blowin' in the wind

thursday:

i was right about thursday morning being intense, but we didn't expect it to begin at 4am with another rocket attack.

i spent a good chunk of my morning trying to get midjourney to make me a picture like this one, but with the right number of toes so i could do this:

my favorite failure of the bunch:

i took mr smear to school, and then accompanied gd to misrad hapnim to apply for her new passport. at least the coffee was good... we arrived on time, waited a short while, and then discovered that i'd made a big mistake by not checking what we needed to bring. we didn't have gd's expired passport with us.

she had a doctor's appointment right after that, and we both understood from the clerk assisting us that i could just come back later with the passport itself, so i made sure she got on the right bus and i stopped off at home, picked up mr smear's meds, rushed to the school gate, administered the meds, rushed back home, scarfed down a bowl of muesli, and headed back to that counter with gd's passport.

i may not have had to make an appointment, but i did have to wait about half an hour for the clerk to finish with the previous couple, by which point i was way later for work than i thought i'd be. and then, to make things even better, the clerk looked at me in astonishment when he realized that gd wasn't with me.

...

so we have to go back again one of these mornings 🤦

...

the work day was crazy. it began with an all-hands with a lot of interesting news, not least of which being that i'm going to need to go through a polygraph experience again. on the one hand, i'm okay with that. on the other hand, i'm not okay with that. this is going to be... an experience. but i guess it's best to get into it and over it as quickly as possible.

...

i completed the thing i'd been working on, and moved on to other stuff, beginning to work "organized" for the first time in ages - not only getting into the new ticketing system (notion-based, it's kinda weird but not bad) but starting to track my hours like i did when i last worked as a contractor. really more for me to understand what i've been doing and how much time i've spent doing it,.

i don't know if it was wise to drink a beer at happy hour, but i definitely felt it and my lead's comment about reviewing code after a beer seemed less funny when i was actually doing that :/

[i don't recall much about the evening]

yesterday:

i spent a good chunk of yesterday updating an old encryption package i maintain, most of the effort being rewriting code "the right way" only to discover that that's still unsupported by modern browsers and needing to revert it :P

gd and i took mr smear to the doctor in the morning, which got weird because i couldn't make heads or tails of what the doctor was trying to tell us and she laughed at my confusion. gd seems to understand what was happening, at least. we did some shopping and came home, and we were all in the mood to not get up again for the rest of the day.

but then i learned that mr smear hadn't brought his homework books home, so we ended up having to walk to the school to pick them up. we ended up having a massive fight, which started because he didn't want to do any homework in the first place but ended up getting really ugly. i ended up walking out of the school without him, but i called gd and she talked me down and i returned to give him another chance.

it took a little while for us to get through things - we were both feeling hurt and angry - but we did, and the rest of the afternoon was quiet. and we even had a positive experience with the homework.

gd has been having trouble with her back lately (i mean she's always have trouble, it's just been worse than usual) and we ended up ordering dinner, which is very complicated on a friday night. it worked out alright, though.

afterwards, everybody crashed.

today:

the weather wasn't nice at all today, so we all stayed in. i got some stuff done in the morning, and the big event of the day was us watching the original karate kid movie. and boy, did i feel dumb: i haven't seen the movie itself in decades, and at some point after the bro mitzvah, i guess i started believing the troll about larusso being the movie's villain.

anyway, not only did mr smear really enjoy it, but there are strong parallels between larusso's experiences and his own, and i think that might prove helpful.

over dinner we began rewatching the fifth harry potter movie. the last few hours have mostly been me trying to build a set of scripts for work, stopping when i felt too tired to carry on, finishing a run of kaycee's mod that i began recently (water tribe, with a mighty ouroboros with double-strike), posting this, and now going to bed praying that we don't have to run for the shelter tonight.