smooth landing

 today's top stories: gd is rapidly evolving into gfd (gluten-free dragon), and my mother landed safely in tel aviv, and the mongoose is now a father of two!

i wouldn't say i slept well last night, but i did sleep for the most part and, after an initial struggle at alarm time, i was relatively rested and functional. so that was good.

after dropping mr smear off at school, i came home to take care of a bunch of stuff, including grocery shopping with gd* and scheduling a meeting regarding the impact investing from the other day. i'm a bit disappointed that my cousin hasn't responded :/

* an expensive, exploratory shopping for gluten-free products. it turns out that a few days without gluten have had a dramatic impact on her health, not just the debilitating stomach issues she's been suffering from the past few months. we've got to schedule a scan to confirm whether it's celiac or not, but at this point it's clear that it's meaningful. and meaningfully ironic that we've both been complaining about and laughing at non-celiac gluten-free fanatics for years.

i decided it made more sense to work from home until the last minute, so i did. a different coworker gave me a different direction, which i continued working on on the train to the airport, and while waiting for my mother to get through customs. later in the afternoon, we had a conversation that led me to understand that every moment i've spent on this aspect of the project was a complete waste of time as the whole thing's essentially deprecated...

it was an enormous relief to see the update that my mom's plane had landed, and obviously great to see her. we hopped on a train back to tel aviv, on the way booking a car to get the baggage home. something was misconfigured in the car which made it make an awful high-pitched alarm the entire ride home and back (which i dutifully - and angrily - reported), and we took a light rail from the train station to pick up mr smear who'd been hanging with his friend outside the school.

the bus ride back took forever...

after getting my mom settled, eating a late lunch, and getting mr smear onto some homework, i did enough work to figure out that i was wasting my time before heading out with my mom to pick up a few things. we ended up walking rather a lot - we picked up brussels sprouts, gin & tonic, and oat milk (neither of us can drink "barista" versions) - as well as sitting over a coffee (and tea), and then caught a bus back just in time for dinner.

full family dinner was really nice :)

we got the mattress inflated and mr smear into bed (eventually), handled two sets of groceries that arrived quite late, laughed at a bunch of different news items (most loudly over rogan losing it behind trump), and i'm now getting myself ready for bed.