doing the right things

 thursday:

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

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

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

yesterday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

today:

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

mom's home

 i didn't sleep very well at all. i got up before my alarm, prepared coffee in a takeaway cup, and even chatted to mr smear, who wasn't interested in coming with to the airport but did make a point of calling excitedly every half hour to find out where she was :)

my timing would have been great had the north entrance to the train station been open. and it was almost great even for the south entrance, but i arrived just as everyone was getting off the train and pouring up the stairs in a way that prevented anyone from going down, and i ended up missing it by seconds.

fortunately the next train was only a few minutes later 🙏

picking up my mom and getting home was straightforward, and it was nice to start the day altogether.

then i went to work, where most of the day was spent setting up in the warehouse, preparing an installation and then executing. it went well, but took a long time.

i arrived home pretty late, we ordered very serious salads and sandwiches for dinner, and i didn't last long after getting mr smear into bed (the air mattress on the floor).

it was nice playing rayman: legends with mr smear before we sat down to eat - he had an eye exam in the afternoon and his vision was apparently too blurry for anything else :P

i slept relatively well last night, although my sleep was disrupted a number of times because my mother wasn't sleeping so much :P

i'm a bit nervous going into today: i have a presentation to give to a bunch of new employees and i've got literally nothing but an empty template right now.

get ready

 i've been listening to a lot of the imagine channel's AI alternate reality covers, which is blowing my mind. rick beato's method of determining whether a song is AI generated or not is interesting.

i walked in to a surprise deployment this morning, after determining that the effort to sort out the workshop yesterday evening was worthwhile. we worked on our devops roadmap for the next two quarters, and my new brazilian devops coworker regaled me with interesting tales as he accompanied me to pick up lunch.

getting my networking coworker to play ball (or focus for two seconds straight, he's proper gen z and is perpetually doing three of four things at once all while glued to his phone) is like herding a cat, but he gets the job done and hopefully his fixes will be tested by tomorrow so i can stop supporting three current versions simultaneously...

awkward sweats from asking one of the founders' if she could arrange a meeting with her husband, because i kept accidentally saying "PR" instead of "creative" and i think she was getting offended 😓

i barely managed to organize some cloud resources for one of the new guys before heading out to meet up with gd and mr smear at the pain clinic for a procedure. the first obstacle was discovering that the clinic had accidentally produced an authorization for me instead of her, and the second was that she's taking an antiviral, and after everything they postponed her treatment another two weeks...

i introduced mr smear to dots and boxes (using a pen and my notebook), which was a lot of fun.

the evening was a mix of bits of work, eating too much dinner, watching another excellent episode of deathnote, and heading down to the shelter for a houthi attack that didn't trigger our sirens.

i haven't heard from my mom, i'm praying she just forgot to call before getting on the plane... (i just sent my sister a message to ask if she's heard from her. i've been trying to tire myself out, but i didn't sleep well last night and i have a feeling i won't sleep so well tonight either :/

feedback loop

 my mom's arriving in less than a day and a half! so now i'm starting to worry about how and when we'll all be getting sick as usual. i'm taking antihistamines and hoping for the best.

...

saturday night:

the deployment took quite a while, and i was very grateful to have asked for my coworker's support - not only did i need it, but my boss mysteriously bailed on us for a "meeting" just as we got underway. anyway, it was ultimately successful and our customer didn't have much downtime.

yesterday:

i started yesterday pissed off because i hadn't realized that our security team had booked me for an early meeting and it threw my plans off. the meeting itself wasn't interesting, but our new devops guy was deeply concerned about something that's not a real problem yet (and it'll be good news if it becomes a real problem), so the boss and i had to talk him through it...

we had lots of new people in the office, we're definitely growing!

a large chunk of the work day was spent getting our workshop set up, and it felt like we were quite successful. i rushed home to take mr smear to the end-of-year class presentation, and along the way got stuck into helping a coworker do a deployment that neither of us was prepared for 🤦

a script i asked him to run managed to break things, and by that stage we were running late and i had to abandon him to take mr smear to the school - i was quite relieved this morning to learn that he managed to come right eventually...

the presentation was awkward, and mr smear was being weird and annoying while i thanked his teacher and made it clear that we're praying she'll continue on next year (a lot of the teachers are quitting, and she apparently hasn't decided yet).

then we waited forever in a line for cotton candy, which really made his day, and then we came home and i worked some more.

mr smear and i had dinner (gd had prepared it before leaving for her haircut), and we mostly had a good time. then i watched some news and it sounds like the "ceasefire" with iran might end soon, so we prepared a ready-bag and hopefully we won't need it.

today:

i didn't sleep well, but i didn't have a particularly bad night, i guess. and it was a pretty relaxed morning.

work was a complete mess of back-to-back meetings, surprises, and overlapping demands. i took one of the new guys with to pick up a sumsum salad lunch, and discovered that he's just come back from a year and a half at columbia university - what a shit-show (O_o)

one of the security team sent me a very sweet message out of the blue to say that she'd put me up for employee of the year because of how helpful i am, which i found touching. then i had my one-on-one with my boss (which was just a one-on-one, i explained that i'd been concerned because the calendar event made it look like an HR intervention), and i was caught completely off-guard by the praise and appreciation, and we were both happy with the mutual feedback by the end of it.

and with all of that stuff going on, gd sent me mr smear's report card which - aside from some funny remarks about his lack of interest in a couple of subjects - was surprisingly positive across the board. we rewarded him with a day of no homework and alternating half hours of screentime, which he was really stoked about.

the end of the day was extremely frustrated, as everything that had worked in our little workshop mysteriously died and we ended up leaving pretty late because it took forever to get everything functional again. and i was so excited to get everything functional that i forgot to check if one of the attempting fixes actually worked :P

the evening was good, with only a minor peep from mr smear after bedtime. i did some work, and was going to do some more when i realized that i'm starting to fall apart, and i wanted to get this all down before crashing.

the secret

 i've complained about the bullshit misconceptions regarding "the secret" before, but there's one aspect of it that is valid: if you decide you're going to have a bad day, you'll be sure to get it.

i began the day trying to disable avatars in zoom:

am i the only person who finds the idea of a zoom "AI companion" creepy, and am concerned by the fact that when i tried to disable it it warned me that that would mean deleting biometric data of mine??!

i mean, i've never heard of the AI companion features until i signed in to disable avatars so that my son's zoom class behavior would be less chaotic...

possibly related, by a bizarre sequence of events gd was forced to re-enact the scene from the dirtiest toilet in scotland this morning and we were all thoroughly traumatized.

most of today was spent indoors, alternating between random shit and napping. i finished reading danny the champion of the world, which was superb. we bought noita, which looks amazing, and i have to say mr smear gave it a very fair chance before he decided he was bored. he wanted to like it, but after going through some of it with him and then reading up on how long it takes before it starts being fun, we requested a refund.

oh, which reminds me - i started investigating entry level gaming PCs last night before going to bed, i think i might have found a good solution but i'm going to ask my coworkers to vet it first.

we also tried to get the MIDI controller working with garage band; it does work out of the box, but i couldn't for the life of me figure out the controls.

after spending some time trying to compile the sonnet comics images into a format for the printer. i was horrified to learn that i don't have all the hi-res images, and that some of the hi-res images are slightly different resolutions. fortunately, mr cat was quick to respond positively and he's going to (re-)deliver them soon.

...

i planned to take mr smear to the charles clore park for an outing, which started off positively but he soon found things to complain about and became progressively more convinced that he was having the worst day ever. the fruit shake was great, the ice-cream was great, being on the promenade on a beautiful day was great, and having dinner at mexicana was great (although once he actually tried the food he remembered he didn't like the rice, goddammit).

on the way home his bike started acting up, so he decided he was going to walk. *i& didn't want to walk because i was on blades and moving slowly over long periods makes my feet hurt, and we'd already travelled pretty far. so i grabbed his bike and rolled with it, he jogged alongside me, and this was going great until he tripped on some sunken bricks and really hurt himself.

the limp home was painful for him, and i ended up having to "walk" anyway so it was painful for me too. and we had a few characteristically unpleasant moments along the way, although we both seemed to handle things better once we got home.

now it's just about 10pm, i've almost finished my strong tea and i'm about to get to work 🤞

bumpy ride

 wednesday:

waking up early and sending mr smear off to school, still broken from lack of sleep

arriving to the office really early (but still with time pressure) to discover that my installation station had been stripped of all its cabling (amongst other things), and it would take about an hour and a half to get that sorted out.

at least the installation itself went relatively smoothly.

one of the aussies gave me and another aussie's cousin (he's helping out) a ride to the test site, where the story of the afternoon was hours of set up for very little payoff - not only were there loads of hardware issues, but the issue that i'd resolved by midnight the previous night turned out to be not fully solved, and it cost another three hours to understand what was wrong and resolve it.

and then cursor started bugging out, because we use devcontainers and microsoft (fuckers!) are now preventing vscode clones from using their extensions.

i don't know at this point how much of the solution to the problem is an actual solution to the problem, or a workaround for ms (and docker) fuckery.

anyway. at least i figured out the cause of one of the other issues we had (aws syncing syncs impossibly slowly if you have debug logs being printed)

anyway.

after wrestling with a bad router/switch setup, and waiting 90's download times for an OS installation, we were finally able to leave one of the machines in a state where i should have been able to continue the installation remotely, and we hopped in the car and rode back to tel aviv.

i arrived home around 11pm. signed in to attempt to finish the deployment, and discover that the machine was offline.

very frustrated, i went to bed.

yesterday:

i feel like the whole city woke up feeling more rested. mr smear went off to school again, i took care of a bunch of things that had been piling up over the course of the week, went past the clinic to get authorization for gd's procedure next week, and continued on to the coffee shop where astérix gladiateur was waiting to be picked up.

of course, i had to pick up a coffee and nurse it all the way to the office.

it was an exciting day in the office. the two most significant pieces of work i did were recording an online demo from a contractor (who threw up a little in his mouth halfway through 🤢), and taking a couple of guys with IT / devops experience into the warehouse and beginning to get a workshop set up there.

another highlight (in addition to the workshop, as opposed to the not-highlight of the demo) was a department weekly with lots of enthusiastic new faces, and a happy hour making a new convert both regarding shakespeare's sonnets and my vision for our software solution.

after putting mr smear to bed, i had a call with my boss; i suspected that i was going to be answering for having been a bit miserable the previous day, but it turned out to be a discussion about how to go about doing a deployment we'd had to defer and arguing over when to do it. we ended up settling on tomorrow night, so 🤞

today:

i guess i slept alright last night, at least better than has become usual. i was avoiding screens before mr smear left for school, and reading a canticle for leibowitz, or trying to at any rate. some of it i've really enjoyed, but the last quarter is proving to be a slog and with everything else going on i've decided to give it up.

while going through that, i realized that even if i'm not on screens i'm still focused very close to my head, so i decided to walk mr smear to school in order to give my own eyes an opportunity to "stretch". surprisingly, gd had had a similar idea simultaneously so we all walked together, which aside from an  encounter with a brazenly irresponsible dog owner was an enjoyable experience.

i had some important stuff to take care of, which generated a fight with gd that put more shitty vibes on the morning, but eventually worked through it and we hit the mall to do some grocery shopping and upgrade my phone.

it turns out the issue with my (old) phone has been that it's only got 4GB of memory, and with my "new" phone (the display unit, i got a significant discount for that) it's clear why it was so unresponsive; my baseline usage with nothing open is 4.6GB, and that's after uninstalling and disabling every app i don't need on a daily basis...

i'm a little concerned about the battery usage, but i'll give it a few days before i decide whether to complain or not.

on the way out of the mall, an older guy came out of the retirement home and lit up a cigarette while still inside the mall. i asked him to please not do that, to which he made stupid excuses and then started calling me a quibbler (not sure if the translation is good). so i called him a jerk, but he continued to act like a jerk and although i succeeded in walking away, it only takes one asshole to ruin a good day, and i'd already had some shitty experiences, and he occupied more brainspace than he had right to for the next while.

it was hot (summer's here) and i was sweaty and tired by the time we got home, but i had to rush off to pick up mr smear and help carry home all the books from his locker. i spent the next while napping on the couch listening to the audiobook of the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, waking up to gd reading asterix to mr smear.

i spent the remainder of the afternoon and most of the evening getting the new phone set up, while listening to insane AI covers like system of a crown and neon maiden.

we went to our friends for friday night dinner, which was a really pleasant evening, both for the adults and the kids.

it's now almost 1am, mr smear has just gone to bed and i'm about to jump in the shower and probably also go to bed.

unceasefire

 how the hell was yesterday only tuesday?

we woke up to sirens (i'd barely slept, i was feeling more broken than ever), and the fuckers slow-dripped the missile attacks so that we were all up and down the stairs for a couple of hours. the old lady across the hall was really, really struggling :(

we were in the shelters when we learned the disappointing news that we'd agreed to a ceasefire.

as much as it would be nice to have some respite from the missile barrages, anything short of total victory against their terrorist regime is a terrible mistake. they're ideological zombies, they will never give up trying to destroy us, they are incapable of surrender, and they will never accept peace.

anyone who thinks negotiating with terrorists is a viable strategy is a fool.

hearing tom nash's analysis does make me feel considerably better, though.

i crashed on the couch for an hour before dragging myself to the table for breakfast and heading off to the office, where our first actual devops guy was waiting. we spent the morning getting quite a lot of onboarding done, but by lunchtime (with two of my previous teammates joining me and my old boss) things were starting to go wrong.

i was there with a job to do, and everything was broken. what followed was a frustrating endless loop of trying to uncover the root cause with a few of the others. by the time i needed to come home for dinner we'd gone through a list of theories and found something that might have worked, but we couldn't figure out how to make it.

my break for dinner was pretty good, we did have some rough moments but not due to any malicious intentions. as soon as mr smear was in bed, i sat down and continued my investigation...

... i finally, after seemingly infinite iterations, found what i was looking for around midnight, and just before 1am successfully deployed a new release to our dev environment.

just in time to get a few hours of sleep (hopefully 🤞) before taking mr smear to school (🤞) and rushing to the office early to initiate a deployment before rushing to our test site to do a deployment...

... and all the while, urgent personal stuff has been piling up and i haven't had a moment to spare.

glassy eyes and smooth brains

i got a lot of work done before finally going to bed around 1am, but we were sent rushing to the shelter around 3am, and after we were finally able to return home i couldn't sleep and so continued to work for the next two hours.

i was bleary-eyed but satisfied by being able to push a clean, working solution before crashing for an hour or so, then waking up and working some more before our parental guidance meeting.

we talked a bit about how tech children communicate strangely, i had an interesting thought but i'm too tired now to recall it :/

oh! i forgot to mention yesterday - i finally got through to someone in the municipality regarding mr smear's art school application: he didn't get in, but he's no. 2 on the waiting list. we'll take it🤞

...

i'm disappointed to learn that there's some unknown issue with gd's cannabis license application. again. i fucking hate these people.

...

my mom discovered that godmother has the original copy of their maternal grandparents' ketuba! and their other sister happens to be visiting for the first time ever, so she's going to bring it back. i'm praying it gets into my mom's hands in one piece 🙏

unfortunately, i was so excited that i reported this piece of information to someone who's supposed to be helping us, and she immediately responded with "oh, nice, so just take that to them then". fuck.

...

i was just telling my boss how i couldn't go back to sleep after the "lame" missile attack in the night (one rocket?) when the pre-alerts went off, so we packed up and rushed downstairs. our sirens hadn't gone off, neither phone nor air-raid, for an oddly long period of time so i ventured outside for internet access to see what was going on and as the door closed behind me there was a massive explosion close by, so i rushed back inside and swore not to do that again.

the day was a mad rush of deployment testing and troubleshooting, being an "onboarding buddy" to a new guy (who's hopefully going to take some pressure off of me personally), and wrangling mr smear.

mr smear pushed hard today, and things got bad before they got better. the day ended on a positive note, but it was long and upsettingly shit until it got there.

...

did i mention the thing on my face seems to be healed (yesterday) already? i'm not complaining, just confused by the speed. and i'm struggling through my beard's itchy phase because i won't shave until i've really sure my cheek's alright, and it's getting hotter.

...

according to iranians, us striking the entrance to evin prison is their equivalent of the berlin wall coming down.

the IRGC attacking qatar (and everything else they're doing) is insane and suicidal, it feels like they're trying to martyr their way out to avoid surrender.

a whole kernel through a nostril

we woke up this morning to another massive barrage. in addition to discovering that our neighbors are also vegan, we also learned about the US strike on the primary iranian nuclear facilities during the night.

now i'm listening to how islamists are attacking churches... they're deep into phase FA, i can't wait to see them FO.

...

yesterday:

after the midnight attacks on friday night we had relative calm. it was a day spent reading (i read about half of danny the champion of the world), we played (or, more accurately, i picked up a copy of webbed and mr smear played a lot). and getting the basis of the frontend for my language project.

in the afternoon, mr smear was invited by his friend to play table tennis, and i joined them and his friend's mother, scouted the area for a bomb shelter, and then enjoyed watching mr smear actually get into playing - giving him breaks by taking turns, and i was quite surprised by how good his friend is!

he came home with us and joined us for dinner, and his mother and i both made the screen-time rules clear. until dinner the two of them legitimately played, amusing themselves in hilarious fashion, and it was a treat to witness it. dinner was nice, but i was concerned about getting him home before mr smear needed to start getting ready for bed (and before the expected iranian attack), so i accompanied him home.

and then felt super awkward when i returned home to find mr smear still eating (demolishing a large pile of corn-on-the-cob), so he could've stayed later...

today:

it was a busy morning, and i was a wreck even though i slept a little better last night (not well, but better). i spent my work day in meetings, and working on something that took a lot more time than it should have, so unfortunately i'm going to have to continue working after posting this.

on a positive note, my mother sent me a whole bunch of documents and images of her parents and grandparents, and aside from being fascinating it gave me what i needed to respond to the people who've offered assistance with her aliyah process.

the saddest reason for a lot of lost time today was mr smear, two days after getting his privileges back, losing them again over homework (and lying to me). so that sucks.

but in positive news, we received the next two illustrated harry potter books (books four and five). it occurred to me that purchasing more beautiful books while we're under threat of getting our apartment bombed might be a mistake, but thinking like that is just silly.

[knocks on wood]

the beginning of week two

 yesterday:

the day began with a massive strike on us (hitting a hospital ward, fortunately already evacuated), so that was a way to wake up in the morning. then we headed to gd's pain clinic appointment, picking up a last-minute insurance authorization on the way (whew!), and coming home just in time for my first meeting.

the first few hours of my work day were occupied with sorting out other people's problems (we have a couple of devops joining us next week, so i might be able to actually work on my own tasks).

around lunchtime, a taxi showed up with a "care package", which made everyone's day (mr smear couldn't contain his excitement over an unexpected haul of vegan treats) and [this evening] gd and i did shots of the really nice vodka to usher in the shabbat, though sadly it appears she's not a fan 🤷

i got stuck into an unnecessarily difficult problem with one of our external devs, and i had just resolved it when i received an urgent call from my boss instructing me to drop everything and head off to our test site. so - after gd assured me that they'd be okay* - another taxi showed up, i hopped in, and after picking up a package from one of my coworkers we headed out.

* that's a big deal, that she was able to accept it so quickly under the current circumstances

about an hour later, we arrived. an hour spent worrying about what we'd do if there were sirens, working on my laptop in the back seat or staring out the window feeling sorry for myself for not having had my afternoon coffee yet.

fortunately, as soon as we arrived i found that we had the facilities to make turkish coffee, so after a brief introduction to the site and preparing a cup i went outside to talk to one of my coworkers. i'd been on-site a total of maybe five or ten minutes when we looked up and saw an iron dome missile fire - i've never seen that with my own eyes before - and moments later the siren sounded.

i'm still amused that the last guy into the shelter brought in a sixpack of beers. genius. 😂

it took a lot more time to prepare a station than i would have liked, but the entire site is full army vibes and aside from learning new and interesting things, it was fun. the first part of my work went pretty smoothly, but then i ran into unexpected issues with my coworker from tuesday's code, and it took forever to find a solution. and not even a good solution. but i pushed on, and eventually managed to get things to a point where i could continue to work on it remotely so that i could stop holding back my coworker who'd offered to give me a ride back to tel aviv.

the ride home was entertaining, but also scary. not only was it made clear to me that we weren't going to stop for any sirens, but my driver was an absolute cowboy and i had to work hard to keep from visibly slamming on the passenger brakes :P

i arrived home pretty late, showered and ate (effectively all i'd consumed since breakfast were two bags of crisps and an energy bar), and then jumped back in to figure out how to continue the work (i'd left knowing it was possible, theoretically).

it was about half past midnight when i finally succeeded, and it wouldn't have been possible without the deep dive i'd done earlier in the day for the external dev 🤘

today:

it was weird waking up in the morning without having been jumped by a siren. the day began well, with a very excited and grateful mr smear getting his minecraft account resurrected.

i did get a little work done in the morning, but i was mostly distracted by random things and the news cycle. then we headed down to the mall (which has taken a fair bit of damage from some of the strikes), where mr smear and i milled around waiting for gd and he badgered me until i purchased death note black edition, vol. 1, which he subsequently completed reading by dinner time; so now we're all watching the anime series together :P

i was feeling very tired by the time we got home. my mother's had some potential success with her aliyah story; she found familysearch.org, and located some really interesting documents which might prove useful.

we helped gd with some cleaning today (mr smear and i cleaned standing fans together, and he helped with the vacuuming too), and aside from two big missile barrages it's been relatively calm.

...

it's 4.30am now, and i started writing this before dinner. but then i was too tired to stay up, but had really bad insomnia for the first time in a little while, and when i finally did fall asleep we were woken by the second missile strike :/

six

 omg. sailor said if we could finish this war in under six days it'd be a new record, today's day six and already many iranians in the government and military are defecting and declaring for the crown prince. we just came back up from the bomb shelter, so it's definitely not over, but i'm praying that this is all actually real and that it's not too good to be true.

i cannot imagine how the iranians must be feeling. after half a century of oppression. no less the rest of the countries in the region.

...

my work-from-home day was mostly meetings, and supporting others, and not getting of my own tasks done. and occasionally helping mr smear, or getting upset with him for not respecting my work-from-home boundaries.

and watching a lot of news. i can't stop, but we perpetually stand at forks in the path, and each fork leads up into the light and down into the darkness, and i'm as anxious about someone somewhere taking the wrong turn as i am excited but slightly skeptical about the too-good-to-be-true outcomes we're seeing out of iran right now.

day 5

 i managed to make myself a cup of coffee to take into the shelter with me this morning.

i made a mistake and pulled a coworker into what i thought would be a quick win, but dragged into three hours. it was important work, but it wasn't nearly as urgent as what either of us were supposed to be doing :(

mr smear had some hiccups, but he was mostly cooperative and had another good day. his attitude is slowly but clearly changing and his approach is becoming more and more positive, and it's really exciting to witness!

he's also been reading voraciously, and i've just place an order for a bunch more roald dahl books. which i hope will actually arrive, because gd's latest clothing order was cancelled due to our closed airspace...

i didn't get much work done today, but i am feeling a bit better (less brain-fog, the hours in the shelter have been stressful but are getting shorter and less frequent. hopefully we're already seeing the end of this part of the story...

my wound seems to be healing nicely.

...

someone posited that the american sniffer plane has been deployed because iran might actually have nukes already and might fire them in a last-ditch attempt to hurt us. i have a different theory: i think they're looking to take out fordow, and i think the americans are moving on iran for two reasons: the first, to have boots on the ground and make "deals" with the iranian people (revolution assistance and reconstruction for oil). the second, to prevent russia or china from swarming in.

i - like a lot of israelis - are a bit offended by his claim today that "we" have air superiority and that american tech is responsible. it's our people who've put themselves on the line and done the most insanely literally-fantastic things to take down the IRGC in a matter of days. and it's not just american tech that's achieved that; sure, a lot of it is, but there's a lot of joint development we've done and there're some very special things that only we have.

but whatever. trump is trump, and it looks like we're writing a new story for our descendants to celebrate by eating too much to.

"they tried to kill us. we survived. let's eat." - famous jewish saying

like a dream

 in the middle of the night, the pre-pre-alarms went off, and i jumped out of bed still in a dream-state and automatically woke everyone up before realizing that there was no point. three or four hours later, anothe pre-pre-alarm, only that one turned into a pre-alarm and we spent the next while in the shelter with no internet hearing lots of loud explosions.

mr smear did some fantastic drawing while i tried to stop one of the neighbors from enthusiastically pointing out all the flaws in the shelter and dreaming up awful ways we might die.

i don't know when the right time is to discuss urgent safety issues with the bomb shelter is, but i am  pretty confident it's not when you're all stuck in the bomb shelter in the middle of a massive wave of rocket attacks...

we did all get back to sleep, but when the 7am alarm went off along with a reminder that mr smear had a hygienist appointment, we painfully dragged ourselves out of our beds (i was the slowest and the groggiest) to get ready to go. i did try to find out if the appointment had been cancelled, but all avenues pointed to "go", and mr smear and i scrambled out the door and just made it to the bus stop on time and i just finished my take-away cup of coffee in time to get to the dental clinic on time to find it closed.

on the plus side, it was an easy, quiet ride there and back and mr smear and i both enjoyed the conversation immensely (kerbal space program has inspired him to want to be an astronaut).

...

when we returned home, i called the dental service to complain, and the woman who answered was disagreeable right from the get-go, which pissed me off, and although i continued to try to explain to her that the clinics should be cancelling appointments if they're not going to honor them, by the time i got through her gaslighting and dismissing i totally lost my shit and i yelled and swore at her.

then i spent a furious little while navigating making a complaint, the process of which honestly made me even madder.

someone called me back a while later, and i explained what happened and told her to listen to the recording. i was satisfied when she took me off hold to agree to handle the complaint with that asshole's manager.

...

we had an interesting all-hands today, our company's in massive demand and things are heating up. this is good. but it's also exhausting right now specifically :P

...

my cheek seems to be healing alright, but it's still very fresh and i'm nervous about it. i'm grateful i didn't bleed on my pillow.

...

while i managed to get some work done today, i'm not satisfied and in spite of my current desperation to return to bed there's a chance i might try to dig in some more.

mr smear was pretty good about doing his homework, with only one emotional outburst that he turned around on so quickly that i'm still feeling really proud of him. he also helped me do the dishes this afternoon, and we actually had a good time of it. he's definitely growing up.

...

both of the people i communicated with yesterday regarding my mother's aliyah got back to me positively. i hope they can help me. i just wrote myself a reminder to contact whoever i contacted last year.

...

there's so much news happening right now. i was actually in a media briefing earlier, though i didn't hear anything new i was pleased that the people involved aren't missing the point of what's happening. and from the looks of things...

holy fuck, it looks like our forces are doing what they're now used to - going from suburb to suburb cleaning up, but there's no actual army to fight. just lots of terrorist cells with missile launchers (my thoughts after watching this tousi tv video about khamenei trying to flee to russia. what remains of the IRGC is absolutely psychotic)

... holy shit. this was only day four. in october last year, i wrote:

i've been fantasizing about us going all out against tehran for months, i keep thinking about how the US went into iraq in 2003 and how everyone was expecting it to be a serious war, and then the americans walked right through them. i have a feeling that if we hit tehran directly, we could be looking at a post-ayatollah iran which would immediately change the face of the entire region... so that's what i'm praying for.

 just sayin'.

history unfolding

 not gonna lie, it's hard trying to figure out what all this means, but a lot of it seems amazing and is almost too good to be true! at the same time, i'm not not to think of the casualties so far, a few residential buildings brought down and while relatively low numbers of dead and wounded so far, still a whole lot more than we're okay with :(

spending lots of time in the shelter hasn't been too terrible, though gd seems to be developing an allergy to something down there :/ and there's a really loud autistic kid. but for the most part, we're just doing our thing, singing along when the kids sing and mr smear has taken to pulling out his sketchbook and doing cool stuff.

...

it wasn't clear whether our pharmacies would be open this morning, so it was a relief when we got to both of them. i was a bit pressured for time, and ended up taking a taxi and then running to get to my neurologist appointment (for the insomnia), which turned out to be the appointment that i'd moved to the end of july 🤦‍♂️

anyway, getting there early worked out well. the procedure (removing something from my cheek) was quick and only incredibly painful for a moment, but it didn't stop bleeding for a long while (they wanted to avoid using stitches) and my hand went numb from pressing onto the wound.

anyway.

mr smear apparently behaved well during his zoom class, and aside from one dramatic homework moment (which really wasn't as bad as the previous times) he was cooperative and did what he had to do.

for me, it was a difficult work day to get into, but i did put in a few hours and by the end of the day did get the main job done.

...

i also had a productive conversation about my mother's aliyah with an ex-saffer who works in the absorption ministry, as well as sending off a request for assistance from yad l'olim. the more i think about my closing paragraph, the more pleased with myself i become:

Any assistance you're able to provide will be greatly appreciated, we have been deeply distressed for years now that she is unable to come home. As someone who is financially secure, I am happy to provide any guarantees she may require to satisfy the authorities that her aliyah will be successful. As an officer of the IDF and who is currently working in our defense industry, I am happy to provide any guarantees she may require that she is not an undesirable immigrant.

...

i'm now very tired (i mean, i haven't stopped being tired since friday), and i'm a little nervous about sleeping with the wound not yet healed, and i'm a lot nervous about being woken in the middle of the night by more rocket attacks... but on the whole, our army and intelligence are doing us proud to an unimaginable degree and it looks like the future i've been fantasizing about since last year may actually be coming to pass right before our eyes.

it's very hard not to get stuck into the news loop. i'm trying and failing to tear my eyes away, but we're literally watching history unfold.

the nap

 i resumed my re-read of danny the champion of the world, which i just saw we stopped reading the day hyperviper died :(

mr smear surprised me by reporting that he'd finished reading it by himself and absolutely loved it, so now i'm giving it another go. and tonight we watched the "lisa the vegetarian" episode of the simpsons so that's all tied in nicely.

...

it was a quiet day (tfu tfu) and i think we're all still in shock from last night, not to mention the shock of the dead and wounded and the level of destruction in rishon le'zion and ramat gan.

[phones buzz, we're on high alert again]

this is exhausting. thank god we had a relatively quiet day, and mr smear is super excited by kerbal space program (even if i was disappointed that he didn't enjoy another case solved), and hopefully tonight won't be too bad. it looks like our forces are doing really well so far and the iranians are beginning to take to the streets 🤞🙏

escalation

thursday:

a full work day, busy and pressured. highlight: talking to my boss about the language side-project and then about my vision for educational games in general, and he and a couple of others were very supportive which was exciting.

the evening was fine, right until we spoke to my mom and i learned that her aliyah process is being interfered with again. i lost it, and posted for help in a number of places. the assholes in charge are making it stupidly difficult for jews in south africa to make aliyah and there has to be a way out of it.

i spent a couple of hours trying to work with a new release and eventually gave up before going to bed.

yesterday:

well played to all our politicians and our allies, we had no idea that things were already underway and the attack yesterday morning is something we're all amazed by and proud of. in my opinion we should have done this half a year ago after taking out the iranian's air defenses, but fine, this is good too.

...

the attack began with alarms and sirens going off all around the country, so we all woke our kids up and scrambled into our bomb shelters only to discover that there was no incoming after all, just a warning to be alert.

as if, after more than a year and a half of regular rocket attacks, we weren't alert enough.

half an hour later a different alarm went off, which scared and confused everyone, only it was basically saying what the first alert should have said 🤦‍♂️

...

so anyway, that fucked everyone up. in the morning, i realized that my late coworker's memorial service would either be cancelled or minimized, and after i'd put a lot of effort into booking a company car and making arrangements the evening before i messaged our boss (his cousin) to say that i (obviously) wouldn't be able to make it. which prompted him to inform everyone that everything was stopped on account of the (the?) war.

i spent most of the day responding to responses to my aliyah posts and writing letters. it's been a rollercoaster, and that's on a background of the iranian story unfolding. it was an insane day.

having said that, mr smear began getting into working with blender, and combined with my own issues with the "old" dell computer i'm becoming more and more convinced that i need to purchase a gaming machine that can handle game dev.

in addition to that, we spent a little time on there is no game and he started getting into kerbal space program. i tried to play fx fighter with him, but the online versions are all broken and the downloadable one is suspicious as fuck. at least he enjoyed the idea of it, when we watched some gameplay videos on youtube...

around 9pm all hell broke loose, as iranian drones and missiles rained down on us. it was really scary, there's no reception in our shelter and we were down there for a long time. after we eventually were able to return to our apartments, we saw the extent of the damage and were horrified by how many israelis posted videos in spite of the warnings that the iranians are using those posts to calibrate their weapons.

a few hours later, having slept through an army briefing i'd signed up for, there was another attack, even more intense than the first. and then a few hours later, another one.

my family's handling this well. mr smear's doing fine, gd's terrified but she's holding on.

i managed to fall asleep after the last attack and got up around 10am, but mr smear has been up since 5am (he's been reading roald dahl books on repeat, and he's gotten through a bunch of them over the past few days) and he's still going strong. we started our day together playing exploding kittens, then finishing (!) there is no game, and now he's learning about building rockets in kerbal space program while i post this and figure out whether i'm going to rest some more, or maybe try to get some work done; even though it's shabbat, we're at war and there's a chance we might need to push things out fast...

doing the thing (overeating)

mr smear helped me clean the window poop this morning. i sorted out a phone bill this morning. i booked mr smear for a dairy allergy challenge in september, and gd for a pain clinic consultation next week. i listened to some more of american gods.

i complained about the company breakfast, which was anti-vegan for the second time this week. then i ate four slices of bread, right before being reminded that we were being taken to an expensive lunch before they pitched us their services*. i ate a lot of really good food.

* we were pleasantly surprised and impressed by the expert recommending a competitor's solutions when he realized theirs wouldn't cut it

overall, it was a successful work day, but it included us making a decision that might well see us losing quite a bit of sleep in the coming week.

i got home in time to listen to mr smear practice on the keyboard, and do a good hebrew reading, and verify that he knew where to look in the book for his upcoming open-book science test.

it looks like we're dealing with dust mites :( gd and i have both gone over a lot of surfaces, hopefully we've gotten through the worst of it.

after shower / bedtime / lots of talk about mr smear's new/renewed interest in 3d modelling and game design (and me installing ableton live because the cubase trial is already over), i settled down to work on the language project and have been jumping between that (making good progress) and youtube/minesweeper since.

now it's after midnight, it's probably a good idea for me to head to bed soon.

catching up

 i've been complaining about being really sleepy in the mornings, but the plus side is that i have actually been sleeping. i hope writing this doesn't affect anything :P

i wrote up yesterday's experience this morning after mr smear left for school, and then rushed to get the dishes done, forgetting that i also needed to clean poop from outside our windows. on my way to work, i checked in with our neighbors and learned that we're not the only ones.

i've been listening to the american gods tenth anniversary audiobook on and off, and although the narration's not 100% i am enjoying it.

most of the day was all over the place, with the majority of it being dedicated to catching up with scr and introducing him to what we're all about. the late afternoon was all about preparing a release, and although i abandoned my coworker with a proper mystery in order to get home in time for dinner, we did manage to get through a lot of the process with significant successes.

another houthi attack. just me and mr smear and a couple of neighbors with their little kids, and one of them was being so cute that even mr smear was amused.

after getting mr smear into bed (with only one time returning to remind him that he's got to handle his fears with his imagination), i spent about an hour diving in to AWS account management, finally hitting a wall that i need our office manager to help me break through in the morning.

not broken!

 everything is broken, and ai isn't helping. i'm now spending an enormous amount of time fiddling with eslint and typescript configurations that are all designed to be as non-interoperable as possible, and this is what i'm doing on *my* time.

...

i struggled to get out of bed this morning (again).

we had a parental guidance session this morning that went well.

i managed to register mr smear for summer camp. it's ridiculously expensive, but it seems amazing and they even have a shuttle to our area, which may be expensive but not as expensive as me or gd having to pick him up here and there. and the timing is fantastic, because he starts going the day after my mother returns to SA. and, also, we're out of debt and we can (kind of) afford it.

i think i may have done something useful at work today, although i'm not confident.

i mean, aside from bringing home the black salt (kala namak) which has been offending some of my coworkers every time i use it. meanwhile, i'm not complaining about them microwaving fish in the communal kitchen. i did, however, complain about breakfast being all dairy except for lots of delicious bread, i'm not losing any weight...

and getting a recommendation for an interesting-sounding book (tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow), and convinced myself that a replay of the (three primary) daniel mullins games is in order.

there was a bullying incident at school today, it's still not clear what happened but it sounds like the english teacher just shrugged her shoulders and gave up on taking any action.

i had a long chat with mr smear's art therapy teacher, who scared the shit of me (as she does every year) by calling mid-morning out of the blue and making me worry that there'd been an incident.

i don't know if i've just got really dry skin or if i'm being attacked by something, so i had a vinegar bath and i'm using moisturizer and hoping for the best.

i asked gd to prepare a "go bag" in case of iranian attack, it looks like things may be heating up. i'm praying we get on with it and attack them for real and shut the IRGC shit down. also, making greta thunberg watch hamas atrocities is a stroke of genius.

[OMFG i finally figured out the configurations and things are working 🥳]

retro-parenting and all the things

 this morning was a bit of a struggle (i did sleep at least, but not nearly enough), i needed to request a tami water filter technician again, have it out with a cannabis license representative (she told me which documents i need to provide and agreed that that should be clearly stated on the application forms). i ordered a bunch of asterix books in english and french and we did an online grocery shopping. and i worked a bit on the language project. then i accompanied gd to the clinic to request said documents on the way to work.

but then i realized, while at the clinic, that i'd forgotten to disconnect the tami so i had to come back home again 🤦‍♂️

anyway, work: i had a feeling that i wasn't going to get to work on my primary tasks today, and i was right. it was a bunch of distractions, not least of which being that gd needed me to go home, pick up mr smear, take him to his therapist, and then have him come to work afterwards.

at least he managed to find his way to the office by himself!

he did most of the homework there - with a little skiving off now and again - and we left the office in good spirits (although we ended up going in the traditional loops of him going to far with the trolling, which reminded me of josh wolf's big fight* and then suddenly i was transported back to the brawl with my father), and arrived home in time for dinner.

* omg there's actually a follow-up with his son.

with no screens, because he hadn't finished his homework. it was pleasant enough, though. and then we told him he'd need to finish the homework before bed. this started off alright, but we had two final questions to get through and he shut down. and we lost patience.

...

i think one of the hardest pills to swallow has been that we never set clear enough boundaries with him, and that not having a strong sense of them is literally hurting him both at home and at school, and is causing him to behave in ways that are potentially damaging to his future. so now we're scrambling to make up for it, but he's already pretty big and it's really hard to force him to face the world and do what needs to be done without things becoming... intense.

i don't know (and mostly don't care) what the neighbors think of the yelling and screaming, but i actually had to make my son properly afraid of me for what i believe is the first time in his life. he's often been angry and upset by me, sure, but not openly afraid.

strangely, once i finally got through to him and got him to accept his fate and finish the job, his mood rapidly settled and he became cooperative, and by the time he'd gotten through it he was clearly happy with himself. i talked to him (sternly) about not making us have to go through this sort of thing again, he calmly agreed and went off to shower and brush his teeth, singing to himself the whole time.

and bedtime was pleasant, too 👀

...

also strangely, i expected to be thoroughly worn out by all of that drama but i felt strangely okay. i spent a lot of the evening watching youtube videos (i really shouldn't) and playing a lot of minesweeper (i probably shouldn't), and fiddling with my computer settings (it keeps restarting randomly) and installing driver updates (which then mysteriously uninstalled themselves), and somewhere in there managed to fix the language project issue i'd been experiencing in the morning.

and now... i don't know. i should probably go to bed soon.

never a dull moment

 yesterday was perfect, right until the end. mr smear came home, we grabbed our gear and headed to the pool. he put in the work, and he's improving dramatically. he's learning how to handle showering and changing in a locker room, and after that we returned home for a calm and peaceful afternoon. he did creative stuff on the old macbook with ubuntu (he made a really cool pacman image with gimp), while i tried to repeat thursday evening's steps in unity on my windows machine. we watched the "season" finale of asterix & obelix - the big fight, which was great fun even though it's totally not canon, and right after all that wonderful stuff gd and i got into a huge row that took forever to... not quite resolve, but to bring to an end and leave lots of stuff to think about.

today:

i didn't sleep well last night, partially due to waking up in the middle of it feeling a lot of unpleasant feelings. i ended up "sleeping" quite late, and waking up with a really sore neck.

my damaged toenail flipped a bit this morning, so it was time to remove it. it... seems okay? i hope it regrows safely...

it's fair to say that i've spent most of the day watching youtube videos and doing really hard quests minesweeper.

we watched a minecraft movie together, but mr smear left half an hour in to go to his friend. i can see why he loved it so much, and it's definitely entertaining in a very jack black kind of way, but it's not quite gd or my cup of tea. so we rewatched léon: the professional after that, which i haven't seen since high school. there were three things i remembered from that movie: mathilda sitting by the stairs swinging her legs, mathilda walking with the plant, and the explosive moment that me and my friend laughed at in triumphant relief just as his dad walked in a furiously berated us for enjoying such intense violence.

i think i appreciated it much more for having read nabokov's lolita, i thought the playfulness of the two characters was beautiful and found the transformation from something sexual endearing.

in the evening, with a little help from looking at my coworker's thursday evening code, i managed to get my first unity project doing an approximation of what i'd intended, i've documented every step for myself and i'm looking forward to our next session.

one thing that i've learned, though, is that microsoft's made it complicated / against the terms of usage to use vscode extensions in windsurf and cursor, so i've now returned to the vscode fold and subscribed to copilot once again. and now that i've taken care of that, i think i'm ready to get back down to business with the language project.

slowdown

 i struggled to get out of bed yesterday. and today, i guess. i think i'm making up for lost time this past week, but i'm also experiencing a general sense of calm that i'm not used to. long may it last 🙏

a week after i made first contact, someone finally got back to me from the university's summer day-camp and we began the registration process. what a relief!

...

i also went through sailors draft game design that he asked me to review a few days ago, and an aspect of it reminded me of another case solved. it's such a cleverly put-together game and it still makes me sad that it was taken off the app stores... but omg! i just learned it's available from the microsoft store!

[loses some time to playing a bit, and then trying to reset it so that mr smear can begin at the beginning: it took a while to figure out that the way to do that is windows settings -> add or remove programs -> reset]

it really is an inspiration for putting game elements together in a fun and addictive way.

...

theoretically, i had one job to do yesterday, but the little time i got to put into it was primarily spent babysitting an AI refactor and so far the results seem less than spectactular. otherwise, the day was all over the place, with two highlights (three if you count great vegan sushi for happy hour):

1. scr has applied to join us! i've invited him for a visit next week ^_^

2. we had a out first game hacking session yesterday, and it was fun and interesting! when i'm down getting all this down i'm going to play a bit and see how much i really absorbed :)

...

the toenail i smashed a while back is beginning to lift, and it's making me nervous...

i was really tired last night, i ended up doing nothing but watching youtube videos and playing minesweeper until i crashed much earlier than usual. but not after seeing the beginning of the trump / musk fighting :(

anyway, one fuck-up at a time. for now, it's a beautiful day and mr smear and i are going swimming after his computer classes.

the real puppetmasters

mr smear woke me up this morning with a surprisingly long talk about dealing with life, and school, and bullying. amazingly, he seemed genuinely open to what i was saying and appeared to appreciate how i tied it into how video games work*, even if he was a little confused at first :P

* that our emotions dictating our behavior make us like an NPC, and that he's been taking more and more control of his character's actions and learning how to navigate the world

mr smear woke up coughing again today, but we medicated him heavily and sent him off to school. i got a bunch of small things done, then arrived at the office with my biggest goal being to wait before tucking in to the breakfast. fasting is harder when the FOMO kicks in.

the day was an interesting, exciting, and sometimes confusing mix of tasks, but there was a common thread between a bunch of them and over the course of a few conversations we may have hit on a viable solution to something that's been gnawing at me for a while.

there was a little drama when i got pulled out of call by a notification that i couldn't make sense of, then pulled into a reference call for a candidate that i had nothing to contribute to, and then the next meeting ended with me trying to be calm and rational and end the call quickly because i suddenly and violently needed to pee.

i arrived at a plan of action in time to rush home and take mr smear out for a "walk"; literally just to the electronic recycling across the road as an excuse to talk about his day, but he derailed that plan with his favorite new game of trying to come up with dumb ideas. he liked my idea of "cold sauce", but i liked the idea of a digital broken telephone even more :P

we watched some more asterix & obelix - the big fight (it's really good!), and while mr smear got ready for bed i ordered the next two illustrated harry potter books (did they only publish up to book no. 5?), and once mr smear was in bed and i'd watched random shit and showered i sat down to do some work.

i was displeased to have to explain to a coworker how to extricate himself from a mess of his own device - well, a bunch of devs, but all of them doing stuff i've explicitly informed them is undesirable and dangerous - so it seems like we're going to have "a talk" tomorrow. but i was pleased to stumble (pretty quickly) on a solution to the most immediate issue that was much simpler than what i had in mind.

score!

the rest of the evening would have been very quiet had my mother not sent me and gd something politically triggering, and after the argument gd and i had yesterday i immediately called her to explain the situation... we're living in what feels like the end times, where being jewish is unsafe no matter where you are in the world, the jihadis have taken control of the media, and even patriotic israelis who should know better have become mouthpieces for jihadi propaganda.

plus, the south african situation is spinning faster out of control than ever.

i think i need to go to bed soon.

a pretty full day

 i *did* look at the PR last night, and was relieved to find it short and not very interesting.

i think i slept pretty well last night - i'm a bit fuzzy now - but the morning was more rushed* than i'd planned for and i left for work having had to skip a few steps.

* it involved a massive argument, but a very unusual one revolving around how we all deal with each other when we've all been influenced (or brainwashed) by too much internet.

i left the office just before our daily meeting to accompany gd to the specialist appointment for her toe. as we arrived at the hospital i realized we'd forgotten to bring the health insurance authorization, which is a real headache to sort out afterwards. while we waited, i video-called mr smear (who was home sick and watching youtube videos behind our backs) and instructed him in hunting through our documents, and was extremely pleased when he found what we were looking for! and then even more relieved when the receptionist informed us that he could just send a picture of it, so i didn't have to lose another half an hour to an hour picking up from home and waiting to deliver it... anyway, i was grateful and proud.

it was quite a relief when the doctor informed us that gd's suffering from a recently understood (since 2010) injury that women (with their longer and thinner toenails than men) sometimes suffer from. he explained it, and that we've caught it relatively early, and hopefully the treatment he's prescribed will be effective. and if not, we'll talk surgery. i really hope the topical cream does the trick 🤞

my work day was all over the place, but mostly positive. i left early and walked to gd's hairdresser, and although it cost double what i wanted to pay, it was definitely a quality cut and the overall experience (minus one of the other hairdressers being borderline abusive to his dog) was good. not including me falling asleep in the chair and then being asked - groggy - whether i was happy or not :P

oh, i guess their toilets are a bit dodgy, too.

anyway, i walked out into a beautiful evening, and thoroughly enjoyed my bus ride home (good trance music, and i found myself swaying to make the floor-glitter (whatever it's done with) move in trippy patterns. i got home in time to eat quickly with my family, and then dived into some unfinished work between getting mr smear into bed and tonight's houthi attack and going rollerblading.

by the time i should have been getting ready to leave, though, i just didn't have it in me. partially because i felt too tired and a little sore, but mostly because i felt like i was on the verge of a breakthrough. so i continued instead, and when i gave up on the AI helping me (after hours of being sent around in circles) i found some useful hints via a google search and *finally* managed to fix the first issue (out of two)!

just then, my coworker sent me a link to a PR because she'd figured out how to do something i'd struggled with an put aside a couple of months ago. it seems her prompt-fu is stronger than mine :/

i turned my learning into an article, published it (with a couple of side quests along the way), killed a large, loud bug that flew past my head and settled on a curtain (that i couldn't identify if you paid me), consumed internet garbage (links from copywriter, we're clearly diverging politically), and it's creeping towards 2am and i think i'm done with my day.

mostly sunshine and rainbows

 today wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, because there was some drama around washing the floor, but it was mostly sunshine and rainbows. whether it was starting the day quietly reading a canticle for leibowitz (i'm finally more than two-thirds in), or spending a couple of highly enjoyable* hours playing through there is no game: wrong dimension, or going to the beach with mr smear on a gorgeous day, enjoying late afternoon fries and beers**, all followed by a smooth dinner and bedtime***.

* although at one point - when we hit a credits screen - i found myself becoming increasingly agitated by a combination of the puzzles difficulty and mr smear's unwillingness to relinquish the mouse. but i was proud of him for how he stuck with me and the dastardly puzzles until we figured them out, and for how he solved a whole bunch of them faster than i could

** his was a malt beer

*** the houthi attack was just as mr smear was going to bed, any later and it would have been much more stressful. and the vibe in the bomb shelter was vibrant and there was lots of laughter

...

i'm supposed to be reviewing a PR right now, but i don't know if i have it in me or if i'm going to put it off until tomorrow morning. one of my coworkers assured an external dev that i'll have it done by tomorrow and i don't really know what it deals with yet...

...

the colorado attack. the recent washington attack. major news outlets should be helf accountable and there should be consequences for propagating libel and propaganda. they're literally making this happen.

the harvest

 i went to bed much later than i should have last night, mostly because i was making more progress with the language project. by the time i hit the hay i was done. and i feel like i slept pretty well.

this morning got off to a rocky start. it was going smoothly enough and then gd and i had an explosive argument about mr smear + screentime + friends. it definitely could've gone better.

work today was very quiet - two of the team in the office, one CEO, an ex-saffer visitor who turned out to be an investor and whose questions about my previous CTO made me uncomfortable (otherwise our interaction was cool), followed by a surprising and very short visit by said previous CTO.

oh, and another coworker came in for a bit, we literally just shared youtube videos and political discussion*. and i learned he and his partner have adopted a husky. i feel sad about any huskies in the desert, but he seems to know how to handle it.

* triggered by the news yesterday about iranian nuclear capabilities. why the fuck didn't we take out the regime last year??

otherwise, i was assured on thursday that the pashtida was vegan, so i had two slices for breakfast. only later did i notice that its cover said GF (for gluten free) but not vegan, so i double-checked and learned that it was not, in fact, vegan :/

psychosomatic or not, i felt gross, headachy, and even a little puky at the thought. i went home, trying to hurriedly pick up some juice and ending up getting into a whole thing with the markolet owners over a refund for a 50 shekel container of apricots. which reminds me, i tried to purchase jusant yesterday and my shitty dell xps can't run it, so i applied for a refund (and received it).

it pisses me off that i spent so much money on this machine and it's never really done what it needed to do without a fight. and i'm pretty confident i can't afford a new windows machine right now.

the rest of the afternoon was spent fighting with mr smear, progressively more aggressively, until he eventually got through two fucking math exercises that weren't even a real challenge for him. even he can't tell us what that was about, after he got through them he made a point of apologizing to both of us for the drama that basically cost everyone a half a day and gained nobody anything.

although at some point gd spilled a cup of juice as she angrily rounded the table to check on him, and i put my back out helping to clean up. so there's that.

chag sameach.

beats

 it was a big day, it had ups and downs. big ups, with a sprinkle of frustrating downs.

it started with me waking up with a sore shoulder, and it's ending with me either being eaten by a mosquito or just imagining it.

we left reasonably on time, with only a minor mr smear hiccup along the way. the drive there was longer than i'd anticipated, but we arrived relatively early in the day. it wasn't quite what we expected - the party took place in an amusement park - but for a family-friendly trance event it was a pretty good space.

immediately, mr smear decided he was struggling with sensory overload and wanted to go home. we tried to calm him down, and make him understand that we weren't leaving anytime soon, with varying degrees of success.

for round one, we hit the main floor while he sat outside drawing, but soon the wind came up and he went upstairs to lie on a bench and watch the floor from above.

in retrospect, i feel really dumb for not having brought him earplugs or ear protectors. i'm guessing roughly half the other parents remembered and/or cared :P

between rounds, we ate the packed lunch in the car and then played foosball before returning to the main floor. something bothered him (i found out later it was people eating at the table he was next to) and he went and sat outside (reading on his phone, i let it go for today), and gd and i continued having a really good time dancing, enjoying a beer or three (i only had one :P), and being both amused by all the families on the floor and proud of all of us for doing precisely what our people fight and die to be able to do: live.

on the way out, mr smear actually joined us for a final dance on the second stage (a dj with a didgeridoo, mr smear wisely thought it prudent to step away from the bass bin because he was feeling the beats in his chest), and the long ride back was (long, but) very pleasant. coming into the apartment, gd made a comment about how we need to do that more often and my heart lifted ^_^

the rest of the evening was good, with mr smear and i playing some there is no game together. eventually, he went to bed. everything seemed fine.

by the third time he called for gd, i went to go and see what was going on. i was surprised to find him in tears, and i pushed him to tell me why he was crying... to which he responded that they were joyful tears, because gd had sung him a lullaby and he'd felt truly at peace for the first time in years 😭

i've spent a little time working on the language project, but it's late and it's been a big day and i think i should probably go to bed soon.

encouragement

alright, i'm *really* happy about how today went. mr smear and i went to the pool, and my biggest regret about purchasing 10 entries is that i should've gone in for a membership (we'll do that when the ticket runs out). our main purpose was him learning crawl, and he worked hard and made huge progress.

and we had a good time.

i do feel a bit bad for him that a part of his motivation is that he's worried about getting fat, but we've been explaining to him that the answer to that is doing sport and eating lots of good food. i mean, if that's what it takes to get him to stop hating sport on principle...

he also really enjoyed the shower there, i had to explain to him afterwards that there're certain enjoyment noises that one just doesn't make in a locker room 😂

we came home, switched clothing, and then headed out with gd to the mall. we had a delicious hummus (with vegan shuwarma) lunch, found him two types of swimming trunks (costumes as opposed to boardies), and picked up what seems to be a really good pair of sandals for me.

by the time we got home i was done. i showered, napped hard, and eventually got up to do the dishes so gd could make dinner.

then mr smear and i spent some time on MAZE (until he got bored / creeped out), which is completely insane (trying very hard to avoid any spoilers, but mapping out our paths in a text file). incredible artwork and concept!

kiddush and dinner, and watching the first two episodes of asterix & obelix - the big fight. so far? brilliant!

too - much - cake.

everyone else went to bed a while ago, i'm probably going to crash soon. we've got a BIG day tomorrow ^_^

buzz

 yesterday:

i felt better, at least. made more progress on the language project. waited twenty minutes at the store to pick up my "neon-nazi"s only to discover that i was supposed to wait for an sms update, but they sorted me out anyway. had a pretty productive day at work, with the biggest achievement being a coffee walk interview with someone we've been courting and who signed later in the afternoon. good for him (as a new oleh) and good for us! ate too much cake at the happy hour, brought home too much cake and nobody else wants to eat it. went through possible summer day-camps with mr smear (whose preferences surprised us) and tried to book it, but we're now waiting for them to get back to us :/

the bug zapper in mr smear's room is super bright and may have been a mistake.

a couple of hours work in the evening (to protect us from a mysterious bug that we encountered during the day), a little more of the language project, then finally passing out.

this morning so far:

getting up early, catching and crushing a fat, slow cockroach, being blown away by the dor brother's AI short film. fighting with mr smear (but winning, apparently) because i'm taking him swimming but he wants to go to his friday computer class. more progress on the language project. now getting ready to head out...

...

i hate the spice girls, abhor wannabe, but i've had it in my head the whole morning and am somehow enjoying the nostalgia of it 😶

deficit

 i didn't sleep enough, but that's normal. i was extra slow this morning, and then we had a "school team" meeting, which really took it out of me. by the time i arrived at my office i felt as if i'd already done a full day's work, and my throat was feeling scratchy, so i've been suspecting that i might have picked up a bug.

i can't right now.

i drank loads of coffee to compensate, but i still found myself passing out at my desk in the afternoon...

i got home at a reasonable hour, and i took mr smear (without any argument!) to the school to shoot some hoops, which was really fun :)

after getting mr smear into bed, i very excitedly managed to lock down a couple of mosquito zappers* inspired by the couple of nasty ones that flew in our window this evening.

* i love calling them "neon-nazis", but lipgirl called it a "little auschwitz" and that's definitely taking it

i had some wonderful breakthrough moments working on the language project, i've successfully completed today's minesweeper challenges, i watched some youtube, and i think i'm just about ready to go to bed.

...

there are two wars against israel right now (gaza is not one of them & israel is losing)

namaste

i went to bed late, but i got up way earlier than i wanted to. the day started off well, i spent the pre-school morning coaching mr smear through some last minute exam prep - he did really well! - and then rushed through an online grocery shopping so i could leave on time to get to our yoga class.

no buses for a while, i ended up arriving *just* in time.

it was a good class, not easy, with some highly amusing moments. i didn't hurt myself.

we got a good company breakfast and i showered before settling in to work; getting in and out of the shower wasn't amazing, but the shower itself is worth it!

it was a pretty successful day. but the most successful part wasn't me: i asked mr smear how his day went and i could hear how pleased he was with himself, because he's pretty confident he aced the test. i am too, but i'm more excited about him not only getting a handle on the math, but feeling good about it too ^_^

i left early to meet gd and mr smear at the pain clinic for her nerve block, but we arrived there to discover that we hadn't sorted out authorization and it costs thousands of shekels, so we rebooked, did some shopping and went home.

i got mr smear to work on cubase for a while, but to be fair a lot of the actual work was done by me. *we* put together a pretty cool beat, and i hope he learned as much as he claims he did :P

then he read a couple of pages of hebrew harry potter - well - we had an early dinner and a pleasant evening. i spent a couple of hours ironing out issues with the language project, where user registration and authentication is now good enough to move on to the interesting stuff.

it's late again. hopefully i'll sleep.

instruction unclear

 last night's sleep was relatively okay, i guess 🤷

[i just burned the tip of my tongue on my tea]

image of the day:

after leaving a big note, and directly telling two of my coworkers not to touch the server under any circumstances, i discovered it had been unplugged and the entire office was treated to my very loud, very not-amused "WHAT - THE - FUCK?!"

some of the team found the story amusing, and one of them posted the above to the entire company along with the message "instruction unclear: unplugged the cable" 😂

...

i got mr smear through some basic math exercises this morning, and in the evening i worked with him on some of the matific exercises he'd been struggling with and which happened to provide great preparation for his math test tomorrow. and then he did some good hebrew reading before dinner, and all-in-all i'm relieved to see him not only improving his general attitude but gaining in math confidence as well.

...

aside from the unplugging incident, work today was memorable for an unusual but mostly positive interview, and an unspeakably unpleasant bathroom incident.

...

my wife is now bugging me about the language project, so i spent some time working on it this morning before leaving for the office and i'll probably do a little bit more now. tomorrow's a big day - gd's got another nerve block procedure in the afternoon - and i can't help feeling i'm forgetting something important...

...

 my prayer was answered, and the rest of the day went pretty smoothly.

i mentioned GPU stuff the other day, this morning my boss asked if it would help if we asked our contact at AWS for some help. literally the moment i agreed, i wondered out loud if perhaps we'd been using the wrong instance type the entire time.

two short experiments later, and all of our cloud instance issues were resolved 🤦

otherwise, i spent the entire day doing everything except what my boss had asked me to do, except for the last half hour during which i managed to get it done.

the bus ride home was interrupted by a dramatic search for vegan mayo.

i ran mr smear through some math homework before dinner, and he did pretty well. my new approach has had some major wins, and some minor losses, but all-in-all i feel i'm on the right track.

i spent some time half-heartedly working on the new language project, and just played a little bit of slay the spire. i'm nervous about going to bed. i'm pretty sure my mother has the sleep cheat code installed, i wonder if i don't...

... probably not :P

...

i have yet to have a fully positive audible experience. either the books i want aren't available, or the narration sucks.

a rough start to the week

i crashed soon after posting last night (although i did play some slay the spire first), but then i woke up around 12.30am with lower back and hip discomfort (like, bad) and spent the next six hours suffering both physically, and from an incessant stream of work-related nightmares.

then i got up to battle mr smear over homework, which we got through in the end but not without some feelings. 

i joined gd in taking him to the clinic, but turned around when i received a message from the mongoose to say that i could drop their old duvet off. i was almost home when i received a call from gd informing me that i neeses to take mr smear to school on my way. 

the walk to the school was unpleasant, to the point where i had to threaten him to stop fighting before we arrived. i really hope he doesn't dump his shit vibe on anyone else today. 

now i'm on the bus, praying that the rest of the day is smoother. 

calm

i'm tired, i'm posting this and drinking my "good night" tea (chamomile and lavender) and then hopefully i'll be ready to get a full night's sleep.

thursday:

it was a relatively calm work day. one of my coworkers was particularly condescending to me and another guy, and i'm quite proud of how calmly i handled it.

lipgirl organized an insanely rich, delicious vegan cake for the happy hour and i ended up bringing most of it home. i've eaten too much cake over the course of the last three days.

i was inspired by some of mr smear's homework questions to try teaching him math from first principles. he was so excited by how much easier it is to understand what's going on!

yesterday:

yesterday was the first day in a long while that i've had bandwidth for stuff other than my day job. i installed the windsurf IDE - which i'm so far quite pleased with (it feels more comfortable than cursor, but i haven't got lots of experience with the important stuff yet) - and recalibrated myself with some of my side projects.

some of the morning was just spent doing nothing.

after mr smear came home from school, i took him to meet gd and urchin at the sarona market for lunch. overall it was great, although it would have been better had mexicana not screwed up my order and given me chicken when i'd asked for vegan. yecch.

by the time we left, our buses weren't running anymore and it was searing hot at the bus stop. fortunately, while we were waiting for a taxi to accept our fare, an unexpected bus arrived that worked for us and we got home without further stress.

the rest of the afternoon was pretty relaxed. i looked up an alternative synagogue - we don't like the politics of the one we've been going to - but the only one that's close by and checks all the boxes doesn't hold friday night services which i find really confusing.

gd experimented with yuba for dinner, which came out really nicely.

today:

i started the day by initializing a language learning project, and then by reading more of a canticle for leibowitz when out spare mouse turned out to be broken and mr smear demanded (begged) to use our main computer.

and then i rotated my rollerblade wheels (which i've been meaning to do for ages) and mr smear and i rode to the beach.

it was a glorious beach day. the rides there and back were good (minus a minor incident where i tried to give him a boost and accidentally pushed him over), we found a spot in the shade for our gear, and we spent plenty of time having fun in the water.

i did get slightly sunburned, but not painfully.

the afternoon was spent reading and napping, and in the evening (after doing a whole bunch of dishes) i walked to our friends to deliver the barmitzvah present two weeks late, and we were all very awkward about it.

it was a very pleasant evening.

i've just bought tickets to a family-friendly trance party next weekend in honor of shavuot. we're praying that gd can come with (she's got a nerve block procedure on tuesday), but even if it's just me and mr smear i think it's going to be awesome ^_^

,,,

tomorrow is towel day! which in my book is synonymous with DNA testing day.

שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה

slower

 tuesday and wednesday.

mr smear was hardcore on sunday night, then chilled on monday. then yesterday's homework session was horrible again - just awful - and today was (mostly) chilled. i feel like we're getting somewhere, but my god it's taking a lot of strain to get there.

even though things were rough yesterday, they ended on a positive vibe and mutual appreciation. at least that.

...

i've been eating somewhat poorly the past few days, lots of snacking. this week the stress has dropped dramatically from day to day, and i've found myself feeling a bit lost in spite of all the urgent surprises i have thrown at me throughout the day.

usually around leaving time...

...

i think i might be falling asleep.

psycho-analytics

 these past two days have been very much about mr smear, and about GPU drivers.

i fucking hate the GPU driver ecosystem. for the biggest / hottest industry in the world, they're all behaving like rank amateurs and the entire experience is just shit. yesterday morning i felt out of my depth, but after hours of coaching by experts i can now confidently say that i'm both out of my depth and incredibly disappointed.

otherwise, yesterday morning began with mr smear informing me - after we left the apartment - that he'd rather walk to school alone. to have some alone time, and because he's nine.

i'm still feeling the feelings.

in the afternoon we had a parent-teacher's meeting. first, his home-room teacher was running half an hour late, and we had a severe conversation with the other mother who was waiting. i was surprised to find an israeli who considered my opinion on coalition governments being the source of our political evil to be plausible.

the irony is that the left and center of the country have consistently forced bibi to collude with the far right and ultra-orthodox for decades, which has been much more damaging to the majority than bibi worrying about just bibi.

right now, the government has cut funding to the teachers in a way that makes it more attractive to them to quit before year-end and go on welfare. we're all fucked.

as for mr smear, both teachers we spoke to said the same things, the same things we expected and have been dealing with ourselves. we've explicitly authorized them to take his drawing gear away if he doesn't comply, but we're shocked that that would even be necessary...

on the way home, gd warned mr smear multiple times to cooperate with me when i helped him with his math homework. we got through an exercise just fine, and then he did his usual thing and played dumb, trying to "run out the clock".

i lost my temper. in a bad way. as in, i'm embarrassed by how angry i got and i'm embarrassed by how long it took me to calm down again. the temper lasted most of the hour or two that it took to get him to finish the damned exercise, but by the end i felt like he'd understood the rules of engagement and that we weren't fucking around.

then we had dinner, and got him ready for bed. it was very late.

this morning began on a much better note, and for half an hour before he went to school i ran him through some exercises on paper, and it was a pleasant and positive experience. i even got him to follow basic algebra!

after that, gd had a bit of a meltdown about the psychologists demanding she see them in person, then took it out on mr smear's therapist during our parental guidance session 🙄

anyway, we had an interesting and constructive session during which i think i've understood something about mr smear's behavior, which consolidated during our evening call with my mom into the following: all of his bad behaviors - when physically changing locations, socially, and academically - all have the same common thread: not moving, at any cost.

but at the same time, he's had this issue with trying to control everything in counterproductive ways since he was a toddler, and it's only when we really crack down on him that he calms down and proceeds in a healthy way. so perhaps all of this is the same cause, and that we've been misinterpreting it all this time: it's not that he hasn't had enough control over his life, it's that he's had too much control and the lack of clear boundaries has left him holding on to where he is for dear life.

obviously we don't know any of that for sure, but it makes sense. either way, although these past few weeks have been particularly emotionally and psychologically exhausting we're seeing positive results.

...

today's highlight - outside of mr smear's progress, which included a good hebrew reading session when i got home - occurred during a knowledge transfer by the contractor who built the basis for one of our systems. he was speaking softly and the guys in the row behind us were talking loudly, so i turned around to shush them saying "please guys, we're recording". one of the guys yelled "then stop recording!" and everyone in the row - including my boss and one of our founders - immediately began calling me names as loudly as they could to make sure it's in the recording 😂

...

i'm not particularly physically tired but i'm soooo over today, and i've got work to do. i also sent a message this morning to ze german who's been consulting me to explain that i have zero bandwidth, and then an email to his contractor to explain that i can't really help her...