feedback

 alright, let's see what i can remember from today:

i did rest a bit after finally returning to bed, but obviously not enough.

i finished mr smear's pancakes this morning, surprised that they had vegan goat cheese inside. i still feel a little bit betrayed.

mr smear's been begging me to let him use google during his art classes for inspiration. i don't know why it took so long, but i connected all our calendars and set up his schedule so that i could set alerts before and after his art classes accordingly. and evening alarms to go through his browser history with him...

that was significant effort.

once again, i arrived at the office *just* in time for my team's daily. there were issues with yesterday's deployment, and i was briefed on them, and i met a new teammate. one of my client team brought his beautiful two year old giant puppy lab. most of my day was a mix of wasting time trying to get java tooling working for one of the projects, advising one of my teammates (apparently finding the root cause of the issue), tweaking monitoring dashboards, and mentoring a junior in the client team.

then there was the "family day" present. i was very confused when i learned i'd been registered for "fondue" (that doesn't sound vegan), then there was a whole story about whether the dark chocolate was actually vegan or not. and then i had to carry the basket home, which was awkward and heavy (oh, poor me).

i came home early after dealing with a discipline issue with mr smear over the phone - he'd been messing around with homework and gd was getting upset - and spent the next hour gearing up for the call with my client.

the call went surprisingly well. he thanked me for the direct and open feedback, explained the context for the craziness, assured me that we're aligned in where things should be, and informed me that i appear to be having a positive effect on my bulgarian teammates, which i take as high praise.

so that's good, and i feel grateful to be in a position where i have a team (my employer) behind me.

i immediately caught a bus to the mattress store - pausing only to report to the municipality what appeared to be a massive human poop about 50m away that was causing an eye-watering smell all the way to our apartment building - on which there was almost an incident as some big guy with a shit attitude got in someone's face, allegedly for staring at him.

i got to the store just in time, and lay down on the mattress. it seemed less aggressively anti-me, so i confirmed that i was willing to give it a try. the delivery guy arrived, and making arrangements for tomorrow got complicated, but i was pleased when he called me back from my way to the bus stop to ask if he could give me and the mattress a ride home right then and there.

i enthusiastically agreed, and we stopped at a gas station so i could draw the extortion money for the mattress and the delivery, and then we made the switch, and then a worker from the municipality called to inform me that the poop had been taken care of - he sounded traumatized, and sending me photographic evidence that it was cleaned seemed important to him - and mr smear completed his homework with much pride and joy, and then it was shower time [remembers to turn off the boiler because we had cool showers], and then dinner, and reading time / admin time, and a short attempt to rest, and now this, and then who knows?