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 :/