cross-ay-eyed

mr smear took the graphic novels back to the comics library yesterday, and i couldn't figure out what i wanted to read before my screen time and then... oh, yes, i wrote up my previous day's adventures, and got not-a-lot done before heading out (back) to the office.

i did not focus on my primary task today. i mean, i made some progress, but for the most part i was heavily invested in the distracting work of resurrecting a retired dependency so that i could fix a bug in it that i need to make the project i resurrected yesterday work properly.

and we had two important meetings yesterday. the first was an engineering all-hands that sounded eerily familiar, with zero irony. i had a little trouble with feeling sleepy, but i woke up to ask a question and had the VP come bouncing up to where i was sitting with the mic, and then very much not like my question about how metrics for velocity conflict with demanding accountability in terms of quality.

at least i managed to catch him for a positive chat immediately afterwards :P

i had a meeting in a fridge phone booth a few minutes later, and i realized just as i signed in that i couldn't find my hoodie. so, on the call but muted, i rushed around the office trying to find it, eventually guessing that it had fallen behind the stands where i'd been sitting, and managing (with enormous relief) to snatch it up and find a booth in time to follow everything.

my new manager is cool - i've worked with him before - but it's not clear how aligned we are on the mission so i had to be really careful to raise all my points in a way that didn't feel confrontational. i think i did alright, but i've now told everyone very clearly that i'm hoping to be able to start experimenting with integrating my hackathon solution by next week; both because it gives me a deadline i have to stick to, and because i'm nervously in a race against time to get *my* opinionated solution in before somebody comes and up with something irresponsible instead :P

when i left the office, i called gd back and we got into it about whether or not we can afford a dog, or will ever be able to afford a dog. that had to be put on hold while i travelled to my employer's office by light rail. there was a lot of tension, but we managed to move through it and had a heavy but important conversation about the challenges gd's been facing with language, community and work over the past few years, and how to approach them.

the meetup at the office was pretty good. not only were the talks not boring (i learned a few things about agentic ai and agentic memory), but i made small talk with a guy who turned out to be another ex-saffer (he went to school with one of my cousins' kids) and the conversation ended up going off the rails in our unique saffer way. it made the eavesdroppers (and there were a couple) a little happier about the hardships they're forced to endure :P

i had a good chat with the head of our group afterwards, though i said something in a clumsy way - i'm sure she doesn't remember, but it's bugging me - and then i bussed home just in time to say goodnight to mr smear and have a bit of a chat before he went to sleep, and watch most of another episode of ludwig with gd, and now...

... i dunno. i think i'm too tired to do anything productive, but also not tired enough to go to bed and actually sleep 🤷‍♂️

subversion

 i've just gotten up after a night with almost no sleep, my usual hip flexor discomfort has been amplified severely and i was unable to stretch it out.

the first thing i saw on my phone was a notification to say that my shared ride has started, and as frustrating (and expensive for no reason) as it is to realize that i forgot to cancel my booking for this evening, it's even more frustrating to learn that my booking was captured incorrectly. now i have to wait an hour to call them and try to get them to cancel it without charge...

yesterday was bizarre. i arrived at the office, walked around setting the air conditioners to a reasonable temperature, and then found a phone booth for my meeting with the guy who'd stood me up the previous afternoon. we spent the following two hours together tweaking things and running things, and my very clear takeaway was that anyone who wants to touch their systems needs to do a full team onboarding.

also, i was totally freezing in the phone booth, and it wasn't until i returned to my seat that i remembered that i'd brought a sweater to work 🤦‍♂️

my meeting with the client: before i went up, i commented to the guy next to me that i might well be on my way out. that was the vibe i felt when i sat down across from the client, and it lasted a couple of sentences. and then everything was on its head, as he explained to me what the past half a year has been about from a leadership / business perspective and how me and my team fit in, and what changes are incoming, and how perfectly aligned my team's new mandate is with my personal roadmap.

then we closed out with a pleasant, interesting conversation about the misaligned between architecture and organizational structure and what we could or should be doing.

then i walked out with the strange sensation that either we're exceptionally well-aligned, or i'm being pranked.

i went out to pick up lunch, and ate with the guy who sits next to me, and then grabbed another booth to have a meeting with my manager. it was a different conversation, but not that different. whereas the client had been unsurprised by some of my suggestions, some of them clearly caught my manager off-guard and that was validating.

as much as i hated having to put together and deliver monday's presentation, i learned a whole lot of really important stuff while doing so and it's completely changed the trajectory of my week and how i think about things.

i spent some more time trying to make an AI agent implement metrics responsibly, then came home. i took mr smear out for a short walk, and to draw cash and pick up beers for the evening. on the way i told him all about my day, and when i got to the end he let me know that he hadn't been paying attention and had no idea what i'd said to him. then he told me a story, and when he was done i asked him to repeat it because i hadn't been paying attention. i don't know if he really cared enough to get the message :/

i walked over to my ride's apartment, and away we went to hod hasharon.

half the evening was lovely, half of it was awkward. i had some really interesting, some even productive, conversations. i met some fascinating people. the vegan food only arrived at around 10.30pm, by which stage i didn't care any more. i went deep discussing the second lebanon war, i encountered an older soldier whose sister reminded me that my bnei akiva shevet was emunah. i didn't bother a couple of celebrity heroes of mine, though i did truly want to.

on the way back, i grilled my ride for his aliyah story and was blown away by how different it was from all the other mixed couple stories i've heard. i guess the law doesn't apply equally when you're rich and influential...

i showered, had a cup of tea, wound down and went to bed. i've just got my rental charges cancelled - thankfully - and i've finished my first coffee, and i'm not sure what this morning's going to bring. i'm feeling particularly proud of myself for having thought to shut mr smear's blinds when i got in last night; it's mighty peaceful this morning :P

asshole accumulation

today - post posting - continued with four assholes. i called the jewish agency to find out something for my mother, and was stuck with their hold muzak while running around the supermarket looking for a product that they didn't stock. as i gave up and arrived at the self-checkout, an agent answered and promptly refused to answer my general question because my mother wasn't with me. while i was being pissed off about that, the checkout assistant came over and insisted on interrupting my call to tell me about a special on one of the items i was purchasing, to which i responded sharply "i really don't care" but i really wanted to scream it. the answer i got from the agent was basically that the people in cape town are continuing to waste my mother's time. i tried to reset emotionally, but almost got run over by an irresponsible cyclist as i stepped onto a crosswalk (he was coming up behind me, and decided to go around in front of me instead of behind me. or slow down a moment, as i had right of way. a few seconds later the crosswalk was blocked by an impatient taxi driver while it was still green for me to cross, and he got angry with me for indicating that he was doing something wrong.

later, i'd learn that half the kids in mr smear's class are sick with covid so tonight's lag b'omer bonfire isn't happening, so that was all for nought...

working from the office wasn't unpleasant, though i was very frustrated by the coffee machine situation. not only do people move the pipes between the dairy and non-dairy milks without cleaning them, and leave milk pouring onto the grid our cups are supposed to go on, but there's no decaf coffee anywhere.

my work day was... well, it was successful in the sense that i eventually managed to run the tests i needed to run (and that i arguably should have run weeks ago). it was unsuccessful in that i uncovered even more of a hot mess beneath the surface than i already thought there was. i worked a longer day than usual, and my last findings before stopping for the night stressed me out. i've sent an update to my manager so that he's not surprised, and i'm overall feeling pretty shit about it.

...

anyways. i came home for lunch, primarily because krybabie's widow (what a weird thing to type, even years later) had come over to pick up some stuff my mother brought with her. it was nice to see her, and it seems like she and the kids are doing quite well.

it turns out she recently met up with some old mutual friends, and that they have pictures of teenage me at summer camp, so i've just awkwardly reached out to them to ask if they'd do me a favor and send me a few of them... i don't have much from before i made aliyah, a handful of photos from my party days is just about everything.

...

mr smear once again came home without having done what i asked him, and i gave him the twenty minutes it took for me to get home from the office to rectify the situation. i spent some of the walk home wracking my brains trying to think of an appropriate and effective punishment if he didn't, and i was deeply grateful that he managed to get his assignment off one of his friends and i didn't have to come up with a solution to the problem 😅

dinner was great, as was the evening in general, but he started coughing just at bedtime and i'm hoping he's not doing the covid thing himself. i actually suspect that that's what my last week was about, and that perhaps mr smear was patient zero when we sent him back to school a couple of weeks ago because he only had symptoms when getting out of bed.

...

i don't have energy or bandwidth to be functional tonight. i'm really enjoying starship troopers and slay the spire 2, one (or both) of them will suffice.

somniferous

 i'm making an effort to stay awake tonight. fortunately, after the weekend progress i made on my AI harness i'm inspired to move forward. there's a lot of stuff going on, and i'm definitely learning.

...

i accompanied gd to the clinic this morning, from there were went to the hospital, begged for an in-between in-between appointments appointment, and returned to the clinic to see a doctor who gave gd a referral that formally begs for an in-between in-between appointments appointment. later i received an email from the hospital that says "okay", with no further details.

it's all very confusing.

i was falling apart after we came home, so i made myself a coffee and napped for half an hour, sipping it before closing my eyes and finishing it soon after. i was still a mess for a little while after that, but i eventually managed to sit myself down and dive into the work.

i feel like i did some real work today, even if a lot of it was being told by the AI agents that none of what they said before made any sense :/

i called mr smear after school had ended, and was pleased to hear that he'd found the last missing book. he gave me a bullshit story about not being able to bring home a workbook without bothering the janitors more than he already had, which i decided to let slide...

today was a mix of healthy and unhealthy snacking.

my mom and i took a walk to the immigration lawyers' office for a free consultation. the weather today was weird, and there were a lot of detours, but we arrived on time for a very pleasant meeting, and we were assured that ours is a "slam dunk" of a case should the need to use their services arise.

we returned home, i ushered mr smear into the shower so that i could spend some time on my AI harness before dinner, we enjoyed a really nice dinner, and a smooth bedtime (i resumed reading the colour of magic for the first time in a while).

my brain's a bit foggy. i'm not sure how much constructive effort i'll be putting in, but dammit i'm staying awake.

a tale of two incidents

 yesterday:

i did sleep, but only briefly, waking up an hour or so before our alarms to jump right back into AI cat wrangling. because my brain was on fire imagining all the cat wrangling i wanted to do.

so i began my day putting together a PR for my boss (not my client) which basically said "this is how it's done", and i was relieved to find it merged by this morning, so he obviously wasn't too offended :P

then i rushed off to the 24/7 to pick up mishloach manot for mr smear to take to school, and afterwards gd and i headed to the dentist for the first part of her two-part root canal, which i had to be there for because her dentist doesn't understand a word of english (or french).

[goddamn i love chocolate-covered pecans]

i dropped her off at home and continued on to the office, where i was completely manic and infected a data engineer and my client with my enthusiastic idea for an AI cat-wrangling IDE extension.

and then i ran a test that my cat-wrangling had produced, confident that it was ready and that i'd had good results from the dry runs.

...

i was pretty bored while waiting for missing user permissions to complete the tests we were running in production, so i took care of some other stuff while i waited.

while i was making myself a cup of coffee, an unknown employee began interrogating me as to why he didn't see me at the company purim party that i didn't go to. he obviously thought he was being funny, but at no point did he get the hint that it would be wise to drop it, and in front of HR staff brought it to a point where had i been so inclined, that could easily have earned him a warning for harassment.

then i was brought into a call with my client team for an incident i knew nothing about and had nothing to do with - let's call it incident B - only to be informed, as i was explaining to them that my coffee wasn't working yet, that it wasn't an issue for us.

at that point i realized that i was falling apart, so i finished my coffee and left for home.

on the way home i tried to pick up a frying pan from kikar ha'medina, but i couldn't find what i was looking for, all the while struggling to get hold of mr smear and then threatening him to get his ass home to assist me on a mission to dizengoff.

...

and then i got home, and learned that the test i'd run earlier in the day had led to an incident.

let's call it incident A.

it took me about ten minutes to figure out what was happening, and another five to realize it was my fault. another two minutes to decide how to fix it, at which point i saw that one of my teammates had already pushed a fix and i'd been typing into silence for five minutes.

over the next twenty minutes i was in contact with my teammate but had received nothing from our client team (who were presumed to be dealing with the incident), and nothing seemed to be happening so i rushed out with mr smear and a washing basket that needed returning to catch a bus to the center.

we were halfway there when my phone started buzzing again, and i'd left my computer at home 🤦‍♂️

the bus was packed, with non-compliant riders arguing with the conductors, and a stop too early i jumped off with mr smear and we raced through the crowded sidewalks, scrambled down to the store, where i had trouble finding a frying pan, eventually giving up and taking an expensive induction one.

we rushed through the center to catch another bus home, and when we returned it was to discover, to my absolute horror, that i'd taken our production services down completely by running a test that i had literally forgotten i hadn't reviewed yet.

i cannot believe i did something so utterly irresponsible, i was mortified and humiliated to post the list of things that had been unnecessarily affected, a danger that i would easily have spotted had i checked it beforehand.

while i scrambled to figure out what was happening - i was in a flat panic, and had no idea where to look for monitors or logs* - my bulgarian teammates were quietly working with AI chewing gum and duct-tape and getting things back online.

* in retrospect, nobody does. and there isn't a lot of monitoring or logging going on to begin with...

all i had to offer were my apologies and volunteering to write up the RCA.

i continued freaking out until my mentor called me (i'd messaged him), and he was very reassuring ("if somebody had lost their life, maybe i wouldn't have called you"). still very shaken, i went to bed early knowing that no good was going to come of me getting less sleep.

today:

surprisingly, i did get some rest.

mr smear gave us some trouble this morning - he's been doing the slow morning thing since we moved, and he's been talking back whenever he gets in trouble - but by the time he had to go to school we were all in a better place.

except for gd, who was pissed off at the new frying pan because it's not as non-stick as it says.

(alanis morissette) ironically, the technician for the stove was due to come this morning and the element was heating up fully. fortunately, they called to tell us he'd been delayed and so we rescheduled for monday, which gives us a chance to test if it's really working or not.

the appraiser for the household insurance came back, an elderly man (a biker, i should say) who was impressively professional and efficient.

finally, the technician from the internet company arrived to sort out internet in our in-home bomb-shelter (our bedroom).

it took a long time. it took a lot of assistance from us. at one point he left the apartment, and then returned but forgot to take his shoes off.

he took so long, that i had to stop following him around to join my morning post-incident meeting with my teammates, which was really important because i knew i had to be able to discuss my disastrous fuck-up while looking them in the eyes.

by the time he was done, i was extremely frustrated. firstly, because the wiring isn't what i thought he was going to install, it's simply a single, very long ethernet cable from one end of the apartment to the other, instead of two wall jacks. secondly, because the outlet in the bedroom doesn't fit properly, so it looks terrible and it was squashing the cable he'd just installed, and i had to explain this to him. thirdly, because as relieved as i am that the network appliance in our bedroom is now working well, the speeds we're getting are inconsistent and surprisingly low. finally, because goddamnit when i tell you you're damaging both my screwdriver and the screw by using the wrong bit, fucking stop.

jesus h. christ.

anyway, so gd and i washed the floor, and there's internet in the bedroom, and on that note i left for the office. it was lunch time already, so i had to skip lunch. on the way i caught up with my mother who'd just had an interesting conversation with the new head of the jewish agency in south africa.

i hope something positive comes out of it.

the first half hour at work was fighting with IT network issues.

the next two hours were a complete mess; trying to understand the impact of incident A as a step towards getting started on the RCA, strategizing with a data engineer, and, amongst other stuff, being dragged back into incident B.

i never did get started on that RCA - i spent five hours on incident B, and was somehow assigned to lead a task force and only walked out of the office a little before 9pm.

not only did i bear witness to a member of my client team - the only guy who legitimately knows what he's doing - threatening to quit, and being mollified by the team lead, but at every step of the way i learned more about the system architecture and was stunned by the absurdity of it all. it's shit, deep shit, all the way down.

also, the guy who just left the team last week? he'd convinced us all that the migration i took over was ready. tonight we discovered that it really wasn't.

oh, and i wasn't home to receive my son, who - in spite of a bit of a freak-out because he'd waited at the wrong bus stop on the way home - had managed to take the comics back to the comics library all by himself, by bus ^_^

my "dinner" was two slices of happy hour vegan pizza (it wasn't bad) and a beer, but when i got home i had gd's ramen (with bok choy and a yo egg) and dessert. after assuring gd that if i do lose my client over calling it quits for the weekend (with the rest of the task force backing me) it'll make him look bad, i immediately sat down to get all this down before i jump in the shower and probably climb straight into bed.

tomorrow's a big day, mostly in preparation for taking mr smear to a purim family trance party on saturday. we have no idea what's happening with iran - obviously if things go crazy we'll have to stay home - but whatever happens i'm mostly confident we'll be fine 🤞🙏

compressed

 today was weird. i don't know if it's related to me getting more sleep than usual, but i felt buzzed.

after seeing mr smear off to school, gd and i had a conversation about whether he really needed a new round of therapy or not. i checked in with his teacher, who assured me that he's participating a lot more in class, and communicating much better, even though academically he's not doing so well*. all things considered, i think the incidents from the beginning of the year can be attributed to him adjusting, i really don't believe anything's nearly as urgent as the school team thought.

* did i really need to tell her that if she lets me know where he's struggling, i can try to help him?

i lost my temper a little bit with the support agent who called to request further proof that the stove isn't working properly. as in, in addition to a photo of a quarter of an element clearly not heating up.

gd found my watch strap, but now we've lost the watch charger. she found the adapter for mr smear's keyboard, though! in addition to getting back into his music "homework", just before bedtime he was reading an illustrated harry potter book (the fifth one) and came running into the office to try playing the sheet music in one of the illustrations - and it was pretty good ^_^

i decided to start my work day by going past the hardware store (i picked up a shower head holder, but the other two items on the list were a no-go), arranged for a technician to install an internet point in our bedroom on thursday, then sat down* at a coffee shop for about an hour of work.

* i sat down after a disappointing service experience, being ignored for a while before i could order. then i sat down next to the coffee cup lid and sugar stand, which was close enough to smell the other patrons (one of whom i described to gd as "smelling like a heavy, sick fishy down-there infection", but fortunately out of line of sight of the large homeless guy who charged in demanding that someone buy him a coffee)

i downloaded gd's id thingy (sefach), then had it printed at the art supply store (all-round, it was cheaper than going to the ministry of the interior), then returned home to work a bit.

i snacked and ate too much today. surprisingly, my weight's been pretty stable lately, hovering around 77kg.

i wrestled both with and against my AI copilot today, and spent a lot of time thinking about the AI vampire article i read this morning.

i lost a half hour this afternoon to mr smear's allergy appointment being brought forward a week without anyone contacting me. and then, when i tried calling the clinic to resolve the issue, someone kept lifting the phone and putting it back down again 😡

i discovered that yesterday, when mr smear was in his room with the door closed, he'd been using the browser on his phone which gd has accidentally left unlocked :/

okay, look - it's not alright, but his reaction IS funny 😂

i took a bus to the clinic, had a funny altercation with the security guard (poor guy was only trying to help, but in a clumsy way), and managed to get gd's prescription and authorization sorted out relatively quickly before returning home.

more work, more of the same.

speaking to my mother after she received the email i forwarded her from yad l'olim, understandably and justifiably furious because they're continuing to mess her around, but making out like it's her own fault.

a "family talk" with mr smear, generally going well (explaining to him that integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is looking).

a very nice dinner.

chatting again with my mom, then reading more of the colour of magic to mr smear (he really enjoyed the gods playing dice with rincewind and twoflower), then showering (with the new showerhead holder), and now... getting ready for bed, i guess?

what a day, what a week

 biphasic sleep ftw. i woke up feeling much better than i have in weeks.

the day began with big drama - a couple of weeks ago my mother's aliyah application was again complicated by a new document requirement she's never heard of. she managed to get everything done, and submitted all her documents, and they've just done it again.

i've sent another email to yad l'olim, posted more online, and i'm once again hunting for someone to platform this insane story...

from that drama, to seeing gd off to her blood tests, to a fourth day at work dealing with an overly-complicated data migration.

in addition to generally feeling better about the world (a bit of sleep will do that, i primarily occupied myself with my favorite thing - making things better.i also seem to be doing a decent job of convincing everyone to look at the giant turd we've all inherited as a fascinating adventure in black box land.

it was a long, long day, but with lots of positive stuff. our weekly status with my director went alright. i pitched a wild idea, and two people appreciated their versions of what they thought i was proposing (one of them fully understood), and both options are viable so 🤷‍♂️

i finished up a big piece of work just in time to have a drink with my client team, and then i came home to re-arrange mr smear's bedroom (now he can enjoy the best view in the house), have a great dinner, get mr smear into bed, and now, after writing a letter to a south african jewish publication and catching up on random stuff (windrose looks amazing), and now this post...

i'm just about ready for bed. i almost forgot i'm driving north for a wedding tomorrow (and taking mr smear to his friend in south tel aviv on shabbat) and i was prematurely celebrating my first properly calm weekend in what feels like months.

three for three

 we're in week three of our new apartment, and i'm starting this post in hour three of trying to sleep but tossing and turning in pain and discomfort. my two-week-plus old mattress is causing me suffering, and my lack of sleep is interfering with everything.

and we don't have a couch i can escape to.

...

grocery shopping, electricity shutoff anxiety (fortunately for gd, they started late and finished early)

misrad hapnim, a 10 minute wait (and failed attempts to use their "self-service" machine) for a one minute print job

phone calls there and back: clinic, municipality

client office experience: 100% of the time in a telephone booth, receiving praise from team lead for handling the previous day's deployment like a professional (i thanked her, awkwardly)

miraculously perfect timing for supporting my team between phone calls, because most of the day-long rollout meeting wasn't interesting to me:

receiving a receipt showing that the municipality owes me (so hopefully we'll get our deposit back soon), the representative recommending a pre-approved "forgery" in order to honor a reasonable request from our new landlord, my new mattress is ready for testing but i have to physically get there during their uncomfortable opening hours, the grocery store confirming that they charge differently to what's posted on the website (i'd used a voucher, it got weird)

discussing the past two weeks' organizational weirdness with my religious mentor, and his stunned silence followed by a heart-felt WTF 😂 half an hour writing an email to update my ("my" my) team after scheduling a one-on-one with my client

a bus to my office, pleasantries and small talk, followed by a class on docker that i didn't need to be in

forgery: doc editing and printing issues

on the way home, receiving a rejection response from the local comic publishing house. zero constructive feedback.

arriving home, completing the forgery (same pen and everything), submitting the request

celebrating a letter from yad l'olim with a double-shot of rum and reading its translation to my mother

a delicious dinner, overeating (probably compensating for nothing but healthy snacking all day)

more of the colour of magic at bedtime

trying not to wake myself up before crashing (but it was all for nought regardless)

...

the world is shifting. it's not subtle (even if you're trying to look beyond the hype), and it's fast.

• anthropic’s 7 billionaire founders just pledged 80% of their wealth (because they know what’s coming)
• openclaw: 160,000 developers are building something openai & google can't stop. where do you stand?

overload

 well, i made a thing: short-fuse at the ball (originally titled "prosthetic cinderella"). it's far from perfect (and required a bit of interference with gimp), but i'm nonetheless very pleased with the result ^_^

i did it more as an experiment with notebooklm than anything else, but i'm very happy to be able to share the story in a fun way!

...

i'm still feeling overwhelmed with the move, there's still a fair amount of admin to get through, and at the same time i'm fighting with social security about unemployment, and dealing with a painfully incompatible mattress, and the temporary fix for the balcony door really does seem to be rather temporary, and gd and i have to go to the ministry of the interior in person while she's really struggling with stomach issues, and i have to take care of the authorization for mr smear's next allergy test, and our apartment is still in a state of chaos and gd's pressuring me (gently?) to build the furniture so she can put things away...

mr smear apologized again to his friend today and apparently things are fine. i hope they are. i hope he's learned from this, though i'm very pleased that he knew to try and fix things without us having to intervene... but he's a bit concerned that he's turning into his parents :P

work today was bizarre. it's become very clear that nobody knows what's going on when it comes to architecture and data flows, but everything i've been told has been said to me with authority. i explained to my client team's lead that it seems to be better if i just don't take anyone's word for anything and do my own research...

halfway through the day i took the train (and walked) to my employer's office, where i was presented with a cute lego representation of myself. i spent half an hour first talking to a lawyer about my mother's aliyah case (he blew my mind asking if she was a messianic jew, and suggesting that from the sounds of things the jewish agency might actually be playing games), and then having an argument with someone from social security (apparently, i was about to be paid more than i thought for january and she stopped it, which is good because it could have caused me real trouble).

then we settled in for a workshop creating an AI agent, which was quite interesting in spite of my fatigue, and a birthday celebration for which i got my own vegan cinnamon cake and vegan cream.

[goddammit, the neighbors' super cute dog is on their balcony barking non-stop]

i didn't have time to go to the mattress store, so i returned home for dinner. after reading some more of the colour of magic to mr smear, and "completing" the comic, and posting this... i'm just about ready to try sleeping again. hopefully i'll manage tonight.

shabbos

 the first week in the new apartment is over. it's peaceful, the air-conditioner is on, gd's on the balcony smoking a joint, watching the highway traffic, mr smear's in bed (he told gd that since we've moved, he's excited to go to bed - i suspect it's the combination of his door not closing and him enjoying the night-light view of bright skyscrapers), we've all eaten well (or, possibly, too well) and the apartment's feeling a step closer to home.

gd managed to cook us dinner on the borrowed electric plates, we lit candles and made kiddush and mr smear joined me for benching (he started falling asleep at the end, i guess he totally caught the vibe) before showering, and i just got out the shower feeling pretty darned good and just about ready for bed.

...

it was a busy morning, lots of stuff about aliyah bureaucracy. and old trance friend (one of the doof crew) who's a lawyer called me to give me some advice (gd was bothered by the fact that he barely let me finish a sentence, but i got useful information out of it), and i had a chat with one of my cousins who's trying to help my mom out as much as she can and might be able to connect me to someone who can do or say something.

...

gd came with me to the ace hardware store, first stopping by the pharmacy. we subsequently had to return to the pharmacy because she didn't realize that the protein in the "protein water" she'd picked up was dairy 🤦‍♂️

we didn't find the main thing we were looking for - insulation tape - but we taxied home with a full kit comprising of "babushka" bins (they had toilet brushes inside), a complex-to-assemble stand for fruits and vegetables, a drying rack for dishes that i made sure she wanted but she now doesn't seem to want, and a couple of small things. then i hopped on a bus heading to south tel aviv, but we were on the highway when half of us realized we weren't going the right way.

"i didn't have the energy to yell at you all to get off the bus," the bus driver said when i asked him why he hadn't told us he was taking a detour. [there was a bad bus accident this morning]

after being encouraged to stick with my current mattress for another week or two, i ended up walking quite a ways around the area and happened to find a hardware store with insulation tape!

i grabbed a coffee, caught a bus to dizengoff center, looked around a bit for cheap air tags for mr smear's new key, gave up, took a bus home, and then we went shopping.

our local supermarket is completely shit. our 24/7 is great, but expensive :/

we came home, rested, coffee'd up, and i began building one of gd's kitchen ikea units as our upstairs friends arrived, and gave some much needed help. aside from putting together furniture, and our kids playing nicely for a while (in both apartments), we had a pleasant afternoon of adult discussions until eventually it was time for our respective dinners.

i built another small kitchen unit by myself - taking breaks to help mr smear put together a birthday card for gd - and that was all i wrote.

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.

breaking stuff

i'm finally in bed, it's really late, and i'm panicking because the window guy cut into the beautiful cupboard doors i promised the landlord i wouldn't touch.

and everything is coated with a super-fine dust.

...

the morning was okay, although it turned sour when the extra-insurance people got my details and i got cold feet realizing that there was every red flag in the book that i was being scammed.

i asked on facebook and apparently it's not a scam, just really stupid behavior that trains people to fall for scams.

at least, i hope that advice isn't wrong.

the ikea delivery arrived, just watching the huge guys carrying made my sciatic nerve twitch. and seeing that they damaged a corner of one of our units... and then i had to move them around a bit, and of course my sciatica is now up to a light burn.

my mom's aliyah story now has a new complication, so i guess it was a good day for yad l'olim to ask how we're coming along...

work was busy, but i was also really distracted. and i ended up embarrassed by a couple of PR comments :(i finally got into a flow after the plumber had returned and fixed two small leaks, but then the handyman was coming and i needed to be there to let him into the building.

...

apparently two of mr smear's friends got into an argument and one of them pulled out a knife 😭

oh, and we've agreed to let him visit another friend in a dodgy part of town on shabbat, a friend whose family makes us nervous...

...

the nice "junior" handyman who managed to do the job before the job grew, waiting for hours (doing a massive hardware store run with mr smear) for the window guy to arrive, who assured me there'd be no dust and that the work would only take a couple of minutes.

half an hour later the neighbors were getting upset, and then we said goodbye to him and his workers, and then we wiped and swept and discovered the damage.

good night

off script

 so there was a monday, and a tuesday, before today - but i only really recall the tuesday, so i'm going to work backwards and see if i took any notes...

today:

i did do a little work, in the morning and in the afternoon, but for the most part it was an admin day. on my way to the bank this morning i called the absorption ministry and made an appointment for gd to find out if she has cover for private hebrew lessons. at the bank, i signed off on the documents to open a savings account, one that i have to message them to ask them to deposit money into [i tried to locate a "scratch head" emoji and failed]

i walked to the mall and grabbed a cup of coffee, and then was joined by gd and mr smear and we got into buying his stationery for the fifth grade, which he enters next week 🤯

a religious woman overheard us working with the clerk to try and figure out what the list we had was asking for, and decided she knew better. the clerk was offended ("i'm not a retard!") and she didn't have much to offer that was actually helpful. afterwards, she tried to make smalltalk and i managed to drag gd out of there just as i heard her awkwardly transforming it into a real conversation...

we spent a few hours indoors, with mr smear playing a monster-eye-view of poppy playtime on roblox and promising that it wouldn't affect him.

we all went to the school together to pick up some of his books for the new year, then picked up a couple of things at the supermarket, walking home with our minds and tastebuds blown by the vegan cornetto ice-creams...

we then headed off to dizengoff center to try and find belts and sleeveless shirts for me, and a school diary (one that doesn't suck) for mr smear. we gave up on the shirts, but we did pick up new, smaller (better fitting) shorts for me, and then we went downstairs to the vegan market.

the burgers looked great, but i didn't trust the guy making them with his bare hands. mr smear wanted tacos, which was a great experience even if the filling wasn't amazing. we took barbecue seitan and quiche from the mom & son's random wares, and it was amazing. we made a terrible mess (mostly gd booby-trapping a drink and me and mr smear eating the tacos as best we could), but overall it was a good dinner and we ate too much. (we have untouched leftovers in the fridge)

we ran into some cousins on the way out the mall, hopped on the bus home, watched the second episode (episode 1) of ren & stimpy, showered and brushed teeth (i'm now using an ultra-soft brush, it's a weird experience), and read some more of the neverending story.

yesterday:

yesterday was supposed to be relatively relaxed. what began with me trying to finalize monday's fix (i'll get to that) turned into debugging bigtalk's build scripts, turned into me understanding that he literally built it from the ground up in direct opposition to what i'd instructed him, and in such a way that it would never work. i actually reverted his change before adding some stuff we needed to the original scripts, and every piece of code he wrote for us (or his imagined alternate universe version of us) has now been purged.

everything after lunch and until about 7pm was us scrambling to rescue a cloud machine that a) we have no way of interrogation for what went wrong and b) we had no idea was being treated as operational by our customer (officially it was a preview for testing). to make matters worse, in spite of my loud protests, one of the guys instructed the new devops to take it offline which made it impossible to recover. additionally, before bringing it back up they changed something critical about it, which broke my scripts.

it was as much miracle as effort, but we eventually managed to get it back up and running, and tomorrow i'm going to poke and prod everyone about doing a thorough RCA (even though i've already posted my recommendations).

we watched the second episode of ren & stimpy (to review it for appropriateness), but i started to fall asleep towards the end and i completely passed out while gd watched (until she passed out) the second season of the sandman.

monday:

i had difficulty getting up. i got to work, straight into a meeting with the new devops and incoming devops. and the meeting devolved into very severe unpleasantness - both in terms of cross-cultural communication (the incoming boss said something that our british devops understood as "your idea is shit"), and in terms of both me and the british devops losing respect for the incoming guys before they've even arrived. i ended up speaking to my boss about it, and his response to my saying that the drama "really isn't in my wheelhouse" was to chide me and remind me that in my current position, it's precisely in my wheelhouse.

anyway, at least the boss knows what's happening, and i'll worry about actual repercussions when the time comes.

the day was full of random distractions, but came to a head when a bunch of us sat down to troubleshooting the canadian contractor's code with him. we had no clear direction, but after an hour and a half we'd tracked down the issue and resolved it, which was a huge win because it's been hurting everyone in the team and preventing us from moving forward with a new release.

...

i tried to help my mother with her email issues after putting mr smear to bed, but i needed a nap. so i lay on the couch and set an alarm for half an hour, which i effectively snoozed over and over until eventually crawling into bed around 2am.

the tension

 my morning... did not go well. on the way to the office i talked to my mother about krybabie's wife whose been coerced into paying for and arranging an english police clearance for a child who was four months old when they left london, which makes my blood boil.

on the back of that, a couple of us spoke to lipgirl about the marketing lecture we'd been invited to on wednesday afternoon.

and then one of my coworkers dropped a bombshell - our tech ops manager is hiring someone to do a job that's essentially devops, in addition to "owning" the entire data pipel... nevermind the details. i tried to talk to her about it - this is after giving bigtalk a lecture about how we approach her - but she's a bit weird, and refused to talk face to face, and when i put everything in writing i tried to carefully step around the eggshells (and copied my text to my boss so he'd know what i said and how i said it), but i still managed to step on a landmine.

fuck.

so that happened. our boss has set up a meeting for the three of us on sunday, hopefully we'll resolve this.

it was a very busy day, with a few big meetings, but the end of it saw us quite successfully merging in the work from wednesday night and i got everyone excited about me interviewing the founders and first employees to start putting together our company origin story.

i happy-hour'ed a little too hard (from a sweets point of view), and i shouldn't have brought the knaffeh back home - i ended up being the only one to eat any.

about halfway through dinner one of my coworkers called me, and it took almost an hour to get him sorted out, by which time i was completely exhausted and had almost missed wishing mr smear a good night :(

the last thing that i recall from last night was a back-and-forth with a coworker who inexplicably refused to understand that the thing he did to solve a problem we didn't actually have breaks our deployments.

today so far:

i slept late, and relatively well. i've just finished my first coffee, helped mr smear enjoy his glow-in-the-dark lego that he just pulled out of somewhere forgotten, informed him that his bully's leaving the country before the new school year, and we're getting ready to roll our way to the swimming pool.

aliyah update

 oh! i almost forgot, apparently someone i've been talking to managed to push the right buttons, because the jewish agency informed her yesterday that they're dropping the ridiculous new requirement and all she has to do is show up with a valid police clearance.

i'll believe this story is over when she has a visa in hand, but it's extremely encouraging!

mission

 yesterday:

the surgeon advised me to return only as a last resort, and to book an appointment with a pedicurist instead.

my mom, mr smear and i took a very long walk to the beachfront and down to the shuk. we had a very serious talk about her making aliyah, and i hope she's processing it all because it was a big conversation and i think i managed to get across all the big points.

we took a bus home, then spent the next few hours resting.

in the late afternoon i picked up a car (which was a struggle, it was hot and the directions were shit) and we dropped off the watermelon at our cousins', then met up with them at the cemetery for a quick and personal memorial service.

we then returned to their place for a really nice friday night dinner. for the most part we all had a good time, including gd who'd been very uncomfortable the last couple of times. mr smear slipped back into his usual baby-hating habits, but was mostly good.

this morning:

this morning i discovered that my hip issues aren't necessarily caused by the bed. halfway through the night it got so bad that i left the couch and went to the bed, and slept better.

weird.

we had a pretty relaxed morning (i read asterix, and napped), and then we all went to the swimming pool. the lifeguard wasn't convinced that mr smear should be allowed in the deep end, but we were with him at all times and he made an effort to prove he actually could swim... but i think my mom and gd are right and that he needs proper lessons.

we were there for a couple of hours, we had a really good time, but it started falling apart as we prepared to leave when mr smear got angry with a baby for picking up gd's phone, and then messed around in the shower while i was waiting for him and while the clock was ticking on our car. and then when he finally came out i saw how badly he's scratched up his leg, and i lost patience.

and then, when i told gd that he was in trouble, she lost patience. so it wasn't pretty.

in spite of that, the rest of the afternoon went pretty smoothly (i think, i napped for most of it) and in the evening my mom took mr smear out for dinner and i took gd to south tel aviv for a dinner date. between the green cat pizza and a random hostel bar, we had a really good night ^_^

...

but we're all sad that my mom's leaving tomorrow.

backwards

yesterday:

i got the vscode copilot to help me with i18n. it saved me a huge amount of effort, but got stuck on the translation json formatting...

we had a good parental guidance session.

on the way to the office i picked up the asterix omnibus and another of the french originals ^_^

we interviewed a devops who's currently stuck in thailand, and ended with such a great feeling that it put yesterday's interview in stark contrast and i've submitted my concerns to the boss.

lipgirl planned to do a build-your-own-salad thing, but the supplier said the food would only arrive between 3 and 6pm. a couple of us left for sumsum, everyone else ordered lunch, and by the time we returned the salad stuff had arrived :P

my boss tried and failed to help us set up workshop equipment, and later on, just as my team and i had decided to call it a day, one of our aussie madmen arrived and dragged us into a couple of hours of installations with beers. and boogie sabbath, which (aside from iron man) is becoming a thing for me.

apparently mr smear was a lot more compliant about homework yesterday than the day before.

i finally prepared my presentation after putting mr smear to bed.

i went to bed shortly after an unpleasant argument with a coworker about meeting scheduling...

today so far:

i didn't sleep very well, and i'm very nervous about my neck, especially as i want to join the yoga class this morning. i woke up to a quote for the dell repair and a failed attempt to do something with my health insurance that's led me to realize that i need to have a serious talk with my broker.

while brushing my teeth this morning i realized that the israeli mantra/prayer for resilience is "it'll be okay", and that my mother uses it just fine in south africa but has trouble applying it here.

her aliyah officer (or whatever) sent her an email denying that she'd demanded the documentation she'd demanded.

gotta go.

glassy eyes and smooth brains

i got a lot of work done before finally going to bed around 1am, but we were sent rushing to the shelter around 3am, and after we were finally able to return home i couldn't sleep and so continued to work for the next two hours.

i was bleary-eyed but satisfied by being able to push a clean, working solution before crashing for an hour or so, then waking up and working some more before our parental guidance meeting.

we talked a bit about how tech children communicate strangely, i had an interesting thought but i'm too tired now to recall it :/

oh! i forgot to mention yesterday - i finally got through to someone in the municipality regarding mr smear's art school application: he didn't get in, but he's no. 2 on the waiting list. we'll take it🤞

...

i'm disappointed to learn that there's some unknown issue with gd's cannabis license application. again. i fucking hate these people.

...

my mom discovered that godmother has the original copy of their maternal grandparents' ketuba! and their other sister happens to be visiting for the first time ever, so she's going to bring it back. i'm praying it gets into my mom's hands in one piece 🙏

unfortunately, i was so excited that i reported this piece of information to someone who's supposed to be helping us, and she immediately responded with "oh, nice, so just take that to them then". fuck.

...

i was just telling my boss how i couldn't go back to sleep after the "lame" missile attack in the night (one rocket?) when the pre-alerts went off, so we packed up and rushed downstairs. our sirens hadn't gone off, neither phone nor air-raid, for an oddly long period of time so i ventured outside for internet access to see what was going on and as the door closed behind me there was a massive explosion close by, so i rushed back inside and swore not to do that again.

the day was a mad rush of deployment testing and troubleshooting, being an "onboarding buddy" to a new guy (who's hopefully going to take some pressure off of me personally), and wrangling mr smear.

mr smear pushed hard today, and things got bad before they got better. the day ended on a positive note, but it was long and upsettingly shit until it got there.

...

did i mention the thing on my face seems to be healed (yesterday) already? i'm not complaining, just confused by the speed. and i'm struggling through my beard's itchy phase because i won't shave until i've really sure my cheek's alright, and it's getting hotter.

...

according to iranians, us striking the entrance to evin prison is their equivalent of the berlin wall coming down.

the IRGC attacking qatar (and everything else they're doing) is insane and suicidal, it feels like they're trying to martyr their way out to avoid surrender.

a whole kernel through a nostril

we woke up this morning to another massive barrage. in addition to discovering that our neighbors are also vegan, we also learned about the US strike on the primary iranian nuclear facilities during the night.

now i'm listening to how islamists are attacking churches... they're deep into phase FA, i can't wait to see them FO.

...

yesterday:

after the midnight attacks on friday night we had relative calm. it was a day spent reading (i read about half of danny the champion of the world), we played (or, more accurately, i picked up a copy of webbed and mr smear played a lot). and getting the basis of the frontend for my language project.

in the afternoon, mr smear was invited by his friend to play table tennis, and i joined them and his friend's mother, scouted the area for a bomb shelter, and then enjoyed watching mr smear actually get into playing - giving him breaks by taking turns, and i was quite surprised by how good his friend is!

he came home with us and joined us for dinner, and his mother and i both made the screen-time rules clear. until dinner the two of them legitimately played, amusing themselves in hilarious fashion, and it was a treat to witness it. dinner was nice, but i was concerned about getting him home before mr smear needed to start getting ready for bed (and before the expected iranian attack), so i accompanied him home.

and then felt super awkward when i returned home to find mr smear still eating (demolishing a large pile of corn-on-the-cob), so he could've stayed later...

today:

it was a busy morning, and i was a wreck even though i slept a little better last night (not well, but better). i spent my work day in meetings, and working on something that took a lot more time than it should have, so unfortunately i'm going to have to continue working after posting this.

on a positive note, my mother sent me a whole bunch of documents and images of her parents and grandparents, and aside from being fascinating it gave me what i needed to respond to the people who've offered assistance with her aliyah process.

the saddest reason for a lot of lost time today was mr smear, two days after getting his privileges back, losing them again over homework (and lying to me). so that sucks.

but in positive news, we received the next two illustrated harry potter books (books four and five). it occurred to me that purchasing more beautiful books while we're under threat of getting our apartment bombed might be a mistake, but thinking like that is just silly.

[knocks on wood]

the beginning of week two

 yesterday:

the day began with a massive strike on us (hitting a hospital ward, fortunately already evacuated), so that was a way to wake up in the morning. then we headed to gd's pain clinic appointment, picking up a last-minute insurance authorization on the way (whew!), and coming home just in time for my first meeting.

the first few hours of my work day were occupied with sorting out other people's problems (we have a couple of devops joining us next week, so i might be able to actually work on my own tasks).

around lunchtime, a taxi showed up with a "care package", which made everyone's day (mr smear couldn't contain his excitement over an unexpected haul of vegan treats) and [this evening] gd and i did shots of the really nice vodka to usher in the shabbat, though sadly it appears she's not a fan 🤷

i got stuck into an unnecessarily difficult problem with one of our external devs, and i had just resolved it when i received an urgent call from my boss instructing me to drop everything and head off to our test site. so - after gd assured me that they'd be okay* - another taxi showed up, i hopped in, and after picking up a package from one of my coworkers we headed out.

* that's a big deal, that she was able to accept it so quickly under the current circumstances

about an hour later, we arrived. an hour spent worrying about what we'd do if there were sirens, working on my laptop in the back seat or staring out the window feeling sorry for myself for not having had my afternoon coffee yet.

fortunately, as soon as we arrived i found that we had the facilities to make turkish coffee, so after a brief introduction to the site and preparing a cup i went outside to talk to one of my coworkers. i'd been on-site a total of maybe five or ten minutes when we looked up and saw an iron dome missile fire - i've never seen that with my own eyes before - and moments later the siren sounded.

i'm still amused that the last guy into the shelter brought in a sixpack of beers. genius. 😂

it took a lot more time to prepare a station than i would have liked, but the entire site is full army vibes and aside from learning new and interesting things, it was fun. the first part of my work went pretty smoothly, but then i ran into unexpected issues with my coworker from tuesday's code, and it took forever to find a solution. and not even a good solution. but i pushed on, and eventually managed to get things to a point where i could continue to work on it remotely so that i could stop holding back my coworker who'd offered to give me a ride back to tel aviv.

the ride home was entertaining, but also scary. not only was it made clear to me that we weren't going to stop for any sirens, but my driver was an absolute cowboy and i had to work hard to keep from visibly slamming on the passenger brakes :P

i arrived home pretty late, showered and ate (effectively all i'd consumed since breakfast were two bags of crisps and an energy bar), and then jumped back in to figure out how to continue the work (i'd left knowing it was possible, theoretically).

it was about half past midnight when i finally succeeded, and it wouldn't have been possible without the deep dive i'd done earlier in the day for the external dev 🤘

today:

it was weird waking up in the morning without having been jumped by a siren. the day began well, with a very excited and grateful mr smear getting his minecraft account resurrected.

i did get a little work done in the morning, but i was mostly distracted by random things and the news cycle. then we headed down to the mall (which has taken a fair bit of damage from some of the strikes), where mr smear and i milled around waiting for gd and he badgered me until i purchased death note black edition, vol. 1, which he subsequently completed reading by dinner time; so now we're all watching the anime series together :P

i was feeling very tired by the time we got home. my mother's had some potential success with her aliyah story; she found familysearch.org, and located some really interesting documents which might prove useful.

we helped gd with some cleaning today (mr smear and i cleaned standing fans together, and he helped with the vacuuming too), and aside from two big missile barrages it's been relatively calm.

...

it's 4.30am now, and i started writing this before dinner. but then i was too tired to stay up, but had really bad insomnia for the first time in a little while, and when i finally did fall asleep we were woken by the second missile strike :/