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.