spikes

 the past two days were really hard, and i've told this story twice this evening so i don't really feel like getting it all down. can't i just upload my thoughts already?

yesterday:

i woke up with the same headache i'd went to sleep with, plus intense fatigue. it was a very tough day, the headache didn't go away, and then in the middle of it the snaky manager interrupted a perfectly positive discussion with her team to aggressively and unpleasantly interrogate me. it took everything i had to keep my responses even and then reset the vibe to continue and finish the discussion.

i kinda meant to call her aside to discuss it, but i didn't get a chance, and in retrospect it was probably for the best. but the cost of that was carrying that shit experience with me out the door, where it directly tied into my experience back when* because the more i thought about it, the less comfortable i was approaching her and the less comfortable i was approaching my boss.

* which i didn't understand at the time was the beginning of me being steered into a trap

i met up with gd and mr smear at home, began writing the message to my boss that had been burrowing into my brain, suddenly realized with horror that i'd been writing it into a message box that i could have easily sent accidentally, so i cut and pasted it somewhere else, and then we all left to catch a bus to meet up with kibbutz cousin's sister and brother-in-law for dinner.

the bus took us most of the way there, and we would have arrived at their hotel on time if i hadn't made a wrong turn... but we made it there not too late, and what followed was generally a very nice and interesting evening. and mr smear mostly behaved quite well, especially considering the fact that he was bored out of his skull and has lost all his screen privileges for the week**...

* he did lose an additional day later in the evening, though, which kinda sucked

the ride home was complicated by the tlv night run locking down most of the city, but we got home in the end. bedtime was a bit rough, though i kinda managed to rescue it a bit.

...

my cousin was found dead from a stroke / heart-attack in his car yesterday morning. after years of struggling, he was literally a couple of weeks into the process of finally turning his life around right before his 60th birthday. i remember stories of his shenanigans (he was notoriously a getaway driver from a botched bank job when he was younger), and a well-known clubbing personality (bar owner) in cape town, and it was partially thanks to him that i could never go down the cocaine rabbithole (when you see what it can do to some like that, you think more than twice). what a fucking crazy thing.

today:

i was tired enough to get some sleep, but i did spend a good chunk of the night lying awake running through scenarios with my boss and the snake manager. i woke up feeling shit, but definitely better than yesterday, and i'm still feeling quite weak and a bit faint. anyway, today was definitely better than the day before.

after handling some chores i walked to the post office to pick up another parcel for gd (another 70 NIS for customs for another item that we just learned needs to be returned :/) and then caught a bus to work.

i arrived at the building just in time for a meeting i hadn't been aware of, and just as two others from my company were discovering that the elevators were out of order. we spent the next few minutes arguing with unhelpful security guards, following directions to nowhere, and eventually jumping on an elevator in the hopes we'd get close enough to our floor to walk.

the two floors up was looooong. in my present state, i was completely buggered halfway up and felt faint at the top, but it took a while for a rescue mission to arrive.

the meeting turned out to be the two guys who displaced me teaching my teammate to use their magic new tools. one thing i couldn't shake was the new manager's bored affect with his chewing gum, very much reminiscint of megaman.

unfortunately for them, the new tools aren't really working, but more unfortunately for them my new manager came in and had to explain to them all the things they've been dismissing when i've tried to help them onboard and understand what we're doing. and then he found out that what they've been promising is very different to what they're delivering...

... i found out later that there was a very intense dressing-down from the boss that took place after, and i have a feeling that they're doing a little of the FOing after their FAing. as it is, i later found out that they've somehow managed to block most of the team's work for about three days already due to their lack of understanding of what they're working with, and i re-bonded a little with one of the other captains over our happiness at not being on their side of the complaints table :P

before lunch, i managed to catch my boss for a couple of minutes, but i didn't have a script and i had no idea what i was going to say until i said it; i just knew i needed to make sure that he understood that something untoward was happening and that i was trying to deal with it. and in a way that didn't project whining.

ultimately, things went awkwardly but - i think - well. unfortunately,

during the conversation i learned that our tech ops guy has been fired, which really strung. we knew he was a junior when we hired him, and this dude has been working his ass off and grabbing every opportunity with both hands. he's also been a really fun person to work alongside.

i had lunch with the brit, who i'm sad to say may well be incapable of keeping his head down until everything sorts itself out. i've warned him with what the boss said, but he's really struggling and i totally understand him. i really hope he doesn't get himself shunted out, because he's professionally amazing both in technical terms and in bigger-picture wisdom.

the afternoon was constructive, and i eventually got a chance to take the snake manager aside.

now, i don't know how much of her behavior was performant, or real, but she claimed she had no idea what she'd done and that she hadn't intended any malice, and she apologized profusely for speaking to me like that.

whether it's honest or not, i accepted it graciously and i hope that's the end of it.

the end of the day was good. just good.

i came home, realizing on my way that i'd forgotten our obligation to the class picnic tomorrow. i quickly dropped of a plate of happy hour "leftovers" for mr smear along with my bag, caught another bus to the nature store, found what i was looking for and receiving embarassingly condescending responses from the teller, jumped another bus home, ate a little with my family, got mr smear through some more of his history homework, saw him brush his teeth and shower and get into bed in record time, and read a little to him until my eyes started shutting.

we spoke to my mom for a bit, and then i went hunting for a story that i saw on facebook (which means i have no way of finding it), and now i've done what i was kinda dreading doing and gotten all this down. and now it's late, and i'm beyond tired, and i'm going to be going to bed very soon.

optics

 last night was reasonably quiet, as opposed to right now where i'm babysitting an emergency rescue deployment and my eyes have suddenly gone out of sync. to be fair, i've been continuing to play the final sequences (i think) of shadowrun: hong kong and i can't really tell if i've just spent too much time in front of the screens or if i'm having some kind of exhaustion-related ocular migraine.

anyway. there was some tension this morning due to mr smear needing help with some homework he'd forgotten about right before leaving for school, but this evening we continued it and it went pretty well - we're learning about interesting greek history while learning some pretty high-level hebrew simultaneously.

the work day was mostly a continuation of the previous evening's frustrations, but combined with me teaching a new guy how to be frustrated and troubleshoot. overall, we were successful and we both learned a lot.

yeah, my brain hurts. maybe i should call it a night.

the relief pt ii

 i left work early yesterday to walk to mr smear's friend's place, where i found him and two other kids midway through guardians of the galaxy. so i guess that's a thing, and i bought the first movie so we can all watch it together.

we enjoyed our walk to the mall, by which time mr smear had decided that he was really hungry so - thinking we had time - i ordered a good hummus meal (with salad and chips and falafel) and we set to. but then we ran out of time, and i had them pack up the leftovers (really not a lot) and rushed to find the hairdresser.

the hairdresser experience was excruciating. i don't like the vibe, i didn't like the woman wet-barking-coughing throughout her pedicure, i never like having to intermediate between gd and a hairdresser when describing a haircut, or mr smear's demands not making any sense, i found the woman trying to help me by dragging a wobbly table with a glass bottle on it so that it smashed all around my feet unhelpful, i didn't like the fact that neither of the hairdressers seemed at all interested in cleaning up the mess, i didn't like having to explain to the hairdresser that the obvious chunk of hair missing from the back of his head wasn't perfect, and i hated paying NIS 100 to experience all of the above, plus walking my kid out with a shit haircut.

mr smear and i caught a bus home, i finished the leftovers and although late, the rest of the evening was good.

except for bedtime and the night, because he kept turning his bedside lamp on at all hours and shining it into his face to prevent scary images when he closed his eyes, which straight-up prevents him from falling asleep.

today:

i caught up a bit of sleep during the night, but there were some sleepless chunks, too. and a dream that involved camping in some kind of ghost town with joe rogan 🤔

i bought mr smear the first percy jackson book this morning, and so far he's super into it.

i took the morning nice and slowly, only really interrupted once by a call from mr smear begging me to let him install chatgpt on his phone because he really wanted to talk to someone, and i hadn't accompanied him. i keep thinking about des bishop on mindfulness.

i went to work, arriving just in time to hear the story behind miyacholaleynu. after an emotional rollercoaster, i rushed out to get to the school in time for a different kind of emotional rollercoaster, our meeting with the team.

firstly, it was a completely different vibe and experience from his previous school. but secondly, the shit we heard made us deeply concerned that he's on his way back to his previous school. not only has he been pretending to the teachers that he can't understand a word of hebrew, and not cooperating during his lessons, but he's also been skipping art lessons (?!?!!), in addition to using the forbidden teacher's computer and looking up horror. these are all red lines for a school that so many kids fight for the privilege of attending, and we are literally at wits' end.

i grabbed lunch and returned to the office emotionally drained. the conversations over lunch were interesting, though. the rest of the afternoon was essentially me doing something that i haven't had to do for months, and really hitting walls (the whole ecosystem of gpu drivers is awful).

eventually i left the office and came home, just in time for dinner and a very difficult family meeting, followed by more of the same when speaking to my mom.

when i put mr smear to bed, i physically removed his bedside lamp from his room and told him that the scary images he sees when he closes his eyes are his brain punishing him for feeding the scary wolf. i advised him to spend his pre-sleep time visualizing good experiences with his teachers, proud moments, and literally getting his hands dirty in his arts class and enjoying it.

at the end of the day, if he ends up getting chucked out of the arts school it will be thoroughly tragic, and we'll just have to live with it, and there will be nothing we haven't tried to help him avoid that fate.

it took me a while after putting him to bed to figure out how to lock all the playstation accounts with a code and prevent him from creating new ones, and then i tried to continue working but the machine i needed was offline, and then i spent a lot of time catching up on instagram messages, and now it's midnight and i'm probably going to go to bed very soon.

the relief pt i

i didn't get any more sleep, my stomach gave me trouble all morning, and i had to switch my morning coffee for chamomile i was feeling so messed up.

distraught, and faint.

cancelling our plans to bake challah-peño for the office, i accompanied mr smear to school and then headed to the office early, which have me an opportunity to sit with the brit and understand that i'm not alone in my understanding of the situation. it gave me an opportunity to offer him some support and advise him according to what our boss had recommended.

from his side it sounds like the boss has heard us, at least.

i enjoyed joining my new team because we all already know and like each other. in our first one-on-one, i told my new lead what i'd practiced for my boss, and thanked him for taking me, and he corrected me saying that he wanted me on the team. we've worked together quite a lot before, but he then proceeded to explain the new role to me and it honestly feels like a *much* better fit. i was really nervous before learning what my first project would be, but now that i know what i'm tasked with i'm legitimately excited for it.

a bit later, i managed to corner the boss and we sat down for a very somber discussion, but he heard me out, reflected deeply and appreciated the feedback on the feedback. i managed to communicate my concerns without explicitly calling out anyone or any specific incident, and i feel heard.

my nerves immediately relaxed, and the rest of the work day was smooth and positive.

an hour behind, a catch-22

 it's 2.50am, when yesterday it would have been 3.50am (daylight savings time). but i don't get to enjoy the extra hour because i can't fucking sleep.

my insides are roiling with the tempest of feelings: the new captain's first mate has been working overtime all weekend to deliver what he promised me would be in last week, and now i realize that he's probably been dragging his feet so that the new captain would be the one to look good on it. and that made me think of the new captain warning me - a month or two ago in private - to watch out because the other manager is a viper.

it bothered me back then when he said what he said - at first i didn't understand why he would - but i've been watching him cozying up to her the past week and i now realize that i may well be in the process of being fucked. and connecting those dots with some others, i'm now quite convinced that he's been trashing me behind my back.

i have spent every moment since panicking, flitting between anger and terror, freaking out because if i address this and i'm wrong, i'm a paranoid asshole, and if i don't address this but i'm right, myself and my reputation are going to be in big trouble.

i might already be in big trouble.

at my mother's suggestion, i spent a good chunk of last night compiling all the things i should say, and possibly some things i shouldn't, and have since had my brain going full tilt on processing and reprocessing conversations that i have no way of knowing how they'll go until they're gone.

i might well be losing my job for trying to rescue my job. i might well lose my job if i don't. i literally cannot afford to lose my job.

...

in the midst of all that noise, i took mr smear out for a bike ride in the afternoon, which was very nice - except for when it wasn't. i think i handled it pretty well (it's all the same "i hate going outside" routine), but it does detract from the experience and the experience was already shadowed by my panic over all of the above.

...

he's really having trouble sleeping again :(

...

the morning was nice, though. i picked up a bunch of books on kindle (including the robert fitzgerald translations of the iliad and the odyssey, inspired by our talk around the hercules movie).

out of air

 i didn't get much sleep last night. i've been having difficulty breathing and my stomache's been upside down all day from the anxiety.

i accompanied mr smear to school this morning, mainly for the fresh air and our usual banter, but also to keep him on track with his school council election slogan. apparently he ended up doing it properly.

my way home was essentially me running through scenarios with the team leads and running through possible conversations with my boss. by the time i got home and sent him a message asking him to call me, i was practically hyperventilating.

but he did call, and i said everything i meant to say and then some. because it turned out that requesting brutal feedback from him was a good idea, and i now understand the trap that i set for myself months ago: i took on all the shit, background, thankless work that nobody else is interested in in order to enable the rest of the team to focus on real stuff, and i've been managing the devops guys (some well, some not so well), and it now looks like i haven't actually delivered anything of value.

not only that, but nobody likes a policeman, and all the things i've been responsible for have required alignment from all the teams...

so now that i understand all that, i realize that how i've handled the situation was fundamentally flawed: instead of spending all day every day being interrupted by context switches, what i needed to do was dump the various responsibilities on other people so that each person would only get hurt a little bit.

i also made it clear to him that as much as i stand by what i said yesterday and recommend that we keep an eye on the new captain, as long as the current situation is what it is i'll be giving him all the support he needs to succeed.

unfortunately for the british guy, there's no way out of his dilemma; either he plays nicely with a manager he abhors, or he leaves. which makes me sad both for him and for the company.

anyway, i'm really glad that i spoke to my boss, both for the clarity on my side and because he was happy to hear what i had to say. having said that, i'm still processing, still running through scenarios, still struggling to breathe properly.

what will be will be.

...

perpetual anxiety aside, the rest of the day was great. i took gd to find a pair of shoes, and she found a pair she's happy with, we got decent coffee and waited for mr smear and another new friend to finish school. we all came home together, then gd and i left for a pharmacy / grocery mission (i would have gotten shoes, but the only ones that made sense were twice the price i was willing to pay), picked up some stuff from the bakery on the way home, and walked in to find the kids playing 99 nights in the forest :/

(they both knew that roblox was supposed to be off the table)

for me, the afternoon was a mix of reading, napping, playing shadowrun: hong kong. for the boys, it was computer games, card games (!), and then his friend convinced him to go outside to one of the parks (!!!) for a while. so that happened.

on his way out, mr smear told me that his friend's father was apparently a famous singer, so we checked it out when he'd left and holy shit he's a cultural icon :P

the late afternoon / evening was all about dishes, baking challah-peño (and finally understanding why some of them haven't been rising properly - too much flour), a little more shadowrun, and then dinner. which was going well - we're still watching disney's hercules - until mr smear started scratching another hole in his leg so his screentime is done until that's healed🤦

anyway, the last hour before bedtime was pleasant, bedtime itself was smooth*, and i've been playing shadowrun since... until i became overwhelmed by intrusive work-related thoughts again and had to stop to post this.

* he really wanted to read call of cthulu which i organized for him, but i wouldn't let him read it right before bed.

...

at least i can say that i'm loving shadowrun: hong kong. i'm playing it on easy so i can focus on the story, but even easy isn't that easy and the story and mechanics are great as always.

a dramatic start to the weekend

i've got two days to process everything that happened today (also, this last week, and possibly month or two) before starting to deal with a bunch of things that make me nervous.

...

this morning started off alright. mr smear went to school, i did the dishes and took gd's wrong-sized shoes to the post office for return. then i caught the bus to work, and immediately got caught in a web of onboarding stuff. otherwise i worked straight until lunchtime.

the good news is, i got my primary job done. and, while i was out talking with my mom on the way to and from getting lunch*, bigtalk stopped in at the office to say hi and report that he's got a new job in the building, which is a relief (i really hope his new job is actually good for his career, and not just another employer blowing smoke up his bum).

* omfg. my niece is three months' pregnant and hadn't told my sister, and when confronted she said "she didn't think she'd be interested". my sister and her son have been living with her and doing all the heavy lifting in the parenting of her kid as it is, whose father (the ex-husband) is a known paedo. the boyfriend is sweet, but useless. all the fucking drama.

the bad news is that just before going to get lunch, the new captain shared his "roadmap" with the team and my british coworker responded (in our team chat) that it looked like it was ai-generated and that it was "mental" to devise an 18 month roadmap for a devops team**.

** it's pretty crazy in general, ignoring the fact that we're a new startup and the captain doesn't understand how anything works yet.

after lunch, i took him aside to explain to him that whether he's right or not (he's totally right) it doesn't help him or anyone to be so tactless.

immediately afterwards, we returned to our desks, at which point the new captain - in front of everyone, because it's an open-plan office - climbed into him, resulting in him telling him "i'm in charge, i tell you what to do, and you do it. if you don't like it, go speak to the boss".

i just kept my eyes fixed on my monitor while this took place. the feeling of the two of them hating each other was palpable.

half an hour later, i had a meeting with the boss. he asked how i'm doing, to which i responded that he'd need to start as he was the one who'd called the meeting. he informed me a) that i was off the devops team and b) that he wanted me back "home" and programming, but that "neither of the r&d dev captains were particularly excited about me joining their teams".

now, i don't know if he was reporting accurately, or if he was being polite and saying that they'd refused to take me, but either way i'm very unhappy about the fact that two people i've been working with for eight months don't want to work with me. even if i do have some idea of why not (each of them for different reasons, but mostly in approach). so a huge part of my processing anxiety right now is trying to figure out how to approach them on sunday and try to find a way to achieve some kind of feelings reset.

so i've officially - with immediate effect - been moved to the system team. this is a fine outcome in my book, at least, but knowing it's my boss's third choice does leave me with a bit of an aftertaste.

of course, that happened right before we all walked out to a special happy hour. which i spent most of talking to the guy i used to serve with. although it was an interesting conversation, i kept seeing my boss and the new captain and a bunch of others out of the corner of my eye and i had a strong feeling that i should have been there instead...

...

gd was supposed to finally be getting her tooth sorted out this evening, and i was expecting her to be done by the time i left the not-so-happy hour. she didn't answer her phone, so i called mr smear and learned that the dentist had been forty minutes late, and that gd had been on the chair for twenty minutes already, and he was sitting in the waiting room bored out of his skull.

so i talked to him until i caught a bus to join them, unlocked a couple of games on his phone for him, and then sat quietly stewing all the way there.

i met up with the two of them just after gd had finally finished, with the unfortunate result that the new tooth didn't fit properly, so she's now got to wait another two weeks. we headed to our usual post-dentist hummusia, had an enjoyable dinner (the food, not the feelings surrounding our respective days), and then caught a bus home.

...

while we ate, i asked mr smear if he'd apologized properly to the girl from yesterday. he informed us - and we double- and triple-checked - that she'd merely giggled as a response, and that aside from that they hadn't had any interactions.

hmmm.

...

mr smear went to bed relatively smoothly, and now i've posted this perhaps i'll have energy to shadowrun a little. last night i clicked through a whole lot of dialog, but by the time i was ready for a mission i was done.

war & peace

 i woke up this morning to an unhinged stream of invectives from the mother of a girl in mr smear's class. it appears that she was so terrified by something that mr smear looked up on the teacher's computer that she was unable to close her eyes until almost midnight. also, the following is the list of "curses" that mr smear name-called her:

1. stupid 

2. miss underpants 

3. a little girl in the nursery 

and that we must keep our child away from hers.

OH MY GOD. considering the rather disturbing vocabulary he's capable of, this is what upset her? as a fifth grader? fucking grow a pair. jesus.

anyway, after calling mr smear (who was already on his way to school at the time) to chew him out, i responded to her that a) his behavior was unacceptable and that would be dealt with accordingly and b) that i'm shocked that the kids have unsupervised access to the internet at school and c) that he claimed that her daughter wasn't entirely innocent in the story, and that i would ask the teacher to try and figure out what happened.

at that point, this woman completely lost it, and sent a stream of messages to the effect that her daughter was completely innocent, that the school has a zero-tolerance policy, and that she hopes they take the appropriate action (the insinuation was clear that he be kicked out of the school).

it was *very* hard to not respond, even to not say "i'm not going to engage any more", and i was in war-mode and literally shaking by the time i walked into the office. i spoke to a couple of coworkers, and one of them said something that made me realize she might actively try to get everyone on her side... i sent the teacher a message explaining that i'd tried to show cooperation, but that she was extremely aggressive.

the response i got indicated that her behavior isn't out-of-character and that we're not alone in our assessment.

...

the legal team guy i served with is now working from the office, so we had a fun catch-up. which included me regaling him with some tales of the bug spray guy who apparently traumatized him with a bike ride.

...

our first weekly lunch hour game hacking session wasn't nearly as successful as i was hoping, but it wasn't bad either.

...

our "daily" meeting was in the afternoon, and afterwards i sat with the new captain for a bit to discuss some things. it was a lot more constructive and positive than i expected. later, as he was on his way out, i remembered that he's from netanya, and i suspect that his nonchalant-but-needs-to-put-his-thing-down affect may be due to growing up around arsim.

...

in spite of the perpetual "urgent" distractions, i managed to focus on my primary task for a couple of hours. i think i made good progress.

...

gd and i talked with mr smear about what's going on with him. it didn't get loud, but it did get intense. i hope to god he stops FA-ing before he FO-s.

...

"i only test my code in production" - i need to get gd a shirt. i picked up some green curry yesterday, so she used it this evening for a really nice dish. only... it wasn't until she's put our entire dinner on the line that she decided that it was too spicy for her. and then, of course, mr smear decided that it was too spicy for him, even though i ate it and it wasn't spicy at all.

except for a couple of random bites, and then it was back-of-the-throat spicy, which i don't like.

in the meanwhile, mr smear decided (after chickening out of the main dish) that he was going to make shit real by loading up onion slices with hot salsa. i don't know which part of that sentence amuses me more, but the results were pretty funny.

bedtime was uneventful - less than it's been for a week at least - we read some more neverending story and then i sat down to post this. the computer's been much, much quieter than usual, though sometimes the fans flare up, but i have no idea what specifically i did that worked :/

under new management

mr smear going to school on his own. the walk to the post office. the washing machine technician coming for nothing.

the long devops meeting with our new "captain", who really isn't much of a leader and who doesn't seem to understand that the business is more important than the tech. a meeting with our security team, with the new captain, which gave me a sense of being (positively) outside the team.

lots of onboarding assistance. and coworker consulting. and a very late lunch + hot sauce run, which was interrupted by a delivery guy who'd been stood up by one of our coworkers.

syncing with the brit after his 1:1 with the captain, and being relieved to hear that it was considerably less combative than we expected.

leaving later than planned, but earlier than usual. not being able to help mr smear with his maths - both because he didn't write down the exercises properly, and because matific was down. a pizza dinner watching the first part of the hercules movie (so outrageously disneyfied that we had to stop mr smear yelling at the screen), a pretty pleasant experience between dinner and bedtime.

then a whole lot of struggling with the windows machine (the high heat and fan speed apparently may be because i use brave, but it seems to happen with chrome too, and even when they're closed).

i'm tired.

lighter mission

i almost forgot! before dinner, gd realized that the lighter for the gas stove was done. so i had to drag myself off the couch, get dressed again, and go to the corner store.

they were out, but the guy was really busy with other customers and his daughter started yelling for help because she was stuck in a tree and afraid. it took me a few minutes to convince her and her sister to come down and not go up again until their dad was around...

i picked up the lighters from the further corner store, and on my way back walked past the bookstore so i ducked in to see if they had any maps. they had one, but it wasn't quite good enough.

the woman behind the counter was being awkward, but there was something familiar about her (and her awkwardness) and i eventually asked her if she'd studied english lit, and when, and although she claims she doesn't remember me at all i now definitely remember taking classes with her!

so that was entertaining.

long and tiring

 t'was a long day. work was a bit weird, we were lucky that the aws outage only affected one of our sites, and only coincidentally. fortunately, one of our new devops was able to fix it manually, in a particularly impressive way.

i went hunting for a wall map, ended up buying a strip of batteries for mr smear's memory game instead. and then i sat down with a coworker for a slow, heavy lunch at a hummusia.

i came home early hoping for some rest, but a message from mr smear's teacher had me worried. in spite of that, we had some good time together before dinner, and we all enjoyed finishing twins. it's aged well.

after dinner, we had a very serious talk about the message; we don't know if mr smear is telling the truth or not, but if he is then he's doing well and we're proud of him. if he isn't, he's going to have to deal with the consequences.

we can only do so much.

but it was encouraging that the new arrangement for his math homework seems to be off to a good start...

bedtime was going fine right until he got into bed, and one of his eyes (his "bad" eye) started leaking. we're praying it's nothing interesting.

the rest of the evening's been nice. and included the expected amount of too much shadowrun: hong kong.

oh, mr smear expressed interest in playing DnD. i'm going to message cm and see if he's up for an introduction.

failed to restart

 i'm tired. but my coworker was worse off than me today, he came in with heatstroke :/

mr smear left a minute or two before me today, and instead of waiting downstairs, he just left. without saying goodbye. so i followed him, walking at a fast pace, and caught up with him just after he crossed the highway onramp, so i got to see him handling everything alright.

i dropped him off at school, then headed to the office.

i'm having a hard time with names and faces now. like, a really hard time.

today was another day of one distraction after another. the new "team captain" has arrived, but he's onboarding so he hasn't really joined us yet.

i struggled to not snack today.

i came home a bit later than i'd like, but not for any good reason. we watched more twins over dinner, and then had a family meeting about the new math homework rules. shower / toothbrush time was smooth, getting mr smear to sleep was much easier... he at least tried what i was telling him about relaxing his body in order to relax his mind.

i guess i'll find out tomorrow how it went from his perspective.

i passed out on the couch, but woke up with bits of the jelly beads from mr smear's "prize" all over me. and then got stuck trying to solve a bizarre work issue.

i want to play a little shadowrun before going to bed, but i don't think i have the brain for it :(

nature nurture

 this was a BIG weekend.

yesterday:

it was a very rushed morning. i dropped mr smear off at school, then took the light rail to the hospital mall where i picked up a bunch of stuff for the camping, especially the two bags of large vegan marshmallows. i carried the shopping home, then spent the next while helping gd knead the six large challot, including one giant challah-peño.

between rising/baking sessions, i rushed out to pick mr smear up from school, stopping at the office on the way to pick up my sunglasses which i hadn't been sure if i'd left there by mistake. i only had a few minutes to get out of there, so of course it was on me to discover that the alarm hadn't been set the night before and that there was some kind of issue with it... i managed to shift that off to my CEO before heading out again, arriving a few minutes late to meet mr smear at the station and take a walk to yuka monsters.

we picked up our copy of the day everything changed, then jumped on a light rail to return home, help gd with the last of the challot, and furiously pack everything. it was far later than planned when i finally went to pick up the car, return to load it, and get me and mr smear on our way to the "fairy forest".

mr smear was very excited about riding up front for the first time in his life, and he did a pretty good job as navigator keeping track of waze and relaying data. it's also been years since it was just the two of us in a car together, so we blasted his playlist, and overall it was a good ride.

minus us leaving the three coconut waters i'd bought for the trip in the fridge at home :/

the camp site was really nice. the tent we rented was way bigger than expected (it said "two man", but we could easily have fit four full-sized mattresses in there with space for bags). the tap water was potable, though it didn't taste very good, so mr smear didn't drink enough :/

in general, the class kids have a good energy together and for the most part mr smear gets along with them. with a couple of them better than the rest, which is positive.

one of the parents - a linguist - started telling mr smear that he didn't need to learn hebrew, which upset me... i tried to remain polite while making it very clear that she was doing something inappropriate, but she just didn't give a shit and it wasn't until this morning that an opportunity presented to share a bit of mr smear's history and make it clear that we (finally) actually have a handle on the language issue...

dinner was quite an occasion, gd's challot were a great success, and challah-peño received a lot of welcome praise. afterwards, mr smear's new friend's dad set up a gas stove so that we could toast marshmallows, which for mr smear was an amazing experience, while for me it was a mixture of excitement and trauma trying to fairly dole out a limited number of marshmallows to a swarm of greedy kids of various ages and cuteness levels.

and then, we realized that that whole time there'd been another family nearby with lots of marshmallows - non-vegan ones - so they could have handled a lot of the load instead :/

mr smear and i hit the sleeping bags relatively early (normal bedtime for him), and he was very excited to not be going to sleep alone. we both fell asleep pretty quickly.

i must have woken up half an hour to an hour later. the sleeping bags we bought are good. and warm. and i suddenly realized that i hadn't showered, and that i'd needed to shower. and then the restlessness settled in, and it wasn't until very late (i'm guessing around 2/3am according to what i heard later) when everyone else had finally gone to sleep that i finally managed to fall asleep again.

today:

so mr smear had a great night's sleep; me, not so much.

we got up with the sun, brushed our teeth, and i somehow succeeded in coercing mr smear to come shower with me. i explained to him that if there wasn't hot water, i'd be going first and have to suffer the longest, and when we entered the stalls we discovered that there wasn't any hot water, and i understood what all the previous evening's screams had all been about.

but the weather was good, so the moment i'd dried off the sun began heating me up. mr smear did not want to get in - i mean, neither did i, really - but he eventually did it and got through it, and once he was dry he also felt amazing.

great success!

i'm quite proud of myself for taking the towels back to the car and using them to ensure that the front seats and steering wheel weren't hellishly hot when we left - not only did that work well, but the towels were also bone dry by then.

he convinced me to start our day with hal's kettle-fried jalapeño chips, then it was breakfast / coffee / him and his friend inventing an activity that involved eating painful things (including the chips) that none of the other kids went for, then a pass-the-parcel game which he eventually joined (and took away a squishy-ball prize he was excited about), and then we assembled for a hike.

it was a much tougher hike than i expected, but it was good, and we got through it. it took a little while to break camp - mostly due to helping other parents and getting into a conversation about age-appropriate gaming - and then we were off.

our biggest issue on the way home was that the UX of the car radio is awful, and we couldn't charge the phone and listen to music simultaneously. so we charged it for the first half, and listened to music for the second half, and by the time we arrived home we were both exhausted, hot, and hungry.

the rest of the afternoon was spent showering, eating, and resting (or napping, in my case), dinner and more of twins was good, and then bedtime was a bit rough because last night reset all the bedtime ritual progress we've made 🤦

anyway, it was overall a fantastic first camping experience for mr smear, and an excellent bonding weekend for both of us, and hopefully i'll catch up on some sleep tonight.

common ground

 it's been a long ass-day and i'm exhausted, but i'm sure i won't have time to post anything tomorrow so i'm going to jot down what i can before i crash:

i accompanied mr smear to school this morning, then hopped on a bus to the post office to pick up a package for gd.

i was on my way home this morning from dropping my son off at school, it's a beautiful morning and the world feels a whole lot more right than it did just a few days ago.

and then, out of nowhere, my brain started pulling up flashes of trauma from the past two years. not the horrors of october 7th, not the endless sheltering from rocket attacks, not the immeasurable loss of our soldiers, not the endless defending ourselves from all the lies, but the "friends" who turned out to be evil scum. the traitorous jews who think that our enemies would spare them if they promote their evil agenda.

i don't know if there will ever be a reckoning. terrorists, jihadists? we know why they do the evil that they do. but those who support and are complicit in their evil? you're worse human beings than the terrorists. at least they have *some* integrity.

on my way to work i arranged for a technician to come and check out our washing machine, which has been leaking :(

i spent the work day jumping between interesting things, getting some minor stuff done along the way. the biggest and most surprising elements of the day were meeting a bunch of the new people and finding lots of different common grounds.

oh, and i reviewed and discussed the investigation results from our security company, it was satisfactory but we're still going to try to bring it in-house.

for a couple of hours between happy hour and me getting home i felt painfully bloated. but only for a couple of hours. i don't know why.

i rushed out a bit late for my hairdresser's appointment, i ended up five minutes late but it was alright. the haircut itself was good, and i only nodded off a couple of times (i tried really hard not to). the poor guy can barely understand english, never mind hebrew, so our attempts at small talk invariably resulted in him holding up his translation app to record me asking questions or making comments that really weren't important :P

although gd had a really rough day with mr smear and his homework, my experience in the evening was pretty calm. once he was in bed, i sat down to get some work done, which took about an hour and a half. i'm not quite sure what i've been doing for the hour since then, but i'm almost done with my chamomile tea so i guess this is it for now.

...

i'm a teensy bit paranoid because i either cut myself on, or got a splinter from, a hand grip on a bus this morning :/

less but not gone

 we all arrived at the hospital more-or-less on time, to discover that the woman who'd called me last week to arrange the challenge apparently hadn't registered it properly in the system. they let us go up anyway, and what followed was a couple of hours of various stages of the challenge along with a spirometer (lung capacity test).

he had subjective reactions - itchiness - but not objective ones; after the fourth increment (which he was totally grossed out by) the allergist stopped us and kept him (and gd) there for the following two hours for observation.

in short: he's allergic, and we'll still have to carry around his epipen and avoid dairy, but if he accidentally ingests any we don't need to panic. more than anything else, he no longer needs to worry about other kids eating around him or not washing their hands properly.

and i don't have to worry about him wanting to consume dairy products, he was thoroughly grossed out.

...

i arrived at the office just in time to be swarmed by our new hires who needed some accounts configured. the rest of the day was a mix of telling my life story to two of my coworkers, strategizing with my british coworker and our tech ops guy, and discussing a moonshot problem that i've been fantasizing about solving.

...

i ate some kabukim today and they really hurt my back teeth. i hope i haven't stripped a filling or something.

...

then i came home, theoretically in time for dinner if mr smear hadn't been busy dragging his feet on his homework... anyway, dinner was good, bedtime was alright, and i spent the next couple of hours doing a mission in shadowrun.

now i'm going to try to get some sleep.

shadowrunning

 i slept alright, but got up early and dived back in to shadowrun: hong kong. if i'm honest with myself, i legitimately spent far too many hours playing it today, but it's a fantastic story, i'm enjoying the mechanics (even if i am playing on easy), and fuck it, we're all just resting today.

mr smear's biggest complaint today was about how "unfair" it is that i spent all day on the windows machine, while he was relegated to the macbook :P

in the afternoon, i took mr smear out for a walk and ended up joining the mongoose for a while. eventually mr smear and i made our way back, stopping at jars and bowls to pick up dinner. we got home quite late, so i regretted having promised him he could play half an hour of portal when we got home, but he was really cool while we were out and he never looked at his phone once, so...

once we got him into bed, it was back into shadowrun, and i've now just stopped (right before a run i recall being particularly intense) and am getting ready to go to bed myself, in preparation for what we expect to be a big day tomorrow.

mr smear's dairy allergy test.

❤️💔 🇮🇱 🙏

 gd's earliest alarm woke me up around 6am, and from that point i was unable to return to sleep, not least because i was thinking about the hostage release.

the next few hours were a mess of me watching the news, then deciding not to watch the news, and then watching the news anyway. it was an intense morning, and while our little mission to the pharmacy should have provided some distraction, our pharmacy is very close to hostage square where 65,000 people were crowded, waiting for updates.

we got what we needed (gd doesn't think i made a good decision regarding mosquito repellent, we'll see*) and returned home, then glued ourselves to news feeds until all twenty living hostages were in israeli-controlled territory.

שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה.

* i went with oil of lemon eucalyptus instead of the chemicals that come with scary warnings ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hearing the helicopters overhead bringing in hostages to ichilov hospital was surreal. today's an emotional rollercoaster for sure - the hostages returning home, their families, their losses, the bodies that haven't been / won't be returned, the thousands of soldiers who were killed since the war started... and who knows what tomorrow will bring?

so we're breathing again and celebrating and mourning all at the same time. it's one hell of a time to say chag sameach

the rest of the afternoon was distractions (chores, shadowrun) while beginning to process, so lots of celebrating and lots of sobbing. someone said it beautifully: for two years now, it's been october 7th. with the last of the living hostages returned, today is october 8th. we can finally start grieving.

even though it's not quite all over. but between trump and netanyahu and all our arab neighbors, it's anyone's guess what's going to happen in the coming days, months and years.

but today was a good day. today we collectively breathe and celebrate the return of those who survived 738 days in captivity, tortured by orcs.

the horror

 today began with preparing a document for mr smear (and gd) to learn the hebrew months, and getting mr smear out of bed to do math homework. there was some tension, but nothing too serious, and we got through it. i flipped our mattresses, did some dishes, (finally) checked that we had authorization for wednesday's allergy challenge, and left for work.

after a long chat with my mom about aliyah, i entered the office for a day filled with interruptions of interruptions.

highlights/lowlights:

a) finally getting in touch with a potential partner after being assured they'd been updated by their superiors, and they hadn't.

b) discovering that our outsourced security team had updated a policy without asking for our consent, or informing us, and it disconnected everyone in rnd, some of whom were engaged in mission-critical tasks. i lost my temper - i've never cursed that much or that loudly in the office*. i informed my boss that they'd crossed a line (not exactly for the first time) and we need to bring our security in-house. i think he heard me pretty clearly this time.

* and, oddly enough, in hebrew. i don't think i've ever done that before, i've always found cursing in hebrew awkward.

c) by the end of the day, after hours battling buggy docker behavior, i finally got to the bottom of our devcontainer / vpn issues. ironically, they were caused by a misconfiguration by my british coworker when he originally tried to fix them, but for some reason everything seemed to work well for almost two weeks before wigging out.

so at least i can move forward with my real work now.

...

i travelled most of the way home with our tech ops guy (there're two now, but whatever), and i was shocked to discover that he's a jewish israeli that was born and raised here but has zero connection or comprehension of judaism. i gave him a bit of a lecture on why i think it's important for non-observant jews to understand the history of our beliefs and practices, and he was totally shocked by what i had to say.

i arrived home, picked up mr smear, and the two of us went off to the mall to buy sleeping bags for the class camping trip this weekend. heavy cigarette smell in the bus notwithstanding, we had a long conversation during which i was shocked and dismayed to learn that he'd spent a good chunk of his day on youtube, behind gd's back, watching really disturbing horror videos.

i've now seen his watch history. i mean disturbing. thanks, youtube, for managing kids' content so safely. and thanks, also, for not enabling parents to block desktop youtube over family link.

on our way home, we sat down for some really good falafel (and i awkward didn't realize why ze british german's wife looked familiar until she'd already greeted me and walked past), then picked up a sandwich for gd, and came home.

another late night for mr smear (his antivirals), but thank god getting him to sleep went smoother than anticipated. i've spent most of the night playing more shadowrun, and now i'm going to bed, trying - continuing to try, at least - not to think about the war / hostage release situation. and now that i've typed that, i'll probably check the news and fuck myself up a bit :/

breathe in

 i finally dived back in to shadowrun: hong kong. i ended up climbing into bed around 2.30am.

i woke up around 8.30am, enjoyed a cup of coffee and more shadowrun, and then took a pleasant, quiet walk to the pharmacy and back to get gd's meds. it was a beautiful morning for it.

a classmate of mr smear's arrived, with a foul-mouth and some interesting inherited opinions (when i said we're vegan, he unabashedly responded "cringe!"), and the two of them seemed to have a good time.

and then a weird thing happened - mr smear's friend convinced him to try watching forrest gump. in spite of the initial protests, we continued watching after his friend's mom picked him up and we all loved it (and i occasionally sobbed uncontrollably, at one point mr smear misread it as laughing).

i did some of the dishes, then took mr smear out for a very pleasant walk to and through the park, and we got home in time for dinner and futurama, followed by showering / brushing teeth / doing the rest of the dishes while mr smear entertains himself and gd reading trivia and garfield out loud.

half an hour to his herpes-meds bedtime.

...

i'm sad that mr smear has decided to stop doing the inktober challenge, but he got through a third of it, and he did so brilliantly.

circus

 today was emotionally zombifying. it began with a massive fight with mr smear (his usual shit that we've been dealing with over the past few weeks) right before his friend arrived and we all went to the circus together. i'm embarrassed that i lost my temper, but goddamn - as i explained to him then and later - when your kid fucks with you in the same ways, over and over, day after day, week after week, year after year, it adds up.

the circus (circo circo) wasn't the most amazing circus experience, but it did have a lot of nail-bitingly good acts. one of which mr smear didn't see, because the scantily-clad rollerskater was too naked for him and he covered his eyes the entire act. the clowns were impressive, the trapeze artists / acrobats did some crazy things, and the dirt bike ball was just crazy.

when we came home we resumed (at a slightly lower intensity) the morning's issues in order to try and resolve them, interrupted by a nerve-wracking fifteen minutes of trying to locate his friend who'd said goodbye and gone home, but forgotten to turn the ringer of his phone back on :/

and then we all hopped in a taxi and went to the emergency clinic to get gd some help with her weird eyelid thing. we were there for two hours before the doctor could see us. we did some of mr smear's math homework, and me and him read comics for most of the wait. gd got a prescription, and we taxied to the pharmacy to pick it up, but the pharmacy was closed :/

so we walked home and i immediately got stuck in to doing all the dishes because our friend and her kids were coming over for dinner. this week, instead of challah-peño, we made challah-banero. it was also really good, but a bit different, not least of which being that the heat, while minor, hangs around longer...

dinner was great, the kids played nicely (on screens, but whatever) and had a good time, and our only complaint was that two of the kids were sporting a nasty cough and gd's terrified of having to deal with another bout of bronchitis :(

it's now 1am, everyone's in bed (finally!) and i've got a little bit of proper me-time for the first time in a while. which i have to take advantage of because tomorrow's looking to be busy.

challenges

don't count your hostages before they've been safely returned. i'm hoping against hope, but god knows if any of what's supposed to be happening right now is real.

...

in addition to everything else, gd's eye's been giving her trouble, and today things got serious. so we began the day accompanying her to the clinic, and then i walked them most of the way home before heading to the office.

the work day was okay, calm but a bit messy. highlights included terminating our contract with a guy who's been on retainer for months but who's been occupying himself with stuff we never asked for, probably out of boredom.

i consumed far too many calories during happy hour.

the game hacking session never happened, but me hanging around did present an opportunity for a wild AI conversation.

• AI Slop Is Destroying The Internet
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• and it's especially creepy hearing an AI describing how we're using AI wrong: Replacing Humans with AI Has Gone Terribly Wrong | Geoffrey Hinton Explains

i came home, we had dinner (and watched an episode of futurama), and i managed to convince mr smear to draw the amazing inktober concept he'd come up with in the morning. unfortunately, we didn't get to publish it because by the time he finished inking it - and he refuses to post it without color - it was already 11pm. and then getting him to go to sleep was a whole other story...

...

tomorrow's the day we go to the circus, but also a friday that gd needs to go to the emergency clinic. oh! and i got a call from the hospital today, mr smear can do his dairy challenge next week 🤞

the lesson

 today started off a bit shit, with a half-hour homework battle. on the one hand, it was exhausting. on the other hand, i managed to take it to a good place, and he was happy when he finally understood what to do.

he joined me in picking up a bunch of garfield books we ordered, and then continued on with me to work.

the work day was a bit rough, with the worst of it being the discovery - around 5pm - that the contractor's code i'd accepted in the morning had a pretty serious issue. i had to work on it before and after dinner, and i only got through the shit a short while ago.

otherwise, the tech ops guy invited us to join him on a mission to see the cosplayers at icon, which we all enjoyed, and mr smear and i both thoroughly enjoyed the bagels we picked up on the way back.

...

otherwise, mr smear's eye seems to be responding well to the meds, but gd's really having a hard time with her shoulder :(

chlorine

 godsdammit. we don't have anything conclusive to go by, but it seems like swimming in chlorine may be triggering mr smear's herpes :/

The authors describe the case of a highly stressed 36-year-old man who experienced ten or more painful episodes per year of recurrent oral-lingual herpes simplex virus 1, which were only partially responsive to acyclovir therapy for three years. A three-year diary of activities, personal stresses, concurrent infections, local trauma, and other possible psychogenic, somatogenic, and environmental events was used systematically to attempt to pair the stresses with the recurrent herpes episodes. Chlorinated swimming pool water seems to have been the triggering agent of the recurrent herpes simplex virus 1 episodes due to its temporal correlation and the greater than twenty-four-month asymptomatic period after the patient discontinued swimming in chlorinated water, but continued to swim in fresh and salt water, along with his normal pursuit of all other activities and habits. [source]

i guess we'll be more aware from now on...

...

otherwise, he was freaked out by the second episode of full metal alchemist: brotherhood and doesn't want to see any more. i guess i'm on my own.

two years

 october 7th, two years later. i have nothing to say. that is, i have lots to say, and zero energy to even say it.

...

this morning got off to a pretty good start. reading and napping, including reading a chapter of the neverending story to my wife and child.

on our way out to ride to the swimming pool, i got stuck for almost half an hour trying to arrange tickets for circo circo for us and mr smear's best friend. we eventually got that right, so crossing fingers that friday will be smooth 🤞

the ride there was pretty chill, though i think mr smear was right about it taking much longer than i'd expected. most of our swimming experience was good, in spite of me having woken up with my neck threatening to lock (it's still threatening a bit). the toughest, drainiest part was the forty five minutes spent getting mr smear out of the pool, into the locker room, out of the shower, and out of the locker room.

we were both that special kind of tired after a sunny ride and a long time in the pool.

and that was before we had to ride all the way home...

we made it, eventually*, stopping only for a much-needed ice-cream break.

* about half an hour later

we came home with a plan, and we executed it well. drink water, shower, eat, play, and watch the first two episodes of full metal alchemist: brotherhood.

the rest of the afternoon has been switching between dirty dishes and inktober. now it's almost dinner time.

impatient

yesterday:

we didn't go. by the time dinner was done, i was done. and mr smear still went to bed really late because he was working on his inktober offering.

i spent a lot of the evening - i went to bed late - updating the windows machine's drivers, removing random stuff, and installing windows-only games to play until we can shift it.

today:

i had to do quite a bit of work today, and unfortunately it included the techops manager being a piece of shit for no apparent reason, but thankfully on a public channel ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

...

gd, mr smear and i went to the pharmacy, and the line was long so mr smear and i had a lot of time together. most of it was good, but one incident really messed me up: the only adventurous things he's ever done without being dragged kicking and screaming have been in video games, or trivial combinations of food. the reason it came up was that i want to take my family to the circus during the holidays, and he's decided - without any understanding of what the experience is actually like - that he'd rather just stay at home.

*sigh*

i've been stretched thin for years, but also his nonsense compounds. it's very hard to be a patient parent and not explode regularly. very, very hard.

...

once we got back, i finally (!) posted the windows machine on facebook's marketplace, for a relatively high price (for its age) that i hope will at least set a baseline for negotiating. the more i can get for it, the less the "real" pc will cost. also, someone reminded me recently that a proper gaming pc is upgradeable. that's a big deal.

...

gd's really struggling, as much psychologically as physically. the pain she's dealing with is the stuff of nightmares.

grind break

this morning we completed the pokemon puzzle (including a few frustrating minutes hunting for the final piece that was resting, camouflaged, on top of the puzzle), i helped mr smear through the first page of his holiday homework, i did the dishes, and headed off to the office.

it was a weird work day, lots of syncing and strategizing, and keeping my nose out of the bunch of kids hijacking the office, and by the time i got to the important, urgent work that needed to be done i ran into some big issues that thoroughly blocked me. and then it was time to leave the office in order to be able to take mr smear to the swimming pool.

mr smear and i arrived at the pool in good time, only to learn that it was closed. the nice lady printed me out some sheets that are much easier to parse than their schedule boards, so now we have an idea of when we're welcome there...

the past hour or so has been all about helping gd in the kitchen (and being upset to learn - or relearn - that the hand blender we bought months ago never worked), and struggling to update the dell device drivers (i'm typing this on the same machine while i continue to struggle), and being frustrated because i decided earlier that i didn't want to go swimming any more, but now mr smear's all-in and he's never all-in so now i have to go.

*deep breaths*

rest day

the rest of the day was good. mr smear finished a really good inktober entry, we've pretty much completed the pokemon puzzle, i read quite a bit and napped a bit, and we had a good ride to the park.

also, we're loving futurama together.

waiting quietly

 we did very little yesterday (aside from cleaning the floor). we did the puzzle (we're mostly done at this point), read / napped / played (mr smear was overjoyed to discover that subnautica runs better on my m2 macbook than on our shitty dell xps), we made challah-peño again - which was an amazing success, again - and after kiddush we ate a simple dinner and watched a couple more episodes of futurama (even gd's getting won over).

this morning has been pretty chilled so far, but i just had a realization about mr smear's screentime/downtime protocol: it's been bothering me for ages that he sets an alarm to the end of his downtime, and it bumps him out of whatever he's doing. he was just making fantastic progress on his day 4 inktober entry, and his alarm went off and he just tossed it aside to go look for a screen.

so no more downtime alarms, only screentime alarms.

we learn.

...

in political news, i've read the hamas response to trump's peace proposal and it doesn't seem like they're going to do what's being demanded of them. which isn't surprising. but i'm nervous, because if they return the hostages, we don't know what they'll do to the hostages pre- or during delivery, everything they've done has been calculated to maximize psychological harm to israel. but if all they do is mess around, at least we have clearance to go in and get the job done.

slow and steady

 the fast itself wasn't hard, but on a normal rest day with caffeine i'm tired and need lots of naps, so yesterday i was tired. 

mr smear wasn't feeling well (he still isn't), so instead of taking him to meet his classmates for a bike ride in the evening we all stayed at home and had a very quiet night. in the morning i went to a service close by that i've been meaning to check out for ages, and i arrived just in time to make a minyan for shacharit. it was a pleasant service, with a bit of a wishy-washy sermon, but by the time one of the leaders said "it's not mandatory to leave for yizkor" i - along with half the congregation - got up and left.

my back was sore, my vision was doubling and i was starting to fall asleep.

we spent the afternoon alternating between reading the story of jonah, napping, putting together an awesome pokemon puzzle (we're more than a quarter of the way through the 1000 piece puzzle), and encouraging mr smear for his day 2 inktober entry.

in the evening, i took mr smear to hear the final shofar blow. it took us a bit too long to leave the apartment - we passed the service in the kikar just before they finished, arrived too late for the other service, and then returned past the kikar service after they'd finished too :/

i broke my fast on pancakes and some healthy leftovers, while we watched and enjoyed futurama. then it was a bit of a struggle to get mr smear into bed (no particular reason), and then it was time to pass out myself.

today so far:

my first coffee was accompanied by a long nap. so far today we've started cleaning our talitot, and mr smear's alternating between finishing up yesterday's drawing and helping us with the puzzle.

aside from cleaning the floor (post-cleaning lady) i'm feeling particularly lazy. i keep fantasizing about picking up a new speaker and possibly a gaming computer, but i'm honestly not confident it's the right timing for the latter.

contemplation

yesterday:

mr smear went to school by himself again, which makes us a bit nervous but i guess it's no different from him coming back home by himself... parenting is weird.

i had a chat with urchin, who's just been laid off along with a bunch of her coworkers due to a change in management. amazing timing, right before the holidays. she's apparently interested in some of our open positions, which would be cool.

yesterday was long. lots of context switching, lots of issues that were supposed to be resolved the day before but weren't. lots of planning with my coworkers (mostly productive and positive). one emotional outburst about procedure that got me called in to a room by the rnd manager to tell me i'd made a bad vibe... i just apologize to her and the guy in question, and i've got a lesson to learn.

on my way into our apartment i picked up a second notice* for the two fluxx games i ordered a while back, which was apparently sent three weeks ago. it took so long to be delivered that they've returned the package, which is really unfair :(

* a first notice was never sent, neither were any emails or sms messages...

i came home just in time for dinner, just in time to see gd almost collapse from the sudden onset of something. i rushed myself and mr smear through dinner while she rested, wished them both a good night, and then headed out to the british ze german's shiva house.

it's always weird and sad walking past my mother and my old apartment.

the next couple of hours weren't unpleasant, the story of my friend's sister's passing notwithstanding. ru55 and the irish ze german were there too, and i alternated between conversation flow and just sitting and listening. ru55 gave me a ride home, i brushed my teeth and showered, and then sat down to do some more testing for our contractor.

it didn't take long to get stuck and stop the testing. and then suddenly there were noises coming from mr smear's room, where gd was attending to him and his suddenly sore throat. when i went in to commiserate he sent me away, but a bit later called out to me, really upset that he'd forgotten to call my mom to say good night 🥹

and then, in the middle of the night, gd decided that we urgently needed to do online grocery shopping :/

today:

i slept alright, but i've been feeling a bit on/off today. mr smear's leg seems to have healed, so we left him to his devices (ha ha) and headed to the pharmacy*, did some grocery shopping and picked up a pokémon puzzle for tomorrow.

* we left the first one in a huff because someone was drilling and there was dust everywhere while a bunch of sick and elderly people were waiting

i did some more work with the contractor, and then the new cleaning lady arrived. she insisted on wearing her shoes in the apartment, which gd eventually conceded and which i'm too nervous to discuss with her later when i get home from my voluntary exile at our favorite coffee shop. i somehow got dragged into a political discussion with her, which included a very awkward "we're not going to agree or understand each other" moment, but also her thanking me profusely for oversharing with a stranger.

i've spent the past few hours slowly drinking coffees, eating a sandwich, and trying not to fall asleep in the comfy armchair while slowly reading some more blindsight.

and spending a fair amount of time just staring into space. i guess i have a lot of processing to do.