made a mistake with a number he then practiced the multiplication table entries for its factors before trying again.

and it worked! he was clearly proud of himself for getting through it, and i told him he'd earned each and every star on that one ^_^

just before dinner arrived we did his hebrew reading, which wasn't as much of a struggle as usual but he still didn't want to do it before he eventually did it and felt good about doing it.

we never learn :P

...

dinner was great, very salad-y but delicious and enjoyed by all. and then it was bedtime, and me and gd watching monk time, some of which i passed out for. then she went to bed and i watched a bunch of stuff on youtube (mostly political these days, but some ai and inscryption strategies too), and now i'm posting this and considering my next move. bed? reading? gaming? probably nothing too practical.

narc-olepsy and hydra-tion 2

 [part 2 / 2 because of the label limitations]

over lunch i was asked about being vegan, and i made a conscious effort to not be preachy. it was hard :P

narcolepsy. i'm considering the possibility that my occasional mid-day sleep attacks are a symptom of narcolepsy. which, according to dr google, can present in my general sleep disturbances and rapid entry into a dream state. i wonder if i should get tested for this?

one of my coworkers was introducing me to a whole new set of things, speaking rapidly, for a long time, while i tried desperately not to fall asleep and out of my chair.

i spent a bit of time on the phone with my insurance broker dealing with pension arrangements and health coverage...

in spite of everything else i did manage to do a little work during my day at the office. in the late afternoon, contractors came in and began bashing down a wall, and i pretty quickly decided that i needed to get the hell out of there. i really hope i didn't inhale any asbestos...

gd and mr smear appear to have had a pretty good day, she tried a new arrangement with screen time between homework / chores and it seems to have worked out well.

i managed to get a bit of work done in the evening, and mr smear did a little bit of hebrew reading before dinner which went well.

i hesitated for a while before deciding not to go rollerblading tonight. instead, i played some inscryption, gd and i watched another episode of monk, and i did dishes. now that i'm done with my mind-dump, it's just struck midnight and i think i should probably go to bed.

narc-olepsy and hydra-tion 1

[part 1 / 2 because of the label limitations]

i spent longer on my cdktf repo last night than intended, but i hit the hay with a sense of accomplishment. i managed about two sentences of of mice and men before realizing that i was too tired to understand anything, and promptly went to sleep.

mr smear woke up coughing this morning, he was doing a bit better but definitely wasn't ready to return to school. instead, he pulled maus off the shelf and started reading it, and he appears to be really getting into it, both in content and in style.

i was sad to learn that art spiegelman has been turned by pro-palestinian propaganda, and - like gabor maté - i suspect their trauma has made them hypersensitive and vulnerable to our enemies' cries of "genocide".

while he read that, i read the first chapter of of mice and men. so far, highly enjoyable.

it was bitterly cold this morning, and i was dressed in a double layer with gloves and my hoodies up for my walk to the post office to pick up gd's new purse.

i asked mr smear to "fix" my water bottle that he did a number on the other day. i'm not sure he followed any of my requests / instructions, but the overall effect is cool so i took to it work anyway :)

i messaged mr smear's hebrew tutor and told her we were taking a break, he's doing well enough now and it's a huge amount of money that we can't really afford...

on the way to work i stopped by the clinic, almost getting run over again by a taxi at the same intersection. after yelling and chasing down the driver - who actually apologized - i decided that instead of filing another complaint about him personally, i need to take this up with the municipality. so now i'm being bounced between departments trying to get them to do something to make the intersection safer.

i had a good meeting with my boss today. he wants me to go on-site sometime soon, so i warned gd and tried to reassure her that i'll be safe...

static electricity and spontaneously bleeding hands: i actually had to run off to find hand lotion for the office, i've never experienced that before.

speaking of surprises, i spoke to our landlord who offered to send a handyman to help us with the flaky sink, which is quite something!

[continued...]

more sick, less slow

 today was a long day. it was hard, but i'm proud of my achievements. not least of which was convincing my coworker / lead to persist with aws eks and (it feels like) we're now almost done getting our convoluted system working.

mr smear woke up sicker than yesterday. we started the day with delicious in dungeon before i left for work, which started off weak but has become really, really good. i've had the opening theme stuck in my head all day, and i'm not complaining.

the work day was... fighting with someone else's git rebase (and a failure with .gitignore), shadowing an interviewer, learning about our business development strategy, and battling with werf and eks. we all had lunch much later than anyone had planned because we ran into a series of mishaps with lipgirl's order, for a while i thought *i* was the one holding everyone up and it was a great relief to discover i wasn't :P

i rushed home for dinner (we had just enough time for another delicious in dungeon episode), said good night to my mom, then said good night to my wife and son and headed to the school for a parents meeting about screen time.

it was an interesting meeting, and the only negative thing was sitting two seats away from mr smear's bully's dad dad and having to avoid looking at him to try to stay civil and drama free. i wasn't up for an hour and a half of whatever we were going to be doing, but that time surprisingly flew by and i made a real impact when i spoke about gaming and a bunch of the parents had no idea how unavoidable and serious a danger that could be. a couple of parents actually asked me to give a talk about that, which i guess i'm up for.

it's late, but i kind wanna try getting a guide repo together for cdktf, which i'm really beginning to appreciate. i also want to start reading of mice and men, which i've never encountered before but which came up in an office conversation about literature this morning.

oh, and thanks, sudden shoulder spasm. i don't know what i would be doing without you :/

slow but steady

it was a long day.

mr smear woke up sick and stayed home, but wasn't impressed that he had tons of homework to do. aside from an incident or two, he apparently did quite well in spite of himself. unfortunately, he had a hard time going to bed and i don't think i handled it as well as i could have.

gd hurt her neck somehow, and her leg hasn't recovered very well from her treatment last week. this sucks.

i went to work early so that i could join the parent guidance session from there. it felt constructive.

our kubernetes expert managed to do what i was supposed to be doing, and i turned my attention on integrating cdktf and eks. it was a lot of small obstacles, but i got the basics of cdktf worked out and we'll find out in the morning if my eks efforts were worthwhile. it felt like a constructive day.

additionally, i'm about to start shadowing the interviewers.

i didn't want burgers for lunch, because while they're good burgers, i'm trying to stick to my diet and the previous three days were cheat days... so i walked to the sarona market to pick up hot sauce, but the store we usually get it from doesn't stock it any more :(

i couldn't find anything there i wanted to eat (that didn't cost twice as much as it should), so i ended up picking up hummus instead. it was a good lunch.

i think i'm starting another cough.

it started raining when i was almost home, wearing my new shoes :/

...

i've finally walked away from a toxic comment thread with a jewish woman living in israel who's completely taken up our enemy's propaganda and made it her own. i find it disturbing and absolutely revolting 🤮

late to bed

 oh, shit - as i begin typing this i realize i still have a bunch of dishes to do... i just spoke to my sister for almost an hour, then played a bit more inscryption - i had stuff i needed to do, but it's almost 11.30pm and i'm just not doing it.

gd's pizza dinner went down well. we watched the first episode of monk after putting mr smear to bed, which is really good.

blowing out

after the additional depravity we witnessed [thursday], and then another attempted mass murder that was miraculously averted [thursday] night, i'm seeing a lot of antisemitism and disinformation on my feeds and it's extremely distressing.

i don't know how to digest what's been going on for the past year and a half - or, more accurately, what's been going on for decades that's finally come to light - nor where things are going, but we've already got too much to grieve for.

to everyone who's got opinions about this tiny little country but doesn't understand where those opinions are coming from: shame on you. for everyone who understands what kind of monster we're dealing with - israeli or not, jewish or not - we have to stick together. there is a great evil in this world, and its greatest trick is convincing the west that it's good, and that good is bad.

it's on us to put an end to this. god knows how, but we have to put an end to this. shabbat shalom 💔 🇮🇱 🕯🕯

in addition to everything else, someone gd believed was a good, reasonable friend sent aggressive messages last night, and that's not the first "friend" to put politics first after being drawn in by anti-west propaganda.

yesterday:

i've been really tired both yesterday and today, and napping or sleeping a lot doesn't seem to be helping. oh! that reminds me - at work on thursday, i was taking care of the dog while someone else cleaned up some broken glass when one of my coworkers walked in. i got up to greet him but standing up too fast made me start losing consciousness, and i literally had to guess where his hand was to shake it because i'd lost the lower half of my vision :/

i rested while mr smear was at school and gd at her sewing lesson. i got up to pick him up from school - he claims he couldn't find his juggling class, so his fridays are become a slack day - and we picked up the new vacuum cleaner and bussed to meet gd at azrieli. in spite of the terrible service, we found a replacement that seems much better and with that we returned home.

gd and i left mr smear to his devices (literally :P) and went to pick up supplements, shoes (to replace the ones that got washed out on thursday), and some groceries.

i was tiiiiiirrrreeeeeed and the walk back home felt loooooonnnnng.

all i remember from that point on was resting and playing pony island with mr smear. and at dinner we watched delicious in dungeon, and after dinner i crashed on the couch before mr smear had even started getting ready for bed.

today:

mr smear woke me up at our normal wake-up time (7am), but i was still feeling really sleepy. i had coffee, played some inscryption and tried not to think too much about the hostage return (apparently all the live hostages have now been returned, but i don't really believe anything about anything any more, which i guess means that in my case the "active measures" were entirely successful).

then i passed out on the couch for a while, eventually waking up for a bit of a delicious in dungeon marathon with the family. some of which i passed in and out of consciousness for.

now it's coffee and play-time again, after a solid roughhousing session that mr smear initiated and i definitely didn't have energy for. it's been a cold and cloudy day and we've no intention of going outside whatsoever.

the rain

nationally, today was a very painful one: the bibas family's bodies were returned. i've said it before, and i'll say it again - every hostage taken is a tragedy. alive or dead, returned or not. every victim is a tragedy, and every hostage is a tragedy, and there is no outcome that will make anything that happened since october 7th a victory.

...

today began in the middle of the night, when gd caught mr smear on his phone. according to family link, he'd been playing with it for over an hour at that point... ignoring the angry disruption at the time, he was entirely uncooperative once his alarm went off so it was a double-bad morning.

in addition to waking up exhausted, i was also stressed about getting his art school application sorted out. i rushed out of the house to walk to the school with him, and managed to get past the security guard to pay the receptionist a visit.

first things first, she told me in a particularly sarcastic and condescening manner that i should've taken the lack of response to my email as a hint that i shouldn't have bothered sending the email in the first place. as much as that got under my skin, i recognized that she's the gatekeeper and managed to keep my mouth shut.

i can't tell you what my face was saying, though.

i completed the form - she did assist me, at least - and then learned that mr smear's homeroom teacher was needed to complete their one, but she had the day off. so that was a fuck-up, but she assured me that they would try to figure something out. i asked her if she could please let me know when the form was submitted to the municipality, and she told me that i'd just have to trust her to get the job done.

did i mention she's the gatekeeper, and that i knew that i needed to be polite and respectful? again, i don't know what my face was saying, but i thanked her profusely before leaving the office.

...

at that point, the skies opened, and i was caught in a thunderstorm with the rain pelting down, with no umbrella and no boots. i ran to the supermarket, getting thoroughly soaked along the way, but of course they don't sell umbrellas. i hung out there for a bit until the shower ended, then splashed home.

my toes are blue from the permanent marker washing off my sneakers. i put tea bags inside them, and i'm hoping they're okay. i guess i need to go shopping for new ones tomorrow...

...

i had a long zoom call with an insurance broker, which i pretended to be interested in even though i'm not leaving my current one. perhaps their quote will prove helpful somehow. then i left for work, this time with boots and brolly.

...

work: sweet doggo at work a plus. lots of back and forth on my task, definite learning happening. meeting a couple more coworkers, eating pad thai for a very late lunch (as part of the pastafarian prayer for mr smear's art school application), and ridiculously good vegan happy hour treats that i brought home to share with gd and mr smear.

let's call today a cheat day.

...

in the afternoon, i was relieved to receive an update from mr smear's homeroom teacher informing me that the application was delivered! in addition to giving us something to celebrate, that means that i can reframe my shoes being damaged as a reasonable cost of giving my son a chance to get into the school :P

the hebrew reading this evening wasn't great, and by that i mean that mr smear didn't cooperate, but the actual reading itself was pretty good when it happened. dinner was great, we talked about a bunch of things and one thing in particular stood out - mr smear's best friend's sister came to their class, and some of the girls in their class were really mean to her. mr smear was pleased to report that a teacher came and gave the mean girls hell, and he sent his friend a message asking if she was okay and he received a grateful one back.

so that's good.

...

post-bedtime and my own shave - toothbrush - shower time, i've played some inscryption and i'm now feeling rather tired and getting ready for bed. it's been a big day. it's been a huge week.

stickers and scribbles

 okay, i'm tired. but i'm also agitated and frustrated - mr smear's school has been utterly unresponsive for more than two days and tomorrow's the deadline to register him for the art school. so tomorrow's going to be started with angry phone calls but, at the end of the day, it's really not in my hands...

i eventually climbed into bed after 6am, and the morning was really hard. so hard, in fact, that i skipped on taking mr smear to school - on the one hand i'm really impressed that we're at the point where he can go to school by himself, but on the other i'm rather disappointed because i quite enjoy the opportunity to chat on the way to school.

the office was really quiet today - one of the bosses kept repeating that, until at one point i offered to put some heavy metal on and she quickly assured me it was fine :P

i asked lipgirl if we had any stickers (swag), and she enthusiastically introduced me to the office label printer. omg i hadn't realized that label printers have evolved so much!

i learned stuff today, very slowly but surely. it's all about a crash-course in kubernetes right now.

i was so desperate for lunch that - believing that the order would take a while to arrive - i scarfed down the previous day's leftovers for breakfast. which was more food than i'd thought, and then a few minutes later a massive burrito arrived for me... and i ate it :/

gd called me in an angry panic, the new vaccum cleaner arrived and she couldn't figure out how to work it, so she wanted to take it back immediately. i've convinced her to let me give it a go first...

in the afternoon i returned home to pick up mr smear and take him to his final psych evaluation session (i sneaked photos of the school's form, that'll make for interesting reading). inspired by the morning's sticker session, i thought it would be cool if he drew something with a sharpie on my fancy water bottle, but he didn't follow the (very simple) instructions and started scrawling something inappropriate. both gd and i were upset with him, and to his credit he did feel bad, but at bedtime i proposed that we turn it into a bit of a graffiti project in the morning and he seems into it.

while waiting for him, i went back to the office thinking i'd continue working, but i had an issue with the coffee machine and ended up in an interesting 1-on-1 with someone i hadn't met before; i'd spent all day thinking that i just couldn't remember him :P

i picked up mr smear (he apparently did well) and we returned home, and between his shower and dinner i managed to get him through two significantly advanced paragraphs of harry potter. *i'm* learning as we go, and he's building confidence, particularly with the stuff that's more his level. this was definitely a good idea.

i had a salad (because of the overeating) and we watched the simpsons, then called my mom to say goodnight. once i'd showered and brushed my teeth i joined mr smear for calvin & hobbes, and i've spent the past couple of hours taking care of random items, watching youtube and ignoring a bunch of stuff on my to-do list.

i suspect that i should go to bed very soon, but i feel like i can't get my head into or out of anything right now.

day three

mr smear: went on a field trip today, forgot his hat and it was really hot and sunny 🤦

but he got home safely by himself for the second time, which is big.

gd: seems to be recovering pretty well from her sunday evening procedure 🤞🙏

me: i was highly alert on sunday, but the past two days i've been pretty tired so i drank the strong coffee... and more of it than i should have.

1. i ended the day with what feels like a fairly good grasp of what i'm doing.

2. my boss called me in to consult with me about one of my previous teammates, which caught me off guard. i have some mixed feelings but i'd be happy to work with him again.

3. later my boss and i had a 1-on-1, and every single thing he told me about what we're aiming for was exciting! not least of which being that we might end up working with the guys i interviewed with a couple of years ago. and i'm feeling pretty confident about my role and what he expects from me.

...

i got up a couple of hours ago because my back was hurting and i was having trouble sleeping. i found yesterday's grocery order outside our door, with the stuff that was supposed to be cold not cold anymore :(

i tried to sleep on the couch, but that didn't help much, and now i've been messing around online for a while... and i'm not sure whether i should carry on, or whether i should try to get back into bed. i'm playing a lot of total minesweeper, lately i can't seem to get my head into anything other than that or inscryption...

day two

 i didn't sleep enough, but i think i slept relatively well when i did... although i might've needed to come sleep on the couch for a while, i don't really remember.

i don't recall much from the morning, either, really, but i did pick up mr smear's new coat from the post office, which led to minor encounters with "humanity" (i got a guy to move his massive bike from right outside the door without trouble, and i kept relatively cool about the woman who jumped the line by taking a number when nobody else had).

i initiated the process of registering mr smear for the art school, which i'm hoping was in time. 

after days of being messed around by the plumber our landlords put me in touch with, he admitted that he had no idea how to help us with the sink, but he also made it clear that it's an old sink that needs to be replaced, which was useful information to have.

i called the dentist to try to postpone my upcoming appointment that i've been waiting months for, and while i was on hold i fantasized about the moment someone picked up and putting them on hold. i got so in the mode - i was on hold for a while - that when a human being finally answered i found myself uncontrollably speaking like an automated message :P

between various chores / admin thingies, i left the apartment a bit later than i'd planned, but it's much quicker to get to the new office so it wasn't a big deal.

the work day was interesting, not easy but not difficult either. socially it was a bit awkward - i haven't got a handle on who's who yet - but there was a fun moment during a process meeting when the four of us in the room suddenly realized we all served in the same branch of the army and the language changed immediately :P

something very special happened today: it was the first time that mr smear came home all by himself.

i made a point of not drinking the "good" coffee, but i found myself dragging a bit in the first meeting and really struggling in the second.

i walked to the supermarket, picked up snacks for mr smear's field trip tomorrow, came home and did some hebrew reading with him, we had a good dinner (not easy, but good, as we had to coerce him into eating the green beans and asparagus) and watched the simpsons, said good night to my mom, and then entered bedtime...

... which was complicated, he had trouble getting to sleep for a long time.

i think i've caught up on all the stuff i needed to get done this evening, and i think i'm going to go to bed shortly.

the first day

 i managed to sleep alright last night, but i was pretty anxious this morning. i made sure that mr smear understood what the meeting was going to be about, and i'll be honest, by the time it was done i was quite relieved that i hadn't posted anything on social media.

after quite the interrogation - including a hilarious part for which i had to bite my tongue* - we ascertained that the social boycott we thought was happening isn't really happening. but we also established that the bullying and violence is very real, and that they need to make a move on dealing with it. additionally, they pretty much convinced me that moving mr smear out of the class right now isn't the best move (mainly because his current teacher and her incoming replacement are, to their minds, the most sympathetic / best suited to deal with mr smear) and that it's worth waiting for the recommendation from the evaluation (which should be concluding this week).

* mr smear was pretty insistent on how unfair it was that his bully was recognized for doing good schoolwork, even after we'd all explained that it was irrelevant :P

the meeting didn't produce an amazing feeling by any stretch, but i walked out feeling like things were relatively okay.

the meeting ended much later than i'd hoped, so i scrambled to get to my new office as soon as i could. the morning was spent meeting lots of interesting people, getting the tour, beginning to get my computer and office access set up, joining my first standup, followed by a very long but surprisingly intelligible presentation on our architectural overview.

it's been an extremely long time since i was introduced to a system that just makes sense. it's elegant, and i feel considerably more at ease about what i'm getting into.

i went with my (for now) manager to get breakfast / lunch (it was around 3pm already), and until i tucked in i hadn't actually realized just how hungry i was. and i managed to stop eating a little after hitting the "too much" point, even though it was absolutely delicious.

after we returned, i made myself a (really strong) coffee and resumed setting up my machine, at which point gd called to inform me that she couldn't find the authorization form for her nerve block... so i sighed loudly, and rushed home to grab it and my family and walk to the pain clinic.

the process was, from start to finish, more straightforward than usual and much quicker than anticipated.

...

the taxi home, though, was completely ridiculous. we were picked up by an old lady taxi driver, who immediately took offense that she could smell that gd had just smoked cannabis, complaining that it would damage her lungs. this turned into a very weird argument, at which point i pulled out my phone and she said "you think google's going to convince me?!"

once we'd established that it wasn't dangerous, she went on a tirade about some (probably fictitious) bride in her wedding dress who refused to get in her taxi once because she smelled... weed? cigarettes? who knows. so i asked if this had occurred once, or if it had occurred many times. to which she responded: "if i told you only once, what would that mean?"

"that she had issues."

ooooh, shit. the taxi driver began berating me for daring to judge a stranger i'd never met. eventually, still very heatedly, she asked "and what difference would it make if it was many passengers?"

"that their behavior was somewhat normal, and therefore somewhat reasonable."

at that point we were approaching our street, so she slowed down very dramatically to share a "tip for life" with me: that if you're arguing with someone and they're starting to show signs of losing interest, you should stop arguing. with that, she dropped us off, and i gave her the single-star rating she deserved.

holy shit, some people should not be working in the service industry.

we got gd upstairs, mr smear showered, dinner served, discussed marijuana usage with mr smear (who'd understood most of the argument, and was surprisingly completely on my side), who assured me that he would never smoke (cigarettes) "because i made a vow to my dad", and who paid attention when i explained the risks of consuming illicit drugs while one's brain is still forming...

anyway.

we had a good good-night chat with my mom, and had enough time between dinner and bedtime for me to shower and join mr smear for some calvin & hobbes. i am soooooo glad i managed to get hold of those comics!

after putting him to bed, i continued setting up my machine, and also started a fantastic run in kaycee's mod abusing the fair-hand mechanic:

unkillable hooved tribe totem FTW.

and now it's half-past-midnight and definitely past my bedtime.

big days

i went back to bed soon after posting, slept for a few hours, then got up and moved to the couch where mr smear assailed me with more calvin & hobbes, which i enjoyed, but only about the half of the time that i was conscious for it.

mr smear and i had a great morning, he played limbo until he was unsettled by the corpses, and ms splosion man which is gloriously unhinged. and then he got into ship design and setting up a game of galactic civilizations II.

in the meanwhile, i was still feeling emotionally raw about last night, which led to more discomfort...

it was an unseasonably beautiful day, and around lunchtime i took mr smear out for a bike and blade. we were planning on going anyway, but just before we got a message asking if we were up to giving back the current borrowed bike and taking our friends' newly acquired one (which they got free from someone in their neighborhood, but was too tall for their youngest).

so we headed there first, and mr smear was immediately incensed by the fact that the front brake was on the right handlebar ("i want to sue the manufacturer" 😂). this was on top of the fact that he does *not* take quickly to unfamiliar things, and it uses the pedals for the rear brake. so we had a bit of a scene, but i managed to get him to calm down and give it a try in spite of himself, and eventually (with some efficient handiwork by our friend) managed to leave on the new bike and go for a really nice ride.

which included messing about in the park's outdoor gym, chilling on the grass watching the parrots, getting a really nice lunch at a coffee shop, stopping for excellent ice cream (salted oreos - genius!), and finally getting home just before it got dark.

everything up until bedtime went smoothly, but then gd and i got into it again because things obviously weren't resolved yesterday... so that sucked, but it feels a little less shitty now.

...

mr smear and i are meeting with the school team tomorrow morning, and i think i'd be stupid if i didn't prepare him for it. and tomorrow's my first day in the new job, and gd has a nerve block in the afternoon, and i'll be damned if i know what i'm feeling about everything right now. it doesn't help that it's past 10pm and my mind's unsettled and i'm nervous about sleeping...

was that it?

 it's almost 3am as i begin typing this, i've just spent two or three hours watching random youtube videos and playing minesweeper (a really hard minesweeper - total minesweeper), after a really mixed friday after a rather awkward thursday.

thursday (yesterday?):

after dropping mr smear off at school, i called back the ministry of education representative who very clearly and urgently set things in motion. later, i received a phone call from the school counsillor inviting me and mr smear to an urgent meeting on sunday morning. when she reminded me what the plan for moving mr smear was, i reminded her how the plan was always to make sure that mr smear didn't disrupt anyone else after being neglected and left in a known bad situation for years.

i wrote up our experiences, and i feel like i should have posted them publicly but decided to wait on my mom's edits instead, which i sadly received yet. posting's potentially going to open us up to attack, though, which does make me a bit nervous.

thursday afternoon was shit. a lot of fighting with mr smear not doing his homework, it was a real drag and absolutely exhausting. in spite of that, whenever he did achieve or complete something he got really excited, and that was hugely rewarding.

gd had a dental appointment (i yelled at the second receptionist to try to cancel it at the last minute and then ignored me and tried to hang up when i told her to give me a moment so i could explain to gd what was going on), and i ended up having to order dinner, which worked out alright in spite of my reservations (we've been burning a lot more money these past couple of weeks than we should have).

friday (today?):

it started off well, we went to the open day at the art school and, aside from the dance demonstration, mr smear was very excited. and so were we. everything was great until we were on our way out and i was trying to summarize / translate the important bits for the two of them, which led to a simmering fight with gd that lasted the day until it became an all-out battle in the evening, which never got resolved. just ugly feelings all day.

while that was going on in the background, i went to pick up insoles for my rain boots and they seem to fit better. i'm now regretting asking the guy to order a better size for me because i really don't wear them enough to justify a whole other pair of boots...

... and then i spent the rest of the afternoon coaching mr smear through the remainder of his homework. it went much smoother than the previous days - although we did have one blowout incident in the middle - but we pushed through and rushed through together and a little after sundown we were done, with a good feeling all round.

after his shower (during which gd and i really got into it), and before dinner, we spent some quality game time together. dinner wasn't great from a vibe perspective, but it was encouraging to see mr smear being empathetic and trying to raise spirits (and not picking sides for once), and at bedtime he asked me to join him while he read calvin & hobbes out loud which was nice.

as soon as he was in bed, gd and i went to bed. i'm not sleeping well, and i'm feeling shit emotionally, and i feel like i neighbor's coughing and the jackals howling has been fitting accompaniment. i don't know what i'm up for right now, but it's not sleeping, it's not reading, and it's not playing anything.

fight or flight or both

what the hell happened today?

i've been on leave for two weeks, they're almost done, and all i've experienced is being sick and loads of unexpected and heavy adulting and parenting responsibilities. i'm not even tired right now - especially after today's drama - i'm just in shock.

...

it wasn't an easy night, mr smear woke up from a nightmare and it took a round or two of parenting to calm him down again.

otherwise, the cold, rainy day started well, and i got mr smear to school in good spirits.

i took care of some stuff (including informing ze german that i couldn't commit to anything), ate an early breakfast (i think i'm putting on weight again, but i'm struggling psychologically right now), and caught a bus to the shuk. on the way i spoke to a cousin who also wanted to start a joint venture, and had to explain to him too that i'm happy to advise but not available.

about halfway there, i was asked to please stop my conversation because i was bothering everyone on the small bus. i thought i'd been speaking in an unobtrusively low voice, but apparently i was wrong so i hurriedly ended the call and apologized to everyone...

we resumed the call when i arrived, and aside from my heart skipping a beat or two during the siren testing we had a good conversation. then i went through the shuk, and was ultimately unable to locate the bag of shirts we'd bought. so i picked up a coffee, bought another set (the guy felt sorry for me and gave me a bigger discount than before), and then walked up king george, picking up fingerless gloves for myself and mr smear and ordering inserts for my too-large rain boots.

i bussed home, relaxed for a bit watching mostly political videos on youtube with gd, then walked to the school to pick up mr smear.

on my way, a group of bigger kids went past with two of them literally in the middle of a fist fight, and it was only afterwards that i realized that i should have intervened. then i picked up mr smear, and learned that his bully had kicked him twice in his sprained foot and he hadn't been able to defend himself.

what followed was in two parts: part one, losing my cool and my "appropriate parenting language" and giving him hell for how he mishandled the situation (in particular, how he got into the situation in the first place by behaving precisely in the way his bully wanted). i wasn't communicating appropriately, but it appears (based on how he responded both immediately and later) that i was communicating effectively.

part two was me, after getting through part one, becoming absolutely enraged to the point of trembling and considering heading over to his bully's home (i have the address) to threaten his parents in person. or just beat the shit out of them. but i was also very aware of the potential consequences of doing that, and i know that if i start down that path that i'll almost certainly end up in jail, and i wouldn't do that to my family (or myself).

so the next hour or two were spent getting in touch with orgs who are now helping me file complaints against the school and move mr smear to a different one. 

all while trying (and failing) to help mr smear do his homework :/

then i rushed mr smear to his evaluation, which was apparently the second last session. the bus there got stuck in traffic, but we didn't notice because we were heavily engaged in a variety of topics - i got into the weeds of explaining what we're dealing with politically and historically, which he appeared to follow.

while he was there, i grabbed a coffee and wrote up the complaints for the two orgs. i had just enough time before being called back to pick up mr smear.

gd was at her second acupuncture session, so i decided to treat mr smear and take him somewhere in the sarona market. we ended up at mexicana, which may be fast food but it really got mr smear excited. we both loved the food, and he invested himself in experimenting with different combinations of foods and sauces which was very cool.

i was very proud of myself for stopping when i was full, and he continued on a loooong time before he was ready to pack up and go home. at that point we entered into a discussion about judaism vs christianity, which got surprisingly philosophical!

while mr smear got himself ready for bed (he's still into the hobbit ^_^) gd and i spoke to my mom, sharing the days trials and tribulations and hearing some things (specifically about my niece and her kid) that made us rather upset.

...

as i just said to gd: while mr smear's got issues that we need to work through, while he drives us crazy on all sorts of little things, if i think about the big stuff he's facing and how he's facing it his resilience is nothing short of miraculous. he's a good kid, and he's tough in ways i can't wrap my head around. his last few years have been immeasurably hard, and he deserves so much better.

i fucking love my boy. i'm fucking proud of my boy. and i'm fucking grateful that our relationship has improved so dramatically over the last year or two. he's learning to trust us, to let his guard down around us and let us in (including taking criticism well, and trying to incorporate it), and it's an amazing feeling.

...

anyway, mr smear went to bed without too much fuss, i've now finished this and am about to try help gd with her neck. for tonight, everything else is just whatever (including messages waiting for me that i'm deliberately ignoring).

fucking tuesday

 well... i was about to go to bed, i was falling asleep on my feet, when we realized that one of the key accomplishments of the day was for nothing - we lost a bag of t-shirts that we bought at the shuk this morning.

so now i've played some more inscryption, and i'm writing this up, and then hopefully i'll manage to get some actual sleep. last night i ended up playing final fantasy vi for about an hour after posting...

...

firstly, my cold / flu / whatever has been slightly better today, but still not great. it was rain weather, but fortunately not boot weather. after dropping mr smear off at school - with him having had a pretty good morning, and repeating his affirmation without hesitation, and being much more healthily social with his friends on the way to school than usual - gd and i headed to azrieli. we went through all the major clothing stores, and found nothing of interest, so we hopped on a bus to the shuk via dizengoff center (to pick up an emergency umbrella) and began the hunt.

we actually found what we were looking for pretty quickly. shirts for mr smear, shirts for me (now lost), and three pairs of decent, i-can-go-to-work-in-these cargo pants (that i had quite a time trying on in their open-air fitting room), and then we picked up a cauliflower meal from the frena place and sat down for coffee, enjoying a nice chat with an elderly couple that was in mixed hebrew and english, and which gd managed to follow and participate in quite nicely!

on the way to the bus i realized that my payment for the cauliflower hadn't gone through, so i returned to have my card declined a number of times before discovering that i had (rather unusually) some cash in my wallet. the ride home was consumed by me on the phone to my credit card company, learning that - once again - i blew straight past my limit by a lot and now i'm blocked for the next few days.

i really don't understand the point of the limit if they're only going to shut down my card way after i've spent too much money.

i mean, i kind of get it, but it's wrong and gross.

anyway.

i picked up mr smear from school, and on the way home we were treated to the sight of a jackal jumping out of the hedges at the park and racing right past us. which reminds me - one of the jackals by our apartment tried to start a howl in the middle of the night, and all the other jackals just ignored him so he dropped it 😂

we spent the next couple of hours doing his homework, which was at least a better experience than yesterday's attempt. slow going, though, and gd and i were horrified to discover that he doesn't know the order of the letters in the hebrew alphabet or the names of the months in the hebrew calendar.

WTAF.

after his "play therapist" arrived, i took a bus to the barber shop, chatting with one of ze germans about a project he wants me in on (which i can't be in on, officially). the haircut experience was pretty good, overall, although it had its awkward points: my "usual" barber had been the person i'd made the appointment with over the phone, so he knew that my first pick was someone else, the guy who did my hair did a pretty good job, though i ended up covered in hair and i had to ask him to fix something rather obvious, and my card was declined so i had to mission to find an ATM.

i waited so long for the bus home that i ended up walking instead, and i arrived home in time to shower and sit down to eat and watch the simpsons.

inspired by a chat with my mom, mr smear went to bed reading the hobbit graphic novel, which is very  exciting!

...

i started the day posting the following:

gaza-lighting: when you try to wipe out the jews in their own homeland, but after you've been defeated you occupy their territory and culturally appropriate their entire history in order to turn it against them, while raising your children as "martyrs" to complete your initial attempt to destroy them, claiming that *you're* indigenous and occupied and under threat of genocide.

("palestinians" are egyptians, jordanians and syrians who were abandoned in israel by their countries in order to use them as pawns in their long game of destroying israel. just to be clear, i'm very happy living with and alongside non-jewish israelis who accept our sovereignty and democratic rule of law. i don't feel the same about anyone who refuses that.)

what's happening with trump and netanyahu aligning to give hamas an ultimatum on returning the hostages on saturday is extremely exciting. this feels like what we should have been feeling the entire war - like america knows what's up and which side they're on - and while it may be too late to help most of the hostages it seems like it's on time to turn this whole ship around.

giving the daus a goat

"feed him a black goat so he gets the worthy sacrifice sigil. it's fantastic on the daus. you get 2 free unkillable worthy sacrifice cards every time you play the daus"

...

it's now 3am, and i'm struggling. peak sick was friday evening, but yesterday (monday) was the first day that i felt mostly alright in spite of still being snotty. but snotty i am, and post-nasal drippy i am, and it's now woken me up (a while ago) and i'm typing this while feeling very tired and sorry for myself.

it was another rain boots and umbrellas days, though it started off alright. i spent most of the morning resting, and in the early afternoon picked up mr smear to take him to his hebrew tutor. it was on my way to the school that i saw that his teacher had sent me a message earlier to the effect that he hadn't been cooperating.

i was pissed off - as usual - and it took a little while to get a story out of him that made sense.

while i waited for him, i found all the neighborhood coffee shops without any dry seating so i walked up to bukeh where i spent about ten minutes putting together a collection of midjourney images to put on t-shirts.

once i got him home, he got 45 minutes to play minecraft online with a friend before it was time to hit the books. what followed was about three psychologically draining hours, alternately helping him with catching up and fighting with him about doing the work (including trying to establish a reward system for each page).

that came to a head just before dinner, and dinner was essentially a family meeting / coaching session, ending with us giving him affirmations to do (i mean, at this point we've done pretty much everything else we can think of). i think what's most exhausting with all this is that feeling of getting through to him after a long, chaotic story and then expecting tomorrow to be filled with more of the same.

i'm on leave for another few days, but between being sick and having to parent a particularly uncompliant kid i don't feel like i'm getting much rest at all.

...

it doesn't help that mr smear's follow-up appointment for his sprained foot *could* have been this evening, but is now next week, and that gd missed her psychologist appointment i've been running around for weeks trying to secure because she forgot to put it in the calendar 🤦

down but out

 the coffee was good, but i left a bit later than i should have, couldn't find a good bus to get home with, and ended up walking the entire way (in my heavy rain boots), arriving *just* in time for the start of the meeting that was then delayed by about ten minutes...

anyway, it wasn't a waste of time after all because he sent me a form i needed, which i then sent on to my insurance broker, which set the ball in motion.

i spent some time trying to rest on the couch, but finding myself invested in apple cider vinegar which gd was watching (i jumped in in the middle of the second-to-last episode).

i was feeling like crap, still, but gd's been in trouble with her neck for a while so i went to pick mr smear up from school. him and his "granny cane", according to the bullies in his class - they teased him that he didn't need it, and in their defense, i really don't believe he did ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

as he told me what transpired and what was said to him, i offered him some suggestions for comebacks and he was both impressed and sad that he hadn't been able to come up with them on his own. i suggested he practice - briefly describing eminem's tactics from 8 mile - and i'm curious to see whether he actually does.

i took him to his therapist - again, feeling really awful - and sorted out my insurance stuff while i waited. then i picked him up, we returned home, and from that point until dinner i was responsible for overseeing his homework.

he actually did pretty well in both hebrew and math, and i was surprisingly quite pleased by his attitude. i feel like choosing a translation of harry potter for his reading is working out well, the language is sophisticated enough that i have to keep looking up words but he understands the story very well so he doesn't get lost.

[holy shit, the jackals have just started howling - they've been doing that a lot the past couple of nights, and it sounds like they're hanging out right around our building]

as for the maths, this evening was the first time i've managed to get him to check his answers before submitting, rather than (effectively) guessing, and once he got into a groove of doing that his performance was pretty solid.

after getting him into bed, gd and i settled in to watch the season finale, and it was perfectly cringy as anticipated. afterwards we watched two minutes of the 60 minutes interview with belle gibson before i decided i really didn't need to see any more. then we watched random shit on youtube for a while before gd decided it was time to go to bed, and i've just finished a run of kaycee's mod and i'm now ready for bed myself.

hopefully i'll be better in the morning.

burnout grossout

 friday:

getting mr smear's foot checked out took about two hours, but was mostly pleasant (we played inscryption together while waiting until my laptop's battery died). it turned out to be just another sprain (same place), so they bound his foot and sent us home.

as soon as we arrived home, i was sent out again to pick up wine and ice cream for dinner, and considering how tired and sore i was feeling and how miserable the weather was, i was not thrilled.

the remainder of the afternoon was spent resting. by the time we were ready to head out to our friends for dinner i was feeling alright, so i didn't think i was being irresponsible, but as we arrived my throat started a thing - no coughing fits, thankfully, but i still feel a bit guilty.

regardless, we had a really nice evening, even if it proved impossible to get mr smear to eat anything. dinner was great, the adults had a good time and the kids had a good time, and eventually we returned home and turned in in good spirits.

yesterday:

i slept alright, but woke up feeling properly sick (hence the guilt). it was another miserable, wet day, and i alternated between flitting in and out of consciousness while watching stuff (specifically cowboy bebop, delicious in dungeon, and pluto) and beating inscryption again (at this point the story mode really isn't much of a challenge, i think it's just become a comforting thing to do).

i did try for a bit to help mr smear with main assembly, and i've arrived at the conclusion that every other player has - it's a game with great potential, but it's abandoned and broken and it's not going to get any better. that's just sad.

...

i had a conversation with gd last night about where i'm at / where i've been for a long time, but specifically now while i'm on two week's leave and feeling sick. i've been burned out but highly functioning for a very, very long time, and that's made it very difficult for me to relax and not have a perpetual sense of anxiety about all the things i'm not doing or want to do. intellectually, i'm very happy to be doing nothing, but in practice i'm constantly feeling either over-stimulated or under-stimulated. i can't concentrate if i'm not doing multiple things, but i also can't concentrate because i'm doing multiple things...

today:

getting mr smear to school wasn't as hard as it could have been, and i hope he's playing nicely with others (to wit, his teachers).

the weather is still miserable, so i've been in boots since taking mr smear to school - i'm now sitting at a nice little coffee shop where our calvin & hobbes books were finally delivered to, and very soon i'll be on my way back home for a conversation with my previous employer's insurance broker that i'm pretty confident will be a total waste of time.

definitely down with the sickness

 i don't know what it is, or how long it's been brewing, but yesterday i continued to feel terrible and snotty and last night i began to develop a throat infection... it's currently in schroedinger's box, i guess we'll see.

yesterday:

the first thing - that set the tone for the day - was responding to the "integration teacher":

let's not gaslight the parents, please. it goes without saying that <mr smear> has a responsibility to cooperate and work in the classroom, and we're making every effort to get him to do so. i'll remind you that the school already knew that he had a specific problem with language classes, and in addition to not giving him the lessons that new immigrants are entitled to, you also put him in a class for two years with a teacher he didn't trust - so letting him, in a new year with a new teacher, start on the wrong foot without communicating with the parents is already an unacceptable level of negligence.

let's add to that that we've heard from him that <his teacher> A. has given up on him and told him explicitly that she didn't care what he was doing, and B. doesn't acknowledge him even when he does cooperate, and C. makes up stories that she hasn't given up "but", without trying to communicate with us *after* we said it was neither logical nor reasonable that until about six months ago we hadn't heard from her or about her at all, this is simply appalling behavior from a teacher who is responsible for a very important subject for our son.

shame on you.

it took a while to get going, but by the evening i'd put together the two side tables. it was a rainy day, and i was feeling miserable, so i lay down to rest for a bit with cowboy bebop on.

ten minutes in, i received an urgent call from the school - mr smear was playing in a puddle and slipped, hurting the same foot that he'd injured a few weeks back. i kitted up for the rain and walked to the school and waited for him to hobble out, very slowly and dramatically.

it turns out the woman who walked him out is responsible for the entire grade, and i was pleasantly surprised when she informed me that she'd seen my message from this morning and is going to investigate.

i walked about two blocks with mr smear, trying to gauge whether he needed medical intervention or not, and i felt that it wasn't warranted. but i did feel that a taking a taxi home was warranted, we were moving very slowly and it was threatening to rain again...

i got mr smear home and gd got him into the bath so he could warm up and soak his foot after being soaked in cold, wet clothing for so long. i lay back down on the couch and continued with cowboy bebop, and mr smear joined me after his bath and the two of us just chilled like that for a while.

until gd arrived to pop my bubble and send me off to the pharmacist. so i begrudgingly dragged myself off the couch, got dressed up again, and walked to the pharmacist. from there i decided to try to pick up the packages that i'd been led to believe had arrived at a post point for me, and i walked through the rain until i found the place and discovered that i'd misunderstood the tracking alerts.

i passed by zuppa on the way, so i picked up an "old time vegetables" soup and struggled home, each step reminding me that in addition to general fatigue, every step i take wearing my heavy rain boots is effectively lifting weights.

gd and i enjoyed the soup when i got home, and i spent the rest of the afternoon doing dishes, helping mr smear with his homework, and putting the bedside tables together. for gd's birthday, we ordered dinner and it was delicious.

...

i realized yesterday that i hadn't checked our bank account since the beginning of the month, and was both excited and confused to see a lot more money than i'd anticipated. it's very easy to do the math wrong - not least because my first paycheque in the new job will only be for half a month. that notwithstanding, this way these events have all played out will prove to be a significant windfall and we'll finally be able to clear our debt!

...

we had some unpleasant business due to my mother asking me in afrikaans if we'd made a card for gd, and gd's very sensitive about people speaking in different languages in front of other people, so mr smear and i ended up being a lot less subtle in kicking gd out of the room so that we could put it together :P

i pretty much crashed after mr smear went to bed.

today:

mr smear and i woke gd up with singing and her card, but with his foot he wasn't up for going to school or checking out the art school's open day, so we had a quiet morning until gd started becoming nervous about getting his foot checked out.

so here we are, sitting at an aroma waiting until 1pm when the doctors and x-ray operators arrive...

fatigued

 today was a struggle. i was exhausted for most of it, and that was pretty much from when i woke up in the morning.

...

the trump and netanyahu press conference from last night was bizarre. half of what trump said seemed incoherent to me, but in the grand scheme of things what he's proposing is pretty much the only reasonable way to make peace... send the "palestinians" back to their original homelands (egypt and jordan) and make sure that we don't have any threats living on our borders.

...

i took mr smear to school, saying goodbye before the big intersection to see how he handled it, and i think he handled it well. then i returned home and put together shelves, which took quite a while and saw me stripping one of my screwdriver heads :/

gd and i had some moments battling some more mold. and it was a rainy day, too.

gd had a consultation with the alternative medicine clinic, and they immediately made her an acupuncture appointment for the evening!

i rested a bit and watched some cowboy bebop while gd made use of the new shelves and cupboards.

i picked mr smear up, and his friend / our friends' kid asked if she could come over, so she did. the two of them watched minecraft videos on youtube until it was time to take mr smear to his evaluation.

mr smear and i were standing by the bus stop, i was facing him while standing between him and the road when a bus careened past the stop and sprayed water at us, soaking the seat of my pants and backs of my trouser legs. it was cold and rather unpleasant.

i dropped him off and found myself a (decaf) coffee, then (uncomfortably) sat down for an hour and thought about the database design of one of my side projects.

i picked him up, and he'd apparently been tired and had a difficult time with some of the tasks, but pulled through. i don't know how that makes me feel.. kinda proud of him for not giving up, i guess. which reminds me, i got a message from his "integration teacher" and complained about his hebrew teacher, and later saw that she'd responded with denial.

i'll have to deal with that in the morning.

we came home, had a bit of a fight about his hebrew reading, but managed to do a fair amount before accompanying gd to the clinic. once sure she was fine, we went to the mall for a falafel dinner, which was pretty good even though i had my eye on the family behind mr smear because i didn't trust their open coughing or waving ice creams around...

we got caught in the rain on the way back to the clinic, which fortunately stopped when we arrived because we had trouble getting a cab and ended up walking home.

bedtime went quickly (and smoothly, in spite of the fact that it's half an hour earlier than he's used to), and while i started putting together a bedside table for gd i got stuck when i realized i'd need to do some hammering, which i wasn't going to do after 9pm.

i've since spent a while playing inscryption, and now i'm enjoying a final cup of tea before hitting the hay. it feels like it's been a day.