heavy dust

it's the end of the weekend, and i'm feeling totally drained. my brain's pretty much offline, and i'm praying that i'll get some decent sleep tonight.

we had a massive dust storm today, so bad we put masking tape over the wonky balcony door. the only time anyone went outside was to take out recycling or trash.

today was, for the most part, about constructing two wardrobes. i started the first one by myself, mainly because i didn't feel comfortable asking big data for help before i knew what was required, and then i kinda got into the mode of doing it. i completed most of the build with a little help from mr smear, invited big data (and his son) to help, and the rest of the build and the next one went relatively fast.

with minor breaks, for vegan cookies his son made, and for gd to angrily wash the floor again after mr smear forgot to take his shoes off when coming into the house (in his defense, he's not used to not wearing shoes in this apartment).

gd and i had an argument over punishing mr smear for sneaking upstairs to play roblox (when neither of the kids was supposed to be on screens), and i compromised. i hope the two day punishment doesn't detract from the lesson 🤞

i have to say that in addition to making my wife happy and enabling us to move forward with the unpacking, it's remarkable how much space there seems to be in this apartment now that our stuff's in here. it felt much smaller before.

...

my legs are hurting in a way they haven't for a while. is my body regretting not maintaining last week's insane level of physical activity?

i'm a bit nervous about this coming week. financially (closing our accounts and getting our deposit for the old apartment back), health-wise (gd's going to the doctor tomorrow), and work-wise (i've got to figure out how to manage this weirdness, and i'm praying that the code i delivered was actually good enough).

...

i don't know if it'll help, but i've put the three sets of imagine (the amazing youtube channel that was deleted) AI covers up for torrenting. i feel like i've become the keeper of a sacred artifact from a parallel universe, like something out of the movie yesterday:

imagine - the battles.torrent

imagine - boogie sabbath.torrent

imagine - synthknot.torrent

hot water

 omg i'm tired. and i just realized, while on a call with my mom, that mr smear had been in the shower for a VERY long time and i now have to wait for more water to heat up so that i don't have to have another cool shower 😡

...

it was a very long day. aside from doing some weekend shopping with gd, and building the last of the chests of drawers (with the help of big data and his younger son), i walked mr smear to his class picnic at the bird park. although he arrived straight into his usual antisocial routine, he soon chilled because one of his - and i quote, along with his airquotes - "clique" was there. he even made his own pita bread on a tava over the fire. we hadn't warned them we were coming, and the other allergic kid wasn't there, so the kids were covered with / covered everything with labaneh and nutella, so we had to be as careful as if he was with his previous class...

i tried to record a jackal that was just chilling as we passed, but my phone decided i wanted a photo instead and i captured exactly nothing :/

mr smear's been a bit rude this evening, but mostly alright. gd's really not feeling well... hopefully we won't have any shabbat emergencies 🤞

discomfort zones

 yesterday morning started off bitter, then got a little better (gd and mr smear had had a talk about being kinder to me). mr smear telling me i needed to stop clinging to bad feelings stung a little, but he wasn't wrong.

over breakfast, i read the veldt to him, which was an interesting experience. he was firmly on the side of the parents, and railing against the spoiled children, but there was just a moment when i was talking about how it maps to screen time and addiction that he got defensive - then i finished my thought that his entire generation was suffering from this stuff, as well as all the adults, and he was back on board :P

a little after he went to school, i completed the base of the chest of drawers and gd and i left for misrad hapnim. this time it was open, and we got numbers and sat down to wait, but immediately gd started feeling terrible and we soon had to leave and come home.

that was a very frustrating and disappointing experience, and also a complete waste of time.

i had breakfast and went to work, arriving in time for a lengthy discussion with my bulgarian teammates as i described my redesign while one of them diagramed it, and once we were done they were totally on my side - "this is how it should have been made in the first place" 💪

what followed was a few hours jumping between reviewing the results of the previous day's rollout - discovering later that i'd been instructed to look at an intermediate file, which explained the conflicting results - and reviewing large quantities of code (ultimately deferring to the AI review bots because i didn't have bandwidth and we were in a hurry), getting buy-in for the redesign, and then working on the redesign itself.

that last part was mostly - hours - me fighting with java tooling and an AI that helped in some ways, but for the most part insisted on "fixing" the problems by either breaking things, or injecting obvious security risks into the code 🤦‍♂️

...

on the one hand, i really want to impress my client and represent my employer in a way that makes them look good. on the other, my client is behaving in a disturbing way and it's uncomfortable for me. i'm working with technology that i want to be learning to work with, and it's an interesting technical challenge, but i'm working with a team whose only member with tribal knowledge is leaving in a week or two and whose other members were nowhere to be found during a week of a massive, highly sensitive rollout in the middle of which they handed everything over to a contractor without context and without any real guidance.

WTAF.

...

by the time i was ready to deliver my part of the solution to my teammate, in the hopes that it wasn't hot garbage because i hadn't had any way to properly test it, i had just enough time to go home, spend twenty minutes with my family, unblock a toilet, and head to the ozen bar for a surprisingly intimate (~50 people) show of yohay sponder, alone because gd was still feeling too ill to come with and mr smear's too young.

the show was a lot of fun. very awkward, both because of the crowd and because he was testing new material, but some of it was hilarious and a fair amount of things that amused me when he said them made me laugh later as i was on my way home.

when he got to the end and invited questions from the audience, things were a bit too silent for a bit too long, so i took a chance and asked a question that i thought he might find funny. i caught him off-guard, and was completely blown away that he didn't get the reference for the question (from his own set), and while he responded with a pretty clever comeback (after asking me why i had to bring the show down) i remain with the hope that he has a revelatory moment later where he suddenly gets it 🤣

i came home just in time to say good night to mr smear (who'd gone to bed much later than he should have), ate a lot (the leftovers from dinner were great, and yo egg on toast was a jolly good idea), and then had a cool shower (that was disappointing), and pretty soon after went to bed.

i guess i slept alright, relatively, at least.

the morning began with a stupidly shit vibe (mr smear "intentionally" doing something wrong instead of just accepting a minor correction, gd pissed off at a person rather than a situation - although she came around eventually), and i completed yesterday's chest of drawers so i can now being on the last one before moving on to the wardrobes. i need new tools, which is another source of frustration.

anyway, i've had some relaxed time, and i'm shocked to discover that i'm down to 76kg, and i have a ton of stuff to do this morning...

bad vibes

after a very long, very intense day at work (i've been coopted in something that doesn't make any sense), the building furniture thing combined with gd's attitude that anything of mine she doesn't care for is "garbage" led to a massive fight this evening. and then, because that wasn't enough, i got a message from mr smear's teacher that he fucked up today. twice.

so not only has it been a miserable, angry, unpleasant evening, topped with a miserable, angry, unpleasant bedtime for mr smear, but i'm now begrudgingly building furniture between keeping an eye on a production rollout*.

* it seems to be going alright now, hopefully that's it for the night. i shouldn't be doing this, though, babysitting a rollout that doesn't belong to me.

...

gd and i did get to misrad hapnim this morning, finally, but it was closed to the public.

nagging (feelings)

 today was... calmer? i mean, gd and i were not vibing this morning, she was upset with me for asking her to do two things outside (that she had to do, but we ended up deferring the misrad hapnim visit), and i was upset with her for harassing me about building furniture.

the weird typo is on gemini☝️

...

i killed another silverfish last night, which led to me doing a lot of research. we're currently serving their favorite meals - books and clothing sandwiched in cardboard boxes :/

so i began my day building a malm desk of drawers and one of its drawers, then off to work i went.

work was weird. firstly, i arrived late for a meeting that had been extended, and i must have joined just after the others signed off, so i was basically alone in a zoom meeting for a while.

then i resumed my investigation, quickly determining that there was a chain of services doing a lot of very silly things. i explained my findings to my client team, who asked me to verify them with my teammate who was also on the case.

"i have good news, and i have bad news."

"we're a bit overwhelmed right now, i only have bandwidth for the good news."

"the good news is that my teammate and i came to the same conclusions. that's also the bad news."

my salad lunch was boring, after i'd been frustrating getting it by crowds of inefficient people (including one guy who was trying to evenly shake canned tuna over the top of his salad).

i excitedly shared my new comic and process with my client team, then made myself a coffee, and then did relatively little (reviewing PRs, mainly) until i realized that i didn't have much to do, but also that i had a small window to pay the mattress store a visit.

the guy tried to convince me that what i'm missing for a good night's sleep is coffee with turmeric and honey before bed. i tried a bunch of mattresses, but had a difficult time determining the harder from the softer ones, and eventually he put in an order for what we have, but customized with something called "super soft".

it took a while to get out of there - he kept chaining his (interesting) stories together, even after i explained that i really needed to go - and i bussed home in time to put together another drawer. mr smear, who had irritatingly refused to take the bus home from the library, arrived just in time for us to grab a cab to gd's dentist appointment.

we waited a long time. we played, roughhoused, and napped in the waiting room. mr smear farted while a woman on the next couch was tried to rest, and she almost immediately got up to get some fresher air 🤣

the secretary who helped us was very kind and helpful, and she explained things clearly, and gd has a treatment plan that seems to be on a reasonable timeline.

we caught the bus home, had a delicious* dinner from jars and bowls, and a long chat with my mom, and a pretty smooth but late bedtime ritual.

* mostly delicious, the mexican bean stew was a little too heavy on the liquid smoke and i overcompensated with hot sauces

i have no idea how tonight's going to go. hopefully alright.

overload

 well, i made a thing: short-fuse at the ball (originally titled "prosthetic cinderella"). it's far from perfect (and required a bit of interference with gimp), but i'm nonetheless very pleased with the result ^_^

i did it more as an experiment with notebooklm than anything else, but i'm very happy to be able to share the story in a fun way!

...

i'm still feeling overwhelmed with the move, there's still a fair amount of admin to get through, and at the same time i'm fighting with social security about unemployment, and dealing with a painfully incompatible mattress, and the temporary fix for the balcony door really does seem to be rather temporary, and gd and i have to go to the ministry of the interior in person while she's really struggling with stomach issues, and i have to take care of the authorization for mr smear's next allergy test, and our apartment is still in a state of chaos and gd's pressuring me (gently?) to build the furniture so she can put things away...

mr smear apologized again to his friend today and apparently things are fine. i hope they are. i hope he's learned from this, though i'm very pleased that he knew to try and fix things without us having to intervene... but he's a bit concerned that he's turning into his parents :P

work today was bizarre. it's become very clear that nobody knows what's going on when it comes to architecture and data flows, but everything i've been told has been said to me with authority. i explained to my client team's lead that it seems to be better if i just don't take anyone's word for anything and do my own research...

halfway through the day i took the train (and walked) to my employer's office, where i was presented with a cute lego representation of myself. i spent half an hour first talking to a lawyer about my mother's aliyah case (he blew my mind asking if she was a messianic jew, and suggesting that from the sounds of things the jewish agency might actually be playing games), and then having an argument with someone from social security (apparently, i was about to be paid more than i thought for january and she stopped it, which is good because it could have caused me real trouble).

then we settled in for a workshop creating an AI agent, which was quite interesting in spite of my fatigue, and a birthday celebration for which i got my own vegan cinnamon cake and vegan cream.

[goddammit, the neighbors' super cute dog is on their balcony barking non-stop]

i didn't have time to go to the mattress store, so i returned home for dinner. after reading some more of the colour of magic to mr smear, and "completing" the comic, and posting this... i'm just about ready to try sleeping again. hopefully i'll manage tonight.

the night is long and full of tossing and turning

when you're so tired you can't get up, but your bed is actively hurting you and you no longer have a couch to escape to.

via GIPHY

it's been a long night, so far. i don't know what to do.

the sadness

 mr smear had a difficult time this evening, and he cries a bit while telling me about it, but i was confused because none of what he said sounded so bad... but it came out at bedtime that he'd lost his temper at his best friend, in a situation where he knew that it was unjustified and hurt their relationship.

he apologized, but he's not sure that the apology was enough :(

it also came out that they didn't take public transport home - they gave up and his friend's dad had given him a ride home...

post-birthday different-kind-of-special

 dinner last night was nice - gd's first home-cooked meal in about a week. a little slower to cook with the borrowed plates, but it didn't bother me or mr smear.

the rest of the evening was all about getting into bed as quickly as possible, the shower was amazing, and i crashed pretty much immediately after.

in the middle of the night, i awoke from a sequence of nightmares: nightmares of being trapped trying to get home from work in a cavernous escape room (that was part of the office on a bond-like villain's mountain fortress), then of living at the docks and catching mr smear skipping school to hide amongst cargo loading equipment to play on his phone.

so that was me getting up at 3.45am with my nervous system on fire, raging at the afterimage of my dream son fucking up his imaginary life.

i did get back to sleep, a bit, but then i spent most of the rest of my time until alarm o'clock uncomfortable, and ultimately woke up with a stiff neck and the dizziness that often accompanies it. i mean, i might just be sick - gd's feeling similar today, in addition to the stuff that's been messing with her for months already - but still.

i think she might have been right on friday, that i shouldn't have let the mattress guy convince me to give it another week or two.

at least gd's happy with her side of the bed.

over coffee, i started putting together an article about producing comics with AI, but then i spent a large chunk of the morning sorting out address changes. and struggling - not for the first time - with the fact that we have money in our bank account but are unable to use our credit cards because we can't pay them off whenever we want.

not right now, but i think we need to consider finding ourselves a new bank.

on the way to the office i called social security, who informed me that the unemployment office hadn't updated them as they're reported. at the office, i remembered that nobody goes to the office on sundays, and according to the cleaning staff there was some kind of power outage as well. on my way back from the office i called the unemployment office, who after a very long time informed me that social security was lying. so then i called social security again, and the agent told me that the unemployment office was lying, and then i got really upset. eventually i got through to a manager, who "helped" me by directing me to the website to request that they look into it 🤦‍♂️

all the while in pain and dizzy.

i spent the rest of the day - until now - fixing the first iteration of my changes and learning how to test them. and eating and snacking a lot; i guess after yesterday's exercise (on top of the past week's) my body really needed more calories.

aside from pain and dizziness, my only real distractions were the electric hob installation (hooray!) and getting mr smear and his friend to come home on his way to the comic library to return the books (today was the deadline), and on their way from here i managed to catch them heading to bat yam by mistake in time for them to turn around.

parenting in 2026 is hard. navigating screen time, inappropriate content, lack of exposure to nature…

… but holy shit, being able to see where my kid is on a map, and know that i need to intervene so that he doesn’t end up in a different city by accident? priceless.

it's dark, the two of them should be making their way back soon, god knows how i'm going to get his friend home 🤷‍♂️

...

i have to say, slowly but surely our new home's starting to make sense. and it's huge compared to our last one, or at least it's much, much longer, because i've discovered over the past day or two that it's more sensible to call gd on whatsapp than to try to yell to each other, or get up from whatever i'm doing :P

the birthday special

 omg i am PAINFULLY tired. as in, i don't feel so good tired.

...

mr smear woke us up to delivery the birthday card this morning, and from there we progressed to making the following (using a combination of gemini and gimp, because the AI guardrails for images are frustrating and the generated images are mostly garbage anyway):

gd loved it, and mr smear and i had a positive educational experience.

afterwards, i spent some more time trying to get notebooklm to make the cinderella reboot comics i was working on last week. i managed to get better results, but still a lot of weirdness. i suspect that i'm going to need to copy/paste across different attempts to get it to the point where i feel comfortable posting it.

i then proceeded to built some small units (i'd promised gd that for her birthday i'd put together as much furniture as i could), while mr smear got his first screen time at home in ages (he used his half hour on oxygen not included), and then suddenly it was noon and time to take mr smear to south tel aviv.

his friend's mother did warn me that it was very far. i didn't think it was such a big deal, but in addition to it very much being a big deal it was also unseasonably warm and very sunny with very little shade. i really hope this doesn't trigger an outbreak for mr smear :)

anyway, he handled the ride better than ever before, was rewarded with his favorite drink (sprite) without even begging for it, and after riding through proper poverty and squalor (and chickens in the streets) i dropped him off in good spirits.

i took a more direct path home, straight through a very busy predominantly sudanese populated area, and the vibe was very different from the other direction...

i only stopped to pick up a desperately-needed coffee on the way home, then arrived home to begrudgingly make good on my promise and begin putting together the first of four chests of drawers.

actually, i guess i must have done something else before then, but i can't remembered anything else and i can't believe it took me quite that long... anyway, i'd constructed the body and two drawers (out of four) before i realized it was 6pm already and i needed to pick up mr smear.

there was no way i was going to ride that distance again, certainly not when it was so late and i was so thoroughly pooped, so i tried to catch a bus (or buses) and was caught off guard by the fact that they weren't operating yet. so i called a taxi. the driver was cool, and i was very grateful when he said "no problem" to picking up mr smear and his bike, as opposed to me walking mr smear and his bike to hunt for a bus stop on the wrong side of the tracks.

it was a story getting the bike into the trunk.

i almost died when mr smear excitedly started listing the contents of his friend's home in front of the taxi driver, and there was nothing i could say to stop him that wouldn't have been insulting. but his friend's family is a true gamer family, with multiple systems online, and he's now extremely excited about their tekken 3 arcade cabinet.

i can't tell you how pleased i am that he's begging me for tekken 3, which is still my favorite of the franchise by far, nor how sad i am that it's so difficult to get hold of.

mr smear has got the chorus from ticks and leeches stuck in his head, he's been singing it on a loop.

i completed the chest of drawers, mr smear helped me get all the cardboard boxes downstairs, and now it's dinner time.

shabbos

 the first week in the new apartment is over. it's peaceful, the air-conditioner is on, gd's on the balcony smoking a joint, watching the highway traffic, mr smear's in bed (he told gd that since we've moved, he's excited to go to bed - i suspect it's the combination of his door not closing and him enjoying the night-light view of bright skyscrapers), we've all eaten well (or, possibly, too well) and the apartment's feeling a step closer to home.

gd managed to cook us dinner on the borrowed electric plates, we lit candles and made kiddush and mr smear joined me for benching (he started falling asleep at the end, i guess he totally caught the vibe) before showering, and i just got out the shower feeling pretty darned good and just about ready for bed.

...

it was a busy morning, lots of stuff about aliyah bureaucracy. and old trance friend (one of the doof crew) who's a lawyer called me to give me some advice (gd was bothered by the fact that he barely let me finish a sentence, but i got useful information out of it), and i had a chat with one of my cousins who's trying to help my mom out as much as she can and might be able to connect me to someone who can do or say something.

...

gd came with me to the ace hardware store, first stopping by the pharmacy. we subsequently had to return to the pharmacy because she didn't realize that the protein in the "protein water" she'd picked up was dairy 🤦‍♂️

we didn't find the main thing we were looking for - insulation tape - but we taxied home with a full kit comprising of "babushka" bins (they had toilet brushes inside), a complex-to-assemble stand for fruits and vegetables, a drying rack for dishes that i made sure she wanted but she now doesn't seem to want, and a couple of small things. then i hopped on a bus heading to south tel aviv, but we were on the highway when half of us realized we weren't going the right way.

"i didn't have the energy to yell at you all to get off the bus," the bus driver said when i asked him why he hadn't told us he was taking a detour. [there was a bad bus accident this morning]

after being encouraged to stick with my current mattress for another week or two, i ended up walking quite a ways around the area and happened to find a hardware store with insulation tape!

i grabbed a coffee, caught a bus to dizengoff center, looked around a bit for cheap air tags for mr smear's new key, gave up, took a bus home, and then we went shopping.

our local supermarket is completely shit. our 24/7 is great, but expensive :/

we came home, rested, coffee'd up, and i began building one of gd's kitchen ikea units as our upstairs friends arrived, and gave some much needed help. aside from putting together furniture, and our kids playing nicely for a while (in both apartments), we had a pleasant afternoon of adult discussions until eventually it was time for our respective dinners.

i built another small kitchen unit by myself - taking breaks to help mr smear put together a birthday card for gd - and that was all i wrote.

fiero

this move has possibly been the most prolonged intense physical and mental exertion i’ve endured since officer’s course.

[redacted: a photo of me in full fiero mode holding a toilet seat over my head ("why's dad making a war cry?!") taken by gd, who had to be convinced to come back and support me after being thoroughly disturbed by what i was putting my body through. as well as by me accidentally lifting the entire bowl slightly off the floor in a moment of lost composure.]

i just won a tough jiujitsu match against two manky old toilet seat screws that were jammed right up into the holes by an incredibly sadistic or incompetent worker and i may need a few days to recover.

...

gods i'm tired. and sore. and parched. [goes to get some water]

i couldn't sleep last night, i spent most of the night "eating movies" [translated from the hebrew] about the damage, and the costs to fix the damage, and a million things that all need to be taken care of.

by 4am i was out of bed and on a ladder, slowly and methodically dusting all the surfaces of the kitchen. and discovering and cleaning chunks of revolting sticky grime on the top of the cupboards. it took over two hours to get everything clean enough for gd to be able to get mr smear ready for school.

then i dove in to a whole lot of admin, but at the same time posted about the ridiculous new obstacle that's been set in front of my mom's aliyah application. i've spent a lot of the day receiving advice and commiseration from strangers on the internet.

speaking of internet, we have fibre in our apartment now. gd oversaw the installation, and as long as the bomb shelter's door isn't closed we have decent wifi access from all corners. we should probably find a solution for when the door's closed, though.

apparently, begging for the technician to install the hob to be scheduled earlier worked, and he's coming on sunday instead of monday. in the meanwhile, our friends upstairs have loaned us a couple of small plates.

...

the window guy said he'd be here around 10-11am, so i marked my calendar for 2-4pm. he arrived just after 1.30pm.

he kind of fixed the broken cupboard. i'm not satisfied, but the doors are working. i didn't hide the damage from the landlord, but i didn't highlight it either, and he seems okay with it.

he fixed some of the bomb shelter window, but not the sealing strip which was gd's primary concern, and which he somehow convinced her hasn't been necessary since the 90s.

he totally fixed the broken, rotting board under the kitchen sink.

he fixed the kitchen window and balcony door, so they can both now be opened and closed. i say "fixed", but it's more like "patched". good enough for now.

apparently gd *really* pissed him off by insisting on compulsively checking for leaks, when he hadn't touched anything to do with the plumbing, and i'm still giggling at the thought of it. 'cause he was pissed before he arrived, which i'm assuming was a combination of having done a lot more work than he quoted for last night, and making an embarrassing mess, and having to clean up said mess.

that said, by the time he came to pick up his cash he seemed to be in a much better mood.

...

my work day was weird. it's certainly not what i'm getting paid for, but as long as it's short term i'm fine with it. i got reassigned to unblock my "customer" team by doing QA for their latest updates, and

a) it was an extremely long, complicated manual process.

b) i was falling on my nose from before i arrived at work today, and i had to have a lot of coffee to compensate. the lot of coffee wasn't as effective as i'd hoped.

c) i had a mojito at happy hour. half an hour later i got a little work done, and then had to bail before i passed out at my desk.

...

our neighbor's eldest came downstairs to take mr smear to get his first ever house key cut. now i need to find out about smart tags for android phones...

...

[yawns]

[gets more water]

i figured out how to update my cibus card on wolt, put up shower curtains, reported the courier for leaving the food without so much as knocking on the door, and we ate a huge hummus meal (for the second time this week) with both mr smear and gd enjoying the potato kubeh just as much as i did. then i went around the apartment replacing toilet seats.

i'm not 100% convinced that the seats i got are good, but they're definitely better than what we had.

[suddenly realizes he was supposed to take the old toilets seats out the building, they've been sitting outside the front door for hours]

[washes hands on return, hands are so messed up that washing them hurts]

once that was taken care of, and mr smear had been put to bed, i climbed in the shower and between the shower curtains, the shower head holder, the hot water and the good water pressure, i had a proper, decent, pleasant shower for the first time in... a very, very long time.

though i did feel a bit faint a couple of times.

now everyone's in bed, i've posted this, and i think i'm about ready to bundle up and get some rest.

breaking stuff

i'm finally in bed, it's really late, and i'm panicking because the window guy cut into the beautiful cupboard doors i promised the landlord i wouldn't touch.

and everything is coated with a super-fine dust.

...

the morning was okay, although it turned sour when the extra-insurance people got my details and i got cold feet realizing that there was every red flag in the book that i was being scammed.

i asked on facebook and apparently it's not a scam, just really stupid behavior that trains people to fall for scams.

at least, i hope that advice isn't wrong.

the ikea delivery arrived, just watching the huge guys carrying made my sciatic nerve twitch. and seeing that they damaged a corner of one of our units... and then i had to move them around a bit, and of course my sciatica is now up to a light burn.

my mom's aliyah story now has a new complication, so i guess it was a good day for yad l'olim to ask how we're coming along...

work was busy, but i was also really distracted. and i ended up embarrassed by a couple of PR comments :(i finally got into a flow after the plumber had returned and fixed two small leaks, but then the handyman was coming and i needed to be there to let him into the building.

...

apparently two of mr smear's got into an argument and one of them pulled out a knife 😭

oh, and we've agreed to let him visit another friend in a dodgy part of town on shabbat, a friend whose family makes us nervous...

...

the nice handyman who did the job but the job grew, then waiting for hours (doing a massive hardware store run with mr smear) for the window man to arrive, who assured me there'd be no dust and that the work would take a couple of minutes.

half an hour later the neighbors were getting upset, and then we said goodbye to him and his workers, and then we wiped and swept and discovered the damage.

good night

bean grease

i started the day with mandatory security training that would take "a few minutes". at 2x speed it took half an hour. i went to the 24/7 and bought some urgent stuff for gd, and was alone in the queue when i asked for a membership. by the time the cashier got my membership organized there were a few people waiting in line behind me, and then i was expected to install an app to swipe in and at that point i gave up and asked to pay. in cash. she didn't have change, and then she had to unpack a whole roll of coins which didn't want to come out 🤦

the tami4 technician arrived a bit late, but he was as quick as he was brilliant.

the work day was brutal, because i'm so freaking tired. regardless of my state of mind and my energy levels, i'm rather grateful for AI doing all the dirty work for me.

i have now promised to deliver something quickly to our client team.

highlight of tonight: gd gave market vegan another chance.

moving day +1

 okay, this is going to be a combination of point form and whatever-the-fuck, but i have to start with the fact that i'm typing this looking out over a major intersection that's been under heavy downpour for an hour or so, after three days of unseasonably warm and dry weather that was absolutely perfect for our move. i'm also nursing a throat infection (that i've clearly been cooking since at least sunday morning) and i might be nursing an eye infection that could be caused by many things over the past day, but probably dirty sawdust from me and - i think i'm going to start calling our friend from upstairs "big data" - big data attempting to use a jigsaw to cut out the bottom from the hob space.

...

which i'd forgotten i'd asked our landlord permission for already, so that was an embarrassing conversation. but not as embarrassing as the guy who delivered the electric hob this morning. by 8.30 - key handover time - gd and i still had quite a bit to do, and while we were scrambling, exhausted and sans caffeine, i got a call from the delivery guy saying he'd arrived. i told him i should expect to be back at the new apartment within twenty minutes, but twenty minutes later i called him to say i'd need more time and he wasn't answering.

meanwhile, we'd handed over the keys, i'd warned the landlady that "airing out the cupboards" wasn't enough to prevent mold from coming in through the walls and that they'd need to remove them entirely, and i'd warned her to deal with the pipes which miraculously held even as we held our breaths for two years, and gd was staying in the apartment to finalize the packing and finish tidying up without letting the auto-close door lock us out.

so around 8.50 i hopped in the van with a load, and on my way got hold of the guy. this time he was upset, and i reminded him that he hadn't warned me he was coming and he hadn't contacted me at all to set a delivery time. this was where the argument went off the rails, because he claimed he did arrange with me to meet at 9am, and i don't remember this happening.

okay, shit, now it's my fault. then i realize, to my horror, that my wallet is empty and i need to pay him cash. so i'm panicking, he's freaking out, he's waited half an hour for me and he's not going to come back later to get paid... i suddenly remember that we now live near a gas station, so i drove there and ran inside the shop asking desperately for the ATM. they told me where to go,  i went around the back, and... it wouldn't let me insert my card.

after a wasted minute with that, i came running back into the shop like a madman, begging them to let me buy something and give me a 100 shekel note as change. i don't know what they were thinking, but it was all very dramatic. the manager kindly explained that i could use their tills as ATMs, i went through an painstaking but brief identification process, got my hundred and ran out the door thanking them profusely.

i arrived at 9.05 - so technically only five minutes late, handed the miserably lug the money, took the plate, and thanked my stars he didn't want to fight me for yelling at him when i was at fault.

BUT.

later i checked my phone records, and i think he was gaslighting me. i don't think we ever spoke the day before.

...

when i picked up the van, it had a lot of recorded damage, the most shocking of which was that the side-mirror and window controls sections had been ripped out. during the haul, however, emergency icons started lighting up on the dashboard, and then this message:

i still had one last haul to go. i prayed, and raced to the old apartment. i'd been carrying heavy things up and down too many stairs for too many hours over a span of two days, and my back was sore and my legs hurt and i was exhausted. every time i took the stairs they seemed to get steeper.

i picked up coffee for me and gd, regaling our neighborhood coffee shop owner barista with our morning tale as if she was a bartender, and returned to carry down two more heavy sets of boxes and items.

gd made a video of the apartment before we stood together in the hallway and locked the door for the last time, having spent a week slowly-then-rapidly peeling back layers of our last four years and thanking the apartment for providing us safe haven from the storm of early '22.

...

we returned the van, complained about it's unroadworthy state, and demanded a refund and a small car to do our ikea run. they sent us a taxi, and after we arrived at the parking lot we walked to a coffee shop, used their facilities, and stopped for breakfast and coffee. then we drove to netanya, which didn't take too long.

but time dilates in ikea. we were pretty good, we didn't get distracted, we had a budget (the relief from getting our last two months' cheques from the landlady was palpable), but we also got turned around a couple of times and it was a while before we made it downstairs to the warehouse.

after everything we'd been through, that i'd put my body through, what followed was madness. three trolleys filled with HEAVY boxes, an insane workout even when i was in good shape. gd was worried i'd injure myself, or have a heart attack considering i was running exclusively on fumes and adrenaline.

...

after a long time in the line (making friends), we got hit with a new cashier. and an enormous bill, and i'm still embarrassed that i said the amount out loud to gd in front of other shoppers. and then both our credit cards were declined. twice. i called my visa service, and learned that it was simply a case of not having enough credit left, and what's infuriating is that in israel you can't just pay off a credit card even if you have the cash. and i was panicking, because mr smear was out of school already, we were in netanya, and it was the only day we had to do the shopping.

then i thought - cash! they had an ATM, so i withdrew my daily limit. then i thought, i wonder if gd can draw the same limit even though we share the same account? so she did, and it worked! just as i was being informed by the manager, after they'd carefully counted out a stack of bills, that over a certain amount ikea will only accept ten percent of the amount due in cash 🤦‍♂️

fortunately, after much drama, we could at least split the amounts so between gd's card, the ten percent cash, and my card, we managed to complete the purchase.

but then we had to run the customer service gauntlet.

on the one hand, if we'd had a van we could have just grabbed everything and left, on the other - there's no way i would have managed that without injuring myself, so it was a blessing in disguise that the van had been in such poor condition.

i was terrified, because i know that customer service can take forever. while we waited, we texted and called furiously between mr smear and our friends upstairs, and all of a sudden our number was called!! i jumped to the counter, and was informed that if we wanted delivery, we had to pay upfront and take whatever time slot was allotted to us. and if that didn't work for us, then we'd have no recourse.

i don't understand how that can be a thing.

but also, delivery in one to two days, but helping construct everything up to three weeks? never mind that part, then. so i paid for delivery, and after struggling to get the illiterate cashier to find our address wrote it down for her, and then we were off, just as the weather was beginning to turn.

...

at this point i was afraid of the traffic into tel aviv, which i see every evening from my client's offices, and i was surprised and unbelieving when waze told me it would take 38 minutes. we let mr smear and our friends know that we were on our way, and zoomed through to tel aviv, arriving at our apartment literally about one minute before mr smear arrived!

i took a break for twenty minutes to charge my phone (it was almost dead), and stumble around with gd with neither of us knowing what we were doing, and then driving the car back to the parking lot. it took longer to get to the parking lot than it had to get home from netanya, and i was having a hard time keeping my eyes open.

i felt like i was driving home on a come-down after a festival.

after a ridiculous series of chaotic events, obstructions and miracles, i made it safely to the parking lot, took a light rail and a bus home, and we'd officially (essentially) gotten through the move. our apartment is complete chaos, and everything is going to be hard and complicated for a while, but we're home.

after a good hummus dinner, making more noise than i'm comfortable with with big data and the jigsaw (i felt like he was parenting me, which was cool but weird, but the experience itself was fun), showering and climbing into bed, i finally got myself a decent amount of sleep.

nose, throat and eyes notwithstanding. my eyes seemed to have calmed down a bit since i got up earlier 🤞, i've managed to get all this down, i'm trying to get hold of a handyman to do the hob preparation for me (i'm amazed i managed to find my old post for a handyman on facebook), gd's gotten coffee made and mr smear has just left for school, and the sun's coming out.

moving day

moving day was yesterday , and a bit of today as well. it began with a long walk to the (actual) 24/7 for mr smear's breakfast and lunch that should have been a bus or a taxi ride. then coffee, saying goodbye to mr smear and launching into a day that was full madness.

- finally getting to the van to find it with a flat tire just as the movers arrived

- the movers finding half the furniture they needed to move covered in items

- giving the movers a run for their money, i'm in better shape than i thought i was. but i am *really* tired and sore

- being dehydrated and particularly dry all day (i suspect i'm cooking something.

- dealing with cuts on a prominent finger of each hand all day

- lots and lots of stresses and fighting but also lots of calming things down and reconciliation

- the new mattresses arriving in time

- losing 100 nis but covering both movers somehow

- getting the paint mixture right the first time, but failing the second. doing a lot of painting. a lot.

- and mold cleaning. a lot.

- our favorite vegan cafe doesn't deliver to our new apartment, so delivering to our old and taking it back with us.

- gd discovering some horrible things about our bathroom. all the bathrooms have real issues. our plumber is an asshole.

- the electric hob never arrived, i called and they never called me back

- having trouble finding the next van at reading. gps getting lost in all the detours at 00:55 with 10% battery and me miraculously recalling / figuring out my way without it

- a complicated shower, finally getting into bed after 2am.

now it's 6.30am and i'm about to arrive at the parking lot for today's van, we still have at least a full load to take care of before handover.

and gd hasn't slept a wink, in spite of her pain and exhaustion, because in addition to horrible bathroom smells we killed two... silverfish? millipedes?

t-1 (shoes in the house)

 i'm sore, i'm tired, and i'm in awe of gd who's been getting through the past week and today and arguably carrying a lot more of the can the me or mr smear.

i woke up this surprisingly summery morning and booked a car for the day, which was very useful. after breakfast we began round after round of scraping walls, priming walls, cleaning, packing, taking loads of awkward or sensitive stuff to the new apartment, removing the projector shelf, and stretching because my sciatica is flaring up again - not debilitating, thankfully, but it's making things uncomfortable...

i've managed to cut myself on the tips of two fingers so far. the plasters are getting in the way and without the plasters i have two pain / infection magnets :(

some additional good news to the guy taking over our last two months' rent is that he's also taking the couches.

i think i'm ready to go to bed. tomorrow's moving day.

t-2

 i finished reading moon knight this morning, it is legitimately mind-boggling and brilliant. then mr smear went off to school after we'd had a very serious conversation invoked by the disappearance of the imagine channel - where we got synthknot from - which resulted in me posting the following:

a really amazing youtube channel got taken down, and it's almost guaranteed that it's due to unjust copyright strikes. watching content producers like rick beato fighting off lawfare trolls makes it clear that google/youtube really don't care, and that there're no humans in the loop...

and then my facebook marketplace experience earlier this week, also no humans in the loop...

and all the people who fled toxic twitter to make just-as-toxic mastodons and blueskys...

and china using discord and tiktok to spy on us and brainwash us (effectively)...

and roblox pushing kids into dark corners and actively preventing people from fighting off predators...

with everything else that's going on, i feel like the biggest, scariest, most dangerous issue of our time is social media. it's not just dangerous for kids and teens, it's dangerous for everyone. and most of us are just going with it because we don't have much choice. and all the good people who try to make alternatives are just creating more of the same, because we haven't figured out a model for connecting people that encourages good, healthy behavior.

...

we rushed out to meet the window guy, who was "almost there" for about forty five minutes. but in addition to him proposing very satisfactory solutions, something made me ask him, on his way out, what it is exactly that he does for a living.

it turns out he's a contractor, and a carpenter.

gd and i looked at each other, and showed him one of the bigger issues we've been worried about, and which for him turned out to be null sweat ^_^

we then went to our new local hardware store to pick up a whole bunch of things - mostly to make sure we can fix and paint the walls in the old apartment properly - and stopped in at the nature store for hydration and snacks.

we measured the gas hob - the underside was revolting, and i cut my finger on it - and then rushed off to buy antiseptic ointment and an electric hob. they weren't in stock, so it'll only arrive on sunday, and it needs an electrician to install it, so it'll only be installed by tuesday or wednesday, and the hole in the counter isn't deep enough, so we'll either need a handyman to build up the area or, i realized later, to cut in a little deeper.

turns out we know a guy.

gd returned to our old place, i went to pick up mr smear from school and show him the "new" way to get home, and then we went to the new apartment to meet up with our new landlord and give him the cheques, and get the keys, and remove a couple of doors and the old oven and carry them down to his storage, and then our friend arrived to speak to him and was shocked to see that the electrician who installed the three-phase plug did something wrong (both from a regulations point of view, and ethically from a cheated-us point of view).

so that's another thing we need to deal with on sunday...

from there we returned to the old apartment, i had breakfast and mr smear and i took a bag of clothing to the donation bin, and the next while was spent fighting over how to proceed, and then proceeding. by the time the new tenant came by to examine our things more carefully, we had a load of sensitive stuff ready to go.

he might take our sofa, he might let us leave the big shelf up, he might take the curtains. but he's not taking the projector. and when i turned it on to demonstrate his response made me sad: we've gotten used to it not being able to focus properly, and not being particularly sharp to begin with. our little projector probably isn't worth much, and i don't think we really have place for it in the new apartment, but it's been with us for so long and we've had such good times with it 😭

i booked a car for an hour, and in that hour managed to pick it up, drive it home, load it with all the things while mr smear "stood guard", drive it to the new apartment, unload it, get everything upstairs and into the apartment, drive to the city market, pick up a bottle of wine, and get it back to its parking spot. and mr smear and i had a great time rocking out to slipknot and synthknot along the way 🤘

...

it's shabbat, and even though tomorrow's going to be tough, we made a point of stopping in the evening, lighting candles and making kiddush for the last time in this apartment, singing loudly and drinking wine and eating vegan burgers and reading the colour of magic (even before bedtime)...

t-3

 the morning was pretty smooth, then we had a guy come over to look at the apartment, in a hurry to find a place to live by sunday and seemingly a decent dude. so with much enthusiasm, we all seem to be proceeding and i'm praying it "takes" and things go smoothly 🙏

not only would this relieve us of two months' costs, but he also might buy our sofa, which would make our lives easier.

the rest of the day was a back-and-forth between the new apartment, the current one, and the office; the electrician did a huge, really good job of installing a tri-phase plug underneath the hob (going over the entire cabinet to minimize drilling into it, and he sorted out a bunch of other things.

unfortunately, while he was working gd discovered a leak - unrelated to him, and apparently unrelated to the plumber. but the plumber had been in the day before, so it was a whole story getting him to come in again... at least it seems like he gave us a discount on the replacement tap (he keeps trying to upsell us, it's kinda unsettling).

i had a chat with the new landlord, and it was such a positive experience - in spite of the costs he's really grateful that we're taking care of his property, and he's shocked to learn what his previous tenants haven't been reporting. meanwhile, while the apartment still has a few things that need fixing up, it feels like all the urgent stuff has been taken care of.

tomorrow we're meeting there with the window guy (just for him to evaluate the situation), and then we're going to buy an electric hob, and then we're going to make sure we have all the primer/paint and equipment we need to ensure the (🤞) incoming tenant is happy, and then we're going to do an early handover with the landlord, which means we might even be able to get a chunk of the awkward-to-move stuff across over the weekend.

...

even though i spent so much of my day juggling between the apartments and the office, i managed to evaluate the n-gram package against a much larger sample set and was ready to report high confidence just in time for the status meeting. the "customer" team lead asked me to try to make sure i'm not going to come back on tuesday to any big surprises, so i had a sync with one of my teammates and we came up with a strategy that we're both interested in seeing happen, and he agreed to "do me a favor" and run some tests in my absence.

i also had a really interesting conversation with the slipknot-not-synthknot guy, who i learned was actually a film student originally.

after putting mr smear to bed, i sat down to try and log my hours for my employer for the first time. i initially did it accurately, but it looks like i won't get paid fairly if i do, so i've normalized my days and i guess i'll find out if i did something wrong in the coming days.

...

the only real choice i got to make today was taking mr smear out for a laffa. not only did we both enjoy the walk and the meal, but we had some interesting conversations along the way. which led to an hilarious moment after we got home: he'd asked me about estrogen ("is estrogen real?"), and i'd ended up explaining to him how fetuses begin both male and female. but gd didn't know that we'd talked about this, and the look on her face when he suddenly yelled from the bathroom "DAD! I CAN FEEL WHERE MY VAGINA CLOSED UP!" was absolutely priceless 🤣

...

gd has been doing an inordinate amount of physical work, and it's worrying me. i understand that she's very sensitive regarding hygiene, and that she wants things to be "just right" when we move, but she's also been doing all the packing and sorting and i'm worrying about her back and pain levels... and she's been struggling for a while with some of the medications she's been on :(

t-4

 there's so much stuff happening, i'm sure i'm forgetting important notes along the way.

today began peacefully, with dishes, and moon knight, and interesting conversation* with mr smear.

* although we did have a serious argument when he told me i'm a hypocrite. i'm a lot of things, but i'm pretty sure i'm not a hypocrite. and besides, i'd only just explained to him what a hypocrite is.

it ended peacefully, with mr smear laughing until he choked multiple times while i read some more of the colour of magic to him (i'm thinking he's finally ready for it), and completing my employer's onboarding, and dishes, and having gd wake up to my howl of distress to advise me to put a glove on to retrieve the sink filter that i dropped into a particularly gross bin situation.

...

we arrived at the new apartment just before the plumber's brother did. we walked through the work that needed doing, and he pointed out that three taps needed replacing, not just one. and then he and his brother quoted me for the work, and my jaw dropped.

the landlord agreed to him taking care of the pipes, but didn't want to replace the taps... "right now", he said. so i asked him if we could make an arrangement, that i'd pay for the taps now and he'd pay me back later. and he agreed, and i rejoiced.

our friend/neighbor came down (she brought coffee) and joined us for a while, and when i felt i wasn't needed any more i headed to the office. when the plumber's brother was done and they were all heading out, she noticed something wrong with one of the kitchen windows - it doesn't latch, and we're currently in the middle of a storm with high winds and plenty of wet.

the good news (to my mind) is that the landlord's acknowledged this issue, so i guess it's clearly (again, to my mind) his fault if the floors get damaged. in the meanwhile, i managed to get our window guy from a few months ago to come in tomorrow afternoon, hopefully he'll come up with a solution that makes everyone happy 🤞

at the same time, while i was in the apartment i managed to get the electrician we used a while back to agree to come in and install three-phase under the hot plates. the "under" part will be tricky, but that's a tomorrow problem...

also, the plumber's brother came up with a great suggestion that makes installing our water dispenser much less messy.

work was crazy today. i got in 45 productive minutes after i came in, but then immediately had to return to the apartment to help gd with the unpleasant woman who came to take another look. i arrived to a not-unpleasant vibe, and after she left gd informed me that of all the details of her life to come into play, this woman grew up in the same neighborhood in turkey that gd lived in for a year. apparently, that's a reason to play nice with us. or maybe it's just because she's desperate for the apartment...

i paid the plumber (who'd become antsy), i ate, and i returned to the office. i had a long meeting trying to explain to my bulgarian teammates what i was doing to fine-tune the model's guesses and enable them to share the workload, and then a shorter meeting with my local teammates (kind of), and during that meeting one of the guys (the slipknot-not-synthknot guy) confronted me about the n-gram detection. we agreed to work together to see if maybe i'd missed something.

by the end of the day - an hour and a half later, because i had to go home again for another viewing - we'd determined that while the "gold standard" n-gram detection that i was using was as shit as i'd remembered, that there's another one he'd used before that was much less shit. but more important than that, he'd revealed that the company officially supports a very specific set of languages, and his n-gram detector proved 100% accurate (on our small sample set) for all of them!

so that's very exciting news, and tomorrow's mission is now to test this detection on as many production samples as we can to establish its "good enough-ness".

...

gd's done an incredible amount of packing and cleaning (even if, in my opinion, she really doesn't need to invest so much in the cleaning) over the past few days, but we're now getting to a point where there's not a hell of a lot to eat or eat with :P

it's very strange seeing the layers of our lives that slowly built up over the last four years being rapidly peeled back to eventually reveal an empty apartment that shows practically no trace that we were ever here.

iran update

 oh, right! and ozdoc messaged me last night, once again inviting us to flee the potential danger of an iranian attack.

the situation really is bizarre. nobody knows what's going on. tousi tv is the only reliable source of information. everyone has theories.

hopefully the iranians won't attack. if they do, hopefully we'll have time to get to the in-apartment bomb shelter in the new apartment, and not have to go huddle in the asthma-inducing dust-and-stale-air choke room downstairs.

overload

 it scares me that today's tuesday. and that this coming weekend is our last one in this apartment, and that there are so many unknowns, so many things i might have forgotten to take care of.

and there are knowns, now, too. gd went in to the new apartment today to take photos, and she called our friend down to verify that under the gas plate, the cupboard smells like gas. after a literal hour trying to get a technician to come and take a look (the first forty minutes were spent talking to the wrong gas company), the guy came in and confirmed that there's no leak, that the gas is off, and that the gas plates are probably broken 🤦‍♂️

there're water issues, too. blocked drains all round, and the toilets don't flush properly. and damage under the kitchen sink. and a whole story with the "jacuzzi". so we now have a plumber coming in - scratch that, he's busy, a plumber's brother coming in - first thing tomorrow morning.

and with all this noise in the background, i had to bail on a couple of hours' work this afternoon. i feel like i'm making good progress though - i've figured out a decent way to compare "my" model's results with what's in production - but it's a long, manual process and it's full of surprises.

oh, and at lunch today my boss/client and my team were having a very strange conversation about alcohol, drugs and chronic illness and i couldn't figure out if i was following what they were saying or not.

i didn't even talk about how my day began, yet - dishes, and reading moon knight: what a completely insane experience, and i mean reading it, it's properly destabilizing. i can't believe mr smear read it already.

oh, yes: i don't know what came over me, but i told him a really dumb but funny joke that could be potentially offensive to white saviors. he thought it was hilarious, and then i had to caution him about not re-telling it and now i'm wondering if i'm going to get in trouble for it :P

after he left for school, i took care of a bunch of things and then gd and i walked to the bank. it was a beautiful morning, and a good opportunity for some time to just walk and talk.

this time everything went quickly and smoothly, gd signed what she had to sign and i picked up the chequebook. we then went our separate ways, and when i arrived at the office *just* in time for my daily, i saw that she'd gotten home and received a message from the bank informing her that she'd left her ID there... so she had an additional experience on top of having to spend the day keeping house and packing for the move.

dinner was very late, but it was amazing. gd made a great ramen, with a yo egg on top with a runny yolk. it was glorious.

mr smear, in addition to doing his hebrew homework before i'd let him read in english (we're doing a weird thing since yesterday, hopefully it's not a bad call), decided that he's exhausted all the english stuff he wants to read and, entirely voluntarily, to both his parents shock and amazement, picked up the hebrew translation of kazu kibuishi's amulet (הקמע) and is devouring it.

...

my brain is throbbing, it's past 10pm. i'm going to make myself a cup of tea, and attempt to complete my employer's onboarding. and hopefully, hopefully, get a reasonably good night's rest.

i mean... the nerves

 firstly, i'm tired, and i've just completed an hour and a half of my employer's onboarding because they're unhappy that i haven't done it yet, all the while feeling bitter that i started working for my client on the same day as my employer and i'm really overwhelmed. not to mention the fact that i'm completely ragged from all the moving things combined with handling mr smear.

to be fair, though, relative to this morning his behavior in the evening was great. he did only go to bed around 10pm, but that's because he had a lot of homework to do...

... it's amazing to us that once he was punished, he cooperated fully and had no issues with actually doing the work. i wish i could understand this.

...

the woman we were waiting for turned out to be a real piece of work. not only did she get pushy when i told her that 1pm was the cut-off, she then had the gall to start asking me why it was so important that go back to work on time!

my mom asked me why i didn't put the phone down on her at that point, to which i didn't have an immediate answer.

then she arrived literally a few minutes before 1pm. i asked her to remove her shoes, to which she responded that "it disgusts her". i explained that she's not coming into our home with her shoes on. she asked if we had animals, i said "no, but the landlords are okay with them".

"me too, but not in the house" she replied.

then she really pissed me off; she took one shoe off at the entrance, then took a step into the living room before taking off the other one. i asked her to move the shoe to the entrance, to which she rudely responded "what do you care?"

at this point, i should have kicked her out, possibly throwing her shoes out the front door and down the stairs first. but i didn't. she took a quick look around, asked a couple of questions, and then i told her it was time to go.

it was only later that i really thought about it; if it wasn't worth two months' rent to me, there's no way i would have tolerated that behavior, but in the current situation it really would be tantamount to saying "it's worth two month's rent to me to not have to deal with you."

i don't have two month's rent to burn.

anyway, later in the evening i agreed to talk to her again - i didn't want to hear her ugly, entitled, malignant-tumor-on-the-backside-of-humanity voice - and when she asked to see the apartment again, and i told her thursday morning between 8 and 9, she said that it's too difficult for her because she has to go to work...

... do you know that feeling, when you come up with the perfect response hours or days too late? that's not what happened to me. immediately, i wanted to fire back "what, do you have a meeting or something? why can't you just go later?" like she did to me.

i'm feeling extremely proud of myself for keeping my mouth shut. honestly, i hope she does want the apartment, and that our shitty landlords agree to sign her on. they all deserve each other. but at the same time, it would give me great pleasure to tell her that someone else has taken it.

but now that i think about it, it would give me even greater pleasure to wait until she and the landlords have signed, and i have our deposit in hand, to tell her "good luck, you're going to need it."

...

the rest of the work day went pretty positively, even though i was half an hour late to a half an hour meeting that i didn't realize was happening.

at 4pm i joined a meeting i'd been invited to with some guys from my employer, without understanding what it was or why i was invited. it turned out to be a game design session, and while it was an engaging meeting and they definitely appreciated my contributions, i really don't think this one in particular is for me. i also couldn't really afford the hour out of my day, especially not today.

home - homework - dinner - shower - toenail treatment (i hope i'm not imagining things, but i feel like there's some improvement) - homework - employer onboarding - posting - my brain hurts and i need to go to bed soon.

...

ran gvili's body has been recovered, his family (and the rest of us) can get a little bit of closure now that his body can be buried with dignity.

impatience

 we had a rough start to the day today. mr smear regressed to being very uncooperative in doing his homework (due tomorrow) until we were furious and he lost his reading privileges again. we're all upset, and i don't understand why it's so hard for him to understand the english we're speaking to him.

anyway, no-one came for the first viewing session, and i'm now waiting for the woman who agreed to see the apartment between 12 and 1pm and just messaged to ask if it's okay if she comes at 1pm.

i don't understand why i have to explain to a grown adult that that's not what we agreed on.

the work day's been going alright so far, i guess. though it feels like the deeper i go into the world of language detection, the more pathetic the results.

the drain

 yesterday:

you know what's a surprisingly good feeling? when i arrive to pick up mr smear after 7.5 hours with his friend and he's clearly bummed out that their time is over.

the return home with was really fun.

it was an easy evening, i read some the colour of magic (we've restarted it, i hope he's ready for it this time) at bedtime and then the evening went into a bunch of random stuff, not least of which being writing up my earlier LLM experience into an article.

today:

i struggled to sleep last night.

the morning started off pretty well, and when mr smear left gd and i launched into removing the paintings from the walls and getting the screws / fisher plugs out. and realizing that *i* was guilty of mixing posidriv and phillips screws throughout the apartment :$

i took care of a bunch of other small things, and then left for the bank to organize a bank guarantee.

...

it's 2026 already. we have ai, robots, and a new evolution of CRISPR, but there i found myself, walking out of the bank after TWO HOURS signing arbitrary pieces of paper to acquire a document allowing me to promise my own money to someone else 😒

and then, OMFG.  just as i got on the bus to get to the office, i received an sms from the bank saying that my chequebook is available for pickup 😡

...

the bank experience really drained me. i got to the office, drank a coffee, and got back to working on my language detection model. i did that for an hour, then had lunch with the other dev who was working from the office, and then he left. i got some more work done before the only other person in the office, who was on the complete other side of it, lost his temper with someone on the phone. i tried not to eavesdrop, ending up suspecting that he'd been yelling at his kids :P

the work itself went sideways. first, when after two days of investment into testing this model, and some apparently good guesswork about some of the bigger languages (french and german, amongst others), i discovered that the model couldn't distinguish between english and russian. at that point, the mapping no longer mattered and i stopped what i was doing to investigate the existing solution.

that was when i learned that the elasticsearch language detection model isn't very reliable either, and that my client has a fair amount of garbage detections in its dataset. i also learned that i have a real advantage in evaluating language detections models because i'm familiar enough with quite a few very different languages.

so the model i've been evaluating is out, though i have infrastructure available to evaluate others (if i can find any reliable ones with labels), and i've established that there's no point in training our own model on our production data. i'm probably going to have to find out how n-gram language detection stacks up...

i left early myself and caught a bus home, authorizing mr smear to go with his friend to the comics library and on to his place. that made it easier for gd and i to go to the new apartment to sign the contract.

we were there for quite a while, it's looking considerably better, and this guy's really giving good vibes as a landlord. i didn't realize how hard it would be for him to grip a pen (he's very handicapped), and there were clauses that neither of us could figure out who should do what with...

we left with a key so gd and i can get started, cleaning it up and moving small things, and taking pre-inspection photos and organizing whatever fixes he missed.

i dropped my bag off at home, then walked to the square to wait for mr smear. he didn't need me to do that.

when we got home he dropped a bombshell - he and his friend watched the first episode of rick & morty today 🤦‍♂️

i fired off a message to his friend's dad - he's never seen the series - explaining that i understand that we'll never have full control, but that i'd appreciate it if his son understands that it's wrong and that he shouldn't share it with mr smear... he responded quickly and warmly, i hope we align.

mr smear has long hebrew homework due tuesday, so after a brief debrief on the rick & morty episode we got through a chunk of it and then had dinner, and then got through the shower/bedtime rituals (showering without a shower curtain again), and after getting mr smear into bed* i got caught up in getting gd's ipad upgraded, which led to some yak shaving in an attempt to free up enough space, which eventually led to an understanding that it's not possible to update the ipad software and apple's successfully coercing us to either abandon it or trade it in.

i fucking HATE apple.

* it took him forever to go to sleep, though

i'm absolutely exhausted, i think i need to go to bed. i hope i actually get some sleep tonight.

going around in circles

i feel like i'm trapped between rocks and hard places.

i have a sinking feeling that i'm out of time for the embedded model solution i've been working on, but at the same time i have the boss *strongly* encouraging me to continue and i do feel like i'm *almost* there.

last night the woman from the morning contacted me to say the apartment's too small for her.

i had a rough night last night, the new cream doesn't seem to be doing its thing. gd was up all night too, so we were both a bit miserable this morning...

mr smear, meanwhile, woke up just a little *too* excitable and loud :/

for both him and me, the early morning was predominantly about moon knight and getting the midi device playing nicely with garageband.

then we hopped on a weekend bus to his friend's place, and i moseyed on to the museum (picking up a coffee next to habima on the way), and i spent about three hours tinkering with local LLM development until my battery almost died.

i came home for a while, now i'm on my way to pick up my boy and return home again.

delicacy

 night has fallen, the candles are lit, the challah-peño dough is rising. i have a shot glass of rum i'm slowly sipping, and tool's lateralus album is playing, and mr smear is on the couch behind me reading moon knight after having finished the hebrew translation of lightfall.

nobody knows what's happening with iran and china tonight, or tomorrow night, or next week, but we're happy and grateful to have a calm moment right here, right now.

...

mr smear struggled last night and all day with a stuffy nose, but we had a really nice morning together and he was well enough to go to school. then someone came to look at the apartment and decided she wanted to proceed - coming in on the 1st was a problem, but gd and i talked it over and we agreed that the 15th was acceptable. not only does it mean someone taking over our obligations, but it gives us a couple of weeks' breathing room which is meaningful.

gd and i took a bus to the school, which was packed with families milling around appreciating all the artwork. mr smear guided us through his grade's stuff, he only had two pieces on display but they were really good, and we were amazed by a lot of what we saw - there're a lot of really talented kids there.

aside from the awkward horror of watching one of his friends' train-wreck family in action, and a couple of awkward moments with some other parents as well, it was a very good experience for all.

and then i managed to corner mr smear's teacher for an impromptu parent-teacher discussion, and confirmed that she's noticed and is appreciative of mr smear's efforts to sort himself out over the past week or two 🙏

mr smear got gd to point and laugh just as a bunch of his classmates were told "NO" when they were trying to leave early without adult supervision, and it was awkward for everyone.

we took the light rail to the hospital complex on the way home, stumbling upon an actual spar along the way and buying delicious candy-like dried strawberries, amongst other things, and then it was time for pharmacy and shopping. the pharmacy took a ridiculously long time, but mr smear set himself up in the food court and worked on his new comic idea.

once gd and i were done, we had lunch (i'd been passing out from exhaustion, but i managed to scarf down 

[pause mid-sentence to fight with my wife over "letting" mr smear read moon knight - he just asked me what "evisceration" means - after i explained that i already told him i haven't read it and i don't approve of him reading it. i can't force him. gd just asked if there's any sex stuff in it, and he said no, so she just raised her hands and gave up]

a really good falafel pita (mr smear had a "salad pita", gd sampled the rice with peas and dill she bought for the weekend) and then we walked home.

the rest of the afternoon had been pretty relaxed, and hopefully the shabbat will be too 🤞🙏

...

right, those dried strawberries aren't going to eat themselves.

the brain slimes out the headcase

i woke up from a strange dream where i reconnected with my first branch commander and his family out in the middle of nowhere. when i got up i couldn't remember his name, but firefighter came to the rescue and i could return to a reality in which it really doesn't matter :P

 today began with an argument over the couch, which *i* had thought we were keeping, and which i'm now scrambling to sell before the move. and i tried to put our mattress on facebook marketplace, but because i used the word "orthopaedic" it was identified as medical equipment.

i could only ask for a review on the grounds of "it's not offensive in my country" and "it was a joke",  and the review was obviously just as automated as the original misclassification. and then, to make things worse, i couldn't edit or delete it because it had been flagged, and i couldn't re-create it either because it was detected as a duplicate 🤦

a sweet couple came to look at the apartment this morning, right after i returned from the hardware store with putty and shpachtel and a replacement showerhead for our last week because ours sprung a leak last night, and they absolutely loved it and we all really clicked over our rick & morty and adventure time pictures on the walls.

i arrived at work a bit later than usual, fielded a call from a scary-looking woman who asked incisive questions, and then dived into work.

...

work today - aside from forcing myself to take a lunch break - was completely ridiculous. as a hired "expert", i probably shouldn't be reveling out loud in the fact that this is my first mlops experience, but my gods, this is a discipline of complete masochists and/or trolls.

my first success was navigating the docker resources required to actually run a model in an ml instance, and the next was figuring out how to request predictions. but then i had to deal with logits and understand that the model i was using didn't include the labels it was trained with. so the data scientist who helped me yesterday jumped in enthusiastically to help, and the two of us were like kids trying to find buried pirate treasure with a riddle of instructions and no idea which map they referred to. or whether or not that map was accurate.

by the end of the day, we'd managed to synthesize a massive dataset of sample sentences (in 235 different languages) manually using google sheets and gemini, and we'd coerced a cursor agent to run a script against the deployed model that took our dataset plus a guessed label mapping and try to figure out what the mapping *should* look like, and we were surprised and amazed when the first iteration showed a fair amount of success and gave us a great starting point.

just before i called it a day - it was already much later than i'd intended to stay in the office, and my brain felt like it was oozing out my ears and nostrils - my boss/client appeared. we enthusiastically caught him up, but he didn't like my original plan, which was to give the project until the end of today and then make a call to use a temporary fallback to avoid blocking an end-of-next-week delivery.

"you should be more optimistic", he told me.

now i'm at a point where i know i'm not going to work over the weekend, but it's going to be bugging me that i might need to work over the weekend in order to make this deadline.

...

i walked home, had a very serious discussion with mr smear (he made a bad call today, and may have initiated some real bullying by some kids in his class), but then moved on to more positive things and dinner and showertime and bedtime were great.

i'm sure i'm forgetting something, but it's late and i need to chill a little.

...

it’s (hopefully) mr smear's second-last day of his no-reading punishment. yesterday i told him that if he reads hebrew it counts as homework, not reading time, and he’s embraced that loophole and is thoroughly engrossed in a hebrew graphic novel i bought a while back :P

the gaping maw

 what the hell happened today?

the morning started well, i had less dishes to do because i'd done half of them the night before, and my biggest distractions from reading more planetes came from mr smear engaging me in interesting conversation.

i got some offers for moving companies, and while i think i jumped on one too early, the guy sold me with his pitch that they're mostly olim and miluimnikim, it was the best price that still included all the "basics" (like insurance), and they did have good reviews (assuming they weren't bots).

a little more than half the price i was previously quoted.

otherwise, lots of communications surrounding the apartments.

i got to work in time to make coffee before my meeting, and while a lot of my day was frustrating (obstacles hidden behind obstacles, it was obstacles all the way down) i did enjoy some successes and i got confirmation from external sources that i'm on the right path.

lunchtime was weird; i went with a small group to the same shuwarma place, but they were clearly drowning in lunchtime demand and nobody seemed to know what they were doing. so it took a while before i finally got my order in (for the same thing i got last time, the poor cashier had to call his boss to clarify that what i wanted was legit) and then it took forever to get served, and then the high-strung server "did me a favor" by putting four things in a tray with three spaces and warned me this would be the last time.

i was more amused than anything, but one of the other guys got way worse treatment and was so pissed off that he's now on a mission to properly boycott them.

my client / boss sat next to me at lunch for a personal conversation. he seems cool.

i was uncomfortable all afternoon, i've developed a rash that i don't have time for :(

i called in the data engineering cavalry at the end of the day, and left on a note of partial success. also, complete bewilderment that an entire field can be at the mercy of cruel tooling that makes every step unpleasant guesswork.

i came home, unburdened myself (i'd fielded calls and messages all day), and then entered some drama with our landlords. only to be served a good helping of humble pie, because i'd apparently misinterpreted her responses last week and she is willing to keep the rent the same for the new tenants' long-term! that was an enormous relief.

oh, and mr smear had his own drama - some kid or kids has been destroying the bathroom taps, and the grade supervisor apparently made it clear she suspected him when she talked to the class about it. he seems genuinely upset ("i've do some really bad things, but i've never destroyed school property!") and i almost wrote something to his teacher, then realized that there is absolutely nothing i can write or that he can say that doesn't make him seem more suspicious.

and no matter how i feel about it, i really can't know for sure.

we had a good dinner, a generally good shower/bedtime routine (tool - ænima) and mr smear sung himself to sleep after i said goodnight, very excited that we're coming to see his artwork on display on friday ^_^

after that, i read through the revised contract the new landlord sent, which is almost ready, and then handled some random shit. including learning that there's a school website i didn't know about, filled with all sorts of reports including some of mr smear's misbehaviors... i'm very grateful it's only the minor ones so far :P

addendum: anxiety diet

 the anxiety diet continues to be effective; i dropped below 77kg yesterday for the first time since my early twenties. scrapper's comment on saturday about expecting me to have learned to handle stress better is rolling around my head a lot.

oh, and i showed mr smear maynard taking down a drunk fan and continuing to sing. he's agreed that as long as he doesn't have to do mma, he's ready to get back into jiujitsu. i told him and gd that we'll look into that as soon as we're over the move.

t-minus 12

 i didn't sleep enough last night, but i did wake up feeling less wrecked than the past two days. after doing a ton of dishes, and exploding at my family because there'd been a whole conversation about mr smear switching art streams and nobody had thought it worth discussing it with me*,  i actually had time to read makoto yukimura's planetes over coffee.

so far, planetes is really interesting hard sci-fi, and the artwork is amazing.

* i feel horrible, too, because he wants to do music and aside from burning a huge amount of money on this move, i have no idea what we'll be able to afford once we're there.

after mr smear left for school, we had a brief window of quiet before our alarms went off reminding us of an important appointment about nerve blocks that we'd both completely forgotten about. thank god we had the authorization ready already...

we walked to the pain clinic, and the doctor was very understanding and sympathetic. it was good that i went, though - gd's communication issues aren't always around language :P

from there i said goodbye and walked to my client's office, arriving in time to make myself a coffee (every morning there's an issue with the coffee machine on our side of the building, so it's a whole thing) before my daily meeting with my bulgarian teammates.

i'm under a ton of pressure, and (along with a bunch of others) lost hours of work today due to wifi issues. i even went home thinking it might work from there - also taking the opportunity to eat lunch, and discover that gd's been using our supposedly vegan fridge to store eggs, which upset me because we explicitly agreed no animal products in our kitchen - and when i couldn't get it to work from home i returned to the office and found the poor IT guy and got in line and eventually got sorted out.

the rest of my day was investigation in ML models, and learning how to run opensearch instances locally, and syncing with the two teams (overcoming a massive, weird communication problem with the only team member with tribal team knowledge), and having a massive info dump with a new face (fortunately recorded), and being unexpectedly hugged by my client / boss when he saw me 🤷

[oh, yeah - there was an "incident" last night when he chided me for introducing myself in a chat as a contractor. but i'm definitely a contractor 🤔]

i called mr smear after school ended to check in because gd made me paranoid that he'd skipped / gone to the wrong arts class. he freely admitted that he might get into trouble for touching his teacher's computer, but he assured me that he'd received permission from another teacher. you'd better believe i messaged that other teacher to confirm, and i was relieved when she not only confirmed, but also praised his behavior 😌

when i got home, it was to discover that gd and mr smear had gotten most of the way through his history homework - alexander the great, and military formations - so i took over from her and we managed to complete it before dinner, with only one minor incident that involved me convincing him that procrastination is poison and that it would feel much better to get it over with as soon as possible.

i was amazed when he agreed, relieved and pleased when he finished the work, and then we could sit down and have a very pleasant leftover dinner before heading into shower and bedtime.

i don't know which i'm more excited about: mr smear getting on my psytrance vibe for most of the routine, or him asking me (just prior to toenail treatment time) to switch to tool - pushit.

his toenails. i don't know if they're getting better. they're so fucking damaged it's horrifying, it's been horrifying to do the treatment every night. i really hope they're getting better somehow.

...

after receiving a ridiculous quote from a mover this morning, gd and i spent a large chunk of the evening trying to get quotes to compare. now it's 11pm and i need to decide whether i should go to bed (i definitely should), or do something entertaining. lightly entertaining, because i've been (obviously) watching lots of streams about iran, and today i learned about the british government agreeing to install the CCP in london, and then about the kurds in syria which i can't figure out if it's good or bad, and holy shit the world feels scary and messy.

if there must be ballistic missiles fired our way, it would be amazing if they could hold off for another 12 days so that we have an in-apartment bomb shelter 🙏

a lost work day

 am i sick? i don't know. but i was soooo tiiiired today, i had trouble not falling asleep at my desk, and then during a lecture. i've also decided that just like i'm lactose-intolerant, i'm also meeting-and-presentation-intolerant. similar symptoms, too: i get real sleepy.

what did i achieve today? i managed to find proof and convince social security that they were supposed to pay me unemployment for december. the packing boxes arrived today. i got mr smear through his hebrew homework (even if it did take until 22.30, and there was occasional drama), and i managed to post our apartment on two sites even if i don't believe anyone's really going to want it (i had three people respond so far, each ending up more disappointed than the last).

oh, and i got authorized for time off for the move (and its follow-up ikea-day), and i had a positive first "roadmap" session with my mentor.

work-wise, i'm not sure i got much done.

...

i am feeling a lot less anxious about the move than i've been since last week.

i'm feeling very anxious about what's happening in iran.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by 𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 ✡︎ ♕ (@niohberg)