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...

lessons not learned

yesterday evening:

highlight of the - day? evening? - we decided to toast vegan marshmallows over a small candle. they didn't toast as well as real ones, but we still had fun.

today:

another tough night.

today began with another fight with mr smear over screentime.

most of the day has been (and still is) all about my shoulder, it's been locked and hurting and massaging has only brought temporary relief :(

aside from letting mr smear go to a friend's place to screentime while we ventured out in 38° weather to have coffee with our friends, it was a day spent indoors doing not much. i played a fair amount of slay the spire and read a little bit of a canticle for leibowitz, which i'm enjoying when i have the headspace to read.

great, now i suddenly feel guilty for avoiding working this evening...

bonfires

 ah, i remember the conspiracy theory now: trump is burying israel so that he can bring us all in to the US as refugees where we'll rapidly integrate and give them a huge tech and manufacturing advantage.

...

yesterday:

another rough day, much less intense than before but with plenty of intensity left to go around. and lots of surprises / factually incorrect theories that led us down rabbit holes while we were trying to get something urgent (literally) out the door.

i ate too much vegan cake at the happy hour (and forgot to bring the rest home), while a new coworker regaled me with inappropriate tales about his parenting approach during covid. and i shared inappropriate stories with some of my coworkers about the horrible things my son has said to me over the years...

we managed to be "delivery ready" just after 6pm.

as it was lag ba'omer, i tried to find a bonfire but none were reasonably close / guaranteed to include actual bonfires. so instead, i took mr smear for a long, really good walk to the beach, where we had ice cream, and then we had a long, mostly good walk back (minus rushing into a stairwell in a random - but very nice - building when the houthis attacked).

today:

i didn't sleep very well. what made it worse was waking up in the middle of the night to pee, and seeing a notification from threads (which i've tried to opt-out from) for a particularly nasty and libellous antisemitic claim. it took me a while to calm down after that.

the morning started off pretty shit, with another fight with mr smear about screentime even though he's been punished with no screentime. that got ugly.

then i put in some work hours, figuring something out and then fixing a different thing, and then i took mr smear out for a walk. we went to the museum, where we saw some really interesting stuff which triggered some very big feelings (motherland), and although he needed some "herding" he came to the party and we left the museum with a good vibe.

the next part of our walk went really badly, but after he understood what the dynamics needed to be (i can't believe this is what we're doing these days) we made some good progress. our walk continued to the mall, where we had falafel for lunch and picked up two heavy bags of muesli which he carried most of the way home.

on the way home, we passed the war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness monument, and appreciated its structure.

i was really tired when we got home, but before i could nap i had to have a massive fight with my wife over trust issues, and i'm extremely grateful that in spite of all the feelings i managed to express myself well enough that it was resolved in a really positive way.

i did some more work in the afternoon, i managed to make some progress but nothing satisfying, and now the sun's about to set and we're about to make kiddush.

shabbat shalom

an unexpected delivery

today was wednesday. yesterday was tuesday.

yesterday:

it was a relaxed morning (in spite of some trouble getting mr smear up and at 'em), but it was still a very long, busy day with lots of interruptions and headaches.

you know when you take leave, and get sick because you finally have time to be sick? i got to the office yesterday morning and i crashed.

in the evening, when i finally got around to taking care of the top item on my to-do list, it went south and made me leave the office an hour later than i'd planned*. and then, after getting mr smear into bed, i had to continue working on it until eventually realizing that i literally couldn't resolve it without accessing the problem device in person.

* i complained about mr smear reading instead of spending some time with me, and then the sirens went off and we had a few minutes playing a game together in the bomb shelter :P

i was falling on my nose by the time i went to bed. and i slept right until the 6.3 magnitude earthquake in crete woke me up with our building moving around in circles. nobody else woke up, but i couldn't get back to sleep.

today:

oh, yeah - my neck and back have been moving issues around for days now.

this morning started calmer than yesterday, and after dropping mr smear off at school i met up with gd at the hospital to track down the clinic for her toenail issue. i was expecting to get bounced around a bit, but were sent directly to the right place and were immensely relieved and grateful to get an appointment that's relatively soon. and then we walked to our clinic and immediately received authorization for that appointment, so that's awesome ^_^

...

i had one mission today, and i barely touched it. i arrived at the office in time for a meeting with a third party, and we came up with a workaround strategy but his issues really didn't make sense. then i got sidetracked by our security consultant investigating a weird incident of my computer behaving weirdly in the middle of the night when it was supposed to be sleeping.

on my way to pick up lunch, i checked in with gd about an unexpected delivery i'd received a call about, and it turned out to be a beautiful care package from my company to say thank you for all the extra effort since our coworker passed away.

that was really touching!

over lunch, i came up with a weirdly compelling trump / bibi conspiracy but i now cannot for the life of me remember what it was :/

a new employee also has lots of tattoos, which set of a funny lunch discussion. then we interviewed a really interesting candidate, who's surprisingly knowledgeable and compelling for his relatively short experience.

in the afternoon, one of my coworkers approached me to ask me for some help with third parties, and in an exciting turn of events we managed to resolve his issues in a way that might help me with those of the morning. i've got some more testing to do, but if this works we'll have learned something that'll save us a ton of heartache going forward!

...

in the meanwhile, it was mr smear's last play therapy session and it apparently went well. i feel bad for her because mr smear was her final project, i hope us bailing on her doesn't affect her too badly.

...

i came home relatively early for a pleasant evening (in spite of a work issue that exploded at suppertime but that someone else ended up taking care of).

...

after showering, i was clipping my toenails when i noticed that one of them didn't look right. thinking that it was dirty or that i was developing something funky, i tried scraping it, and to my horror most of it almost came right off then and there 😱

it looks like when i recently smashed my toe into a table leg, it did a lot more damage than i thought...

...

at bedtime, gd came out laughing because mr smear had wished her a good night and asked her to never commit suicide. i immediately quipped that i'd bet he wouldn't wish me that... and i was right.

but while i was busy being hurt, gd informed me that mr smear's almost done reading maus, and he's obviously affected by art spiegelman's mother committing suicide. so i feel a little less bad.

i thought i'd get work done tonight, but i'm done. g'nite.

the stress ball

yesterday began positively, and so far the post-privileges world is looking pretty good.

when my mother informed me last night that mr smear had reported that he'd lost his privileges forever, i was reminded that on the way to school, we'd seen a child dressed up in a costume and mr smear had asked me how long until halloween.

now, please bear in mind that my son has absolutely no concept of time, and asking him what day it is is usually a silly waste of breath, but also that on our way home on saturday i'd told him that he'd remember the 10th of may as "the last time [he] fucked with me". so when i asked him what day it was, he didn't hesitate to say "11th of may" and it took everything i had to not laugh out loud and continue with "and what month is halloween?" 🤣

the past two work days have been hard, but yesterday was the harder of the two. it was almost exclusively about planning and preparing installations, although it also included entertaining nystire for a bit, reminiscing about our late coworker with our security officer (who's also mourning, but is outsourced so hasn't been doing so as part of the organization), and interviewing a very interesting candidate (i marked him as "strong hire" when i should have marked "proceed", but there's nothing i can do and it's probably fine).

those distractions notwithstanding, it was 7.30pm when we finally had a release candidate that had been sufficiently tested to begin the first installation, and we then found ourselves doing it on unfamiliar hardware and with a very clear and unrealistic looming deadline.

i found myself alone, nursing a beer (my meal replacement) and running into the weirdest issues, until at 10.15pm i realized that i'd been battling for over an hour with a VPN misconfiguration thinking that i was having network issues - that was when i finally left the office and came home; not physically tired, but emotionally completely done.

oh, and my back having been in a spasm for most of the day didn't help much either.

...

i finally posted the following yesterday evening, which i'd been thinking about since being painfully disappointed by a post from tpj a few days ago:

a few days ago an officer that i served with, who lives in a country with some of the most toxic, antisemitic media in the world (the BBC), wrote a post describing israel as an "occupation" and our army as guilty of war crimes. such counterfactual propaganda is painful enough when other people repeat it, but it's led to me recognize that the old adage about the greatest evil being the indifference of good men needs to be revised:

the greatest evil is the amplification of evil by people who we expect to know better. 

in retrospect, our lives since october 7th have been completely overtaken by a perpetual sense of mourning. we mourn the victims of the massacre itself, and all of the traumas both personal and national that the massacre has left behind. we mourn the hostages even as we hope against hope that some of them might return, and we mourn the horrors that they've endured and continue to endure. we mourn the hopes that we've held for so long that peace was somehow just around the corner, and we mourn the decades that we spent deluding ourselves that the situation was so much simpler and less demonic than it is.

but most of all we mourn the illusion that this modern, 21st century, hi-tech world was somehow better than before, that truth and justice were shared values, that antisemitism was fringe, that the west wasn't at war with innumerable enemies who work tirelessly in underhanded ways to turn democracies against themselves. and we mourn each and every friend, relative and supposed ally who falls into the sophisticated propaganda traps and turns their back on us. even more so the jews who don't realize that they're not only unwittingly betraying us over here, but themselves, and every jew everywhere, before us and after us.

perpetual mourning and grief are hard, exhausting pills to swallow.

...

it wasn't an easy night, but at least the massage time in the morning made a big difference. i dropped mr smear off at school, then headed to a post point to collect some ali express gear for gd. i arrived half an hour before opening time, so i hunted around for a coffee shop and settled down with a vegan coffee slushie.

life was good - for all of three seconds, before my phone rang with a video call from a coworker and an unfamiliar name in desperate need of assistance because one of our systems died.

the unpleasantness continued all the way to the office, with only a few minutes' pause as i picked up the package, and for the most part i didn't feel like much of a contributor (although i quietly celebrated a moment when something i'd suggested did help).

i went straight from that to troubleshooting my own installation, which needed to be done before with could continue with any others, with a bunch of different people breathing down my neck...

ultimately, i figured out what we needed to do, delegated some annoying manual labor to the project lead, and between the two of us we managed to get (almost) everything ready by the end of the day.

which is the point at which we were informed that there would be a delay in delivery, but thank you for the effort 🙄

no matter, it's been one heck of a learning experience for the organization, so i'm good with it. i came home relatively early, we all had a very pleasant evening (and watched the first episode of the original naruto series), i've had some time to myself (including playing slay the spire), and although it's late i'm going to at least spend a little time thinking about some of tomorrow's work before hitting the massager and going to bed.

...

the bitcoin money finally landed in our bank account today, and it was enough to cover the last outstanding debt we owed to my mom. this is a very special moment for us ^_^

almost restful

yesterday:

we all went out to pick up pillows (the ones we bought a few weeks ago are expensive but shit), a bunch of nature store groceries and treats, and then "opened a table" at the hummusia. it was great.

but all the while we were on the clock, trying to make arrangements to get mr smear and his friend to cinema city to see a minecraft movie (in english with hebrew subtitles, as they instructed, because his friend's trying to learn english and they both agreed that it's always better to see a movie in its original language 🤣)

we caught the bus home just in time for me to be able to pick up the first car (our "usual" vehicle wasn't available), figure out how to start it (?!), pick up the boys and get them there just in time, and only almost taking a wrong turn once. i turned the wrong way for parking, though, and we ended up having to walk quite a way... his friend's mom had organized the tickets which were supposed to include concession stand items, and figuring that out when they were already running a bit late was stressful.

i eventually got them seated, then headed out to the car to get it back before the reservation ended feeling somewhat liberated by them being okay and somewhat nervous about them being alone (i was thinking about the off-chance of mr smear somehow coming into contact with dairy)

i drove back to the car's parking spot, parked it, and had just left the building when the sirens went off - a houthi attack.

good grief.

i managed to get into a bomb shelter nearby, one full of extremely loud neighbors, while frantically talking to mr smear's friends parents and explaining that they were alone in glilot but that it was probably okay (because the theatre should be a protected area). then i walked home, grabbed a cup of tea, and began the journey to the second car, which was much futher away.

just before arriving there his friend's mother called to say that she'd called him, and that he'd complained that she was disturbing their movie :P

i drove back to cinema city, found a closer parking, and got to the theatre just as the two of them were walking out, full of enthusiasm and joy ^_^

it took a while to get out of there, but it was all good spirits and they decided that mr smear should go to his place for the evening. the drama that followed was him refusing to take stuff for the night (insisting that he didn't want to sleep over), even though he eventually did end up sleeping there.

god knows if he brushed his teeth. i know for sure he didn't shower :/

gd and i made kiddush, ate a very simple dinner, and watched the rest of nightcrawler (meh. also, have i seen it before? but mainly meh - it's a good movie but not something i'm ever in the mood for)

today:

it's weird waking up without mr smear at home. not unpleasant, but weird. after much not-much-ing (including a fair amount of slay the spire), gd and i took care of the humungous pile of dishes, and around lunchtime i called mr smear and heard that the parents were out and that he hadn't eaten. he was "peckish", he told me, but not hungry.

i walked over there (it's a half hour walk) to pick him up, and arrived in time to find them being fed. i ended up being coerced into staying for lunch and extra coffees, while the kids continued with their screen-time marathon, and the adult conversation was excellent and ended in me passionately describing the magic of shakespeare's sonnets to people who really appreciated it.

after that, i finally managed to extricate myself and my boy, and we were off on our way home. in very good spirits.

...

right until i explained that due to the excessive screen time, there would be none until dinner (which at that point was only an hour or two away). what followed was pretty extreme, not just the fighting over screentime and rudeness and consequences, but also me having to physically drag him half the way home.

it was all just fucking awful.

there were big feelings and strong words and angry silences. also a couple of funny moments, but they didn't last. i explained to mr smear that we're going to mark today - the 10th of may - as the last day that he gets away with the bad attitude.

i didn't know whether gd would be supportive or not, but it only took her a minute to realize what he was doing and how and we agreed whole-broken-heartedly that real measures needed to be taken. so while he showered, i figured out how to block specific sites on the computer, initiated an account deletion for roblox, deleted almost all the games of the ps4 (except for my games) and unsubscribed from their plus program, and disabled his access to our steam library.

it's cold turkey time.

there was still some lingering nastiness over a very quiet dinner, but afterwards we all had a family talk and it really feels like we got through to him. in addition to everything else we discussed - and we discussed a lot of stuff - i instructed him to start working on a gratitude journal, which he did with gusto.

bedtime was smooth, and pleasant.

post-bedtime? gd and i are absolutely drained following all the drama. it was a beautiful, restful weekend that was marred by car rental issues, terrorism and a massive parenting failure, and it's pretty hard right now to focus on the good stuff. i'm going to go practice that now.

"hummus thursday"

 "hummus chamishi" - lipgirl's started a pretty dangerous tradition. miraculously, i was fully functional during the post-lunch meeting in spite of it, and i only began to crash around 4.3pm when leaving the office for the weekend.

i taught mr smear how to construct beats in the morning.

it was a tough day, although less than the previous ones since my wednesday night achievement, and us agreeing that the other stuff on my plate was more "nice-to-have" than bona-fide requirements.

our friends' son's barmitzvah was intimate and pleasant.

[writing paused to write a complaint at the discovery that all the construction noise today is from a new project]

this morning so far has been mostly alright, although there was a bit of a meltdown over writing a mother's day card (i still haven't got a clear answer as to why there was yelling and tears). i woke up and used the massager this morning, and my neck's still tender but feeling markedly less so.

...

we're retaking gaza. we should have done this well over a year ago, instead of pandering to the american left and letting the situation get worse. all the land from egypt to jordan belongs to israel, it's in everyone's best interests that we reclaim it and put this jihadist's wet-dream of a  "palestinian" experiment to rest.

more strike

 the strike continues, on through tomorrow. this morning i took mr smear with me to pick up a parcel, and then took him to work, picking up a mother's day gift for gd along the way.

getting him to do his homework was tough, but aside from that having him in the office was fine and he enjoyed coming with me to build a salad for lunch.

it was another annoying work day, though. slightly less annoying, but annoying nonetheless. but: while i didn't get through what i needed to get through at the office, i did make progress and managed to get things working after getting mr smear into bed. and i got to show off something cool to gd, which was fun.

mourning / scrambling to finish the work / dealing with a strike / not sleeping well / overcompensating by snacking and consuming too much caffeine -> wired, tired, not happy

and my wrist's a little sore from too much minesweeper.

i don't know if i'm ready to rest, but i think i'm ready for the massage kit.

strike^3

 omg.

another strike day, and tomorrow's another one. godsdammit.

the day began alright, then involved a fight over misunderstandings, then (once resolved, at least) i headed to the shiva house. i expected to be the only coworker there, but a few others arrived just before me. i talked to a woman i once served with (who turned out to be my late lead's sister-in-law), spoke briefly with the widow, and spent an interesting while with the parents.

then we bussed back to tel aviv, where i met up with gd and mr smear, took him to mexicana, and we walked to the office and ate there.

by the time i was finished eating i was done. my brain was fried - the sensation i suspect of being a kind of mild narcolepsy - and my coworkers needed me functional.

i wasn't functional.

for a while, at least.

anyway, most of the afternoon was me feeling harassed and not getting any of my work done, while simulatenously feeling guilty about feeling harassed. and at the same time dealing with mr smear who couldn't do his homework on the old computer.

it wasn't a particularly successful day. we came home and enjoyed a great dinner, and then i began falling apart. but i had stuff to do, so after putting mr smear to bed and doing some massage-kit time, i did a little of the work (symbolically little) and then got caught up in bullshit. and now it's late.

so i think i'm going to go to bed soon.

strikes

 jesus, another day of the teacher's strike. and tomorrow's another one.

i slept alright, i guess, but still needed some massage time when i woke up - i feel like consistently using it for long periods on my neck is helping. i did another page of hebrew reading with mr smear, and gd and i had an encouraging parental guidance session.

the work day was long, but alright. tough, pressured, but alright.

it was an enormous relief receiving my payslip and seeing that my broker was right - it was just the last one that was out of whack.

during the day i got a call from gd, who'd realized that mr smear wasn't doing the math homework he'd claimed to have done (fight, battle won). when i got home, i taught mr smear how to make beat in cubase before dinner (minor fight, battle won). at bedtime, we had an issue with closing his door (minor fight, battle mostly won).

i thought i might get some work done tonight, but no. youtube and minesweeper, a bunch of random admin chores, slay the spire, and now... back to youtube while i type this, and then... bed.

the mandate

 i'm absolutely exhausted, but finishing my "good night" tea and dropping these notes before hitting either the couch or my bed.

yesterday:

a mix of learning, getting distracted and improving my changes from wednesday, and distracting myself with random shit.

in the early afternoon we all took a walk, a very pleasant one, and ended up at the ice-cream parlor with the salted oreos flavor. mr smear was *extremely* excited by how clean their toilets were and couldn't stop repeating, in wonder, how much they care about their customers.

after we returned home, i caffeined up and got a ride to the shiva house. a whole lot of us were there, the family was stunned to hear stories about a side (or sides) of my lead that they never saw, and our hearts broke for his wife, their kids, and his poor parents.

that was hard.

i missed my ride on the way out but got a lift from one of our founders who i've been chasing for a one-on-one for weeks, so we talked all the way back to tel aviv. i was in a hurry to meet with the rest of the team on the beach for beers in my lead's honor, stopped to use goodness' toilets and paid for a shake, and then had to hang around forever while they made it.

and it was getting cold.

i hopped in a taxi and met up with them, borrowed a sweater and we all commiserated over beers and pizza. i got a ride home just in time to say goodnight to mr smear, get myself ready for bed, and crash.

today:

in the middle of night i became restless, both physically and psychologically uncomfortable, and after an hour or two i moved to the couch where i stayed until morning. (i think the massager helped a bit)

mr smear's school's on strike (and again tomorrow), but we forgot until we arrived there... we did a full page of harry potter in hebrew, and he did well, and then i went to work.

between conversing with coworkers, a picnic in my lead's honor, and bussing through to the funeral, the day was almost all about him. in between, we discovered some issues with a deployment and i just (a few minutes ago) redeployed, found some more issues, and put it aside until tomorrow.

the day was hard, the funeral being the hardest part. i've only known the man for two and a half months, but son of a bitch, i don't think i've laughed that much or cried so hard at a funeral before. i still can't believe he's in the ground.

and i'm keenly feeling the weight of the additional mandate to succeed for his memory's sake, and for the sake of his family.

psychosis

 the past couple of days have been schizophrenic, and utterly psychotic.

thursday:

the fight about going out notwithstanding, thursday was amazing. it was a gorgeous day, we rode to the port and sat down for far too much ice-cream. which was amazing.

then we rode to babylon park, where mr smear did a VR ride and the two of us played a shooting game, both by raw thrills and both brilliant experiences.

then we came home via the dog-friendly coffee shop, where he made a new four-legged friend named "cheesecake". (and where i witnessed the horror of a woman with a big dog who, after she'd waited for ages for her two coffees, yanked her so hard that all the coffee painted the sidewalk)

inspired, we came home and re-watched jurassic park with gd, and ordered rainbow burgers for dinner, and all-in-all it was just a magnificent day.

yesterday:

i went to bed quite late, but slept alright. i took mr smear to school in the morning (it was a pretty relaxed morning), and by around 10am gd and i were ready to head out. that was when i first looked at my messages, and learned that on thursday night, my lead had had a heart-attack and died.

this is utterly devastating. not only professionally - we're a new company and he's the chief architect for our central platform - but personally as well; we've been working closely together for the past two and a half months and he was a personality and a half, insanely smart, larger-than-life and full of obscure knowledge about the world in general.

to add to all that... this last week was particularly rough on him, and i know that a decision that i made was the cause of a lot of his frustration.

jesus christ.

so that was the background for yesterday, and today, and the next while as we not only mourn, but also scramble to take over his responsibilities.

today is shabbat, and i'm loathe to work on shabbat, but that effort begins today.

...

gd and i picked mr smear up from school, dropped everything off at home, and then headed to the shuk to find him shoes. this was a rough experience on two fronts: the first being the shuk itself on a friday, and the second being the usual difficult involved in getting mr smear to try on shoes.

the experience was not in any way fun.

but we did manage to get him shoes and sandals for his class hike next week. although to balance that, we also got some shirts with prints and the prints are already flaking off.

we stopped for coffee, then walked to the bus home. then decided to walk to a different bus stop rather than wait for twenty minutes. we had a pleasant walk down sderot chen, arrived at the stop in time... and then gd saw the hummusia next to the stop, so we sat down there instead.

we "opened a table", and while it wasn't the highest quality food, the experience was great.

we got home with just enough time for a quick rest before getting on a company call just to be together. and then i took mr smear to shul.

the walk there was fine, but the shul experience itself was... difficult. mr smear was mostly alright, but in two separate incidents behaved so badly that i had to punish him (he's just finished brushing his teeth and the punishment timer has started), and once again got into his "i hate babies" mode and glared at any infant that made a sound.

add to that the hard-left political stance of the rabbi's sermon (we must be united, so let's fight the fascists) combined with inappropriate re-gendering of the litergy, and i left the synagogue totally over it.

but then things got more wrong, because mr smear - as usual - got angry with me for talking about stuff he doesn't like to hear as a consequence for his own bad behavior.

at this point, i dropped my bad language filter and went all out.

on the one hand, things got loud enough that i was half-expecting someone to call the police. on the other, i eventually and miraculously got through to him and we had a very honest, very clear discussion about his behavior and what he's doing to himself and others.

the rest of the walk home was hand-in-hand, and peacefully positive.

we got home, he jumped in the shower and i caught gd up on the events, and we called up my mom and said kiddush. things were going just fine... until mr smear - lounging backwards in a way we've been telling him not to for many moons - tipped a plate full of food all over himself (in his clean white shirt) and the floor.

and that was the straw that broke gd's back. she absolutely lost her shit, and while i think there were things she said and did that may have been a bit harsher than warranted, she wasn't wrong to be completely (and scarily) clear with him on how fucked up he's been.

so the rest of the evening was under a dark cloud, but the good night wishes weren't met with fighting and landed well.

i went to bed soon after.

today:

i got up groggy, and spent the first hour or so on the couch with the body massager crushing into the connective tissues in my neck (i've been having trouble with the muscles below the left side of my occipital bone for the longest time) and the eye massager doing its thing, feeling very futuristic.

now that i've got this down...

*takes a deep breath*

... it's time to face the music. All The Music.

yom ha'aztmaut 2025: everything is on fire

the devastating eco-terrorism fires set yesterday seem to be relatively under control, so we can at least open the windows and go outside for yom ha'atzmaut.

this is a tough one.

a beautiful prayer has been written for it: a prayer for yom hazikaron and yom haatzmaut 5785-2025

saturday:

mostly resting, with mr smear finally feeling better. watching big, which has aged surprisingly well. an afternoon walk which turned sour, but managing to rescue it by the skin of my teeth (and a mix of forcefulness and letting some shit slide).

explaining to mr smear that there are four types of authority (power, knowledge, leadership, and dependency).

sunday:

a really good night's sleep

waking up to surprise renovations downstairs while trying to get stuff done, including lots of time on the phone learning that my debit card issuer can't cancel our debit cards

successfully getting our freelancer to deploy, then discovering that my son had informed his therapist and mother that he was suicidal. a long, serious but mostly positive talk with him and gd at schnitt's

homework help: after some fighting, establishing that he'd done the book report properly, making a lego pizza slice

spending the evening mindlessly doing minesweeper quests until way later than i should have

monday:

a very positive morning after a short but relatively good night's sleep. surprisingly good yoga start. surprise water outage, but at least an apology / acknowledgement from the apartment owner that he should have warned us beforehand

a reunion lunch with my previous teammates, no vegan options but a manager who took the feedback well

rushing to get the car and pick up gd and mr smear, surprise trucks blocking the pick up point after mr smear misunderstood that "meet us here" meant "meet us here now", parking too early, gd getting an answer about her toes (her toenail seems to be disconnected from the matrix, and might be infected)

fucking up the installation, a panicked hour or two with my lead on the line trying to help him (through his panic) to do stuff he doesn't want to do while simultaneously trying to get anydesk to work so i could rescue the machine i'd auto-deleted from our vpn

leaving the office around 9pm, getting on a bus with a suspicious package and getting off at the next stop because the driver didn't care. the next bus driver doing me a favor by dropping me off where he shouldn't have

getting myself cleaned up and then diving right back into work. making some progress but grinding until 3am before giving up

tuesday:

3.5 hours sleep, good quality sleep but waking up feeling broken

crazy day of non-stop support and phone ringing, exhaustion, napping before a sezchuan lunch, everything still broken but eventually somewhat successful (our test site, at least), the simpsons and pushing bedtime back a half hour (possibly a bad idea)

our whole family at the door putting shoes on to rush to the shelter before realizing that the siren was for yom hazikaron

an early-ish night

wednesday:

a proper good night's sleep

starting the day with a massive wake-up fight (see previous comment about possibly bad idea)

a clinic mission after dropping mr smear off at school

visiting the bank on the way to work: "you could have just sent me a message". getting the cards cancelled pretty quickly.

my son the asshole ("secretly" erasing the board every day, then threatening the kid who told him not to - the kid whose mother he insulted, and whose artwork he tore up, and who he hit with a rock - then calling gd in tears to say he was being bullied by the whole class, then kicking "the usual" bully, then telling the teacher she's an idiot that's being manipulated, then finally apologizing)

jesus fucking christ.

over the course of the day i managed to defuse the situation with my lead by agreeing to walk back a change he was unhappy about, and we're going to have to find a different way to approach it. and i expect that we'll know soon enough if that was what broke the deployments...

ordering lunch was a mess, wolt took the wrong payment method and the two agents i spoke to were completely useless. but the lunch itself was absolutely delicious (yellow curry), and i should only have eaten half of it.

the rest of the workday was smooth, cursor's "assistance" was a mixed bag (90% of the code was ai-generated, but it was also 90% wrong and needed a lot of iterating). i learned a lot about kubernetes, though :P

on the way home i needed to mask up because of the ash

a long "family meeting" that was very intense. parenting is hard.

a quiet start to yom haatzmaut playing minesweeper and slay the spire and thinking a lot about everything.

today so far:

mostly quiet, but now heading out with mr smear. we had a fight about heading out - as usual - but this time i warned him that we won't tolerate this shit any more. if he doesn't change this behavior, i'm going to start deleting his game accounts, like roblox and minecraft. i'm done.

chag sameach.