the (big) little things

 today had some pretty important achievements.

after mr smear left for school, i had breakfast so that i could take some ibuprofen for the leftovers from yesterday's migraine and registered for unemployment for the first time in my life.

then gd and i walked to the pain clinic. it took a while to get to see the doctor, but he was in and available and he sorted us out with the recommendation we needed. afterwards, while advising gd not to see an osteopath for her shoulder issues, gd said something and he suddenly registered - apparently for the first time - just how disabled she is. and that was when gd's floodgates opened, because almost nobody we've dealt with really gets it.

i hung around and chatted with horseman while gd got a prescription, and then we walked to a copy shop to print a return label for a pair of shoes. i followed the instructions - sending an email from my gmail account to the shop's gmail account - but they claimed that "sometimes it can take a while" which doesn't make any sense. i half-jokingly asked if maybe their internet was disconnected, and the manager took offense and made a few snide remarks. while i was standing there trying to figure out whether it was worth being offended or not, i realized that the customer-facing computers were logged in to the same gmail account. so i hit "all mail" and lo! my email had arrived.

fuckin' idjits.

so i spent 10 NIS on poor service, a single printed page and a plastic sleeve.

then gd and i walked home, had a bite to eat, and after a few failed attempts to request her cannabis license renewal i made myself a turkish coffee for the road and walked the shoes back to the post office.

with everything that's been going on, i've needed any excuse for a walk and think, even if there hasn't been a whole lot of thinking going on.

i arrived at the packed post office, and tried to set the package down because usually they don't make us wait for that. except that now they do, and the clerk made me feel pretty shitty for not waiting my turn...

when i got home, i sat down at my desk and cranked out some improvements to the language app i haven't touched in months, and although gd got a bit frustrated while testing it i feel like it's actually on it's way!

i went to pick mr smear up from the school to take him gift shopping, encountering the unhinged mother and making a point of neither looking at her nor avoiding her. then mr smear came out and we enjoyed a pleasant walk to the mall, where we found some posters but not the right one. the guy at the store had a south african accent, and we ended up talking, and i ended up learning that we could do custom prints! so we found a perfect image, got an amazing print made, and hopefully tomorrow i'll be able to pick it up with it's basic mounting.

the owner of the store told me some weird stories. i'm not sure i really understand what was happening in them.

mr smear and i bussed home, and settled in to homework. the hebrew homework went well. the math homework started off pretty well, had some rocky moments, and then mr smear took a toilet break and when he came back he was completely unfocused and uncooperative, and i got upset. and then gd got upset.

and then i started thinking about how i got called out for getting upset with skippity in the office, and about how i wasn't modeling well, and i explained to mr smear that i wasn't upset with his homework performance, but with his uncooperative behavior, and that even if it was reasonable to get angry after having all my patience worn down, i wanted to get back to the positive vibe from before when he and i were both so excited by his progress.

and between the two of us, we did it. his behavior over the next half hour or so wasn't perfect, but i managed to keep an even keel and focus on the good stuff and we both learned some cool stuff; he learned about exponents, and we learned how to use prime factorizations to make large numbers easy to reason about, and he was super proud of himself ^_^

dinner was... i overate.

bedtime went similarly to yesterday - the new plan is working, hopefully it'll keep working 🤞

finally, after putting mr smear to bed, i tried one more time to renew the license, and this time realized that i was using brave with its shields up. so i took them down, and voilà! done. what a thoroughly different experience (not using machon mor).