adrenaline dump

 i barely slept last night, and i woke up absolutely exhausted. so much so that i thought i might literally be sick. but i revisited the messages, and the advice i got from our friend, and i effectively scrapped my original, well-thought-out but ultimately combative response and made nice, and the response we received was reciprocally positive. i also got a very positive response from the new landlord, when i was being cautious because i know he's not asking anything that isn't standard.

so this morning was a huge relief on that front.

gd and i did the grocery shopping, and then i hurriedly took photos of our big belongings for the mover (i really felt like i was casing my own joint), and continued adding on to the list of things that need doing, then i had to leave for work in the rain, only once on the way realizing i needed to be working from my employer's office.

i called our kibbutz cousin to wish her a happy 70th birthday along the way, then walked in to the office with a dripping umbrella (and nowhere to put it) and tried to warm myself up with a sequence of hot drinks.

i managed to make some progress in understanding the data pipeline project, but i had a lot of trouble staying focused. eventually i got up to take a walk and pick up an early lunch, and sync with gd along the way, who'd been dealing with a bunch of stuff herself.

after lunch, and a long chat with a kibbutznik coworker who travelled africa extensively in the 90s, i finally sat back down for an hour of focus-time. that was when i realized that the chairs in our office are the same as in the wework that i suffered in a couple of years ago. it got so bad i had to move to a couch.

both before, and after, moving the couch, i was having a lot of trouble keeping my eyes open. but i did learn some important stuff. i have to say, if it wasn't for the combination of half-decent documentation and ai i don't know where i'd be right now.

then it was time for the final session of the weekly agentic courses i've been taking. i understand what was being taught, but me and the tools did not get along. when things calm down i'm going to get back in the ring with opencode and ollama and see if i can get them to play nicely. in the meanwhile, no matter what i did - mostly trying to copy and paste the prompts that everyone was doing fine with - my ai agents were playing dumb and i couldn't get anything done.

it was a relief to know that as frustrated as i was, i wasn't the only person in the class, but i think that there might only have been two of us...

my brain was cooked by the time i got on the bus home, and i put on some psytrance and tried to get in some meditation time. it was working, my mental state was stabilizing, when a bunch of big, brutish bus conductors stormed the bus to check our tickets. aside from telling myself "this is fine", i didn't think much of it and carried on being in my head, but a short while later i started hearing strange sounds (the wrong kind of strange) and i paused the track to discover that one of the thugs was having a fight with the bus driver, a big, elderly man, and for too long it looked like they were about to come to blows.

eventually their fight climaxed (to my knowledge) with the bus driver confronting the conductor to take a photo of his badge, and that almost got physical, and then when the conductor asked him his name he responded, in a heavy israeli accent, "james bond".

and then we were all treated to the two of them calling their bosses at the same time to report each other, each one telling a different story and none of us having any idea what had actually gone down initially.

i got off the bus a stop early, even more on edge than before i got on.

i came home to a pile of dishes that needed doing, and i was going to work through mr smear's history test studying with him but he informed me (and it was later confirmed) that he'd actually completed the test earlier already. so we sat down to do his upcoming literature homework, which is the story of pompeii.

it - took - forever. and i honestly felt bad for him, because the language was very difficult (lots of dictionary lookups for me) and every time he got into it he'd start talking about it in wonder, or making jokes, or going off on tangents about things in the text, and on the one hand i really wanted to encourage him engaging in the text but on the other, we had a limited amount of time to get through it :(

we paused for dinner, and then resumed after, and i'm very pleased to report that the second half went much faster. i made sure to give him some encouraging words when i said good night after that, and he seemed pretty pleased with himself.

i was falling asleep myself by that stage, but i still had to shower. so i did, and then i wasn't feeling quite so tired any more. it's now an hour later, i have a ton of stuff to do, but i have to make sure i catch up on some sleep because tomorrow's also going to be a high-pressure day.