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.

fiero

this move has possibly been the most prolonged intense physical and mental exertion i’ve endured since officer’s course.

[redacted: a photo of me in full fiero mode holding a toilet seat over my head ("why's dad making a war cry?!") taken by gd, who had to be convinced to come back and support me after being thoroughly disturbed by what i was putting my body through. as well as by me accidentally lifting the entire bowl slightly off the floor in a moment of lost composure.]

i just won a tough jiujitsu match against two manky old toilet seat screws that were jammed right up into the holes by an incredibly sadistic or incompetent worker and i may need a few days to recover.

...

gods i'm tired. and sore. and parched. [goes to get some water]

i couldn't sleep last night, i spent most of the night "eating movies" [translated from the hebrew] about the damage, and the costs to fix the damage, and a million things that all need to be taken care of.

by 4am i was out of bed and on a ladder, slowly and methodically dusting all the surfaces of the kitchen. and discovering and cleaning chunks of revolting sticky grime on the top of the cupboards. it took over two hours to get everything clean enough for gd to be able to get mr smear ready for school.

then i dove in to a whole lot of admin, but at the same time posted about the ridiculous new obstacle that's been set in front of my mom's aliyah application. i've spent a lot of the day receiving advice and commiseration from strangers on the internet.

speaking of internet, we have fibre in our apartment now. gd oversaw the installation, and as long as the bomb shelter's door isn't closed we have decent wifi access from all corners. we should probably find a solution for when the door's closed, though.

apparently, begging for the technician to install the hob to be scheduled earlier worked, and he's coming on sunday instead of monday. in the meanwhile, our friends upstairs have loaned us a couple of small plates.

...

the window guy said he'd be here around 10-11am, so i marked my calendar for 2-4pm. he arrived just after 1.30pm.

he kind of fixed the broken cupboard. i'm not satisfied, but the doors are working. i didn't hide the damage from the landlord, but i didn't highlight it either, and he seems okay with it.

he fixed some of the bomb shelter window, but not the sealing strip which was gd's primary concern, and which he somehow convinced her hasn't been necessary since the 90s.

he totally fixed the broken, rotting board under the kitchen sink.

he fixed the kitchen window and balcony door, so they can both now be opened and closed. i say "fixed", but it's more like "patched". good enough for now.

apparently gd *really* pissed him off by insisting on compulsively checking for leaks, when he hadn't touched anything to do with the plumbing, and i'm still giggling at the thought of it. 'cause he was pissed before he arrived, which i'm assuming was a combination of having done a lot more work than he quoted for last night, and making an embarrassing mess, and having to clean up said mess.

that said, by the time he came to pick up his cash he seemed to be in a much better mood.

...

my work day was weird. it's certainly not what i'm getting paid for, but as long as it's short term i'm fine with it. i got reassigned to unblock my "customer" team by doing QA for their latest updates, and

a) it was an extremely long, complicated manual process.

b) i was falling on my nose from before i arrived at work today, and i had to have a lot of coffee to compensate. the lot of coffee wasn't as effective as i'd hoped.

c) i had a mojito at happy hour. half an hour later i got a little work done, and then had to bail before i passed out at my desk.

...

our neighbor's eldest came downstairs to take mr smear to get his first ever house key cut. now i need to find out about smart tags for android phones...

...

[yawns]

[gets more water]

i figured out how to update my cibus card on wolt, put up shower curtains, reported the courier for leaving the food without so much as knocking on the door, and we ate a huge hummus meal (for the second time this week) with both mr smear and gd enjoying the potato kubeh just as much as i did. then i went around the apartment replacing toilet seats.

i'm not 100% convinced that the seats i got are good, but they're definitely better than what we had.

[suddenly realizes he was supposed to take the old toilets seats out the building, they've been sitting outside the front door for hours]

[washes hands on return, hands are so messed up that washing them hurts]

once that was taken care of, and mr smear had been put to bed, i climbed in the shower and between the shower curtains, the shower head holder, the hot water and the good water pressure, i had a proper, decent, pleasant shower for the first time in... a very, very long time.

though i did feel a bit faint a couple of times.

now everyone's in bed, i've posted this, and i think i'm about ready to bundle up and get some rest.

jalapeño-powered

 my knees are threatening every time i get up, and my lower back's sore, and my neck's been giving me trouble on and off today. hello, mid-forties.

...

i'm very excited to report that before leaving the apartment this morning, i was able to complete the work on my side project's auth flows, and i'm hoping to have the whole thing essentially ready to roll out before i begin my new job on monday!

our first stop was dropping off the first challah-peño at the bakery. we're looking forward to hearing their review, it seemed like the wife thought it was good :)

gd and i walked to the light rail and made our way to the school, where mr smear was waiting, alone, playing with one of the school cats.

i thought he was allergic to cats? i don't know anymore.

we walked to our cousins, with gd stopping by the pharmacy on the way and mr smear and i sitting down at a coffee shop so that i could have a coffee and he could eat his lunch, then show me some really funny drawings he's been working on.

lunch was long, and mostly really nice. our cousin appeared to be more restrained that usual regarding overriding our parenting, and i think a lot of what we said and did really pressed her buttons... but all-in-all it was a pleasant afternoon.

unfortunately, gd had been getting more and more uncomfortable because of the cold, so the beginning of our walk home (we couldn't catch a cab) was a bit rough until she warmed up a bit. mr smear and i discovered jalapeño pretzels on the way home, which are really good.

after we got home, it was time to bake another challah-peño for ourselves (that's a lot of carbs for one day), and while we waited for them i caught up with the class whatsapp group which had gone a bit off the rails over the course of the day, which led to some important-yet-fun family conversations.

over dinner and after, we watched most of the first episode of the a-team, which we apparently tried to watch with mr smear before (but i can't look up "a-team" on my blog) - mr smear was skeptical at first, but once it got going he was all in :)

after everyone else went to bed (around 11pm), i completed my (relative) speed run through botopia, and now i'm sitting with my chamomile getting ready for bed.

family ties

 i scrambled to get some work done this morning before we left, but i'm not sure how much i achieved because at this point the morning seems very far away. i know i took care of some admin stuff, and mr smear built something cool in blockbench and we were all super excited by it.

then we headed out to herzeliya. the old age home was a bus and a short walk away, and we arrived in good time. it was sad to see the birthday boy (99!) and his wife so out of it, but it was really nice to spend time with some of the cousins and meet the newest addition (she was born three weeks ago). it was a good morning.

getting back to tel aviv was a bit of a story, a stark reminder of how good our public transport is compared to anywhere else in this country. and the train station we were planning on getting a rav-kav car from was closed for renovations, so we bailed on that plan and i went to the office.

i was only in the office for four or five hours, but it felt like a really long four or five hours. at least there was a nice leftovers-lunch of build-your-own falafel, apparently to celebrate the new quarter. i spent half my office time making an effort to not physically smash my own head into a wall, but eventually made some progress and walked out with two out of three of my goals achieved.

sadly, the third goal is the biggest and i'm still not sure where to begin :(

i also got good feedback from a coworker, who was pissed off that we'd both been instructed to work on the same thing and had duplicated efforts - he apparently preferred my solution, so he's co-opting it. that's nice.

i eventually left around 7pm and did some grocery shopping, then came home in time to sit with my family while they ate dinner. mr smear had a very successful day at his jiujitsu lesson, in spite of himself and his misgivings (he walked off the mats) he got a hold of himself and climbed back in. this is big stuff for him, and we're really feeling good about the whole thing.

...

HUGE news! gd's just been granted her license for medical marijuana, so we're off tomorrow morning to try and figure out how to use it ^_^

this is great for a number of reasons, not least of which because we're struggling with the costs and this will bring them down considerably.

on a related note, though, and a troubling one - she's been developing a really bad cough the past few days. i hope it's going to pass...

...

i was supposed to get some more done this evening, but i just can't. so we watched some more of the animatrix, and now i'm faffing around until antibiotics time. tomorrow's the last of the course, hopefully i'll stop feeling so shitty soon.

almost there

 my neck/shoulder thing's still going, but much calmer. on the other hand, my stomache was doing a thing this morning and i - thinking i just needed to fart - almost pooped myself today while bussing home with my son and carrying a whole bunch of heavy grocery bags. fortunately there was no incident, but i wasn't sure until we got in to safety.

mr smear's back in school as of this morning, and i must admit that it's a bit of a relief.

an unlikely-looking mom from his class turned out to be a burner. i found myself referring to my heavy party days as "when i was a kid" and stopped, horrified, by what had just come out of my mouth.

i'm still mildly disturbed by it.

aside from  school drop-off and pick-up, and grocery shopping, i spent the majority of my day writing an article triggered by gd and myself agreeing to stop watching power slap: road to the title this morning. there're some people on that show who should be getting real help, not being encouraged to hurt themselves and others for something that really isn't a "sport". it's a game, certainly, with rules... but as hard as they may try to legitimize it i just cannot consider it "athleticism".

i don't know why writing that took so long. i guess the asides to look things up were more distracting and rabbit-holey than i thought.

speaking of which, i was today years old when i learned the original cherokee story of the two wolves.