sinking feeling

 mr smear got up early today without a fight, which was a relief and a great start to the day. i read a bit of my book on the garden of earthly delights, so my day began with some inspiration, and i took care of a little bugfixing before sitting down with gd to go through our budget again.

i don't know why, but last time we did it we missed a bunch of important things, and now it's clear: we're living beyond our means. but a couple of thousand shekels a month, which we weren't doing before we moved here. this was, in large part, hidden by the first half a year of moving expenses and refurnishing, and it's caused less by the costs in the new apartment and more by the drop in salary that i took after losing my job last year.

so this... this is a problem. the bonus my employer's giving me will ease things for a few months, but it's not a real solution. now i either have to find a new job, which i really, really don't want to do, or sort out some kind of supplemental income. or both. i'm freaked out by the fact that one of the guys i'm friendly with who works for the same employer is currently juggling three jobs because otherwise he can't make ends meet. this does not bode well.

my bonus, which is attached to the condition of me continuing to work for my employer for another year, is now looking more like a loan.

...

we walked to the pharmacy to pick up some stuff, and that's where mr smear began pushing both of our buttons. this would become progressively more serious until a couple of full-scale blowouts back home later, but the past couple of hours have been alright.

from the pharmacy we went to the mall, to pick up a couple of things and, unable to locate a water cooler in the mall itself, discover that you can easily walk across the bridge to the hospital and use the coolers there without getting wet when it rains.

oh, yes - it rained a bit today, and we got caught in it :P

this afternoon involved lots of thinking (employment), and building (my social media side project, as well as a traditional game that i'm hoping i can make a little money with), and cleaning the floors with mr smear.

now it's dark, almost dinner time, and i'm about to drag him out on our rollerblades while by back threatens to spasm before i'm even out my chair.

a series of unrelated events

 i guess i slept alright last night. i woke up to a pleasant morning, it's was cooler and cloudy today (the heavy summer appears to be over) and i finished reading the history of western art in comics, which was a bit dry, but nevertheless an excellent teaching tool and the illustrations are great. i was also struck by inspiration to do something with hieronymus bosch's garden of earthly delights.

i managed to take care of a bunch of admin today. i was disappointed to learn today that the voucher for a pizza hut pizza which i was gifted by an employer a couple of years ago had expired. gd and i got into a bit of a tiff about something - parenting related - and i was pleased to have been able to figure out (eventually) how to express my side of things in a way that landed. i might be rougher than i need to be, but it's important for me that my wife and child understand my motivation, and that my number one priority is and has always been keeping mr smear safe and making sure he can handle himself out in the world.

it's after half-past eleven and mr smear is reading in bed and giggling to himself... and that's after i finally finished reading the colour of magic to him a little earlier...

mr smear and i walked to the comics library, which we found closed until next week. that was sad. we continued walking to the icon festival, but as soon as we arrived mr smear decided he wasn't feeling well (i believe it was the crowds that put him off) so we walked right through it and caught a bus or two home.

i then chatted with sailor for an hour and a half (!), and i'm relieved and pleased that he's excited about the social media app i'm building, and while we talked i formed some ideas about how to turn it into a platform that supports others building "apps" on top of it ^_^

mr smear chose cthulhu fluxx, which is apparently his favorite, and it was a fun game.

we watched another episode of the fall and rise of reggie dinkins over kimchi rice dinner, during which i convinced mr smear to try a drop of the carolina reaper hot sauce 😈

after showering after dinner, we sat down to watch the second half of suicide squad. i must admit i dozed off a couple of times, and a lot of the writing and acting was iffy, but mr smear enjoyed it immensely so 🤷‍♂️

now, post bedtime (even if he's not asleep yet, and it's been about twenty minutes since i started writing - largely because i've been getting distracted poking the AI in the background), i've been making progress on the side project and also on my mini-games, but i think i might end up going to bed soon.

architecture adventure

random thing i made a little while ago

 what happened today? it started off simple, reading more of the history of western art in comics while sitting on a beanbag and using one of the new little tables for the comic and my coffee.

after gd and i did some online grocery shopping, i sat down to work on the database redesign for my social media project, which turned into a proper collaboration between me and the agents and i ended up with something that feels really solid and clean.

gd had to go to a physio appointment, so we accompanied her, and then i took mr smear for a walk down to migal hashalom, found the entrance on our second try and hung around the ground floor exhibit* for a while examining the designs for what could have been and musing over an "i can see my house from here" artist's rendition...

* i tried to post a video to my app while there, but there was a bug. i just learned now that the "bug" was that the AI "forgot" to complete the work 🙄

from there we walked to bialik square, through nahalat binyamin, which triggered the only drama of the day - mr smear noped right on out the moment he recognized that we were near the market, and i needed to threaten him with punishment to get him to follow me on a speed run through the crowds.

we did okay.

we eventually met up with gd, then wandered around a bit looking for a place to have lunch, and the walk through the holiday crowds of mall people down king george and through the actual mall raised my stress levels step by step until i was almost as emotional as mr smear had been earlier... but we finally found some peace and quiet, pleasant reggae and good hummus and i pretty quickly regained control of my nervous system.

it was a great meal, and i don't think i ate too much.

the bus ride home was a bit rough - line 5's drivers are always really heavy on the pedals - and when we got home i was suddenly overcome by a deep, desperate exhaustion, the kind that made me wonder if i was sick, or narcoleptic after all. when the groceries arrived i got up to try and help and ended up sprawled on the living room floor for a forced nap for half an hour (i was feeling really faint, so i lay down on one of the beanbags). i woke up groggy and still really tired, and even with a 4th coffee i still felt like crap for a long while after.

the recording of gd fixing my hair had been processed by then, and between then and dinner i set about downloading the auto-generated captions, cleaning them up, and then running them through a local AI (ollama + gemma) to translate them to french and hebrew. that's been an experience, let me tell you. challenging, but interesting.

we had a very light dinner, watching youtube videos on the playlist i curate for mr smear (he'd been watching that while i was focused on the caption editing), and after dinner and showering we all sat down with a bowl of salt and vinegar kettle fried chips and watched the first half of the original suicide squad movie.

i think mr smear's enjoying it, and it sounds like leto's joker is his favorite 🙄

since putting him to bed, i've been watching lots of random videos, slowly turning my brain off, and i think i'm just about ready for bed.

moving forward

 dinner and spider-noir, deconstructing this year's jigsaw puzzle, and then me getting back to my projects while mr smear got ready for bed. i paused, around 11pm, to go and read him to sleep (we're sooooo close to finishing the first discworld novel!), then returned to long conversations with AI, involving lots more typing than usual, as i dived deep into why its database design was wrong, what it should look like, and how to climb out of the hole it had dug itself into. at the same time i finally, a few minutes ago and after a couple of hours of mind-bending fails, managed to get the AI to make a rubik's cube function just like a rubik's cube, and i'm elated!! ^_^

between prompts, i've been drinking tea and watching youtube. i think i should probably hit the hay soon.

a busy pause

 i don't know what switch off meant yesterday when i wrote it, but i was still messing about (on and off) with my side project and a new minigame [stops writing to prompt the AI to improve rotation behavior]. 

most of yesterday evening is a blur to me now, but we watched a great episode of spider-noir over dinner, and after mr smear went to bed* i spent some time driving myself crazy playing cook, serve, delicious!...

* a process that began at a relatively reasonable hour, ended around midnight, and at some point when i went in to turn off the lights again and tuck him in he was offended because i didn't do the bedtime ritual and he'd forgotten that i'd already done so much earlier :P

i went to bed late, but not too late, and i guess i slept alright. on my way to bed i had a revelation about the change that came over me since last week's game meetup talk - i got so excited about the potential for making money with games that i lost focus, and i need that focus and excitement for the raw components of the game before i can start making something that's lucrative. every single thing i'm building, or failing at building, is a lesson, a dot to connect when i'm ready.

i woke up to the stress of reading a post i shouldn't have looked at before coffee, another oleh really struggling economically. one of the things i did after coffee was creating a facebook group to help olim network and build things.

my morning started quietly, a little meditative outside time followed by getting back into history of western art in comics, and then finally settling down and taking care of a bunch of admin that i've been putting off for about a week now. after mr smear completed his chores, he asked if we could play something together, but neither of us could agree on what. eventually he sat down to play valheim, and honestly, it did me good. first, because he made a point of chewing gum** the whole time, and second because he was playing something outdoorsy and really getting into it. it's like that "the children yearn for the mines" meme 😂

** "training": both exercising his jaw, and practicing dealing with the fact that it doesn't keep the taste for more than a couple of minutes.

our big adventure today was going to find some kitchen items and something we could use as a low coffee table for when we're sitting on the beanbags. on the bus, we encountered the old man who took a dump next to the bus stop a while back, and as soon as we recognized him we all quickly and quietly agreed to slide over to the back of the bus.

the sales lady at the kitchen store was stunned by gd's hilariously disorientating description of how normal it is for her to cut herself in the kitchen (or while cutting hair), she helped us figure out what we need to buy (it's a chain-link glove) but we've had to order it in gd's size. then we caught a bus to the hardware store, almost getting run over a few times by wolt drivers, where we found what we were looking for but everything felt like far too little value for money.

we walked up to the square with all the restaurants, and sat down to two delicious bowls of hummus, one with vegan shuwarma, and then headed down to osher ad to be amazed both by the prices and quality of their products, and by the lengths of their queues during the holidays. we'll go back there another day.

we were planning on coming home but ended up in azrieli mall instead. i had a coffee and mr smear and i milled around waiting for gd, crowded by surges of mall people, but fortunately not being pushed beyond my usual limit. i mean, it was exhausting, but it didn't put me into fight-and-flight mode like it usually does.

we found *exactly* the coffee tables we were looking for at the dollar store, very cheap and absolutely perfect. we caught the bus home, and halfway there i jumped off to take a call from the dermatologist i'd been waiting to hear from for two days - she's not concerned, she agrees with my assessment - and after having a bit of a rest (taking out one of the tables, lying down for a bit, then hearing gd out as she described how she's selling some of her childhood toys she's been carrying around because she's come to understand that she's holding on to nostalgia for really dark times, and then sitting down to edit the haircut recording from yesterday.

i've done very little development / AI whispering today, and that's okay. i've just had it out with mr smear over his piano practice (i wanted him to practice a new thing he's just learned before stopping), but otherwise things are good.

unremarkably successful

i didn't sleep long, but i slept alright. i woke up with stomach issues that lasted until the early afternoon, and i'm pretty confident it has something to do with the sheer quantity of suboptimal snacks i've been consuming over the course of the past week... my weight's been bouncing up and down accordingly, and i really, really need to start behaving with a little bit of discipline.

i cleaned the balcony floor this morning, but it was already too hot and sunny to sit outside. i spent a good chunk of the day resuscitating my social media side project, and it's looking good, and i've put some effort into a new minigame as well.

i sat gd and mr smear down this morning (as soon as he was clear of his first two screen-free hours) to watch a fascinating video on jaw development, which unfortunately includes two incidents of animal cruelty so gd only made it through half. but mr smear appears to get the idea, which was the main intention.

he's busy playing the sims 4 right now, i can't tell if i'm an awesome dad or a terrible one :P

the big event of the day was gd fixing my haircut on camera, with mr smear serving as cameraman, and we're going to edit it and post it (and hope i don't get blacklisted from barber shops :P). i'm hoping this is the start of a hairdresser equivalent of kitchen nightmares, and that this builds gd's credibility towards becoming a consultant or mentor.

in the meanwhile, my hair's looking sooooo much better and gd's only a little bit injured from the effort... 🤷‍♂️

we all went for a short walk to the grocery store to pick up a few things, which was a corrective experience as gd was forced to admit, begrudgingly, that it's not the worst supermarket and that they do have stuff sometimes.

alright, i think i need to switch off for a bit.

all the epochs

 i'm using astra, and it's great, but it's still.. just another model, making just another model mistakes if you don't guide it. the playbooks we've been building these past months shouldn't be thrown out the window just yet, though i suspect jev will trigger a large part of them to be rewritten. but i will say that i've had the privilege of working as a software engineer for a quarter century, and during that time i had the privilege of working on systems based on 70's tech, and to be able to experience two different epochs of computing history and then be able to experience this new one as well?

what a time to be alive!

indecision

 well, here we are. past midnight on saturday night. between last night and tonight we have finished watching small prophets (brilliant, btw, completely unhinged and brilliant), and mr smear and i completed the jigsaw puzzle, and the day was generally quiet, indoorsy, and involved a lot of me working on, well, mostly on the bird game, with which i made plenty of progress in spite of the fact that most of it was dealing with the agents being slow and dumb.

that slowness also meant just watching a lot of stuff on youtube and doing minesweeper challenges and snacking heavily 🤷

in the evening i took mr smear out for a particularly long walk, it was a great evening for it and aside from strategizing about games, i also successfully conveyed to him what my social media side project should feel like and he was excited by the possibilities ^_^

and along the way, we sat in a sukkah and said the blessings and we got an amazing view of the enormous harvest moon.

after watching the first episode of season 2 of ludwig with gd, after mr smear had at least theoretically gone to bed, i played some aces of the luftwaffe and am now trying to decide whether to go to bed or not.

i'm having a little trouble decided what i actually want to do.

not up

 it hasn't been the greatest first-day-of-vacation-friday ever. it began alright, with some relaxed meditation (kind of) on the balcony, in spite of having woken up with a stiff neck and sore back after getting to bed *much* later than i'd intended.

then i watched in horror as the astra model crashed and burned, abysmally failing to understand my prompts and context, and making me understand that while outsourcing my developer brain to code that's inconsequential (like a video game) is one thing, but these new models are not significantly different from what came before and i still need to maintain the discipline of guiding, managing and keeping a close eye on the results.

then we went to the shops. but first we had a fight because misinterpretation on top of misinterpretation, and then we had back to back mall people and friday/erev chag shopping people and foreign workers on public transport with no sense of personal space people, although we did manage to pick up most of what we were looking for.

then we dropped mr smear off at home and did another run for the non-mall stuff, which was tedious but not as bad, and then we finally returned home.

which has mostly been okay, except for me losing my temper over mr smear doing something ugly while we recorded a greeting video for someone, and then much drama with gd have hidden something away that she needed, and now i'm sitting with chocolate halva and rum to stabilize while continuing to chip away at my projects.

i'm not really feeling the joy of the incoming holiday, but here we are...

perspective

 i'm loathe to put this in writing, but something about the last couple of weeks has made me more cognizant of the fact that we're getting older. gd's about to hit fifty, and i'm not that far behind. it's weird.

it's not terrible, it's not scary, it's just plain weird.

i'm not unhappy with my story so far - quite the contrary - in spite of how much anxiety i tend to experience on a good day and how messed up we both are health-wise. it's just that my story really hasn't gone in the direction i once thought it would, and i'm kinda hoping that the side projects i'm working on might help me shift things.

i honestly feel like they are already, even if just a little bit.

pushing on

i guess i'm on vacation for a week? i'm starting to write this just before 1am, while babysitting an agent working on my social media project and i *just* want to have a reasonably good result before i turn in for the night. also, i'm finally down to 6% of my weekly limit, which is good, i guess?

...

i slept alright last night, and began my day on the balcony, writing. i actually wrote something i felt was worth sharing.

i helped gd make a couple of appointments this morning and did a little more work on the project and the bird game, and then i switched modes and started working. today was mainly about managing my dev environment, fine tuning and troubleshooting and rediscovering that intellij is horrible software even on an m4 pro with 48GB of RAM. i literally almost burned myself holding my laptop because of the indexing, which was my primary complaint for more than seven years now.

visual studio code with claude code is a much better deal, and so much more effective.

i got my first PR out, and by the end of the day i had the second one ready to go. i had a pleasant one on one with my lead, and although i almost kit-bag-questioned my way out of vacation he assured me that it makes no difference to how much pressure this project has whether i take the days this week or the next, so 🤷‍♂️

i'm particularly pleased with how well my devex (that's a thing now) is now that i'm getting a handle on all the tooling, and getting the tooling to play nicely together ^_^

while i worked, mr smear and gd seemed to have a pretty relaxed day, but mr smear did give gd a hebrew lesson from the madregot book my mom delivered a while back, second day in a row and i'm proud of both of them :)

he also got through (with a little encouragement from me, some positive reinforcement and some not so positive) a tough piano lesson based on these boots were made for walkin', and practiced afterwards, and did himself proud.

otherwise, i ate a LOT today. lots of healthy food, but also lots of less healthy food (i've got a problem and i know it). once i was done with the work day, mr smear and i strapped on our blades and went on a mission, we didn't find what we were looking for (reflectors) but we mostly had a good time and got some good exercise.

we got back to great sushi, the second episode of small prophets (painful to watch, but we're all invested), and mr smear and i made great progress on the puzzle together before bedtime.

...

i hope i'm going to bed soon. i'll probably crash soon regardless of my dev state...

redirect

i took horseman's recommendation to heart last night, and as a result i went to bed particularly late and invested a significant amount of my energy (and tokens) on three different projects, in parallel with burning my client's tokens on the project they're actually paying me for.

then i discovered that the "reset" wasn't going to happen automatically, that we've been given an additional one to use when we like. oooooooooooooh.

but i got a hell of a lot of stuff done today, including massive improvements to the game (mr smear was overjoyed) and reviving the stalled social media experiment i've barely touched since december. i used a lot of AI back then, too, but i've leveled up considerably in the past few months and the experience is now completely different. also, the new models are completely different as well.

...

i did manage to sleep last night, but instead of being kept up by the usual pain or discomfort, or just restlessness, it was a nightmare that i awoke from with adrenaline pumping through my veins, and it must have taken about half an hour to calm down enough to get back to sleep.

the nightmare: extremely vivid, with lots of grim parts, ending in a chase scene (i was in the back of a flatbed truck being shot at, and some of the bullets struck centimeters from my legs), followed by a narrow escape after being discovered (and abandoned by one of my "friends"), which involved a favor (some random guy deciding to look the other way) and then sneaking into a secret passage i was sure he didn't know about.

the morning dream: i woke up from another epic dream that ended in me cleaning an oven (and scratching it accidentally by using the wrong tool) then finding out i was covering for some kind of crime. the last person i encountered as my alarm went off was a cartoon daffy duck (à la who framed roger rabbit) but man-size, which was pretty intimidating.

aside from work - one of my biggest achievements being getting my client's environment playing nicely with my personal skills and sandboxed playground - and all of the token burning, i feel like a large part of my day was spent snacking, and trying to help gd get through all the food she's made (we both decided, spontaneously and simultaneously, that she should have frozen half of it), and in the evening she accompanied me to my haircut.

she's *not* happy with my haircut. neither am i...

dinner and the wonder years and me and mr smear working on the puzzle together until late, followed by this post and a cup of tea, and now i'm trying to decide whether it's bed time or more work time. my brain's feeling a bit fuzzy...

from fasting to hardcore hiccups

 the fast... went by quickly. i made it, albeit is very lethargically and with a caffeine headache. 

i listened to a bit of the shul service, but after the rabbi began waxing political i shut it down and took mr smear out rollerblading. it was awesome, we had a good ride, good chatter (in particular a quiet break on a bench staring at the stars and having a serious talk about something that was bothering him), and his biggest concern was that not all the highway roads are completely smooth.

i showered, but i didn't hydrate. we went to bed soon after.

i woke up pretty early yesterday morning, and i was sad and anxious to see a surprising number of vehicles on the roads. i can't imagine what could be so important as to be driving on yom kippur, but apparently tel aviv isn't the only city that saw a sharp increase in this happening, which is disappointing, and feels ominous.

my day was primarily spent napping, reading comics, and working on the jigsaw puzzle (we got quite far!), and the absolute highlights of my day were playing a full game of pokémon with mr smear (he beat me with a surprisingly good strategy) and him participating heavily in the puzzle ^_^

sadly, gd wasn't interested in it and barely so much as looked at it, which i'm trying not to read into too much...

i broke my fast on chili and dill rice (a fresh, better batch), and then sat with mr smear - regretfully not recording - as he playtested our bird game with absolute, unadulterated full joy for about forty five minutes straight.

i managed to sleep last night, even though i woke up multiple times i was able to get back to sleep relatively easily.

this morning saw me starting my day on the balcony, writing in my notebook, and what was intended to be another comic script turned into a journal entry that was slightly more prosaic than this one. my fingers are too tired to transcribe, though, so 🤷‍♂️

i went to the acupuncturist, the session didn't feel quite as productive as the previous ones and i struggled to not snore during the treatment. fortunately, i didn't have any problems getting home this time. i shipped off to the office, where my work day was essentially a lot of social interactions punctuated by investigation, and i think i've got a proper handle on using claude the way my client intends without losing access to my user skills.

i came home early, had an early supper (disappointed to be eating alone), then took mr smear to the comics library to return some books. i said goodbye to him before he got on the bus home, but he clearly didn't understand what was happening and ran out of the bus when he realized i wasn't on it with him, and in the time it took to re-explain and turn him around the bus driver had already closed the doors... fortunately, he let him on again.

i made my way to the game dev meetup, which was again quite constructive. i met some nice people, got some extremely good tips from an entire talk built around a single slide, and had some interesting conversations. then i came home, not expecting to find my family having just watched the daredevil movie without me (i haven't seen it! [oh, wait, i have. i guess i had better things to bother remembering]), 

i played a bit of aces of the luftwaffe - squadron while mr smear ate his late dinner as slowly as possible in order to watch me [stops writing to write down some ideas that game him, look up the binding of isaac and wishlist rebirth, learn from horseman that i should be burning codex tokens before tomorrow's reset, and develop a weird and particularly intense case of the hiccups]

i had a weird argument with mr smear over him wanting to write something down, but not enough to do so with pen and paper (he wanted to use google docs, and it was late), and then i told him he was being a schmuck and he responded with "no, you're being a schmuck" so he's down an hour of screen time tomorrow and i'm questioning whether i did the right thing or not. at least the next time i tried to talk to him about what happened (a few minutes later) went well, he got the upper hand by deliberately answering my rhetorical question in a way that was so incorrect that i had to stop for both of us to laugh, and then regroup, and then think up a different approach 😅

after putting him to bed, i sorted out some minor things on my work laptop, agreed to what appears to be the go-ahead for my project's action plan, read some news articles and then began posting this.

god damn these hiccups.

the opening gates

 we never got to pokémon yesterday, but we did make great progress with our bird game, it was a great experience both as a father-son bonding session and as a building-something-good session. then we washed the floors, which took a while but is always less work than i expect it to be, by which time it was getting dark and we hadn't been outside all day, so we strapped on our blades and went for a night blade.

overall, the evening was excellent. there were a couple of shit moments, though, the primary one being almost being crashed into by an idiot kid on an electric scooter.

we had a good, but late, dinner and watched random videos from mr smear's playlist, and then it was bedtime.

i guess i slept alright, if not enough. i began the day with the other ant-man comic, then did some random stuff, then tried to get some actual work done - my employer expects us to work on holiday eves, but not my clients :P - and the first hour or so was spent migrating from helium to brave and upgrading software. then i settled in to write up some notes about my project and put AI to work investigating the current state and poking around to surface the risks, and i think i have enough to have a sync with the team's product lead when we're back in the office to determine how much effort this is going to require.

from there, i went out with an already irritable gd and our already irritating son to do some shopping, and while she let me win the argument about which grocery store to go to first, she turned out to be right that they wouldn't have any vegetables and then she was doubly pissed that we had to walk much further to get what we needed...

at least the rest of the shopping expedition was somewhat successful.

when we returned, i sat mr smear down to play pokémon, but gd turned it into a family meeting first. then we resorted the cards and ran through the tutorial, and we both had a good time. then we moved to the computer and got back to work on the bird game, and although the AI has been dragging its metaphorical feet the game itself is at least fun to play.

now it's about to be yom kippur, and gd mistimed dinner so it looks like i might be starting the fast a bit late... and taking mr smear our rollerblading, so i'll probably be drinking some water too :/

but i've eaten plenty today, carbo-loaded, in fact, so i'll probably be fine. two bowls of rice, and pancakes, and gd's failed experimental baked potato chips, and choc-chickpea fudge... i'll probably be fine.

catching 'em all

 it's after noon on a saturday, and i'm writing this because i feel compelled to press ctrl+s on my life (just like when editing a doc that isn't autosaved). i'm currently taking a break from doing a lot of busywork that got triggered by me wanting to begin working on a game with mr smear, and then finding myself studying how to shave the yak of terrain map import.

[stopped here to write down the trophies design details from my conversation with horseman earlier]

yesterday:

i eventually gave up with helium and migrated back to brave. hello, brave. you're annoying, but you're alright. that took a lot of energy, both effort and psychological, and it was pretty draining.

after mr smear went off to school, gd and i went to the pharmacy, me with my little notebook and an intention to spent gd's waiting-in-line time writing down some stuff, more-than-loosely inspired by inside moebius. i'm pretty satisfied with the results, it was a good idea.

so gd took care of her meds for the long weekend, and we did a quick grocery shopping, and then we returned home.

oh, i should mention that gd and i were both struggling with post-nasal drip and coughs, but it was relatively manageable.

i spent way too much time trying to make a comic about something that happened at the mall, eventually giving up because notebook / gemini just kept failing and failing and failing to capture anything remotely like what i'd scripted. at some point it decided to DEI the comic and make gd black, which was super weird.

in the afternoon, our upstairs neighbors paid us a visit, and i flooded big data with my opinions and ideas on gaming, and introduced him to the israeli version of jones in the fast lane, which he played through completely :)

while we both enjoyed gd's marzipan and choc-chickpea fudge. that stuffs growing on me 🙄

i helped (as usual, now) with the challahpeño, then mr smear and i went upstairs to join them and their kids for a couple of games of fluxx - marvel and star. mr smear won both rounds! then we took our leave and went to the store to pick up wine for gd, with me become enraged along the way by a cycling who (apparently deliberately) almost ran into me even after we left him enough room, and then lost trying to find the wine gd was looking for...

gd almost ruined the rice by following the recipe... i made a suggestion that actually rescued it and we were both surprised ^_^

we went upstairs for dinner, and we all had a good time (mr smear doing a minimal amount of trolling, and encouraging their kids to fight over the piano by sitting down and playing quite nicely). after dinner, big data handed me a folder full of really interesting pokémon cards! somebody appears to have left it on our neighborhood's giving bench, and according to what he saw online it's probably worth a fair amount of money, but i'm taking it as a sign that i should sit mr smear down and get into it again :P

everyone was tired by the time we left, and i went to bed soon after helping gd put everything away (impressing her with my packing skills, we didn't have to toss anything) and clean up the kitchen, and aside from waking up in the middle of the night for an hour or so of very uncomfortable indigestion, i slept really well.

i began my day cleaning and then sitting on the balcony, with my notebook, working on an idea inspired by a conversation with big data's wife (who's not convinced that one can use games to teach social skills), and then moving inside when the sun streamed onto me directly (we get direct sunlight in the winter months, and we're protected during the worst of the summer, that's pretty cool) to do some research into writing mysteries.

i thought about swordschool, who i haven't heard from in a long time, and i sent him an email because i suspect he's changed numbers again. also, i discovered his actual surname, i believe for the very first time.

i had a long chat with horseman about trophies, then invested an hour into burning the last of my week's token allowance before the refresh on the app i've been working on all week, unfortunately hitting the reset with an annoying issue unresolved after everything else worked out beautifully.

then i took a nap, and then fell into the busywork, and now that i've got everything written down i need to decided whether it's pokémon time or game dev time with mr smear.

things that bother me in the middle of the night

 dawn is breaking, i've been up since about 4am (gd claims 4.30) and while some of it was because of gd struggling to clear her lungs (thank god we got her prescription sorted out yesterday!) a fair amount was due to a combination of worrying about how my teammates are supposed to deal with their kids when the other parents aren't on board, and how mr smear's friend's mother - who's a psychologist, if i recall correctly - sent me an article about peter gray, who may have a sound theory regarding self-directed play but who is clearly very, very wrong about how that applies to the internet and gaming (especially roblox), and AI, and also schooling.

and then i made the mistake of updating my browser, and learned that the weird anomaly that happened at work a couple of weeks ago is a known bug in helium (or chromium in general?), and i got signed out of *all* of my accounts and had to reinstall and reconnect *all* of my extensions. that's not what i wanted to be doing when i sat down at my desk in the middle of the night.

...

i slept awfully "last" night (wednesday night), i was struggling with my sinuses / post-nasal drip / sore throat, and i needed a lot of caffeine to get me through the day. lots of green tea punctuating my coffees. i managed to clear a bunch of things off my desk, though, although that did include discovering that we're going to need to borrow money to pay rent this month again. hopefully my bonus will come in with my next salary. hopefully it'll be at least half as much as the stated amount 🙏

my drip & cough got worse as the day wore on, then magically cleared up around the second half of the afternoon. this is the general pattern of this week. aside from the clear advantage of not being in a office with other people while going through it, i had access to the really hot jalapeño kettle fries (which helped clear me up, temporarily) and got to taste gd's first marzipan, which came out really well!

the majority of my work-from-home day was spent in meetings, i learned a lot and i encountered some of the trickier logic this company has to deal with, which really isn't easy to wrap my head around. my biggest stress was troubleshooting my dev environment, which mysteriously broke down on wednesday, but by the time i had my last meeting (a very friendly and positive 1:1 with my manager) i'd managed to get everything green ^_^

during one of my meetings, i heard a yell from the kitchen: gd managed to slice herself cleaning the "mandolin" 🤦‍♂️

when i was done with my day, the three of us walked across the bridge into ramat gan, paying a visit to the hardware store and the stationery store, and, after a confusing talk with the knick-knacks guy next door, to the pharmacy after learning that cloth diapers really can be used as a stand-in for cheese cloth.

we watched the first episode of small prophets over dinner last night, and after (eventually) getting mr smear to bed i sat on the couch reading medium articles until i passed out.

drips, some slow some fast

we started watching the fall and rise of reggie dinkins over dinner last night, it's legitimately good. after getting mr smear into bed, i continued with my diff tool.

i finished reading one of the ant-man comics we borrowed from the library, it wasn't bad, it was entertaining, but it definitely wasn't the kind of writing i get excited about.

i spoke with my mentor today, who made me feel really silly: why not take something that has many users like kdiff3, and write a plugin for it? it's worth looking into, though kdiff3's last update appears to be over a decade old... [EDIT: brave search gave me the old kdiff3, there's a new one that's actively maintained]

i ran into another guy from my officer's course platoon this morning, it was pleasant catching up :)

i was asked for an opinion on one of the team's not proposing to his long-term girlfriend, it sounds like the team primarily comprising married moms has a very specific vibe. amusingly, them working on the first guy convinced the guy who sits next to him to get engaged last month 😂

i managed to keep my mouth shut during the lunchtime discussion about sleep training, but later - and i honestly don't remember what triggered it, i think someone in the team was talking about "eating healthy"  [EDIT: it was a conversation about healthy snacks]- i laid down some of my opinions, the most harsh regarding fish and seafood and children's cognitive development. i was pleasantly surprised that it became just another calm conversation, and then it was over and we went back to work.

at least a couple of my teammates seem to be excited about the tools i shared today. i started diving into my first task with my "buddy", and i think i have a pretty good handle on it. unfortunately, it was a day full of distractions and by the time i sat down to look at the code i discovered that my dev environment's completely buggered, even worse than before i managed to get everything working yesterday 🙄

on our way out the building, i found myself facing into a crowded elevator across from someone from my previous client, which was awkward. then i thought i saw the guy from yesterday ducking round the corner with a cigarette in hand, and i walked all the way up to him before realizing it was someone else. there was no one else around.

i stopped by the hardware store and picked up a "mandolin" slicer and and knife sharpener, then i came home and was greeted by mr smear trying to show me what he's decided he's ready to put together for a youtube channel. i'm very excited about the comic book he picked up for me at the library today: judgement on gotham!

i tasted gd's new chocolate chickpea fudge, which... i don't know how i feel about it. it's not bad, it's very moreish, but i think i prefer my fudge either chocolate, or chickpea, but not both.

gd and i finished watching the witness after putting mr smear to bed, it still holds up.

my busy sinuses / post-nasal drip / sore throat was worse today than yesterday. it's really late and i'm worried about not sleeping tonight.

...

the "naza" documentary: anyone who's served here or knows anyone who's served knows that this is a massive pack of lies, but for whoever isn't sure, here's a rabbit-hole to go down. this is not a case of freedom of expression, this is a case of malicious disinformation being used to support our enemies during wartime.

just one more fix

 the nose and throat thing got serious overnight, although when i did sleep - i eventually slipped into bed around 1.30am, just one more teeny tiny little fix - i slept pretty well. vivid dreams and all that. i woke up way earlier than i would have liked, had a bit of a rough morning stomach and throat-wise, and then caught a bus with mr smear to the clinic.

in spite of how bad a state i was in, my system pulled through for the duration of the acupuncture and i left feeling pretty good. that lasted all of about two minutes, because as i was crossing the road a woman slammed on the gas to get around a car that had stopped for me and damned near ran me over. my automatic response to her doing that neatly pulled my back out of alignment, and my back had actually been fine the whole time up until that point.

so then i was doubly pissed, and i've spent the remainder of the day needing constant readjustments.

i had to do an online grocery shopping with gd and ended up leaving late when i was supposed to be meeting up with my old officer's course friend - between me arriving late and both of us being confused about which floor we were meeting on, we ended up with barely a few minutes to chat, but it was nice nonetheless and i guess we'll have to do lunch one of these days :)

the first thing i did when i got in was clear the air about the game dev i'd been up to over the weekend, with videos to back it up :P

most of my work day was spent getting my personal environment(s) set up, and using AI to build power tools to simplify the process. my first meeting with my team lead was rough - peak sore throat and coughing - and from there i joined my teammates for lunch, and then after that my system seemed to calm down and while i do still have a bit of scratchiness, it's nothing like it was this morning.

after lunch i had a very intense and animated conversation with the other parents in the team about kids, gaming and parental controls, and i feel like a lot of the things i was saying landed. later, one of the mothers told a story from her kid's class (he's a couple of years younger) that was absolutely horrifying, legitimately worse than the shit mr smear went through :(

i had two more meetings, both on balconies because all the rooms were taken, and the rest of the afternoon was spent getting everything working and impressing my teammates with the helper tools i built along the way ^_^

i came home much later than i'd expected, mr smear having just sat down to do his homework after his new friend left, and now i'm writing this while occasionally authorizing the agent to continue and frequently having the app i'm building suddenly pop up with a flurry of simulated activity, which is actually pretty cool.

...

i have to say this whole "one shot" hype train for astra is ridiculous. yes, you can do amazing things off a single prompt, but just like any other model you're still going to have to do a lot of QA, bug-fixing and re-speccing once it gets through the initial generation. as always, if you're asking for something new and innovative, it's not going to get it right first time.

paro-day

 i definitely have a nose/throat thing going on, not serious, but uncomfortable enough.

during my team daily i shared what i worked on over the weekend, and - painfully aware of this in real time - failed to communicate just why the games i made were even remotely fun or interesting. i felt so awkward 😬 

this morning gd decided to keep mr smear home and take him to the doctor, but then she suddenly wasn't feeling well enough to take him so i had to bail on two meetings (that were specifically for me) in order to take him myself.

the doctor didn't find anything interesting, and recommended sending him to school next time unless he's feeling unwell or has a fever. after stopping by the pharmacy, i took a number for the receptionist and then found myself in an uncomfortable race with an older woman who was trying to jump the line; when the receptionist noticed her hovering behind me she asked "are you with him?" to which she responded "i wish" 🤢

from there were went to the children's hospital to book a couple of follow-up appointments, after which we caught a bus home, and i pointed out a guy with frighteningly long toenails to mr smear who was horrified.

we arrived home to find gd had made a baked polenta with jalapeño dish, which turned out to be surprisingly more-ish and quite spicy.

i made slow but steady progress with my client's work, then joined my employer group's discussion about worktrees and our post-AI futures as plumbers and locksmiths.

between that meeting and leaving for my feldenkrais appointment, i reached out to one of the team and he helped me out quite a bit. then i walked to the clinic, and went through another awkward session. i truly don't know how i feel about this stuff, because the exercise she gave me seems to be a useful one, but half the things she did made me feel like it's the kind of stuff that only works if you truly believe in it, and the other half is suspicious but oddly convincing. for example, she had her fingers on each side of my neck, but on the side that's always giving me trouble the skin sensation was muted even though i could feel her fingers on both sides. whatever annoyingly gentle manipulations she did, after a while the sensations did become more balanced, so 🤷‍♂️

after dinner and another relevant episode of the wonder years*, and then i embarked** on a project inspired by one of my coworkers (in my employer group) saying that he can't work with something he needs to because the old-school tool he uses doesn't support it. that made me realize that it's cheaper for me to set the AI to work building me my own diff tool that answers all my needs that to pay for a license for any of the good ones that all only do some parts of the job well.

* the walk out: the americans lost the vietnam war primarily because their own population had succumbed to communist propaganda, and it's the same enemies with the same playbook turning the world against israel now.

** remember this picture, it taught me about derived works being under copyright. i had to drop the left one, which was perfect, and generate the one on the right instead.

we had a huge fight around shower time, with my queen of hearts decreeing "off with his head (lice)!" and me finally letting go in spite of the fact that as far as i can tell we clearly don't have head lice. so we wasted (in my opinion) an expensive treatment that for all intents and purposes seems to be repackaged margarine, which gd would never, ever put into her hair 🙄

anyway, it went smoother (and more buttery) than it could have, and the rest of the evening has been kinda okay. while i'm typing this, the app my agent is building keeps flickering onto the screen and disappearing while i runs tests, and the flashes i've seen so far are quite exciting.

gaming in the new year

friday evening was lovely. the kids were all fine, although they didn't eat anything and between gd and big data's wife there was waaaaaaay too much food. i... i ate too much. so much that i was very uncomfortable and needed to keep myself upright for a couple of hours after we got home to ensure i wouldn't have indigestion :/

both yesterday and today were essentially spent either making games, or playing games. cascadia was a great success. the mini-games i've been experimenting with have been a great success. i spent a good hour or so with horseman discussing game dev and vibe coding, and then blockchain dev, which was cool.

mr smear and i played settlers of catan with our upstairs neighbors this afternoon, which was mostly good except for a) big data getting upset with his youngest - as usual, but his youngest just continued doing the things that he kept asking him to stop doing and it got so bad mr smear joined in, and i had to stop him - and b) mr smear "jokingly" calling big data "asshole" because he did something that stopped his plans. at the end of the game we managed to make it worse when i told him to apologize and he repeated the word while apologizing 🙄

we watched more spider-noir, we watched more the wonder years, we watched the first half of the new masters of the universe which is a tragically funny parody of the original series, but with too much violence and swearing to be appropriate for kids. the casting for evil-lyn was spot on 😂

what else? i don't know. i guess i should record that my throat's been scratchy for the last couple of hours, which i definitely don't need, and mr smear's cough hasn't fully let up yet. oh, and gd made pretty good chickpea fudge today. and my main thing these past two days has been the games i've been working on. it turns out making nostalgia-flavored edutainment mini-games can actually be fun, to make and to play!

happy 5787!

 our puzzle and board game mission was successful, gd and i picked up a gorgeous zozoville puzzle and a copy of cascadia, which hopefully will be interesting for all three of us 🤞

on the way home we did a last-minute grocery shopping for some items we missed yesterday, and then we returned home.

i upgraded my codex subscription in order to experiment with astra, and the experience of generating my trauma game has been pretty good so far - i initialized it with astra, and have been using terra and luna for the tweaking.

really good news: the work i've been doing on my boss's pet project was accepted this afternoon, with a recommendation to open an upstream PR for it as well 🙌

[pauses to help gd in the kitchen. i've now made two round challot, one choc-chip and the other chilli-choc-chip, and prepared the vegan meatballs]

there was a bit of drama in the kitchen earlier (mr smear wasn't helping gd in a particularly helpful way), but we're just about ready to head upstairs.

shana tova and chag sameach! hopefully this next year will be calmer and more reasonable 🙏

unexpected things

i jump-started my day yesterday by taking the rosh hashana cards mr smear forgot to deliver on tuesday to the school.

on the way, our bus was stalled by a homeless guy who literally stood in front of the bus, smoking a cigarette and trying to goad the driver into a fight. the driver kept edging towards him, with his fucking bus. the homeless guy didn't give a fuck. then, suddenly, another bus pulled in front of us and the homeless guy ran into it with his lit cigarette to go and terrorize the poor people on it :/

i stopped at the pharmacy on my way home to pick up gd's meds (a long wait, but less long that usual), then came home for breakfast and to begin working.

...

it was my first group meeting with my client, and i was unpleasantly surprised to be asking to introduce myself to the group immediately after the manager had given me a pretty robust introduction. in retrospect i should have probably focused on the personal aspects of my life rather than the professional 🙄

regardless, two people reached out to me privately as a result of my introduction: the first, a fellow contractor who i didn't realize was in the same group. the second? a guy from the officer's course i haven't seen in almost sixteen years, who i happened to be thinking about on wednesday because we were last together at the same place our company status was held!

...

the work-from-home day went alright, but for two things:

the first, that i had a real snacking problem yesterday, and by "snacking" i mean "i ate a few more actual meals than i should have". so it's not that the quality of the food was questionable, but the quantity was out of control.

the second, that at the beginning of my meeting with my lead he asked me to pause the recording, and after a congenial personal sync during which he wanted to know how i was feeling about things, i asked him for feedback and learned that there is a point regarding my progress on which he's disappointed.

i spent the rest of the day heavily focused on resolving that, and i believe i finished the day having made good progress.

...

gd had a big day yesterday: she finally got the haircut she's been longing for for months (she had to postpone her appointment until we were sure we were through the lice incident, and the incident caused her to cut her own hair in a way that bothered her), and she finally got it cut short which i've been suggesting for years. so we're both happier now :)

in the afternoon we went to two stores to do the grocery shopping, and by the second we found what we needed for the long weekend and, specifically, her experimental kebab dinner.

...

while i didn't enjoy the experimental kebabs, the episode of spider-noir we watched along with it was great (i *love* the cameo musical phrase appearances borrowed from all the other spider-man movies). after dinner / showering and brushing teeth, we sat down to watch the second half of judge dredd. overall: it's a bit childish, standard 90s action fare with one-dimensional characters and some heavy character assassination by wedged in "romance", but the concept of megacity one, and the ABC warbot and mean machine, was great and we all had fun.

two puffs before bed (my lower back and hip flexors were doing their thing), and it helped.

...

i woke up this morning to a coffee on the balcony (no comics, no computer) while thinking about my tarot game (i'm feeling quite lost, actually, when it comes to the actual game mechanics), and i've since spent the past few hours working through my open work in my auto-doc project and my employer's spec project. i'm done with the former and just about (i think) done with the latter, and now gd and i are leaving our heavily coughing mr smear at home to go to the mall and find a board game that she's interested in playing.

cheat day

 i did *not* lose weight today.

mr smear woke up worse than he was yesterday, so he stayed home. i began my day on the balcony, cleaning up someone's cigarette ash (apparently it's the woman above us, she's promised to be more careful) and trying to read knights of sidonia, which seems cool but i struggled to make sense of what was going on, or care.

i've just read through some reviews, and i'm not interested in giving it more of a chance than i already have.

i hopped on a bus to herzeliyah, walked through my mom's favorite mall (most of the stores were closed, but in general it looks very much the same as it always did), then past the country club and the school i once re-took linear algebra in (and still failed to understand very much), and then to the company status.

"breakfast" was pretty good, pizza and a too-hot grilled chilli and a bunch of nice salads. heavy discussions about south africa, the state of the industry, and then my previous employer.

then we were given a motivational talk by omri rozenblit, which was really powerful, and then we had our status, which was... unsurprising, which is more than desirable. it's comforting to know and have known what's going on, and we got some clarity into how we're adapting to the rapidly-changing market situation.

i returned home, after waiting for a while in the sun, herzeliyah style, and stopped for a hearty leftover lunch. then i got mr smear to draw on two stickers for my work laptop, then i walked to the office.

my first meeting was with the guy who wanted to hire me at the beginning of last year, and it was pleasant, though i did make it a little awkward. the second meeting was with my line manager, and aside from it being a fun talk, i caught him off-guard when i spoke about conway's law and i enjoyed seeing his gears start turning.

aside from those talks, i had two meetings with a couple of my teammates, both of which gave me insight into what we're doing and one of which gave me some really cool ideas of how we could operate financial analysis in a similar way to how we write code.

i didn't need to snack so much in between all of those...

the end of the day was packing up our work stations for next week's move, my manager needed to remind me that this weekend is rosh hashana and that we won't be seeing each other in person until tuesday :P

i rushed home - stressed about tomorrow's acupuncture session in my calendar that turned out to be non-existent - to get onto a webinar about the metro works that are going to be starting in the next few months. it was a looooooong talk (i played a lot of minesweeper games) but with a lot of encouraging aspects, not least of which being how clearly the people responsible for public transport in this region understand their mission.

i coerced mr smear into giving star fluxx a chance, and we had fun, and then we started watching an episode of the wonder years which involved animal cruelty so we had to stop halfway, and mr smear and i watched an excellent talk on the history of sumeria while i not only cleared my very large plate of food, but also the rest of the bag of liquorice allsorts along with a few blocks of chocolate 🙄

...

dark matter upsets me. phenomenal writing, great concept, but i just can't deal with that level of darkness right now.

sideways

 last night gd and i started watching dark matter. we continued this evening, and it seems appropriate; i feel weird. like, i'm in an alternate reality kind of weird.

yesterday was a work-from-home day, which began with one of my new teammates outing herself as a nose-picker while centered on on our team call, which led to me recording gd's hilarious response which gd doesn't think is that funny - mr smear agrees with me - and which neither my mother nor my sister were able to watch because of the subject matter :/

then another teammate outed herself as a "meat proxy".

i'm new, i didn't say anything.

mr smear was home "sick", and according to him the reason he didn't have any real symptoms all day was because he was entertained (screen time)...

after hours of onboarding and an awkward demo in which nobody else spoke either, i took mr smear for a walk to the comics library to pick up some books for the high holy days. i still can't believe that's in a couple of days!

oh - he learned about "stippling" from a youtube video and drew a really impressive looking ghoul / zombie.

i tried out the new astra model yesterday evening, it burned through my tokens but i'm not confident it did a good job 🤷‍♂️

in fact, it feels like all the models are chewing tokens more rapidly than usual. i've been half-assing two projects (one for my boss, and my auto-doc) and i feel like i'm spinning in circles.

...

in spite of his cough, we sent mr smear off to school this morning, snapping a photo of him with his toolbox and his portfolio as he headed out the door for his first full arts track day. he appears to have had a great day, and made a new friend, and he came home with a really cool couple of pieces ^_^

i continued with my half-assing this morning (i'm kinda doing it in the background now, but more like a quarter-assing), then went off to the office. today was more onboarding, but with a few surprises:

1. almost two hours talking to a monitoring expert about their lack of vision, who was really excited to hear my ideas

2. today i discovered that my division manager is the guy whose offer i rejected when i joined the defense startup, which turned out to be a dodged bullet because his replacement was unpleasant to deal with.

3. i forgot my headphones at home, and nose-picker offer to lend me hers. nuh, uh 😂

4. one of the guys keeps trying to prank the girls, and one of them almost fell for it but asked for confirmation (he was out of office). they turned the tables on him, and he's now convinced that she fell for it and feels bad, general hilarity ensued

5. i began to realize how powerful my client's solution is, and that it's used internally by default. zero privacy - all intra-org calls are recorded and reviewable by anyone in the company - but the benefits are enormous!

6. i think i'm dong a good job of getting some of my teammates on board with new AI best practices :)

7. there was a big "do" for rosh hashana. not only did i witness some surprisingly antisocial behavior by a couple of people, but the vegan option was malabi and it's the first time i've ever eaten malabi that wasn't enjoyable. i don't know why i finished it, and it took a while + another coffee (decaf) to get rid of the bitter aftertaste :(

after coming home, taking down the recycling and running into big data kicking a rubber mouse and dealing with a bicycle that doesn't belong to our building, mr smear and i played a game of cthulu fluxx before dinner that got absolutely ridiculous - he'd play draw 2 + doom and kept pulling creepers, by the last round he was literally holding half the deck in his hand!

we watched another episode of spider-noir over dinner, i really enjoyed gd's polenta but she didn't :(

it's late, i have a big morning (our company status), which was the retroactive reason for not rollerblading tonight...

shredding

 mr smear appears to be sick, so he came early yesterday and he's staying home today...

i bought him a lock yesterday morning on my way to my client, and discovered an amazing stationery store across the road ^_^

i realized on my way to the office that the client's catering is saving me a significant amount of money per month, which is a really nice bonus!

my day at the office was a combination of onboarding, meeting new people from the team, investigating the build failure that turned out to be affected more than just me, and all of this punctuated by round after round of shredding documents i've been gathering for the last eight months.

i'm most of the way through :P

my team lead has authorized me to take off a week for the sukkot holidays - i'm really excited for the staycation!

also, a decent lunch, a couple of healthy snacks, and too much shame to take an ice cream after going upstairs to find that the ice creams were all right outside an office filled with people and only a glass wall separating them. so my weight's down a little today already (back to 80kg after a week or two hovering around 82, and i have some shame to thank for that.

on the way home i called up sailor, and we ended up talking about his trauma-bonding. i hope my advise was helpful, but i also woke up around 4am this morning with an interesting idea for a game based on my understanding of mental trauma and spent twenty minutes or so working on writing it up.

while mr smear completed his rosh hashana cards (this was before i understood that he and gd hadn't understood the hebrew lit homework instructions), i watched more of des bishop's breaking china series, which is really fun!

we watched a sad episode of the wonder years over dinner (the piano recital), and after mr smear went to bed (relatively early) gd and i finally finished watching the first season of ludwig together, and i crawled into bed soon after.

...

we seem to have been out of the lice woods for a while now, and mr smear just got invited to sleep over at the carrier. so here we are strategizing over how to manage the next outbreak before he's even told us whether he wants to go or not 🙄

almost boring

 it was a bit of a weird weekend. i guess i slept okay, i got the balcony pretty clean yesterday morning, mr smear had a very long and screen time-filled hang out with his friend on his last day in israel, and i managed to make a little progress on my tarot game, though a lot of my time spent on that was understanding that my initial ideas didn't really make as much sense i thought they would, and subsequently thinking very hard about what could and would work.

i've nailed the experience of getting into and out of a "level", and i've understood that i need to figure out the relationships between tarot, astrology and alchemy in order to put something coherent together... and i really didn't have bandwidth for that...

in the evening i took mr smear out for a walk, which was great right up until the last five minutes or so. at that point, he got into fight mode and started pissing me off (the trigger was him being too precious to drink from a water fountain, and asking me to stop and buy something instead), and when we got home he went into a downward spiral from which gd lost her shit.

it got so bad that we agreed he wasn't welcome to eat with us, and the situation wasn't improved by him coming out of the kitchen to tell us he actually quite enjoyed eating alone in there and could he please do it every night 🤦‍♂️

anyway, we had a family meeting after dinner that went late, but very positively.

i've spent this morning uncovering things that need to get done, but not actually doing anything (aside from a little tarot game polishing), and now i'm off to by mr smear a lock for his toolbox (he appears to have thrown away the lock i bought him last year, jesus fuck) and then go to work.

le'chaim

 i spent very little time last night making sense of things, i was very sleepy and went to bed soon after posting. i slept... i guess i slept alright.

the morning got off to a rough start, but then it calmed down, and then i became quite nice. big data paid us a visit, and we played a pretty interesting game of cthulhu fluxx, and a bit later gd and i went to the school to pick up mr smear and take him to dizengoff center to pick up his art supplies.

we bumped into his friend along the way and travelled with him, apparently everything is cool but it sounds like he was taking a break from mr smear over the holidays (when he wasn't drumming with his dad).

the shopping experience went relatively smoothly, we found the toolbox we were looking for along with a gluten-free toaster for gd, and the woman (?) at the art store really helped us get All The Things, and mr smear received a pretty hefty arts school discount which was particularly welcome.

then we came home, i had lunch (the last of the chili), and gd and i went out to pick up wine and snacks, and the rest of the afternoon was me slowly but surely making progress with my tarot game and spec repo projects.

mr smear and i just got back from shul, and i'm still stunned by the fact that next week is rosh hashana already (O_o)

i'm enjoying an arak and mr smear's testing out a new minecraft skin he made, while gd finishes preparing another sushi dinner (we're feeling pretty spoiled).

good shabbes.

cleaning the filters

 i slept like shit last night, but at least i woke up without the headache. and gd got her shit, so that's okay.

it was a long day, beginning with me leaving the apartment with mr smear and going to the clinic, only to discover that i didn't actually have an acupuncture appointment today. i took care of a bunch of admin and chores when i returned home, then dived into the troubleshooting session that i walked out of the office on yesterday, which i resolved at roughly the same time that a guy came to clean our air conditioner and vents.

oh! and i spoke to one of the async game jam guys for half an hour today, mainly encouraging him and assuring him that there are no rules or guidelines regarding which tech we use :)

the cleaner was very respectful, and didn't make a lot of mess, but it still demanded a lot of running after him and then cleaning up once he left. he did a great job, but there's mold in the tubes and he explained to us that it'll cost us more to clean them than to replace them...

so that's a fight for another day, at least i know how to take care of the superficial cleaning myself now and harassing the landlord about the tubes is for later.

poor guy (our landlord) is currently dealing with his father developing dementia, so definitely not today.

the rest of the work day was spent onboarding / setting up my dev env for my new client, which was mostly successful by the time i called it a day and headed out to the school for the parents' evening.

i walked into the school with firefighter and his wife, who were very interested in my mom's aliyah story. i mentioned it to her when we spoke a bit later, and now i'm concerned that she's not moving on it...

the arts track for the sixth graders just got serious, and their program sounds amazing. i was stressed about not having known about the arts stream whatsapp group - were we supposed to have joined it last year? - but then i learned i wasn't the only parent worried and that we were only supposed to find out about it today :P

the class meeting was a bit awkward, but peak awkward was the crazy mom yelling and putting on a show because she's - apparently - the only parent who doesn't want there to be a class whatsapp group with the teacher 🙄

there was a big deal made about which parents would be on the class council this year, and i think everyone was rooting for the teacher who was using every trick in the book to prevent the crazy mom from being on it. i really didn't want to volunteer, but in retrospect i think i should have.

it was already 9pm by the time we walked out the classroom, and i felt awkward, so i walked straight out and took the light rail and bus home, said good night to mr smear, ate and then spat out some leftovers that i think were bad, had a whole other bowl of chili (just like i did at lunchtime), didn't join big data for a game of fluxx (it was too late by then), showered, and am now drinking a cup of tea and writing this before i spend a little time trying to make sense of the world before going to bed.

undo not disturb

gd's phone tends to beep all night, which disturbs me but not her. so a few days ago i set up do not disturb on her phone, with exceptions for when anyone calls more than once during a short period.

i noticed that this didn't really stop the notifications, but whatever. tonight, though, it made big drama - gd was waiting for a delivery of something, and her phone never rang. it's clear from the suppressed notifications that it *should* have rung.

fucking samsung.

so now she's pissed, but also terrified that she'll be blacklisted for putting a delivery person through this :(

...

i wasn't sleeping well, but now i'm not sleeping at all. and my head's still aching.

stuffed brain

 fortunately, i didn't regret that last coffee, but not because i was able to go rollerblading... i wasn't. i was so tired even after the coffee that i just showered, and then minesweepered myself to sleep. i somehow ended up sleeping alright.

this morning went alright, although gd was very angry with mr smear for not leaving his books and equipment in his locker yesterday, which meant that he left this morning with the same heavy bag on his back plus another heavy bag for today 🙄

...

i wrote the above, then got distracted - mr smear called me when he got to school, he was unable to get his combination lock open and i almost lost my voice; initially, yelling at him to go somewhere quieter so that he could hear me. then, because he couldn't follow basic english instructions and spent more time complaining about how bad the design of the locks is instead of applying himself to understanding what the term "full turn" means.

by the end, i got him through it, but while gd was laughing hysterically as his reflection of her behavior, i was thinking that i'm pretty sure i'm not going to be drowned in college fees after he's old enough to leave the nest...

i started the day at my employer's offices, where my mentor ran a workshop in responding to CFPs. it was pretty interesting, and i guess my homework is to record the auto-doc presentation i promised to re-record a few weeks ago so that i can put it online and use as an application sample.

i went straight to my client's offices, arriving just in time to meet some more of my team and enjoy a catered lunch. not as good as yesterday's, but still pretty good.

over the course of the afternoon i made progress with my onboarding, almost fell asleep during a particularly droning talk during an employer group tech circle while sitting in the heat of a balcony because none of the booths were available on any of the four floors i checked, tried hard to be helpful when a not-so-bright guy i used to work with at my previous client contacted me for assistance doing something i've specifically warned them isn't necessary and isn't a good idea, sat in on a meeting where someone explained prompt caching in a way that actually made sense, and then left the office feeling tired.

like, am i sick? or just tired? i don't even know. i might be sick.

on a related note, gd's having lots of asthma attacks and she's convinced we have mold in the air conditioner. this is now the third week in a row i've asked the landlord to do something about it, i guess if he doesn't soon we're going to have issues :/

i dropped off my bag when i got home and took mr smear for a walk through the park, stopping to draw money twice (the ATM didn't give me any money, i really hope there was a proper error and that i didn't just get taken), and then we returned home for a delicious chili dinner and a great episode of the wonder years.

i've got a ton of stuff to do, but my brain is fried.

the first day of fall

 things that upset me in the middle of the night: looking at my phone's notifications, and then finding myself scrolling on instagram, and coming across these two self-hating jews discussing the ugliness of a rigged system that is everything anti-capitalists claim capitalism is: the opposite of a free market.

...

i'm regretting taking a puff before bed last night, partially because i'm feeling totally exhausted right now and it's almost 8pm and i'm drinking a fourth cup of coffee in order to be able to go rollerblading, partially because i passed in and out of conciousness earlier while listening to my new client's all-hands and i realized at some point that i'm not breathing with my whole lungs and when i do, it feels... smoky. like, tight and sticky.

i hope i don't regret this coffee.

mr smear surprised us by getting up and being ready on time for school, and then away he went. i took care of a bunch of first-of-the-month admin, and then suddenly it was time to go to work.

overall, i'm really impressed. the offices feel good, everyone i met seems relaxed and organized, even though they all described the work as anything but. during my first daily with the team mr smear called me, twice, while i was introducing myself - turned out he was worried that he couldn't find his meds, when he finished taking them yesterday already 🙄

i spent most of my day setting up my new machine and accounts and beginning the onboarding process, and talking to people, and i was *really* surprised to learn that my client offers catered lunches that include vegan options that are pretty darned good.

in the all-hands, i was literally amazed to hear them discussion employee retention and training, and making their approach very clear, and their approach is stellar. to go from a company continually laying off good workers to one making a point of developing theirs is quite a relief!

i guess mr smear and i shouldn't have eaten when i got home, because we also ate at dinner time and we both stuffed ourselves on gd's sushi while watching an episode of the simpsons that irritated me because its premise revolved around everyone in town being a total moron.

yes, yes, i know.

anyway, here we are. mr smear apparently had a great day at school, i'm going to at least try to go rollerblading tonight, and gd seems to be doing alright herself, so... 🤷‍♂️

the calling

t'was a strange day.

the guy who was at the same client with me asked me if i was coming to the office, he meant my now ex-client's office :P

i spoke to the sales guy, after about ten minutes the conversation went in a way i didn't know how to end, eventually i just kind of extended my hand for a handshake and then fucked off.

i'm convinced the awkward guy from the game meetup is autistic, because i spoke to him today and when we were done talking, he just stared at me for far too long until i unintentionally continued the conversation, and then we had another long silence before i said "cool" in a way that finally made him go "i should get back to work"...

but they're interesting conversations, and i'm learning a lot from him, so i guess if that's the price i have to pay 🤷‍♂️

i spoke to my boss, who was cool about my work and my contributions to his project, which was cool.

i had lunch with a new guy and an old guy, and we had a really long and interesting argument about team management that ended with "it's hard to argue when everyone's right".

i had a talk with our insurance broker, we managed to reduce my payments by a little and i hope not in a way that'll end up hurting us.

i got some work done on my auto-doc project, and at the same time on my tarot game, though the latter took on/off work until just a few minutes ago to finally get right, and i'm still not quite sure what the problem was. regardless, every small achievement makes me feel like i'm finding my calling in life.

am i missing anything up until this point? i don't think i am.

i went past osher ad on the way home, and picked up a cheap set of pots, and then walked a ways to run to get on a crowded bus to get home, drop off my stuff, and walk to the clinic for my first feldenkrais session. it was a bit weird, not least because my right shoulder started hurting intensely while she was working on my left, and we weren't able to trigger it again.

i'm not quite sure how i feel about this stuff just yet, but it's intriguing.

on my way into the treatment / examination, i received a message from my new client informing me that they expect me in the office tomorrow. cool.

mr smear was quite annoying this evening, but overall we had a good one. we watched the third episode of fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood and ate a huge dinner, and mr smear got into bed not unreasonably late. between sessions of arguing with the ai about my game, i watched fascinating videos about falling down and watchmen, the former being compelling and the latter completely blowing my mind, especially in light of me having just re-read it.

it's late. i'm going to try to get some sleep now.

...

another mashup the world needs: she's got the look / hold on to my fur. i can't help but hear similarities both in the non-chorus versus and in the "na na na na na" "nya nya nya nya nya nya" 😁

false start

yesterday was NOT the big day i was anticipating! it was a super weird day, to be honest. when i finally got up (i originally woke up feeling totally broken, so i slept on the couch for a while), i discovered that my new client had sent me a message the night before informing me that i wouldn't be able to go into the office.

later i learned that this is because they forgot to send me an NDA in time. so now that everyone's signed off on it, apparently i'll be able to go into the client's office tomorrow. maybe.

in the meanwhile, i submitted my spec repo article to my employer's publication and sent the whole company an email, realizing immediately after the window to "undo" the send that the subject of the email made it seem like i was challenging the project our boss has been championing... oops.

that set the ball in motion for two things: first, establishing that i'd be spending my work day trying to get on board with the boss's project, and second, that i would go into our office to try and catch the boss for a face-to-face to assure him that my project supports his rather than undermines it.

i jumped on a bus, listening to transformed - it's got a lot to offer, but i think i'd have benefitted just as much from skimming one of the many product operating model web pages - and eventually arrived at the office to find it empty and locked.

fuck.

so i immediately caught another bus home, and said goodbye to that hour and a half of my life.

i spent the afternoon jumping between the boss's project and mr smear's horror game, eventually getting ahead with both, and then took mr smear to the supermarket to try and spend as much of my lunch allowance as possible before it resets at the end of the month.

otherwise, we opened cthulhu fluxx and enjoyed a fun game before dinner, we watched the second episode of fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood, and the rest of the evening was quite boring. we all went to bed relatively early, although mr smear didn't actually fall asleep until something like 1am.

i woke up this morning after a relatively good night's sleep, looked out into a world that didn't make sense - it was cloudy and rainy in tel aviv on this last day of august - was reminded by gd that i have a kindle (i had to explain squatting to mr smear so that i could call him a squatter) and read some more of stranger in a strange land, and was very excited to receive vocal support for my spec repo initiative from my boss and for them to have accepted my article into our publication.

now i've explained to mr smear that today is get-ready-for-the-first-day-of-school day, and i'm about to have breakfast, and then head to our office to see what the day brings.

just the good stuff

 it's been an hour or two and i have no idea why i'm not sleeping, so... here i am 🤷‍♂️

...

on friday night, we watched the first wallace & gromit, which was great, but gd and i were both falling asleep by the end of it. we all went to bed, and i slept well.

after starting my morning on the balcony - having cleaned a whole lot of bird droppings and re-sprayed the bird repellent, and then being harassed by a bumblebee - i then moved to my office and finished writing up my article about my new spec repo.

that felt good.

...

i then spent the next few hours working on my tarot game, which involved website scraping, establishing the rules for the basic game, and implementing a deck being shuffled and dropped in to the game, which worked out *really* well! i mean, like, so well that i got high fives from both gd and mr smear, and not just myself :D

in addition to that, mr smear joined me and we worked on his game for a while, figuring out the design needed to do the first real experiment of "is it fun?" while he regaled me with descriptions of the enemies he's invented. which, by the way, are genuinely disturbing and make me continue to question whether i should be assisting him with this or not...

by the time we got the design worked out, and my initial experience implemented, we were down to 1% of the five-hour window's tokens remaining!

...

we strapped on our blades, a little worried about the weather app warning that it apparently felt like 36℃ degrees outside, and went out for a while. as we headed out i warned mr smear not to whine about how far we were going to go or about going home, and to his credit he didn't - we went all the way to the park lake, and he was great! he did excellently, we had a good time there and back, i managed to get him to drink from a water fountain without too much drama, and when some kids kicked a soccer ball right into his path and he fell, he landed really well. score!

...

after getting home and showering, we re-watched the first episode of fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood over dinner, then received a package from our upstairs friends who had just returned home: cthulhu fluxx and star fluxx! i'm very much looking forward to playing them ^_^

...

i got into judge dredd comics when i was a kid - my first tattoo was inspired by the world of megacity one, and chopper in particular - and when i saw the stallone movie i was at the same time overjoyed to see so much of the world brought to life, and upset that dredd removed his helmet and rico wasn't rico. i've been carrying that with me for over three decades now (say what?!), but this week i decided that it's time to put my big-boy pants on and introduce my son to the franchise via the movie and then let him discover the magic of the comics if he wants to.

we watched the first half of the movie tonight. mr smear is definitely enjoying it, and i let go of the minor grievances and enjoyed it far more than i did in the theatre :)

...

i really hope i can get back to sleep soon, today's a big day!

achievements unlocked

 alright! we had fun last night, yohay sponder's show was brilliant (even though it was very different to the one i went to with the same name), gd had a good time, we both laughed hysterically many times, and then we returned home to find mr smear also in good spirits, having spent the previous couple of hours playing video games without his parents to bother him :P

i don't recall what i did between getting home and getting into bed (aside from showering, brushing my teeth and spending half an hour on the spec library i've been working on for the last few days), but i ended up going to bed around midnight after taking a puff.

i slept pretty well.

i woke up earlier than i would have liked this morning, started my day with my morning ritual which included reading more of doomsday clock on the balcony, but relatively quickly arriving at the conclusion that i really don't want to read any more of it.

i really want to like this. the artwork is superb, and there's clearly a will to do something interesting, but the result is an incoherent mess and i just cared less and less as the panels wore on. this feels stuck somewhere between a cash-grab and an attempt to recreate something that was truly groundbreaking but without offering anything new.

instead, i spent the next couple of hours working on the spec library, then we all walked to the book / stationery store to buy what mr smear was missing for next week, and to the cobbler to pick up my sandals (expensive, but he did a great job), and then we took a bus to fox to learn that nobody stocks shorts in my size this late in the season (it's still mid-summer), and then another to dizengoff center, stopping along the way to eat really good hummus.

most of that story took place under a bit of a cloud because mr smear was being shitty, but by the time we sat down to eat things were fine. so lunch was great (except for the bit where i unwittingly dipped pita bread into gd's hummus, completely forgetting her need for sterile gluten-free environments, and then had to scrape out anything that might've made contact and hope for the best... so far, she seems fine.

*phew*

we found no shorts in my size at the mall, or nothing that i'd be interested in wearing, at any rate, but we did pick up mr smear's new glasses, so it wasn't a waste of time.

we came home, immediately began preparing the challahpeño, and i dived back into the spec library. within the three hours that i spent on it before leaving for shul, i achieved the following:

1. completing the main work, and figuring out how to interact with it.

2. testing it out on my other game project, very successfully!

3. writing up most of the article that i'll publish along with it.

i fired off some screenshots to dx, and he's excited too ^_^

i took mr smear to shul. this evening's service was weirdly short because a lot of stuff was left out, but that was because it was dedicated to the kids going back to school and (apparently) a conversion class graduating. mr smear was generally cool, he handled the babies well, and i was fascinated by the child-like mentally handicapped guy in front of me who's extremely muscle-y, but was so freaking cute as he kept jumping up and down whenever there was singing and his mother had a really hard time explaining to him that he was too big to join the little kids for their little ceremonies.

...

well, here we are, getting ready for kiddush at the end of the summer holidays, the shabbat between having finished strong at my previous client and looking forward to a new client with interesting potential, having completed the exciting work i embarked on at the beginning of the week...

shehecheyanu vekiyimanu vehigiyanu la'zman hazeh

finishing strong

 now i'm not so sure that walking to acupuncture and back was much better than taking a bus, because by the time i got home my hip was hurting... but the acupuncture itself was another good experience.

i stretched hard when i got home, and ate breakfast, and then all of a sudden i was running late for my last day with my current client.

the work day went as follows: i managed to figure out the final issue from yesterday's testing, and it turned out to have nothing to do with the data or the code. there was much rejoicing! i then proceeded to spend the rest of the day preparing the handover documentation, discovering an issue that required a backfill that sharpened the procedure documentation significantly. i had lunch with my client team, which turned out to be a really good idea because happy hour ended up being cancelled. and i managed to say a proper goodbye to pretty much all the people i have relationships with.

and then... and then i was done. i left my computer and my keycard on the IT guy's desk, and i packed my bag (with the headphones they gave me, i asked my manager the kit-bag question and he assured me i could take them), and i sent a farewell and thank you message to the boss and my managers, and then i left.

it's been eight months, some of it rough, all of it educational, and to finish on a good note with a delivered project on my unexpectedly last day feels amazing.

i came home, picked up mr smear and took him for a walk, which was going great until we had an argument about drinking water in the park, followed by a much heavier fight about him being an asshole about other people's music, which pissed me right off and made me want to throttle him.

we managed to get past the bad vibe about halfway home from there, and arrived in time for dinner and the simpsons.

now we're getting ready to go out, and gd's just informed me that she's going in spite of the fact that her stomach's doing a thing again today 🙄

hopefully it'll be a fun evening.