breaking the cycle

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

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

*sigh*

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

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

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

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

today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[checks]

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

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

a hard end to the week

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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

the good place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

relative

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

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

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

...

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

parenting is hard.

...

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

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

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

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

the FO part

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

it's been a day.

...

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

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

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

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

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

hi ___, i hope you're all well

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

what happened next was a total clusterfuck.

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

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

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

jesus fucking christ.

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

holy shit.

anyway.

...

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

...

it's been a day.

parents vs the school vs the bullies

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

parenting is fucking hard.

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

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

*heavy sigh*

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

...

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

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

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

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

parenting is fucking hard.

...

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

אם אתה דופק את הקומפיילר, זה אומר שאתה מהדרפאקר?

...

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

...

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

not today.

hacking

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

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

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

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