mental

i just stopped working (11pm), after 30-50 minutes of going around in circles with the AI, in continuation of what the rest of the past two workdays have all been about.

...

for all my vibe-coding friends: a rare moment of AI honesty. this was after a good half hour trying to upgrade my agentic skills so that it could get to the solution without me doing any manual edits of the code.

babysitting AI agents is exhausting.

...

 what a fucking day. i went to the office, chatting with dod about an ambitious new project of his (and trading some wild family stories). the next few hours were me chasing after code reviews and, of course, discovering after they'd been merged that their respective CI pipelines had been broken for a long time and nobody else noticed or cared.

i also spent about an hour doing one of the teams a favor by cleaning up the permissions in their repo, which entailed removing a whole lot of names of people who were retrenched last year. leaving some projects with exactly zero people receiving alerts or able to manually intervene. the irony, that they thought they'd be saving themselves money by firing all those poor people when what they really needed to do was invest in training them better.

between the lack of tea varieties and decaf coffee, and the appalling state of the bathrooms, and the fact that i had an employer team meeting in the afternoon, i packed up around lunchtime and came home to eat. after lunch, i realized that i still hadn't gotten any response from the water company's whatsapp, so i gave them a call.

what i discovered was as follows: there *was* a personal warning sent to us, because we used more water these past couple of months than the previous tenants used last year. even the support agent acknowledged that that's obviously irrelevant and not an indication of a leak. there was *also* a warning sent to each and every apartment in the building, warning us about higher usage because big data refilled the shared reservoir last week. but there's nothing in the email to suggest that it's referring to the shared property.

assholes.

the meeting was long and difficult to get through - precisely the kind of experience that makes me think i might be suffering from some kind of narcolepsy. it's boredom, for sure. i've developed a sensitivity to meetings, and to boring meetings in particular.

while i was having my brain melted, gd discovered where i'd temporarily put some of our pictures a while ago. with her toenail. now that she's had both of her big toenails fucked up, i'm grateful that it's not the one that's still recovering from surgery but my gods, she really lost it. it's was almost her "broken shoelace", after an insane combination of hard things she's (and we've) been going through for the last very long time :(

work-wise, today was long hours, making progress but slowly and painfully. dinner was a nice break - we started watching cool runnings, and i decided that if there ever was an israeli bobsled team it would need to be called slalom aleichem, and then i found out that this year there was an israeli bobsled team, and they gave themselves the amazing name of shul runnings, but then they totally humiliated us by trying to cheat and getting disqualified 😭

after saying good night to my mom, my sister called for a quick sync (she and her son are experiencing moving troubles), and then it was time to put mr smear to bed, and then... AI sisyphus time.

it's late, i think i need to turn my brain off now.

rolling two rocks uphill simultaneously

after a night of being wired and getting very little sleep, yesterday was a bit rough. the first thing i did, after mr smear went to school and i'd already done a little more AI harness work, was head across the road to the supermarket to buy some more containers.

i'm still feeling stupid for having bought one that was clearly broken, and removing the stickers before i noticed.

but the walk itself was nice. the weather was pleasant, and there was a certain... tel avivi something... in the air.

i did another hour or so on the harness, then finally - and unwillingly - sat down to work. i spent the rest of the day doing the dual sisyphean tasks of babysitting PR review / fix loops, each pass trying to update my agentic skills to avoid the next, and each time failing more spectacularly than before. my first omgihavetotakeabreak was spent washing the containers, the second vacuuming the entire apartment*, and the end of the day i was so antsy that i did something i haven't done in years - i got dressed and went for a long walk.

* i asked gd if she knew why i was vacuuming the apartment. "to help me?" she innocently responded. "hell, no!"

i walked up to the park, crossed the river, and stopped to try and get a photo of a really weird, interesting-looking bird that might have been a white-throated kingfisher. then i passed a pond, and noticed a crow and an egyptian goose parked on the side, with another crow sitting on a sign behind them. i walked up a little distance away to join them, as we all watched the pond in the bright sun on its way to setting behind the trees. moments later, what appears to have been a little egret landed right between us, and we all shared a lovely moment together.

i got home feeling a bit better, but still frazzled. we finished watching spaceballs over dinner, mr smear had been really cool all day (he did his chores without complaining, even though it took him a long time), and bedtime was pretty smooth.

gd and i coordinated and i took a photo of the water meter at 9.45pm, and we stopped using any water until i got up at 5.45am to take another photo, and i'm relieved to see that we don't have a leak. unfortunately, though, it made the night a little more stressed than it needed to be and i couldn't get back to sleep after waking up, so 🤷‍♂️

i began my day with a coffee and stranger in a strange land on our balcony, and it's a beautiful day. mr smear gave star birds a try after making the case that he'd gotten up at 6am and taken care of all the things he needed to, so the one-hour-after-brushing-teeth rule applied, and it seems like he's enjoying it.

i've paid our rent, and i've typed all this up, and now i'm going to sit down for breakfast before heading off to pretend to be a professional adult.

sleep journal entry

i eventually went to bed around 1am, but most of the night i was restless for no identifiable reason.

i did get some very constructive AI harness time in, though.

firsts

 this morning got better. mr smear woke up, we had a really good chat (starting with my telling him about my dream, then discussing industrialization's effect on work and sleep hours, then rhetoric and gamification), and then he sat down to draw up a birthday card for my mom.

that ended up taking a while, and a few retries, but we ended up with something nice in the end.

i spent a couple of hours working on my AI harness, and then we all began the pest-control mission on the other half of the kitchen. this took a *long* time, and a lot of it was tense and unpleasant, but we got through it in the end, and pretty much everything is put away safely, minus a couple of things that we need to buy containers for tomorrow.

mr smear negotiated for an hour of minecraft before we headed out for rollerblading training day.

on our way out: big emotions. mr smear's ten, and he's never had to learn to tie shoelaces before. jesus fuck. anyway, we got through it, and he kind of got the idea, and i'm sure he'll get better at it quickly.

the way to the park - which is only a few blocks from our apartment - took a long time, but it consisted of consistent, incremental improvements and i was already pleased from the get-go as the first skill he's begun to grok has been the t-stop. by the time we got to the park, he'd already developed a sensitivity to different brick textures, and once we hit the bicycle path to the ice lolly shack he was already skating, albeit slowly, pretty confidently.

the way back, in spite of one backward upset, was smooth and quick, and then he blew my mind by just walking up the steps without holding on to anything, just like i tried to show him last week 🤯

and the entire time was fun, positive, and entertaining. i'm so damned proud of him, and feeling so damned grateful!

he showered quickly, and then it was dinner time. gd had had a rough day physically, so she skipped dinner to lie down and we watched his youtube playlist, which resulted in me just picking up a copy of star birds. i hope it meets his expectations, but either way i'm happy to send a little money kurzgesagt's way.

i was literally falling asleep before we called my mom, and as soon as i'd said good night to mr smear i hit the bed. and then got up fifteen minutes later, unable to sleep. tomorrow's a big day, so i wonder if i'm going to get anything productive done after posting this, or just de-brain myself quietly...

wake up

 i just woke up both furious and ashamed and sad. i had a series of three nightmares: the first, i couldn't get on an international flight because i was unable to fill out a form through an ever-enlarging cluster of technological failures. the second i don't quite recall, but it also had to do with systems failing. the third, i was riding a tandem bike with mr smear and he refused to get out of the road when it got dangerous, and defiantly kept both of us in the lane until i braked hard and dragged him and the bike off to the sidewalk. i was so mad and feeling so incapable of getting through to him without violence that i slapped him so hard that i broke his glasses.

it also doesn't help that i woke up much earlier to go to the toilet, and ended up doing exactly what i keep trying to avoid - doomscrolling. learning that the UN has continued their filthy campaign against us by adding israel to he sexual violence list when we're the victims of it (see the silenced no more report), and then learning that there's another global round of layoffs happening and that israel is likely to be particularly badly affected because of the strengthening of the shekel.

gods help us.

his first (bought) wheels

 ye gods, it's been a long and busy day. i woke up tired as usual this morning - though i never napped, even though it was a friday - and i read some more of stranger in a strange land. look, it gets off on the wrong foot, but it becomes apparent (apparently) at some point that the author's writing is about a fictional society with extreme attitudes, as opposed to him simply sharing his opinions. and while it starts off a bit simple, his postmodern understanding and its delivery mechanism become far more interesting.

i spent an hour or so doing another agentic skills evolution (cleaning up the leftovers from yesterday's romp in AI frustration park), finally managed to give away mr smear's old jiujitsu gi's, then let myself be dragged out for a shopping run with gd. it was a fairly successful run, although by the time we got to the last shop i was already over it and feeling decidedly claustrophobic in a store with heavy friday morning traffic and very narrow aisles.

we came home, gd rushed something to eat, and then we bussed to the mall. mr smear was nervous (panicky) about meeting us there, and then ended up in the bizarre situation of being blocked "by nuns" (we think they were muslim women) at his stop and unable to get off, and then laughed at by a shitty bus driver who refused to open the doors again so he had to get off at the next stop and find his way back.

anyway, he made it eventually and in one piece, and by that stage gd and i had had a coffee and enjoyed quite a while watching a guy with his tiny puppy unable to take more than a few steps at a time before being crowded by women who simply couldn't resist the adorableness (not to worry, we encountered them later and couldn't resist either 🤣), and found the two stores we needed.

we began with the sports store, and although it wasn't a simple process, we managed to find mr smear a decent pair of rollerblades and a set of pads that should last him a year or two and the price was considerably less than i'd been worried about.

then we hit the shoe store, and for the first time ever gd had a very smooth process finding and fitting sandals that he didn't fight about. of course, they turned out to cost considerably more than the rollerblades 🤦‍♂️

in any event, great success!

we came home and i made him take his brake off first thing (no arguments, and it was awesome helping him doing it with his own two allen keys). we had a delicious leftover meal, with mr smear and i discovering a) that chrain works really well with shuwarma and rice, and b) that mr smear likes creme soda just as much as i do (i suddenly realized he'd never tasted any before).

things were calm and quiet for a while, i played some slay the spire 2 and watched some stuff, and read some articles, and then it was time for all of us to sort out the kitchen, which involved a hell of a lot of dishwasher unloading and loading, and washing the big stuff, and then washing All The Containers that i've purchased over the past few days. some of it was fine, but mr smear wasn't cooperating very well (his idea of helping and ours...) and at some point i properly lost my temper.

for a while after that, i was angry with him, and embarrassed for losing my temper, and frustrated that i'd yelled so loudly that i hurt my throat :/

anyway, things calmed down eventually and we got through it, and the challah-peño is in the oven and smells great even though it was hard to work with, and mr smear and i have showered, and i've had a generous shot of rum, and i think the world is kind of okay right now.

reset: for better and for worse

 i didn't sleep well last night, but that's psychologically speaking. gd and i are feeling horrible about her toe, and praying that it doesn't cause complications down the line. it's demoralizing for us both.

i was enthusiastically writing up my article this morning when i overheard mr smear's phone call to gd - he'd been playing with a stray cat (a well-known one) at school, and got scratched :(

i arrived at the office just in time for my team daily, but once again it was only two of us. i hadn't yet updated my manager, so i sent him a message to avoid surprising him in our evening one-on-one.

most of the day was heavily invested in struggling to get the AI to help me plan the data migration work, and then put together an actual good prompt for doing it. it was tough. it was ridiculous. i went around in circles for ages on even the clearest prompts and requirements.

it was about ten minutes before my one-on-one that i was able to push what i believe are the right code changes to origin, and then i nervously joined the meeting.

i explained my position, my sentiments regarding the project itself, and how i've essentially just spent two days completely resetting the project to what it should have been from the very beginning: a migration of close-to-identical data to a new data store, wiring it up, and being able to verify that the customer experience hasn't changed significantly. and that we could ask questions about whether the customer experience is ideal at a later stage.

i was relieved to receive encouraging feedback; he's happy with my approach, he's been on top of things in general, and it's clear to him that i'm not doing anything that doesn't make sense considering the awful and ever devolving constraints. we then reopened a previous conversation we had about ownership, and he was intrigued by some of my suggestions, and the meeting ended on such a positive note that, in spite of gd's toe bringing us down, we're celebrating the end of the week with g&t and wine.

oh, it's THAT kind of night

i just managed to step on gd's recovering toe. FFS

the malicious compliance genie

 today was rough. i started writing an article inspired by it, but then the evening fell apart, and by the time we all reset i was too tired and depressed.

today was a long and difficult day battling with AI in an effort to get it to explain the current state of the system i'm working with. and the more i dug, the weirder things got. i feel completely out of my depth, and i'm under immense time pressure, and it's not fun. and most of the effort was in getting the AI to follow my instructions without doing its own thing.

i was ready to leave the office more than an hour before i was finally able to walk out the door. i came home, dropped off my bag, took the recycling down, then left again to try and get my hair cut. i managed to get my hair cut, and it's not bad but it's much shorter than gd's happy with... so i had to buy her a bottle of wine to make up for it :P

gd had her wine, i had a beer, and dinner was nice. after dinner we chatted with my mom, and then things got tense because gd's struggling with the infestation (which she's already effectively stopped, but she's freaking out about the final clean). and along with that, the usual struggle to get mr smear to just shower and get ready for bed without drama. and then he got out of the shower and showed us that he's got some new issue with a couple of his toenails (looks like his shoes might be too small) which is yet another thing we didn't need to deal with. and then, while trying to calm down and get ready for bed, gd needed to discuss something political which i didn't really want to talk about, but i also didn't want her to stew alone about.

so now i've played (and been defeated in) a map of slay the spire 2 with the regent, and i've written this, and i've finished my tea, and i'm hoping that i'll not only sleep tonight, but also not wake up feeling like a haven't.

i can't believe tomorrow's thursday. i have a one-on-one with my manager, i guess it's going to be an interesting day.

unfocusing

 today was... awkward. not bad, but a little weird.

first, we all got out of bed half an hour late - gd had disabled her alarm because she's been relying on mine, i'd disabled my alarm for last week's jewish holidays and forgotten to reactivate it, but the last couple of days was woken by a different alarm that i subsequently disabled yesterday.

i know i got some stuff done before i left for work, but it didn't feel like it. i called to wish my brother a happy birthday, which he's spending trying to organize an inverter because his broke down and johannesburg doesn't have much electricity 🤷‍♂️

my work day began with a message from the product guy to say that what the report i put together shows is unpalatable. during and after my team daily, i spent some time putting together advice for my team, and over the course of the day shared it with a bunch of people in an attempt to raise general awareness. everything else (that wasn't a bunch of random distractions*) was preparing for the big meeting, the meeting itself, and then reporting the results of the meeting to various people. but the results of the meeting are, essentially, do some more research, and if i find that the real source is what we think it should be then i have a plan of action...

* including a kickoff to my employer's hackathon, and a video was shown where i recognized a woman i studied with in my first degree. she appears to have worked for my employer for many years, but left within the last few, and hasn't updated her linkedin profile. very strange.

mr smear got off the bus at the wrong stop, so he arrived home later than i did. very sweetly, he thought that he was saving money by only taking a single bus home, so i explained (again) that a chain of buses and light rails is one trip. i hope he internalizes that.

after he did a little music practice and helped gd in the kitchen (gd had a big day today, she went to the dentist entirely by herself for the first time in ages), we did an mma session. he complained about his post-rollerblading soreness (ow! my tailbone!) but with only minor coercion his was a reasonably good re-entry after more than a month (which was also after a break). the post-training stretching in particular did me some good.

we showered, ate a delicious gluten-free pesto spaghetti while watching more infinity train, spoke to my mom, got mr smear into bed, and ended his evening on the sour note of me asking him multiple times to stop making the evening end on a sour note before having to yell at him.

that sucks.

anyway, it was more performative than emotional and the rest of the evening's been pretty relaxing. i'm a bit nervous about tomorrow's work, but i'm absolutely done for the day and i'm considering going to bed early tonight.

...

oh, yes:

recalculating

 today was a DAY. i managed to get some annoying admin taken care of after mr smear left for school, and sort out an impending price hike from my mobile carrier, and try to help prepare gd for her day ahead with the cigarette bugs.

just before i left the apartment, i pulled the trigger on my PR, knowing that my bulgarian support team was on holiday and praying it wouldn't break anything.

i was still extremely anxious on my way to work, but i got in touch with my mentor and managed - through a bit of blathering - to explain the situation. he, positive as usual, assured me that i'm doing great. he asked if i've verbally abused anyone in the office, or physically abused anyone in the office, and said that as long as neither of those things have happened and that i'm doing my best to operate as professionally as possible, i can stop worrying about my misjudgment hurting my employer's reputation (and therefore my standing with my employer). and that besides, everyone must be fully aware that i'm doing damage control on a system that has been left in utter chaos due to bad management... just like everyone else's.

so that was really comforting, and although i still have leftover anxiety, it's worlds' less than it was.

i came in to find my deployment successful, which was another relief.

then i was asked by one of my client team's how long my contract is for, to which i replied, somewhat evasively, that i don't really know. on the one hand, i'm learning a hell of a lot of what i'm supposed to be learning. and it's a great place to hone my craft with (somewhat) less risk. on the other hand, it's a really toxic situation. although apparently on par for the course, these days.

i discussed yesterday's achievement of disabling all of the garbage that was unknowingly being injected into each and every prompt with a couple of people, two of them heavy, experienced users of AI. not only was i pleasantly surprised by their finding my personal skill-sharing strategy intriguing, but they'd never known about the extra weight either and one of them asked me if i wouldn't mind giving a short talk to the group about it 😅

i spent some time crafting a message asking for help with the new data pipelines, got called in to consult on a language identification problem and was surprised to find myself effectively running the meeting, and then i left the office to return home for lunch, stopping by the supermarket on the way home and finding precisely the kinds of plastic containers i was hoping to pick up for gd, who was apparently up to her elbows in cigarette beetles.

i believe i have a handle on their life cycle, now. it looks like if we manage to, erm, contain the present situation, we should be able to put a proper stop to the next potential generation. unfortunately, gd's had to throw out an enormous amount of very expensive food, which is thoroughly distressing.

i think i may have mentioned that money's a little tight right now...

after lunch, i returned to the office and began redesigning the monitoring dashboard. i would spend most of the next four hours troubleshooting the results, half of that time refining my agents' troubleshooting and self-improvement skills. while the improvements after yesterday's cleanup were palpable, by the final stages i just wanted to tell the AI "don't be an asshole" even though i knew that that probably wouldn't be constructive :/

i also finally delivered that report that had been causing me so much trouble - once the product guy gave me the green light this morning, it took about six hours to run...

i received an unusually helpful answer to my plea for help, from a couple of guys i've worked alongside before. one of them was in the office and introduced me to the two people who can actually help me, who very luckily are also in our office. and now i know that the work i've been planning to do - AI-guided, of course - has been entirely wrong 🤢

once my dashboard was looking good, i made my way home, dropping off my bag and picking up my child (essentially rescuing him from the trauma of experiencing gd freaking out over the nuisance beetles all afternoon) and heading to the container store. we bought a bunch of stuff - it's a little more expensive than the supermarket, and not quite as high quality, but it was a bunch of different shapes that we needed - carried everything back home and then continued on to the supermarket again, picking up a bunch more containers there.

we got home in time for a take-out dinner (gd was in no position or mood to cook), watched casual geographic and learned about gay giraffes, which was awkward.

we chatted with my mom, but mr smear brought the vibe down considerably when he became uncooperative at shower time. then, to make matters worse, he decided he needed to toilet. for almost an hour. it was very late by the time he finally had showered and brushed his teeth and gotten in to bed. i don't have any idea where we're supposed to get the patience from.

it's been a day. i think i'm probably going to go to bed soon. i'm expecting to sleep a bit better, he said out loud and then instantly regretted it.

sleep journal entry

 heavy anxiety before bed - about 45 minutes before i managed to fall asleep - and after waking up (i got up an hour early to go to the toilet, and couldn't get back to sleep after). i was physically okay, though. so there's that.

discouraged

 the more i worked today, the more despairing i felt. i'm extremely anxious and overwhelmed, i feel like i'm drowning. every layer of the onion i peel shows me that the onion was far larger and deeper than i thought; or, at least, each wall that i break down thinking it's the last one turns out to have two more standing right behind it.

it doesn't help me personally that i understand that what this company has done to itself is dangerously stupid: most of the companies in our industry, it seems, have shot themselves in the foot by attempting to drop headcount and fill the gaps with AI. even if we were using the latest models this would be a stretch, but with the model pricing being raised across the board (the drug dealer's sample period is over) and the israeli shekel having strengthened significantly against the dollar (making actual developers more expensive to the company), it's a race to the bottom and everyone's losing.

the only positive thing i managed to do - i'm not holding my breath about the disappointing reports i put together after five additional hours of investigation, or the plans for tomorrow so that i can ask for help - was to disable and migrate all of the thousands of lines of irrelevant and contradictory repository rules and skills that i didn't realize were polluting each and every AI context i've been working with up until now :/

...

gd and i were a little late to the school meeting this morning, because of course we hit ridiculous rush hour traffic and of course we decided to get off and switch to the light rail just as we got through the worst of it. we had a good, productive hour with the councillor and new homeroom teacher, though, some of it was funny and some deeply concerning. the homeroom teacher did a little snooping right after, though, and called me to clarify that the incidents were not quite as serious as they'd been made out to be.

that was an enormous relief.

gd stopped at azrieli by herself on the way home, which was the first time she's felt safe enough (from a health perspective) to do so in many months. i came home and dived into work.

i had a really rough afternoon, and i don't know if my regularly running back-and-forth to the bathroom was the result of something i ate, or the anxiety that was slowly building up.

either way, my first real "break" was after mr smear came home, and we had a very long (an hour or so) family meeting during which we discussed All The Things that had come up during the school meeting. it was mostly positive, but the big stuff is him needing to learn to avoid alienating his peers, and find more ways to connect with them.

oh, yes - mr smear came home sporting a weird rash on his hand. gd and i suspect that it might be from the borrowed wrist protectors, but it didn't seem to be getting any worse so now we think he must have brushed past a bush or something that he had an allergic reaction to.

because we were super-bored, and not stressed about anything, we discovered that in addition to everything else we have an infestation of cigarette beetles - or something very similar :/

by the time we had dinner i didn't have much of an appetite, and neither did gd, though we managed to eat anyway. after a couple of great episodes of infinity train (we're into season 2, now), we chatted with my mom for a while, fortunately discussing her birthday present and not making the mistake of getting her something she doesn't want.

...

we also discussed my cousin who was scammed a while back, and taken for literally everything he had. not only has he just gone from wealthy to destitute, and not only is he seemingly making every effort to not get back on his feet again, but gd made a good point today and now we're all really concerned that he's essentially dragging his son down with him, because nobody else is going to put him up.

it's just awful.

...

i honestly don't know how i'm going to sleep tonight, but i have to. i'm so nervous about all the steps i need to take in the morning, and i feel just horrible about everything.

sleep journal entry

 hip trouble again last night. i think i slept most of the hours i was in bed, though i've still woken up really tired.

the great peeling has begun.

...

i wrote this a while ago, and got distracted by a whole bunch of admin. we have to leave in ten minutes to meet with the school team and i haven't done any actual work yet 🤮

good vibes

 today was really cool. i completed a previous slay the spire 2 run (ascension 1 with the silent and some insane shiv combos), and mr smear and i both spent some time reading on the beanbags.

gd gave hair a try while i set up blink for her so that we can put mr smear's money somewhere constructive. there literally aren't any viable banking options for us, and that's messed up.

our upstairs friends let us borrow their rollerblades and pads again, so i mr smear accompanied me to the recycling station and back. it was tough going - the ones he borrowed today fit better than yesterday, but they're damaged and caused him more pain - but learned an entirely new thing is hard, and he handled it very well.

we've agreed to go shopping on friday.

after showering, and then after dinner, i spent most of the evening working on my AI harness and honing my agent skills. dinner was late, and simple, and we spoke to both my mom and my sister.

between prompts, i watched an interview with angine de poitrine and then their live performance again. dammit, these guys are aweomse, and i can't help but wonder how insane it must have been for people to see them live for the first time not knowing what they were going to witness.

right, bedtime. not only is tomorrow going to be a high-pressure day work-wise, but we have a meeting with the school staff and no idea what to expect.

one drama at a time would be nice.

sleep journal entry + the game of life

 i haven't finished my first coffee yet, it's 10.15 on a saturday morning and all that i've done so far is have a long family meeting that began about mr smear not following instructions, and clean the balcony from the masses of bird poop that's been piling up since the birds decided that our immediate upstairs neighbor's balcony is a great place to hang out.

the architect of this building most certainly did not take birds into account :/

...

i had a pretty good night's sleep, although i did wake up around 5am to stretch because my lower back and hips were giving me trouble again.

last night was pretty cool. mr smear sang with us wholeheartedly (and nicely) for kiddush, and we're all thoroughly enjoying the first season of infinity train, and after dinner mr smear and i had a long talk about the stories in the tanach and our history as a nation and what it all means, and then we ended the day with me segwaying into (re)introducing him to conway's game of life which blew his mind (and gave us some really cool inspiration for a game).

little big moments

 as i pour and get started on a beer, i reflect on my son, who has just spent the five minutes helping me take down trash and recycling doing everything to hold on to his anger at being disturbed in order to fuel his will for the pvp minecraft battle he's now returned to.

...

we watched alien today. it was magnificent. not just because mr smear was engaged and entertained, but specifically because he was so appreciative of the quality of the production from an age where there was no computer assistance in special effects, and the peak computing that could be imagined at the time looked almost exactly the same as it was in real life.

and giger's artistic vision brought to life, of course. absolutely stunning.

afterwards, we joined our upstairs friends who let mr smear try on their rollerblades. they unfortunately didn't fit, but we had a blast getting him and their youngest into the swing of things, and mr smear not only started getting the feel of it, but he had a great time and is confident that rollerblading is for him.

here we go... 🤞

location matters

 i'm still feeling tired, after an hour and a half on the couch occasionally sipping my first coffee and almost passing out while reading stranger in a strange land. 

yesterday was a half-day of work for me, though a full day off for my israeli coworkers and my son. i spent it doing two important things: the first, determining that most of the current round of work i had tickets for could be safely discarded. the second, figuring out a way to share agent skills across different accounts and devices without checking anything in.

once i was essentially done with the work day, i took mr smear with me and we did a round of pre-chag shopping. there was a literal back-and-forth and we hunted down the more esoteric items on gd's list, but we got most of what we wanted in the end.

we came home, had lunch (and a really funny fight / battle over the mixed leftovers), and then big data came downstairs to help me install the blinds and shelf my mom and i picked up from ikea a couple of weeks ago. we didn't move very fast, but we did a good job, andwe now have good-looking blackout blinds in our living room and can consume media on our failing projector during the day 🤘

then the rest of his family came downstairs for a visit. gd wasn't too happy seeing us drinking beers - we need to find her gluten-free beers now, although in general we don't really drink beer at all - but we enjoyed a pleasant afternoon while the kids... well, their kids watched my kid playing video games. he begrudgingly gave them turns whenever i intervened, but i think he was just taking advantage of them being as desperate as him to have any kind of screen time whatsoever :/

the kids stayed over longer than their parents, during which time they entertained themselves playing fluxx, which mr smear insists that he hates (he's just not very practiced with it) so he antisocially read his kindle. meanwhile, i worked on an article describing my skill-sharing adventures, and then it was dinner time for everyone.

we watched - for the second evening in a row - infinity train, which is really fun!

mr smear's bedtime took a while and ruffled gd's feathers, but once in bed on a non-school night (it's shavuot, though, and i feel a bit weird about not doing anything special) i (finally) read some more of the colour of magic (we're so close to the end!) and then continued writing that article and researching better ways to sync.

i climbed into bed pretty late last night, just after 2am, after publishing a piece i was pretty happy with. and i may be tired, but i slept pretty well for the second night in a row.

this is good.

pulling the triggers

 it's after midnight, and i've just spent the past couple of hours working on my AI harness. but using AI, so also watching random shit on youtube. some of it important shit, like ex-climate activist speaks out - lucy biggers on triggernometry. some of it like angine de poitrine.

my AI skills skills are leveling up. i've got skill evolution and troubleshooting baked in to my project now, and i'm feeling just how much it's making my life easier.

burning down

 i'm replaying today over and over, and no matter which way i turn things over, i'm in shit. and it's absolutely my fault, regardless of context.

there's something magical about the accumulation of various anxieties and stresses, and bad decisions made under high pressure, and now i've just broken the cardinal rule of my employer by grossly misjudging my time estimates and having to ask my client for an extension, which i'm praying i won't need. this is literally me praying for a miracle, and lots of extra hours.

but my life doesn't allow for focusing. that's not how things go.

i spent most of my hours today laser focused, in high gear, generating reams and reams of code and then reviewing it with a fine-toothed comb to make sure i didn't miss anything with my own eyes. with one agent doing a fix-and-detect cycle, and another ensuring that the first agent's changes still fit into the grand scheme of things, a task that i thought would be quick and easy and had scheduled for sunday evening past, i finally completed its first subtask after 6pm on wednesday.

and this is just the prep-work so that i can get into the real stuff.

...

gd's toe's looking and feeling much better, so much so that she decided not to see the surgeon today. let's hope it keeps getting better 🤞

...

mr smear had a good day today, although he's already doing his usual thing of latching on to any bad memory he can grab hold of and ditching the fun parts. his class went on their annual hike, a proper tour through the cave system at beit guvrin, and from the photographic evidence it seems like he had a good time in spite of himself.

...

i started my day today reading a bit more of stranger in a strange land. so far, it has not aged well. i'm now ending my day trying to make some progress on my AI harness, or climbing into bed at the earliest opportunity. i actually slept pretty well last night, which was amazing, and shocking too. but my lower back / hips were doing their thing all damned day instead, and i'm nervous about what tonight might bring. at least i was able to shower without triggering hell's itch again. i think i'm starting to peel now...

constructive

it's half-past midnight, and i honestly didn't realize it was so late already. i just put together and posted my hackathon presentation, and i'm actually quite proud of it :)

...

 i don't know what possessed me to "experiment" with moisturizer this morning - i thought it was over, but after i put a little on one of my shoulders, it burned terribly (while the other didn't) for at least a few hours afterwards 😫

i managed to make some progress on my side project this morning, but i got into a flow state and then suddenly it was a rush to get to the office before my team daily, so i stayed home until after the meeting and then went out. the work day was pretty good, but my own work was delayed by a fair amount of lending a hand to other projects.

and then i found myself consciously asking my boss the exact kind of thing that i suspect my now-ex teammate might have asked, and hoping that it's not giving a bad vibe. but i *did* find a reasonable workaround for something that's been bothering me - manual dashboard editing - and now i've got AI agents building and modifying version controlled dashboards even without corporate support.

so there.

i came home early (although having done plenty of hours), had a good leftover lunch, then got some more work done before we all headed out to catch a bus to the school for the parent/teachers evening.

peak rush hour. we managed to get off the bus a stop early and walked the last leg, which was a bit much for gd but we didn't really have a choice.

meeting mr smear's new homeroom teacher was encouraging. the problems he has are real, but the improvements are real too, and - as i said to gd and my mom earlier - he's no longer in crisis mode. he's got shit to learn, like discipline, and apparently some of his "funny" mannerisms are offensive to his teachers and peers (like his tendency to "air quote" when he doesn't agree with something), but from what we heard tonight he's doing okay.

although... we also have a follow-up meeting with the full team on sunday, so perhaps not? who knows.

the meetings with his art teachers went well, and it was then that the penny dropped that there's only one arts track from the sixth grade onwards, and mr smear is talking about switching to music which doesn't make any sense. i've got no clue how this story plays out, but even if they did accept him, which they probably won't, i don't know if we literally are able to afford the lessons :(

we had a really funny meeting with his math teacher - she called mr smear a "good student", and then gd and her both burst out laughing - and then light-railed and bussed back home. i got some more work done and mr smear showered while gd made dinner, then we ate and finished the highlander movie (which barely made any sense), chatted with my mom and got mr smear into bed. once that was done, gd helped me sponge bath myself to avoid triggering hell's itch again, and then i dived in to the presentation.

it's been one heck of a week so far. please god let me sleep tonight 🙏

sleep journal entry (sleep vs hell's itch)

 it was a miracle i was able to sleep at all. and i cannot begin to describe the depth of my gratitude that "hell's itch" only seems to be affecting the relatively small and accessible surface area of my upper arms and shoulders.

between uncontrollable, violent spasm reactions to the sensations, i tried moisturizing, damp cloths, and running cool water over it, but nothing helped longer than a few seconds. it got so bad that the thought of tossing myself out of a window crossed my mind, like, i can totally understand an experience like this driving someone to injure themselves (or worse).

so believe me when i say that i have no idea how i alighted upon the idea of "confusing" my nerve endings my lightly brushing or tickling my fingers over the affected area. i had to do that for a long time (most of an hour), and i was expecting to just have to keep doing that until i passed out from exhaustion, but i was able to actually get to sleep in spite of having to position myself uncomfortably to do so.

i woke up twice in the night with the sensation returned, did the same thing again, and ultimately slept until about twenty minutes to my alarm clock. i'm feeling pretty beaten up this morning, but also magnificently relieved. i hope this part of the story is done - or at least, almost over - and i pray i never, ever feel anything like this again as long as i live.

hell's itch

 i've never experienced anything like this. according to dr google:

hell's itch is a term used to describe an agonizing, agonizingly intense, and relentless itch that occurs roughly 24 to 72 hours after a sunburn. victims frequently describe the sensation as feeling like "fire ants" biting beneath the skin, or a stabbing, deep pain that worsens dramatically if scratched. 

while a standard sunburn is painful, this specific condition is a form of severe, non-histaminergic neurological nerve malfunction triggered by UV damage. 

FML. 

expanding to fill the hours

psychologically, i'm really struggling. it wasn't a bad day, i think, but it was mentally tough and now that it's just about 10pm mr smear's finally gotten into the shower after only just finishing his hebrew homework. it has been extremely trying for me, even though i did finish my first ascension in slay the spire 2 while i sat behind him alternately coaching and chiding him.

i got a surprising number of hours in at work today, in spite of the fact that i had to take two hours to bus to the other side of bnei brak and back for a (literal) two-minute ultrasound.

it's always an experience seeing how those people live. bnei brak, a city as beautiful as its people. i arrived there with the back to the future theme in my head :P

my coworker who i spoke to for a couple of hours last week pitched some ideas this morning. this afternoon, our manager contacted me for a quick meeting and informed me that that coworker is no longer with us :(

the explanation he gave seemed reasonable, but didn't quite match with what my now-ex coworker said in a linkedin message (his company slack had been disabled by the time i found out).

apparently i'm okay? i guess we'll see.

we had a Q&A with my client's COO, which was edifying, but really, really long and boring. i'm really glad my client is not my employer, i'd be nervous for sure.

["i'm done showering!" | "really? the water's still running" | "well, if that's how you define if someone's still showering, then fine"]

i came home to hound mr smear (his homeroom teacher informed me today that he was trolling the hebrew teacher about his assignment which he'd claimed to have completed), and then we took a break for dinner (and highlander), and now...

... i have so much stuff to do, but i'm tired, and i don't feel like it. also, it's been two days and i'm sooooo damned sunburned it's ridiculous.

morning vibrations

 bad vibrations, that is. not only did the last month hurt financially a lot more than i was expecting - it's been a while since i was this stressed, and we have summer camp expenses to worry about - but it appears there's been some kind of mix-up with our municipal fees so i have to deal with that now.

[chokes suddenly for no apparent reason]

and then i just spent more than half an hour fighting with my new headphones only to come to the realization (after upgrading the firmware) that the microphone is dogshit and i get better results from my laptop mic. i was finally getting through a really good recording, with good flow, when a series of honking horns and ambulance sirens wailed, because i live on a fucking highway.

so i guess i have to record my hackathon "ad" at night only, then.

...

gd seems to think her toe's doing a bit better, and i don't know if i should be relieved, or concerned that a new surprise is in store.

sleep journal entry

 it was still difficult to sleep because of my sunburn, but iron and magnesium supplements seem to be helping with the lower back / hip discomfort.

i got up early this morning, even after waking up much earlier and trying to sleep in. i've subsequently learned that mr smear *did* complete the assignment his name was on the board for (that caused concern last night), and that we have a mystery pooper in the house (nobody will admit to having used the bathroom last night before i discovered it in the middle of the night).

unexpectations

 what a weird day. it began with me walking in on mr smear brushing his teeth to angine de poitrine, gd's not a big fan but the two of us were loving it. i watched their davie504 response (mr smear hasn't seen it yet) and it's pretty freaking cool :)

i spent some time making a change to my AI harness that i was proud of, but discovered later already has a better cross-IDE solution. so 🤷‍♂️

we managed to get gd an appointment with the doctor, but we had to wait quite a while so we walked across to the mall and i got some work done. halfway through, i was having trouble concentrating so i went and bought myself a new headset, like i've been meaning to do for a while now.  ugreen studio pro, pretty good and not too expensive.

the appointment went alright, but it was good i was there. then we walked to the bigger clinic to try and arrange the prescribed ultrasound, but discovered that wasn't possible and gd didn't want to see the surgeon without it. unfortunately, we found out later that the earliest opportunity for an ultrasound is months away, and she just can't wait that long :/

aside from desperately needing a nap - i'm so grateful we have our bean bags - and an interesting conversation about our company hackathon which i unwittingly signed up to lead a team for - i managed to get a fair amount of work done.

after mr smear got home and ate something, i took him to the oral hygienist. overall, the trip was positive, minus narrowly averting an incident with his phone, and we were in good spirits and chatting away the whole time. right until we arrived home, when i saw his bike, parked across the walkway chained to itself, with his helmet over the handlebar.

i cannot believe my son a) is such a dumbass, and b) lied to my face when he came upstairs yesterday and i asked him about it. i mean, maybe i can believe it. maybe he is a little bit brain damaged 🤦‍♂️

anyway, the evening was nice, dinner was surprisingly delicious (another really good gluten free pasta), and we finally resumed watching highlander.

i did some more work after getting mr smear into bed, although it was mostly me squaring off against google's AI and losing dramatically (notebooklm fails). i guess i'm going to have to do the hackathon presentation myself...

sleep journal entry

i think i got a reasonable amount of sleep last night, but as i'm very sunburned, while i didn't get out of bed i did spend a lot of time awake and physically uncomfortable.

i feel so freaking stupid.

pain and shame

 washing the floors was a real mission, and it took so long for mr smear to be ready that we had to pause towards the end for dinner, during which time gd threw a fit because she didn't like how unclean the uncleaned floor was 🙄

we finished dinner late (it was partially davie504's fault) and then i had to complete the floor after mr smear went to bed.

that was when i started understanding just how sunburned i am. i am burned. it's not just painful, but it's embarrassing. i can't believe i'm so freaking dumb.

anyway.

i'm nervous about tomorrow. i have two weeks to complete an enormous amount of work, but tomorrow begins with taking gd to the clinic and then the surgeon.

productive lazy afternoons

 i didn't lie down, i did have a beer, and i managed to finish the PoC for my AI harness in time to play some more slay the spire 2 before kiddush. and i just had another beer now, that's two down and too many to go :P

we watched some random videos over dinner, one of which led to us watching a bob ross episode in awe.

we ended up going to bed very late, with me getting into bed just after saying good night to mr smear.

then i woke up in the middle of the night for an hour and a half...

this morning started off alright, but turned sour after mr smear not only broke the screen time rules, but hid in his room to continue breaking them after he'd been given a warning. so he lost his privileges for the day, which led to drama... gd didn't agree with me entirely, but at least she understood (and explained to him) why it was important and i wasn't undermined.

then nystire messaged to say he and his family were going to the port, and i managed to herd mr smear out and onto his bike, and we arrived at the port in good time and with only mild complaints. until we crossed a bridge, at which point the complaints became a total meltdown. once he'd calmed down (a bit), i agreed that we can give rollerblades a try, but that he has to have wheels.

and if that doesn't work out, then maybe his bike just isn't a great bike and we need to invest in a good one.

the afternoon with nystire was very pleasant, we sat on the edge of the beach while his kids played in the sand and mine read under some shade, but unfortunately i never did get around to putting on sunscreen and i ended up getting pretty burned :/

after we split up, i took mr smear for a laffa, which we both enjoyed immensely, and then he - true to his word - walked his bike the entire gorram way home. walking on rollerblades gets painful, and i think he knows that, and i was done by the time we finally made it home.

so i showered quickly, cracked open that beer, and now that he's showered i'm waiting for him to be ready to help me wash the floors...

a lazy afternoon

 we took a taxi to the clinic, getting out early because the road was blocked and almost having an incident with a street cleaner. i decided to try reading stranger in a strange land while we waited, and was very busy nodding off just as gd was called in to see the nurse.

the nurse was very sweet and helpful, but the most helpful thing she did was inform us that her daughter had recently gone through a similar thing with a toe and the local anaesthetic hadn't helped in the slightest. so i looked it up when we got home, and discovered that it really is a thing, and i know what to suggest to the surgeon next time we encounter him.

after we got home i spent some time fiddling about with an ai side project (it's building right now) and learning about some more devious google nonsense, which introduced me to helium: i'm trying it out right now, so far, so good. i played an act of slay the spire 2, tried to nap (but didn't get in more than five minutes), and after mr smear got home i went out to do some shopping, which turned out to be quite a mission.

i'm tired, but i can't decide whether to lie down or drink one of the beers we bought for lag ba'omer. not because i particularly want one, but because it's hard not to have one just because i keep seeing them whenever i walk through the kitchen.

...

when he's not doing his homework, mr smear's been playing minecraft with stabbity-stab-stab, which is how gd and i have been calling his classmate who allegedly threatened another friend with a knife. and they're still friends. so either someone's lying, or everyone's mad.

...

i've been listening to if pink floyd played the entire ocarina of time soundtrack today, and it's amazing.

the perpetual trauma train

 sleep journal entry: i was so tired i didn't record the precise times. i got up in the middle of the night from a combination of things, part of it was minor lower back / hip discomfort, but mostly it was restlessness and belly discomfort.

i'm really tired, and after a relatively good sleep (even if it was in two parts) i feel like it's just from being psychologically and emotionally on edge for too many days straight.

...

i never left the house yesterday. my team daily referenced the outcome of my sync with my manager - we had two items on the agenda that were affected - and afterwards one of my teammates contacted me and we sat on a video call for almost two hours, discussing the challenges in our work environment, debating viable approaches, and i guess a bunch of me reframing things to motivate him as much as myself.

between those three morning talks, i feel like i'm starting to shape my "mic drop" for when i leave; i told my mentor and my boss that i don't want to end my contract without having had some noticeable positive impact, and i feel like i'm starting down the path.

my afternoon was spent doing "more of the same" ticket preparation work, where, unfortunately, "more of the same" refers to going around in circles with AI and uncovering missing aspects that i somehow never encountered before. i took a break for dinner, and then had to put in another hour after, but i think i've done sufficient scoping. it worries me that it's real work, across a wide range of aspects of unfamiliar moving parts, and i only have two weeks to get it all done...

...

gd's thoroughly traumatized. not only does it look like the surgeon didn't get all of the nail out, but she's been reliving the surgery itself because the anaesthetic didn't take. she's terrified of losing her toe, and her foot with it. so we're heading out in an hour or so to see a friday doctor and hope that there's someone who can help her.

i felt really bad all afternoon after an incident; she was venting, and i was trying to be supportive and constructive, but at some point she yelled stuff that was so unhinged* i couldn't take it any more. so in addition to not being supportive when she needed it, it took additional time for things to cool down enough for her to resume and get through what she needed to get through.

* it may be unhinged, but it's understandable. all i needed to do was STFU

"the universal pressure cooker" - i feel like our family's a microcosm, and the world just keeps raising the temperature of the stove while lumping more shit into the pot.

...

at least mr smear and his friend sorted themselves out yesterday. they both apologized, and hopefully they'll both be better to each other.

over dinner we finished watching dead poets society. it's generated some very interesting discussions, but regardless we all enjoyed it (or, appreciated it, it always feels weird to say "enjoyed" for a tragedy) and i was surprised by how much i remembered for a movie i haven't seen since i was mr smear's age.

...

i don't know if elite's turkish coffee is "good" coffee by whatever arbitrary standards the world has, but i really enjoy it. it's a taste and smell that makes me feel like there are wholesome constants in the world. with all the madness around me right now, opening a fresh bag is like an emotional override.

painful realizations

sleep journal entry: a couple of hours of restlessness, but no breathing troubles and no physical discomfort. the nights are definitely getting warmer, though, and we had a mosquito in the room...

the back of my head's still a bit numb, which is worrying :/

i woke up from a dream in which i was with a bunch of people playing sports (frisbee and ball sports) around an open light rail station. my alarm woke me up, and i got out of bed, but my mind and body were still in sleep mode for quite a while after.

yesterday:

my biggest issue yesterday was motivation. i was finally feeling better, tired but better, and i got a few admin tasks squared away before sitting down to work. my primary task yesterday was reviewing an incident that i'd been told about a few weeks ago, and my work day was essentially reading through a month's worth of messages and documents, and the deeper i dove (dived?) the more tragic i understood the situation to be. by the end of the day i was literally shocked to discover that the incident, a fundamental break in a critical component of the business, and the efforts to get things back on track are still ongoing and being blocked by the company's lack of any meaningful ownership.

i'm heartbroken for these guys, they're good people and they're working hard, but they're trying to fight their way uphill in an avalanche. i don't see how this company survives if it doesn't have a dramatic shift in culture.

i want to set up a meeting with my client and manager and explain this to them, but i'm struggling to come up with a way of approaching this without causing offense or throwing anyone under the bus.

[sends message to manager, receives an immediate call and proceeds to discuss concerns and strategy for 35 minutes]

well, that went well - i was a bit clumsy in how i expressed my concerns at first, but we aligned relatively quickly and he appreciated my suggestions; i think the most crucial element is ensuring that all the developers are aligned with what ownership of a project entails, and unblocking unofficial ownership by "outsiders".

...

i had a good sync with my mentor in the afternoon, and a pleasant one later with my actual boss. gd laughed at me afterwards for the "awkward sweats", what evolutionary purpose that serves is utterly beyond me.

...

aside from taking a walk to do some shopping, that was pretty much my day. the evening, however, was a different story.

when mr smear came home, i asked him how his day went, and he assured me nothing interesting had happened. as i finished work, while i was processing the bizarre work situation i'd just finished reading about, i noticed that the father of one of his friends had sent me a voice message, that the two of them had had a massive fight that got violent.

we then spent the next couple of hours alternating between talking and yelling, trying to get the story out of him. he eventually admitted that he threw the first punch - making him the biggest asshole - but the most concerning thing is that he claims he doesn't remember the sequence of events at all. i said that he's either lying, or brain damaged, and he's now latched on to the latter and is trying to convince us that he's actually brain damaged 🤦‍♂️

we had another talk about it this morning, strategizing, and i hope he takes our advice. in the meanwhile, i've just sent a message to his friend's dad, who just responded positively. i really hope these kids manage to settle this in a mature way...

sleep journal entry

 my nose was stuffed by the time i climbed into bed, and i had difficulty getting enough oxygen the entire night. i struggled to get out of bed and i feel as if i slept well, and didn't sleep at all, at the same time.

patience is a virtue signal

"patience my ass, i'm gonna kill somebody" - the vulture

 i must be getting better, because it's almost 1am and i'm only now getting ready to go to bed. one of my nostrils is a noticeably blocked, but otherwise i'm doing okay. for now...

the next meeting was run by the guy responsible for my current project, but related to an aspect of my previous project, which is owned by a team that doesn't really know anything about it. he mumbles, and even if he didn't mumble it would still be difficult to understand him - not the greatest communicator. and the team lead who didn't know why she was in the meeting doesn't have the best english, so i was amused when i saw that she'd sent me a message thanking me for summarizing - i explained that it wasn't for her, i really did need to verify that i'd understood what we were talking about for myself :P

mr smear came home, and he was absolutely taken with the bean bags; as gd pointed out, he's all cat.

i was supposed to leave the apartment at that point, but then learned that i had a meeting with my employer team. which turned out to be an hour long presentation, or sales pitch, for software i really don't care about. i was so bored by the halfway mark... it was basically an unpleasant minesweeper session for me.

i took a walk through to the courier pick-up point, which was quite a long walk, but it felt good to be out in the sun (even on such a suddenly hot day) with my brain switched off. then i caught a bus home, and between the bus and our apartment took a quick detour to hunt down gluten-free pastas for gd.

the good news is, i found some - and the spaghetti which we tried tonight was surprisingly decent! - but by the time i got to the self checkout i was already sans patience from all the tourists and leisure class people in the store and i had a really hard time keeping my cool while waiting for two women moving in slow motion and with entirely suboptimal bagging strategies.

i came home, oversaw some of mr smear's progress (he did well this afternoon) and got back to work. once done, mr smear called me over to demonstrate that he'd solved the multiplication level in human resource machine all by himself, and he was rightly proud of himself ^_^

i received a very strange email this evening, apparently from an investment research company who are offering to pay me to answer questions about my previous employer, answers which, if honest, would explicitly violate my termination agreement and i'd owe them my severance pay back. i wonder if this is a case of entrapment?

dinner and some more of dead poets society was nice, although by the time we got to dinner my patience had been worn down to nothing; i did lose my cool with my mother while trying to help her, and as much as it was partially her fault i was upset my reaction certainly wasn't appropriately measured. mr smear also did a little patience testing, but for the most part he continued behaving well.

after dinner i did a little more work on my telephony side project - i'm rather pleased with the results - and after watching a few videos i decided to allow myself some spire slaying. i've just completed my first run with the defect, so that's all the characters done (no ascensions yet), and some of the relics and cards i picked up were completely insane!

...

some good news, at least - it looks like gd's toe might be starting to heal 🤞

mid-day update

 i'm sitting here on the carpet in my little office, back against one of the nice new beanbags that finally (!) arrived this morning, in a state that's a solid mix of coronavirus light-headed dizziness and post-meeting euphoric relief.

our meeting went so much better than i could have anticipated. after i presented my findings, the boss made it clear that he believes the new data to be more accurate than the old data, and that he's happy to overrule the product team's requirements. this means that the bulk of the work i've been wrestling with simply falls away, and what's left is a very small effort for bonus points, and pulling the trigger. the only new thing that came up that needs doing happens to be something i've already built for as part of my investigations, so all-round this has been a massive windfall, a huge stroke of luck for me.

...

gd's really traumatized. she made an effort to wash her toe again this morning, and i just inspected it while she's resting and it seems to me to be looking less angry.

i just chatted with my mom, who i was delighted to discover has actually taken the day off. i hope she's able to have a good rest and recover.

...

right, now for a coffee and another meeting, and then i think i'm going to go for a walk to pick up some replacement watch straps that were just delivered to a courier pick-up point.

sleep journal entry + nerves

most of the night my nose and throat were calm, but i felt like i wasn't getting enough oxygen. i woke up with lower back / hip discomfort in the middle of the night and i had to stretch hard before i could get back to sleep.

gd's in pain and scared, her toe doesn't really look much better than before. it's deeply worrying.

...

i've spent the past hour or so adding functionality to my telephony side-project. i guess i'm distracting myself because i'm nervous about the upcoming meeting i have, in which i present a whole lot of information that i neither fully understand nor care about. i mean, it's not fair to say i don't fully understand it, but from what i've read it's two ways of looking at similar data that give different results, and my take-away is that the whole marketing industry is mostly based on a load of horseshit and hand-waving.

...

in the middle of the night i had a thought: metacognition is the ability or skill that protects someone from being caught up in a cult or modernist ideology

a moment of semi-clarity

 today was psychologically tougher than it was physically. i'm fucking done.

trying to be supportive of gd while protecting her from her own terror almost got me sent to sleep on the couch instead of her (she has to sleep on the couch so she's less likely to injure her toe while she's unconscious).

trying to get mr smear into bed on time was simply impossible; i'm still trying to figure out where the hour and a half went between finishing dinner and saying good night to my mom and actually saying good night to him and having to explain the word c*nt and subsequently learning that he heard it in a video gd showed him 🤦‍♂️

i hope i can sleep tonight. i pray i don't get sicker. as i type this i'm developing a bit of a headache...

...

i finally got the network issues sorted out, hopefully for more than a while (one of our neighbors must have triggered a channel conflict). also, the above facepalm emoji was done with a keyboard shortcut, i finally figured out how to get karabiner to map a "globe" key from my windows keyboard!

i had one (million) job(s)

 while i wait for my token scopes to update, and try to make it clear to my child that it's not advisable to be argumentative with a gorram textbook... (the textbook, in this case, is not wrong)

gd and i took a taxi to the clinic, where we faced off with the unhelpful receptionist, and then tried to negotiate our way in to an early visit with the nurses. we gave that up when we realized that there was only half an hour to go before she could get helped without any favors, so i walked over to the pharmacy to pick up some of her meds.

somebody a few numbers before me had given up and put their ticket on the side of the machine, so i switched the tickets and felt guilty even though i'm pretty sure i wasn't doing anything wrong. irritating, yes, but not wrong.

i managed to get gd's meds, even though she'd given me the wrong prescription. thank $#%! i had a digital copy of the right one accessible.

i picked up a teff pita from the neighborhood bakery, then rejoined gd just as she got called in. the nurse was super-kind and helpful, and even though gd screamed when he tugged off the pad there was very little blood and he bandaged the toe up very gently.

we returned home, and after a quick breakfast i crashed for an hour and a half. i got up, figured out how to request doctor's permission for being sick (it's actually quite a reasonable system), and after two coffees and a bunch of chores dived in to work. or, i would have dived into work if i hadn't run into a whole bunch of networking issues.

i'm deeply regretting the whole networking appliance story right now. i don't know what's changed suddenly, but i think maybe i shouldn't have returned it after all.

i promised my clients a report by this afternoon, but the more i've prepared it the more questions i've found unanswered... i'm still going at it.

at least i'm feeling better (overall). having said that, this is probably just like those other covid times when i've felt like i was getting better and then suddenly it's gotten much worse. my mom's having a really difficult time, too.

sleep journal entry

i spent most of the night coughing and barely able to breathe. i did get a couple of hours' sleep before waking up.

gd's unwrapped her nail and is soaking it, the pad seems to have fused to the wound, though, and isn't coming off :(

i'm now trying to rush mr smear out the door after he did another negative test. and then i have to head to the clinic to get a doctor's permission for my work (first time in my civilian life), and inform my client that i'm sick, and that i was sick yesterday.

and i already sent a message to our old neighbor that we ran into yesterday to inform her as well :(

of ******* course

 

aaaaand it's covid.

more than rough

 firstly, i've been so thoroughly exhausted today as to be dysfunctional. to be honest, i can't tell if this is because i didn't sleep last night, or because i'm just through-and-through sick.

in retrospect, i shouldn't have hugged our old neighbor when we bumped into her at the clinic.

oh gods.

after sending mr smear off to school, i accompanied gd to the clinic. the doctor was very understanding, and we booked an appointment with a surgeon. we went home, had a visit from our upstairs neighbor, who amongst other things informed us that they're going to get started working on building a metro station under our building and we're going to need to replace all the doors and windows for soundproofing.

after breakfast, i crashed for a very short nap and tried to get some work done, but was constantly distracted. some of the distraction was about my previous employer; the lead i felt betrayed by has apparently left the company (though he got some of his options), and someone i served with asked me about an opening so i told him what had happened.

then i was time to accompany gd to the surgeon. aside from his poor bedside manner, he didn't convince us that he understood the problem, nor that his solution made sense, so we thanked him and asked the receptionist for advice. she was very kind, and made gd an appointment with the surgeon i had been *hoping* we were going to see.

i'm going to remember his name this time.

so back home we went, i napped again, and got a little work done before we headed out a third time.

the surgeon immediately knew exactly what was going on - there were two possibilities, with the same treatment - and i advised gd to take his offer and get it taken care of immediately rather than wait for it to continue to fester.

we waited for a while, but he eventually arrived. he was clear in his explanations, and made me feel confident; unfortunately, when it came to the procedure itself things went south. the local anaesthetic did not anaesthetic, and i've never heard gd scream like that before. it was painful and nerve-wracking just going through it holding her hand, so i can't imagine what it was like. except that i would probably have fainted very quickly.

he bound up her toe, and sent us on our way. every step was agony, and only got worse as we proceeded towards the street. fortunately, we managed to order a taxi and jump in very quickly, and the toughest walk was getting her from the parking area to the couch.

in retrospect, i don't know how i managed to get any work done before dinner.

gd didn't manage to keep her dinner down, so that unintentionally accelerated her getting her teeth brushed and ready for bed (or rather the couch, i suspect), and fortunately i came up with the idea of wheeling her around in the office chair, which has made all the difference.

as the afternoon and evening have worn on, my nerves have worn thinner and thinner and my throat and my brain are clamoring for bed and threatening to keep me from sleeping again.

and it looks my mom's not doing so great either, health-wise, but at least she got back to cape town safely.

oh! and just prior to gd's procedure, my boss - my actual employer - called to ask me how i'm doing. i asked how he thinks i'm doing, and suggested that we schedule a sync. i hope i'm not in shit...

sleep journal entry

 i was up all night with a painful post-nasal drip (painful swallowing). no lower back / hip discomfort.

i was expecting today to be rough, but it really didn't need to be this rough.

prophesy

i left later than i should have to pick up the car (of course), and arrived at the address to find no cars, having been explicitly informed by the app that no further instructions were necessary. i tried calling the car sharing service, but their lines were down, and it took a while (and some helpful people) before i happened upon the vehicle and realized that the directions were simply wrong.

i made the pickup, and told waze to get us to the airport, and it gave us all sorts of weird directions that neither my mother nor my son were able to read. so my stress levels were kinda high by the time we finally made it onto the highway going in the right direction. when we finally arrived and parked, the signage led us astray (it's incorrect on shabbat, at least, i'm not sure what happens during the week) and sent us in circles with broken elevators before we finally entered the terminal.

at least from that point things went smoothly, and we had time to be ripped off for coffee and sit down with my mom before her flight. after we saw her to the security checks, we made our way back to the car with only one incident (i didn't realize we could only pay for parking at the exit, and made the mistake of getting out of the car and walking all the way back to the locked up pay machines), and aside from the shock of how expensive an hour or two's parking was the drive home was uneventful (fortunately, because we encountered some really insane drivers on the way home). i dropped mr smear off at home, returned the car, and on my walk home managed to get hold of the service hotline and complain and was offered a voucher as compensation.

this afternoon, after returning from the car ordeal, we watched the starship troopers movie together. i've always loved starship troopers; it's not a perfect movie, but it's a fun action film with some interesting ideas. so i'm embarrassed to admit that it took me this long to finally get around to reading the book.

in addition to what i wrote earlier, it's also surprisingly prophetic, considering that it calls out the kind of irrational 20th century ideology that's infected the west and the movie producers who tried really, really hard to misrepresent, subvert and undermine everything the author was trying to say. that's not an adaptation, it's a deeply disrespectful bastardization. thank god the original ideas hold up so well that so many people didn't "get" the "satire".

we're about to enjoy a late dinner, mr smear and i have showered and taken out the recycling, and my nervous system is bouncing up and down because i keep thinking about tomorrow's tasks.

i guess i'm really grateful for having had a couple of days off, a lot of which felt like actual days off even though i was pretty busy.

a calm before the farewell

my mom and i caught a bus to azrieli, we picked up a couple of things and then moved on to try and meet up with the mongoose. we got off the bus at dizengof center, walked up to the square to pick up a coffee, then walked all the way back to the square to meet up with the mongoose, only to end up having to leave again to meet him on the way back to the square again :P

at least we managed to see the baby and deliver her gift! the catch up was quick, and then we were off to do some last-minute shopping before coming home for the afternoon.

gd wasn't able to go anyway - isn't able to go anywhere, with her toe being so bad - so my mom, mr smear and i walked to an unfamiliar synagogue (relatively) nearby.

at least i wore pants and not shorts? i was hands-down the least appropriately-dressed there, everyone else was in white button shirts. the liturgy and nusach were familiar from my youth, and it was really nice not only to have a shared singing experience but to hear mr smear singing along as well :)

for mr smear, his reaction to the baby right behind us and the woman with tourette's on the other side of the mechitza was (relative, for him) admirable, my mother seemed comfortable enough from her side, and although i did feel like an outsider it was overall a good shul experience.

i'm not sure how gd would handle it, though. she's softened on the sitting separately thing, but i think she'd find following along a bit tough with her own marked siddur (she wouldn't be the only one) and i think the biggest obstacle is how far away it is.

kiddush and dinner were quite late, but both were lovely. even though my mom's been here for two friday nights, this was the only one where it was just us doing it our way, together as opposed to on a video call.

we were all pretty tired last night, but to keep things interesting my mom started getting sick and we have to take her to the airport in less than half an hour... FFS.

and gd's toe is only getting worse...

and mr smear still not 100%...

i just finished reading starship troopers:

"Controversial". I've read some suggestions as to why it may have been called controversial. I'd heard many times before how one of my favorite movies was intended to be satirical, and failed.

I've also served in the military, and am living through a crisis in the west where the people yelling loudest "for" democracy and "against" fascism have no idea that they've succumbed to communist, terrorist propaganda and are, in fact, begging for the opposite.

With that in mind, there's nothing "controversial" being peddled in this book. What is in this book is a phenomenally accurate depiction of military service, warts-and-all, a compelling notion of civic duty, and - barring one technically heavy pre-battle scene - it's a thrilling glimpse into what galactic war could be like.

...

someone proferred the name of the 2D side-scrolling aerial combat video game where you battle waves of enemies and shoot down ducks in between levels that we used to play on the ps3: minisquadron!

sleep journal entry

 the extra coffee was really strong, i was tired but had a lot of trouble actually sleeping for the first few hours. i didn't have trouble with discomfort, though. after getting up, drinking a decaf and reading starship troopers, i napped hard on the couch for most of an hour and just got up to write this down and start being functional.

mr smear had a better night, though he's not quite ready to go back to school (and certainly not be near any newborns). gd woke up with her toe in a lot of pain.

ikea day

 the first two pieces of furniture went smoothly, and didn't take long at all. the third one, i asked - nay, compelled - mr smear to be my assistant. that did make it take considerably longer than it should have, but i wasn't in a hurry and he actually participated and engaged; there were very few aspects of the build he couldn't handle.

but then we got to a part that wasn't machined correctly. fortunately, it was a minor piece of the overall build and we could try a workaround later. but then we encountered a metal bar that didn't fit correctly, which i hammered in to a point where it almost broke, after which the whole build failed and it was impossible to put the pieces together.

this was an expensive piece of furniture, and heavy, and i did not want to return it to the store for customer service. i called their number, and spoke to someone, who assured me that unless ikea workmen were doing the build, returning the item to the store was my only option.

i was upset, we were stuck, and then suddenly i had an epiphany: i deconstructed to before the bar i hammered, and switched two of the seemingly identical pieces around. and it worked! i'm not pleased that it was so easy to get it so thoroughly wrong, but i was hugely relieved that the build was salvaged without great expense.

once that was done, we decided that my mother and i would head back to the store to look for window blinds, and along the way try to get the poorly-machined part replaced.

getting there by bus was quick and painless, and after our previous visit it became immediately apparent that taking the train had been a mistake, so we didn't do that again. i was pretty tired when we arrived, so we picked up coffees, and i (in retrospect) probably made a bad call choosing a double espresso when i'd already had my three cups for the day...

we started off at the customer service desk, and they were very helpful once they established that our claim was legitimate, in spite of the fact that it's an item i purchased just over three months ago (and never got around to opening until now). we went upstairs to look for blinds, learned that the blinds were downstairs, and entered the lower labyrinth. not only did we manage to quickly find what we were looking for, but we stumbled upon a number of items we'd previously agreed were bonus finds and not worth the side quests.

from there, getting through the cashiers and back to customer service was unusually quick, and although it took a while to get the replacement part extracted from a new item (which enabled us to eavesdrop on the very angry, racist french women yelling in a combination of hebrew and french at each other and the staff) we we out of there in excellent time and boarded the bus home with everything we wanted precisely one and a half hours after disembarking.

mission accomplished!

we got home pretty quickly, completed the build and moved things around and cleaned up. i also got the ball rolling with the landlord about getting the door replaced.

my son is going to be responsible for my aneurysm, or at least for accelerating it dramatically. he just told me unsainted is boring. BORING. not "i don't like it". this is even more disturbing to me than when he called led zeppelin muzak.

i complained to gd, and she was shocked too (and asked me to send her a link, we'll make a slipknot fan of her yet!)

i finally beat slay the spire 2 with the necrobinder against the doormaker just before dinner (they waited a couple of minutes for me), which was really exciting! dinner was nice, and afterwards while mr smear was showering i received a call from the mongoose which was very welcome; we'll try to see him tomorrow and give them something for their little girl :)

mr smear's bedtime was late, but smooth, and i watched a bunch of random shit and played through the plague inc: evolved tutorial. it *is* interesting.

it's half past eleven. i'm hoping i actually managed to sleep tonight. i'm still feeling a bit wired, but i *am* yawning, so... we'll see.

sleep journal entry

 i watched a couple of youtube videos, then played slay the spire 2 until 1.30am (i feel like i might finally on a winning run with the necrobinder, but i'll probably get my ass kicked by a regular monster soon).

between my brief wake up just after 3am and my alarm going off at 6.30am, my hip discomfort returned. the hour and a half i spent trying to get back to sleep was disturbed my son being loudly sick and lower back pain. all-in-all, it wasn't a great night.

i've just had my coffee while reading more starship troopers (it's always an experience reading something that gets the army), gd's just informed me that our balcony door is going to need replacing soon and my stress levels just spiked.

my only real, personal plans today are to build ikea furniture that's been sitting around. or do whatever my mom wants to do, and be sad that she's leaving this weekend already. not only is it great spending time with her, but in spite of the rare friction she really does make our lives easier even when she's just hanging around.

a day off

 according to dr google i'm at risk of developing a stroke because i used a massager on my neck. i'm not sure that's true, but i'm definitely scared off doing that again as the back of my head's been feeling a bit numb since i did it.

...

i got a relatively good night's sleep last night, minus waking up in the middle of the night with my neck / shoulder locking up and needing more than half an hour of work to be able to return to bed, but little-to-no lower back or hip discomfort.

mr smear, however, did not have a good night. he's clearly properly sick, regardless of yesterday's RAT outcome.

the three of us left him home alone as my mother and i dropped gd off at her physio appointment, then walked about florentin looking for blinds. we eventually found a place, but were rather put off by their charging approximately NIS 500 per small window, and double that per door. we have quite a few windows and doors.

as it is, i'm feeling decidedly financially unstable lately...

we met up with gd and went to meshek barzilay for a really nice lunch. speaking of financially unstable :P

we then returned home for a while - disturbing mr smear's full day of screen time - and a bit later my mom and i paid a visit to the library, where i checked out a better (though not pristine) copy of my name is asher lev. we meandered all over the place until catching a bus home, then meandered between the shops to find vegan marshmallows, then returned home for a relaxed evening.

i mean, it was relaxing for my mother and i, for gd and mr smear not so much. him because he's sick, her because in spite of a good physio session her shoulder's been locking up the whole afternoon.

my mother made - and taught gd to make - her pea soup for dinner, which was delicious ^_^

i've just put mr smear to bed, reading between his coughs, and i'm amazed to see it's 11pm already (O_o)

...

aside from contesting my parking fine, and opening an investigation into our bean bag purchase (after holding for half an hour to be told they'll call me back, after more than a week of trying to get hold of them to find out where our bean bags are), and holding for half an hour with social security to be told that i should just ignore the last message i got from them, i've been made very uncomfortable by the idea that there are authors warning other authors not to so much as quote a lyric of a song - even if it's clear that it's a quote - because that's not considered fair use. i cannot believe that's true, but if it's true, then the state of copyright law is even more awful and even less aligned with its spirit than i thought.

...

i saw a couple of disturbing things today: even "educational" tech is interfering with our kids learning, and this guy's quote is heartbreakingly powerful: "do you know how hard you have to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?"

we're in serious shit as a species right now.

it's difficult to wage war on reality...

 ... because reality always has the home team advantage.

it's been a long day, but not unpleasant - bar the lower back / hip issues that usually plague me at night, which today, after leaving me in peace last night, came back with a vengeance and harried me all afternoon.

i generated a comic this morning that i'm pleased with, and another one this evening that i'm somewhat pleased with.

i arrived at work a minute late for my team's daily, and i regaled them with the tale i'd been planning on telling our manager, with which they could all identify. i very fortunately was able to keep my head down and work hard today, and ask the right questions, and by the time i had my meeting with my manager i not only had real progress to report, but also additional information that i'd luckily stumbled upon that made the required business decisions much clearer.

it's a mess, but it's clearly a mess, and my manager understands why i've been struggled and what our options are. i took full responsibility for "falling in the bin", as we say in hebrew, by being caught out again following documentation and paying attention to what other developers and managers say. the saddest part is that aside from getting through my own poor AI usage, the architecture, the data and the code are all completely misaligned.

i guess if there's one thing to be grateful for - assuming they like me and don't terminate my contract before i do - it's that this is one hell of a training ground for learning to work with AI when the stakes are low and the state of the entire organization's a complete disaster with or without me :P

my mother took our hypochondriac mr smear to the museum today, though he was "too sick"to go to the museum she wanted to go to (but managed to walk a while after they got lost on the way there). he just did a RAT and it came out conclusively negative, he spent a good chunk of his time before bed trying to convince us that the control line showing clearly means he's done for 🤣

my neck's been giving me trouble, i'm hoping my time with the massager makes a positive difference. it certainly feels good, at least.

dinner was great, progress with starship troopers was great, bedtime was particularly great - not just laughing at the colour of magic, but segwaying into a talk about sacrifice, cain and abel, and the value of the old testament (and our mission as a people to carry it into eternity, just like shakespeare's sonnets).

and now, physically and psychologically, i'm about ready for bed. which means another couple of hours of reading, gaming, possibly torturing myself by watching the news for the first time in at least a few days.