spinning

 it's the middle of the night and i'm having trouble sleeping, but i did sleep a bit and - surprisingly - without the mattress topper i'm hurting less.

i woke up a short while ago, and have been lying in bed with my mind in a spin about mr smear's new school, and the sonnet comics, and spoken word...

...

i accompanied mr smear to the school in the morning, he insisted on taking the light rail. it takes a lot longer than the bus, but he much prefers it... i dropped him off, dropped off a form with the secretary, and on my way out the building bumped into an old friend whose daughter's in the same school! i only found out in the evening it was his birthday, but that served as a good excuse to determine that i still had his phone number :P

from there i went to the allergy clinic, and almost cried when they told me the next possible date for mr smear's dairy challenge is mid-december.

from there i headed to the office. i had an interesting and positive chat with our tech ops manager, and then got into work early.

i can say that my two primary objectives for the day were, for the most part, achieved. the first was supporting my coworker and getting my own part of the work done, the second was shutting out anything that wasn't the first part. i wasn't 100% successful on that score, but i was pretty successful nonetheless.

...

around lunchtime i realized that i needed a face-to-face with the school councillor, who refuses to communicate over anything other than email. so i ducked out and went to the school, and lurked around her office until she (luckily) appeared. we had a quick chat, put faces to our names, and she introduced me to the principle who laughed at me for being around so much this week :P

unfortunately, it doesn't look like mr smear will be able to get into the music track unless he's a student of a particular music school; and it's not clear to me how much that's going to cost nor precisely which music school that is because there're apparently a number of the with the same name (O_o)

...

i'd asked mr smear to wait for me because i was already at the school, but he was champing at the bit to get himself home on his own. i took the opportunity to interrogate him about his day; there were some minor incidents, but according to him he handled them well. i guess we'll see ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

additionally, i spoke to the woman in charge of the self-sufficiency group that's an alternative to the scouts, it sounds amazing but i'm not sure how gd will handle their approach.

...

by the time i left the office, my coworker had almost made good on his delivery that he'd assured everyone in the morning would be ready before lunch. and i'd managed to lay the groundwork for some big changes coming in. i arrived home absolutely exhausted, just in time to help mr smear and his friend make actual plans. gd - in spite of her neck still being in a horrible condition - made delicious vegan pizzas and his friend joined us for dinner.

it was relatively late by the time mr smear got to bed, and gd and i followed suit soon after.

doing it wrong

 i barely slept last night, (and) my lower back's messed up. gd's in an even worse state.

we got up at 6am in order to get mr smear to his new classroom by 7.30am. gd forgot that his dairy challenge was scheduled for wednesday, and gave him an antihistamine, so now we have to postpone that and it's usually months before there's a slot available.

gd wasn't able to come with to his first day in the new school.

he was very awkward, but the general vibe and other parents were cool, the school is (as is to be expected) completely different in every way. but some of the adjustments are hard. and me having to handle the admin side of things, and then walk into the office only to realize someone cruelly scheduled an interview on the first morning of the school year, broke me.

it didn't help that there was little oxygen in the room - i really don't handle the meeting rooms well at all.

i left the hour and a half interview and went straight back to the school to pick up mr smear, and then spend more than half an hour waiting in line for his books. then i taught him how to open his locker (i'm sure it'll be a struggle for a while, it's an old-school combination lock) and we went to the light rail together.

and then i got off at my stop and let him go the rest of the way home by himself for the very first time. that wasn't stressful at all.

the next couple of hours was mostly spent getting the team aligned with our new priorities, and then i went into another interview. more interesting than the first, but i still had trouble staying awake by the end of it.

the last hour was torture. and i think i made one of the new guys feel bad. i'm pretty sure i'm making a bad impression on everyone lately, because i'm just burned out and every interruption has become a thing and i'm finding it really hard to display a positive attitude.

i'm fucking tired.

but i'm also tired because i have to handle all the new-school shit on my own, which includes the parent groups as well as figuring out how to get mr smear into the music track, which until today we had no idea required a history of formal lessons.

godsdammit.

anyway, at least mr smear is happy so far. on the other hand, our friend's daughter / his classmate decided not to leave the school, and is apparently deeply regretting it.

just before dinner, i managed to get in touch with someone in his old school who didn't register for their book program, so he took over mr smear's books and i'm grateful that it didn't cost us double.

...

there's some huge insect or something that was flying around our living room earlier, but it hasn't shown itself since. i'm going to bed now. i hope those two statements don't clash at any point.

interrupt

yesterday began with a fun find - i didn't use up my food allowance, so i purchased a voucher with it. as usual, it took a few steps to add it to my wallet, during which i discovered that one of my phone numbers wasn't connected to my account. when i did that, i found that my first israeli employer had gifted me two vouchers on my other number that i'd completely missed! the big one's link had expired, but i got on the line with their customer service and they reactivate it for me ^_^

so i basically found some money that had been stuck in the couch since 2023!

...

the story of yesterday was basically me starting to do things and almost immediately being interrupted and pulled in a different direction. it was frustrating, and constant context-switching is overwhelming.

to make matters worse, i was planning on taking sunday off, but now i've got interviews lined up for sunday and monday, some important stuff on tuesday, and mr smear's dairy challenge on wednesday, so there really isn't a good day next week that's worth taking off...

[shifts it to the following week]

i felt stretched thin by the time i got home last night, we had dinner, showered, and i read a little of the neverending story to mr smear (and gd)...

... and then i got back to work for the next hour or so :(

i spent the following hour or two trying to understand crop marks for my comics and playing slay the spire, slept kind of alright, and now i'm gearing up to take mr smear to the extra-mural fair at the school.

a big bigtalk talk

 it's the middle of the night, i've just spent an hour or so playing slay the spire and minutescape (and leaving the following review for the latter):

after three hours, i don't know whether i recommend this or not. on the one hand, it feels like there's a story incoming, and it has a certain meditative quality to it (if i play late at night it's like a lullaby with achievements). on the other hand, i honestly can't tell whether i'm getting better or whether my improved times are just a combination of bonuses and luck, and it feels like a really, really slow grind either way.

otherwise, it's bothering that my eyes are still quite irritated after a week of the drops that i was given for five days.

...

after seeing mr smear off this morning, i went to the hospital where they printed out his most recent allergy test results, then took those to the clinic to request authorization. then i returned home, grabbed my gear and headed to the office. the morning was a hot mess, which included welcoming the new english devops, syncing with my boss*, arguing about scope with bigtalk in front of the new guy because he insists on not understanding how to work with others, and juggling a bunch of support requests from all over the place.

* about bigtalk, and my own plans. it was awkward to realize that he'd joined the meeting while on vacation in greece - i hadn't noticed he was on vacation, but he insisted on continuing because he knew that i wouldn't have set the meeting if it wasn't urgent and important - but we're clearly aligned on what's happening with bigtalk. and his feedback for me and my own intentions was very positive, so that was nice.

gd and i had a parental guidance session in the middle of the day, and it wasn't at all easy. mainly because we have very different ideas about screen time and socialization; i'm worried about undoing our progress with mr smear by fuzzying the boundaries, even while i don't think giving him more "holiday" is a bad thing.

i was surprised that he hadn't asked me for the next one piece volume today, until he sent a video he'd made in flipaclip which i'd forgotten i'd installed for him. i watched the video on my way to pick up lunch, and it was so well done - albeit eerily gen alpha - that i giggled helplessly the whole way out the building. i felt compelled to share it with some of my coworkers, which led to potentially bringing in another coworker to the game hacking fold :)

the next hour or two were more of the same from the morning, and then i left early to get my hair cut. i literally passed out in the chair while the hairdresser worked, and aside from one thing i needed him to fix it seemed to go well.

on the bus home i had to work to solve a weird networking issue, and a little bit when i arrived as well, but after taking the last tortit ice cream from the freezer (and having to share it with mr smear, who'd previously asserted that he didn't like it any more) and jumping in the shower, we had a great leftover dinner (more of gd's not-onigiri) and finished watching stargate (which we all thoroughly enjoyed).

i read some more of the neverending story to gd and mr smear after he finally got into bed, after which i soon passed out myself. and then woke up a couple of hours ago.

near misses

 i arrived just in time for my appointment, which started on time, and i felt attended to by the neurologist and validated (especially regarding the mild narcolepsy concern). the tests she did before referring me to a proper sleep doctor were fine, although i was a bit uncomfortable with the fact that she warned me that her foot nerve test would be ticklish and it wasn't.

she then handed me a referral and a prescription, i went downstairs to the pharmacy and barely had to wait before picking up the meds and walking out to hop on a bus.

...

the meds were pregabalin. what followed was gd freaking out (for hours) that i would take it regardless of her warnings (we've been having a long-running fight about trust issues that have nothing to do with me), and she sent me the following:

1. lucy thought her prescribed pain drug was safe

2. lyrica is another brand name for pregabalin

3. pregabalin side effects

hard pass.

...

the work day was alright, but a highlight was having the conversation with my boss and coming up with a couple of satisfying strategies. i'm still not sure what bigtalk is up to, i really hope he delivers something soon.

i left the office early to go to the dentist. on the way, the bus driver slammed on the brakes to narrowly avoid running over a child that had run across the street. i'd been facing the back with my headphones in so it took me a little while to figure out what had been going on, and a part of the drama was that one woman was yelling at the bus driver while he was still freaking out that he'd almost killed someone. before getting off i took the time to thank him for his quick response and to assure him that he didn't need to pay attention to people who don't know much about life.

the dentist experience was better than last week (same dentist), and i feel like he's done a good job. he's also reassured me that as things stand i don't really need to worry about root canals and crowns, which is an enormous relief.

on the bus ride home i had an awkward conversation with an american woman who were scarfing down a pizza; i asked them to please be careful because dairy allergies are a real thing and she responded sympathetically, but with an unexpected interrogation when i just wanted to move on to the back of the bus...

when i got home read a bit more of the neverending story with mr smear before dinner. dinner turned into a massive fight over my inability to not eat the food on my plate (which was too tough and chewy for my new filling) and then over my family bullying me about my mr. burns-level sensitivity to nail filing.

so that happened. by mr smear's (late) bedtime we were okay, at least. then i hopped into a meeting to coach a coworker on a deployment, which went on until almost midnight.

...

right, it's been a pretty relaxed morning (minus the trust thing over the meds again) and i'm off to pick up a mystery package (probably a book).

history unfolding

 not gonna lie, it's hard trying to figure out what all this means, but a lot of it seems amazing and is almost too good to be true! at the same time, i'm not not to think of the casualties so far, a few residential buildings brought down and while relatively low numbers of dead and wounded so far, still a whole lot more than we're okay with :(

spending lots of time in the shelter hasn't been too terrible, though gd seems to be developing an allergy to something down there :/ and there's a really loud autistic kid. but for the most part, we're just doing our thing, singing along when the kids sing and mr smear has taken to pulling out his sketchbook and doing cool stuff.

...

it wasn't clear whether our pharmacies would be open this morning, so it was a relief when we got to both of them. i was a bit pressured for time, and ended up taking a taxi and then running to get to my neurologist appointment (for the insomnia), which turned out to be the appointment that i'd moved to the end of july 🤦‍♂️

anyway, getting there early worked out well. the procedure (removing something from my cheek) was quick and only incredibly painful for a moment, but it didn't stop bleeding for a long while (they wanted to avoid using stitches) and my hand went numb from pressing onto the wound.

anyway.

mr smear apparently behaved well during his zoom class, and aside from one dramatic homework moment (which really wasn't as bad as the previous times) he was cooperative and did what he had to do.

for me, it was a difficult work day to get into, but i did put in a few hours and by the end of the day did get the main job done.

...

i also had a productive conversation about my mother's aliyah with an ex-saffer who works in the absorption ministry, as well as sending off a request for assistance from yad l'olim. the more i think about my closing paragraph, the more pleased with myself i become:

Any assistance you're able to provide will be greatly appreciated, we have been deeply distressed for years now that she is unable to come home. As someone who is financially secure, I am happy to provide any guarantees she may require to satisfy the authorities that her aliyah will be successful. As an officer of the IDF and who is currently working in our defense industry, I am happy to provide any guarantees she may require that she is not an undesirable immigrant.

...

i'm now very tired (i mean, i haven't stopped being tired since friday), and i'm a little nervous about sleeping with the wound not yet healed, and i'm a lot nervous about being woken in the middle of the night by more rocket attacks... but on the whole, our army and intelligence are doing us proud to an unimaginable degree and it looks like the future i've been fantasizing about since last year may actually be coming to pass right before our eyes.

it's very hard not to get stuck into the news loop. i'm trying and failing to tear my eyes away, but we're literally watching history unfold.

doing the thing (overeating)

mr smear helped me clean the window poop this morning. i sorted out a phone bill this morning. i booked mr smear for a dairy allergy challenge in september, and gd for a pain clinic consultation next week. i listened to some more of american gods.

i complained about the company breakfast, which was anti-vegan for the second time this week. then i ate four slices of bread, right before being reminded that we were being taken to an expensive lunch before they pitched us their services*. i ate a lot of really good food.

* we were pleasantly surprised and impressed by the expert recommending a competitor's solutions when he realized theirs wouldn't cut it

overall, it was a successful work day, but it included us making a decision that might well see us losing quite a bit of sleep in the coming week.

i got home in time to listen to mr smear practice on the keyboard, and do a good hebrew reading, and verify that he knew where to look in the book for his upcoming open-book science test.

it looks like we're dealing with dust mites :( gd and i have both gone over a lot of surfaces, hopefully we've gotten through the worst of it.

after shower / bedtime / lots of talk about mr smear's new/renewed interest in 3d modelling and game design (and me installing ableton live because the cubase trial is already over), i settled down to work on the language project and have been jumping between that (making good progress) and youtube/minesweeper since.

now it's after midnight, it's probably a good idea for me to head to bed soon.

almost restful

yesterday:

we all went out to pick up pillows (the ones we bought a few weeks ago are expensive but shit), a bunch of nature store groceries and treats, and then "opened a table" at the hummusia. it was great.

but all the while we were on the clock, trying to make arrangements to get mr smear and his friend to cinema city to see a minecraft movie (in english with hebrew subtitles, as they instructed, because his friend's trying to learn english and they both agreed that it's always better to see a movie in its original language 🤣)

we caught the bus home just in time for me to be able to pick up the first car (our "usual" vehicle wasn't available), figure out how to start it (?!), pick up the boys and get them there just in time, and only almost taking a wrong turn once. i turned the wrong way for parking, though, and we ended up having to walk quite a way... his friend's mom had organized the tickets which were supposed to include concession stand items, and figuring that out when they were already running a bit late was stressful.

i eventually got them seated, then headed out to the car to get it back before the reservation ended feeling somewhat liberated by them being okay and somewhat nervous about them being alone (i was thinking about the off-chance of mr smear somehow coming into contact with dairy)

i drove back to the car's parking spot, parked it, and had just left the building when the sirens went off - a houthi attack.

good grief.

i managed to get into a bomb shelter nearby, one full of extremely loud neighbors, while frantically talking to mr smear's friends parents and explaining that they were alone in glilot but that it was probably okay (because the theatre should be a protected area). then i walked home, grabbed a cup of tea, and began the journey to the second car, which was much futher away.

just before arriving there his friend's mother called to say that she'd called him, and that he'd complained that she was disturbing their movie :P

i drove back to cinema city, found a closer parking, and got to the theatre just as the two of them were walking out, full of enthusiasm and joy ^_^

it took a while to get out of there, but it was all good spirits and they decided that mr smear should go to his place for the evening. the drama that followed was him refusing to take stuff for the night (insisting that he didn't want to sleep over), even though he eventually did end up sleeping there.

god knows if he brushed his teeth. i know for sure he didn't shower :/

gd and i made kiddush, ate a very simple dinner, and watched the rest of nightcrawler (meh. also, have i seen it before? but mainly meh - it's a good movie but not something i'm ever in the mood for)

today:

it's weird waking up without mr smear at home. not unpleasant, but weird. after much not-much-ing (including a fair amount of slay the spire), gd and i took care of the humungous pile of dishes, and around lunchtime i called mr smear and heard that the parents were out and that he hadn't eaten. he was "peckish", he told me, but not hungry.

i walked over there (it's a half hour walk) to pick him up, and arrived in time to find them being fed. i ended up being coerced into staying for lunch and extra coffees, while the kids continued with their screen-time marathon, and the adult conversation was excellent and ended in me passionately describing the magic of shakespeare's sonnets to people who really appreciated it.

after that, i finally managed to extricate myself and my boy, and we were off on our way home. in very good spirits.

...

right until i explained that due to the excessive screen time, there would be none until dinner (which at that point was only an hour or two away). what followed was pretty extreme, not just the fighting over screentime and rudeness and consequences, but also me having to physically drag him half the way home.

it was all just fucking awful.

there were big feelings and strong words and angry silences. also a couple of funny moments, but they didn't last. i explained to mr smear that we're going to mark today - the 10th of may - as the last day that he gets away with the bad attitude.

i didn't know whether gd would be supportive or not, but it only took her a minute to realize what he was doing and how and we agreed whole-broken-heartedly that real measures needed to be taken. so while he showered, i figured out how to block specific sites on the computer, initiated an account deletion for roblox, deleted almost all the games of the ps4 (except for my games) and unsubscribed from their plus program, and disabled his access to our steam library.

it's cold turkey time.

there was still some lingering nastiness over a very quiet dinner, but afterwards we all had a family talk and it really feels like we got through to him. in addition to everything else we discussed - and we discussed a lot of stuff - i instructed him to start working on a gratitude journal, which he did with gusto.

bedtime was smooth, and pleasant.

post-bedtime? gd and i are absolutely drained following all the drama. it was a beautiful, restful weekend that was marred by car rental issues, terrorism and a massive parenting failure, and it's pretty hard right now to focus on the good stuff. i'm going to go practice that now.

gurgle splat (and a review of our son)

 i did get a (literal) couple of hours' sleep before my alarm went off this morning. most of them, anyway.

mr smear was great this morning. he was rewarded accordingly, with multiple reminders that it's a special treat. gods help us.

the skin under my fingernail is splitting again. this is the third or fourth time since winter started and i'm so over it.

gd is very much over her damaged toe, but she insisted on not going to the clinic and instead going to her sewing lesson ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the work day was a struggle and a half, it was very frustrating and a lot of what i had issues with made me feel rather dumb. otherwise, i had a couple of good syncs with coworkers, i finally got to sumsum for lunch (one of the syncs in question, fascinating talk), and my stomach gave me trouble pretty much the entire day. also, i'm regaining weight... i have definitely not been eating responsibly.

...

in the late afternoon gd and i met with the guy who did mr smear's psych evaluation for a feedback session. it was very comforting hearing that we've already got a good understanding of his abilities and his struggles, though it's heartbreaking that so much of his hardship is trauma response, primarily from immigrating and bullying (but also his fear of coming into contact with dairy).

we've been given some helpful recommendations and we'll continue doing what we can. and the school has absolutely no validation for medicating our child.

...

i left work pretty late, but got to enjoy some of my leftovers dinner (i avoided tonight's pizza) with gd and mr smear, and after we got mr smear into bed the two of us watched about half of john wick (neither of us have seen it before). and then i got back to working, after forty minutes deciding that i'd had enough.

i suspect that tomorrow's going to be a reckoning of sorts.

bad language

i slept a bit better last night, but still tossed and turned a lot.

mr smear was off school today for shushan purim, and i left for my blood tests, which got off on the wrong foot because i couldn't register my arrival, and i waited impatiently for very slow people before finally getting to counter and discovering that i'd been using mr smear's card instead of my own :/

fortunately the wait for the blood test wasn't long. the drawing itself was a bit unpleasant, not terrible but not good - the guy left the needle loose and it was mostly hovering around a 90° angle. then i went to the pharmacy, where i learned that one of gd's prescriptions was incorrectly entered into the system, and then back to the receptionists to find out that the message i'd received regarding mr smear's therapy authorization was meaningless.

anyway.

i got home, and gd and i confronted mr smear about his hebrew teacher's report. we were shocked to discover that mr smear hasn't accepted his new reality at all, and that he's still been holding on to the idea that he doesn't need to learn hebrew, that he's going to give up being jewish and go live in america.

what followed was a long and brutal affair, but eventually we seem to have gotten him to understand that a) we have nowhere else to go and b) you can't give up being jewish and c) without hebrew and good school grades in general he's not going anywhere, least of all america.

good grief.

work today was alright, it began with a chat with lipgirl about south african violence (i didn't know she'd worked as a stewardess and had naively walked from a hotel to a mall in johannesburg), then a fight with file.pizza as an alternative to scp (but it refused to begin downloading on multiple attempts), then a very pleasant walk on another beautiful morning to the hardware store to pick up a modern flash drive.

the rest of the work day (and another hour or so after mr smear went to bed) was spent getting a very important part of our installation working. i think i'm about halfway through at this point.

i picked mr smear up after his therapy session and brought him to the office, where he mostly did his homework (reading hebrew comics and a few pages of maths). he also made a funny comic which uses the word "motherfucker", and as always it's very hard to admonish a child for bad language while you're actively laughing both at how he's used it and at how pleased with himself he is for straddling the boundaries.

good grief.

we ran into one of his classmates' dad on the light rail home, and amongst other things we talked about the allergy drama and he was supportive.

dinner was good, delicious in dungeon is still going strong.

i'm tired now. i didn't take the alpha lipoic acid and tomorrow i'm picking up my "home sleep lab" kit on my way to work. i think i'm going to hit the hay soon.

drama allergy

 well, shit. today was pretty dramatic, my workday isn't over yet but i need to do a quick mind dump to free up some bandwidth for what remains...

yesterday:

i slept better on sunday night. i'm wondering if the alpha lipoic acid the doctor recommended is having an immediate effect. seems too good to be true, but if it's working i'll take it.

i rushed to the office early to return the keys i'd accidentally left with, and started the day on a zoom call with gd and mr smear's therapist which was generally optimistic.

the work day itself was tough, and i got home pretty frustrated.

mr smear did some good reading with me, and as a reward for doing it with a good attitude i started teaching him how to play minesweeper :)

after dinner i managed to make a little progress on a dev tool before settling down to watch an episode of monk with gd, after which i watched a few random youtube videos until realizing i needed to go to bed.

today:

i slept relatively well last night. lots of dreaming.

today started off pretty well, between the time mr smear left for school and the time gd and i left to meet up with him and his teacher i managed to make a bunch of appointments (from sunday's meeting with the doc).

the meeting started off awkwardly, as they wanted mr smear to introduce himself and tell us how he's doing. my gods, i wouldn't have been comfortable being put on the spot like that either, certainly not at his age, but after a brief silence we got things moving forward and lots of things were said.

in summary: mr smear's teacher seems really solid, and they appear to be off to a good start. i think we covered all the things that have been going on, where he's coming from and what he's been learning to deal with, and it was pretty optimistic. once he'd left the room, we talked about some of the heavier stuff.

of particular note was the councillor informing me that she received a call yesterday from the organization i spoke to, and she was offended that i'd reported that we didn't feel like they were doing anything. i made it very clear that our second complaint was about bullying, violence and harassment, and that until i informed the principal that we intend to go to the police the next time mr smear is injured we never saw any real response from the school. we talked about that in depth, and i think both the councillor and his new teacher understand where we stand and what's at stake.

i managed to keep my mouth shut when the councillor told us how important communication is, when we're the ones who've been begging them to communicate...

from there i went off to work. my lead and i came up with a plan, but my boss' request to prepare what i've been working on for a third party took up most of my day. and random conversations surround our procedures and practices too, i guess.

...

after lunch, though, was when all hell broke loose: mr smear's teacher dropped a bomb on the parents by demanding no dairy in the mishloah manot that the kids are supposed to bring tomorrow, and a lot of the parents were furious. not just because they'd already invested in and prepared the packages, but on principle, too.

my immediate reaction was flat panic because we do not want the parents or the other kids to resent us or mr smear due to his allergy. let me tell you, it's very difficult to navigate a situation like that tactfully when you want the teacher to know that what she's doing is appreciated (and correct, considering dairy is supposed to be banned on school grounds just like peanuts) but you also want the parents to not hate you.

i sent a message to the teacher to that effect, then i posted in the parents' group that i'd done so and that we had no intention of making everyone's lives difficult.

what followed was surprising: the mother of the bully from last week reached out to me, along with another parent, and both of them were stunned to learn that his allergy is a real danger and that he's been isolated from the other children because he's (justifiably) too scared to eat with or near them. i spoke to the mother on the phone, and she almost brought me to tears: she remembers being an isolated olah chadasha when she arrived, and she was deeply upset that mr smear has had to deal with the food thing on top of everything else. she's determined to use this story as a way to teach her son, and insisted on putting together mishloah manot specifically for mr smear.

she also convinced me to clear things up for the other parents. so i wrote a post in the group as follows:

hi everyone, i just spoke to some of you and realized that <mr smear>'s situation wasn't so clear until now.

<mr smear> has a severe allergy to dairy products. not a sensitivity - an allergy - at a life-threatening level. he has to carry an epipen with him at all times, and he is (rightly) afraid of other people's food that contains or may contain dairy products, so he usually avoids eating with the other kids in class or stays away from them because he is afraid that there might be an incident.

there are even kids in the class who take advantage of this fear to hurt him. just so you know.

we are very grateful to the parents who are considering the social implications of this, and those who contacted us - you touched us deeply. those of you who already understood and always cared - we thank you very much.

we're happy that <the teacher> is taking this matter seriously, but i promise that it is not our intention to make things difficult for you or your children. this is not an easy situation, for both us and you, and i hope we will continue to cooperate (and tolerate as much as possible) so that we can all be as comfortable as possible ❤️

the responses that followed were positive. and even if only some of the parents are with us and supportive, that's huge, and for the first time we don't feel so alone with this and we understand that the lack of consideration has mostly been from ignorance, not apathy. and now there's a bit of competitive overcompensation going on and it looks like a bunch of kids might be bringing vegan mishloah manot for mr smear tomorrow, so of all the directions today could have gone in i ended up having to give him a talk about showing gratitude for any gifts he receives even if they're from kids he doesn't like.

to underscore the first lesson, though, when i discussed it with mr smear after i got home he told me that he'd been really angry to learn that most of his class - after three and a half years with him - didn't understand what an allergy was. so today mr smear and their new teacher taught them. and maybe some of their parents learned, too.

...

that whole story took about two hours out of my work day, i went from terrified to overcome with gratitude to awkward and anxious and it took quite a while to come back to earth and be able to do some work. and then it was time to come home (late), i was supposed to help mr smear with his homework but between our talk and his stomache really hurting that didn't happen.

he'd better be doing okay by tomorrow morning. his best friend sent photos of himself hand-making oznei haman with pistachio cream for him. holy shit.

dum, dum dum dum, dum dum dum...

 i gave clickolding a try, and it crashed every time it hit dialog, so i uninstalled it and requested a refund. i was pleased to see that i'd received the refund before i went to bed.

today:

mr smear had pancakes for breakfast, so that he wouldn't have to eat walnuts.

i took him to school, then continued on to our pharmacy to pick up a couple of prescriptions. the pharmacy was completely empty, and there was no one ahead of me in the queue, so i only had to wait for ten minutes. they had one of the items i was looking for, but not the other.

i walked down to the mall pharmacy, where i waited another ten minutes or so (thankfully, i had my "kindle" with me for both waits), and picked up that prescription, although the pharmacist was concerned that the doc had prescribed it differently to what she's used to. that caused stress, but when i looked it up when i got home i discovered that there's a range of "configurations".

the work day started off pretty relaxed, and i was saying to a coworker that it's the first time in many years that i've been back from a ny sort of vacation for an entire week and i'm still feeling relaxed! at noon we all went off for a farewell feast at a nearby restaurant. sadly, i burned off some of my tastebuds on the delicious onion soup, but the pad thai was still exquisite.

i ate far too much.

the next few hours were hellish, because my tummy had decided it was time to move and it was relentless. in addition to that, gd and mr smear and i had a few dramatic phone calls because he'd had an incident at school, and it wasn't clear if he'd kicked the other kid back or not. i was relieved to hear that he had.

we also learned that some of the kids employ a nasty tactic of hitting mr smear and then claiming that they've just consumed dairy, and we've explained to him that aside from that not being likely, it's also not a big enough concern for him to not defend himself :/

eventually that calmed down, and i finished the week on a constructive note.

after dinner, mr smear wanted to show me something on the keyboard, and he did it really well. then i reminded him that we'd discussed him trying to figure out the tetris music on his own, and - holy shit - he got it! i can't describe how excited i am, and he was excited himself, that he figured out how to play the tune by ear and by feel ^_^

i was disappointed - and embarassed - to discover that the keyboard we bought can't connect to a computer. i'm going to speak to the store tomorrow and see if we can arrange a trade or something...

after we got him into bed, i had a quick chat with my sister, mostly about her status between jobs.

i've spent the past couple of hours doing lots of not much, and i'm considering heading to bed now and reading a bit. i'll be surprised if i last more than a minute or two :P

winding down

 it wasn't too bad a day. i rollerbladed to work, which was very quiet because i was the only one in the office. in spite of things getting a bit hectic at one point, i managed to complete the frontend work that's been upsetting me for the past couple of weeks and returned home for lunch before taking mr smear to his jiujitsu class.

while there, i did a little more work - but nothing too serious - and when his class was done we returned home. as we stepped off the bus, the sirens sounded and we scrambled through narrow stairways into a deep bomb shelter along with a large number of coffee shop patrons, most of whom were clumsily wielding their dairy-based drinks in a way that made it anxiety-inducing to navigate to a safe corner while keeping mr smear out of contact.

god damn.

anyway, it was unpleasant but we didn't have an incident, so that was a win.

we both showered quickly when we returned home, and there was time before dinner to fire up the vr.

gd and i agreed that we could afford to get him one of the vr games, and he decided on battlezone, then he discovered that i'd downloaded a bunch more vr demos, so instead of buying something we dug into those instead - and we had a really good time. there were two games in particular, which caused a bit of a fight at first because we didn't understand what was going on or why mr smear needed us to tell him what was happening, but once we did get it they were brilliant. and then i took a turn, and i was absolutely blown away by how good the vr experience was!

after dinner, mr smear went to bed, i posted my two books on gumroad, and then gd and i settled down to re-attempt deadpool & wolverine. we made it a bit further before we were both falling asleep. it's really fun, we're just really tired...

i haven't slept well in a while, and i know that going to sleep early will cause problems, so i carried on fine-tuning all my online offerings and i'm now pretty happy with how things look. i think i'm about ready for bed now. i hope i am.

i'm very excited that i'm going on vacation tomorrow evening.

baby rabies, coughs and game time

friday evening:

gd wasn't well enough to join us, but my mom, mr smear and i walked to the synagogue and back. it was hot, and it's not *that* far but it's definitely too far for gd even on a good day, so i guess if we're going to start going regularly we're going to be taking a taxi or something.

overall, it was a good experience, it's a nice shul and very familiar. having said that, mr smear has an issue with smaller kids and it was *really* hard to manage him in the moment. we've since sat him down and had a conversation, and we've talked about it again, and hopefully he'll calm the fuck down.

so that was friday night. otherwise, it was really nice to be able to make kiddush together for real, and not via whatsapp.

yesterday:

we had some good talks with mr smear, and we had some difficulties with mr smear. it was another "downtimey" day, reading / video games / not much. in the afternoon my mom, mr smear and i went for a walk to and through park hayarkon, then stopped at a really nice bar near basel for beers (or sprite), and then stopped for sandwiches and croissant desserts on the way home.

their cubed croissants blew my mind, and i had to get one just to try it. a croissant cube filled with pistachio and vanilla cream. it was pretty darned good.

the evening was a bit rough. mr smear needs to spend more time with kids his own age - but at the same time, he also needs a break from his schoolmates.

revelation of the day: disco elysium isn't just a great detective game, and it isn't just great eye-candy. it's a comedy, but a psycho-philosophical one deeply rooted in literature and with a deep sense of irony.

today:

first order of the day: gd gave me a haircut. i feel much, much better about it.

i rollerbladed to work, and made great progress on my current project. i took two breaks during the day: the first, to pick up a package from ali express; the second, to buy a new vacuum cleaner. now that we have the replacement, it seems like the warranty on the original is much longer than we were told...

gd's on antibiotics, my mom's started coughing too, and mr smear's cough has suddenly gotten dramatically worse. gd's given him something in the hopes it would help him sleep, but it doesn't seem to be helping and it has antihistamines in it so we're going to have to defer (again) his dairy allergy challenge that was scheduled for wednesday :/

after dinner all four of us played uno together, and it was lots of fun.

i suggested my mom watch the game changers this evening, and she did.

i played a whole lot of kaycee's mod this evening. that's a whole lot of excitement, followed by a whole lot of disappointment.

goddamn.

i'm going to bed.

infestation

tuesday:

tuesday morning, i managed to convince mr smear to join me for a walk to the post office to pick up his test synthesizer. we had a good walk, a little bit of tension when arriving at the post office and seeing that we needed to make an appointment - which turned out to be nonsense, but nobody else saw the sign pointing to their package depot either - and i was very pleased and relieved to open it and discover that it's actually pretty good (for a cheap chinese product) and mr smear's been giving it a good go!

by the time i'd gotten him set up, i realized i was going to be late for a meeting at the office, so i scrambled and made it there on time. the coworker i was scheduled to meet was late :P

my coworker made a comment about disco elysium, and he's not wrong. he stopped playing the moment he realized he was playing against his own character's self-destructive behavior.  i'm finding the game's story and mechanics fascinating, but my character is indeed the kind of person who i would avoid like the plague in real life.

yesterday:

i went past the hospital in the morning to arrange for gd's final allergy challenge (in the current round), and on the way out picked up some really nice fruit from a stall nearby. it was really expensive, but also really good, and i guess it's supporting our farmers down south so i wasn't upset.

my boss, however, wasn't happy that i'd bought my own fruit for the office and insisted on paying me back for it. no complaints here :)

gd, my mom and mr smear went to the museum in the afternoon, and due to a miscommunication i was in a shitty mood for a lot of it. but we had a chat when i got home and all was settled.

today:

the day began with bad vibes, primarily triggered by me unwittingly dumping big pieces of food into the kitchen sink's drain thinking that our drain filter was in place. and gd is definitely sick with a horrible cough.

i went to the clinic on the way to work, after it took me way too long to get all the right documents together, and hopefully the authorization for mr smear's dairy allergy challenge will arrive before the scheduled date.

i was quite unmotivated to work today. i feel like the most constructive thing i did all day was take a walk to the sarona market at lunchtime to pick up hot sauces, chutney and potato spice. oh, and pick up a pack of sharpies from the post depot on the way home.

oh! and take mr smear to the climbing wall. he did great, and there was a group of amputees climbing *well* with or without prosthetics that just blew me away.

...

 
i haven't managed to complete kaycee's mod yet. this game so far, i picked up an ouroboros and have been slowly pumping it up... but i also managed to build myself a bee and ant deck along the way, which just became ridiculous as i've also scored a totem of undying insects... PLEASE let this be the deck that gets me through!!

...

godsdammit, i just completely ruined my run because i - on autopilot - picked up an insane amount of pelts. which i realized immediately that i didn't want at all.

carb bomb

 it's the middle of the night, i'm not sure what woke me up but it just might be the indigestion from two different pizzas.

we were celebrating. not just our anniversary, but that gd isn't - or is no longer, we'll never know - allergic to hazelnuts! it was a really long morning for her, and unfortunately she's still allergic to kiwis, but being able to stop worrying about hazelnuts is absolutely huge.

mr smear was mostly pretty cool today. he didn't care much for the "old lady" dog in the office, which is just as well because her dogsitter (it's his parents' dog) found fleas on her in the afternoon... he had a great time playing inscryption, though, and now understands why i'm so into it ^_^

gd's feet were hurting (new shoes), so i had to take him home and come back during the hottest part of the day...

i spent most of my work hours struggling with minor nonsense, but finished quite strong. so that's the week done, and i'm really hoping to be able to take this weekend slowly.

winding down / gearing up

tomorrow's going to be a big day: gd's got her allergy challenge in the morning, so mr smear and i will accompany her there before we head off to my office. where i still need to decide whether i should apologize to one of my coworkers for get upset during a ridiculous argument three of us were having about TODOs in code.

i probably should.

aside from that, i managed to get a huge and important piece of work done today - not only are my boss and coworkers apparently impressed, but it's opened some doors i wasn't anticipating so i'm quite excited to try and stuff some stretch goals into the sprint.

oh, and there was an early 4th of july celebration* in the office with crack pie, and the vegan option was truffles. insanely delicious truffles. ömg.

* oh! tomorrow's the 4th of july. happy independence day to any american readers, and happy dependence day to me and my wife!

...

i rollerbladed to work this morning, relatively comfortably. i had to pick up a package from a post office i'm not familiar with, so i left the office a bit early and skated all the way to ramat aviv. i should've stuck to the shady side of the road, even if the paving isn't as good. by the time i arrived there i was melting, and my shoulder hurt from my heavy backpack being at a bad angle, and i still had to get home afterwards.

i thought maybe it was a wet-bulb temperature thing, but it doesn't look like it had anything to do with it.

anyway, the new wrist pads i picked up seem... fine.

...

inscryption - kaycee's mod to be precise - is thoroughly insane. it's hard not to get hooked, and it honestly feels like i'm trapped in an abusive relationship. but the satisfying moments? the insane plays that make one feel like a god? holy shit, they're worth it. even if i tend to get crushed shortly after.

i mean, i still haven't beaten the game once yet. i've reached the final boss twice, been crushed once and "quit while i'm ahead" a little while ago.

...

speaking of gaming; steam's summer sale is on, and i picked up a couple of interesting-looking games very cheaply. disco elysium and the witcher 3. and i was just wondering earlier if i'm not spending too much of my personal time unproductively :P

end of school year

seven more sleeps until my mom arrives!

friday:

we had a busy but productive friday morning. we picked up small lamps for mr smear's bike, two minecraft comics in hebrews (without nikud, and he's reading them!), and we picked up a scale (not amazing, but does the job), i got some vests, gd got new shoes (which don't fit), and i had one of the most amazing sandwiches ever.

we had a quiet friday afternoon, although as usual getting mr smear to do homework was a bit of a struggle...

yesterday:

yesterday was mostly a quiet saturday spent indoors, lots of inscryption (i'm apparently really bad at kaycee's mod), a fair amount of resting and wondering about how one would make inscryption work in real life, watching home alone 2 together, and finally: taking mr smear for a ride to get ice cream. the ride there was great, and the ice cream was great, but then...

... on the way out, mr smear decided that we weren't heading in the right direction. after trying and failing to convince him, with him becoming angrier and angrier, i suggested that he lead. we went about four more blocks before he realized that he didn't know where he was. then, on the way back, he decided that he couldn't trust my navigation skills and that the only way to find out how to get home was to use the phone.

which i refused, because godsdammit i *knew* where the fuck we were. so we argued on and off until he got smart and agreed that we just shouldn't talk for a while, and when we finally arrived at a place he was familiar with he admitted that i knew what i was doing and that he should have listened to me.

so yesterday, mr smear learned the word "putz" :P

the rest of the evening was nice, and we watched what is now his new favorite show, run for the money.

today so far:

i got mr smear to his last day of school with a good vibe, and then went past the clinic to make sure gd has what she needs for her upcoming allergy challenge. also, my hand's been really hurting for the last few days, i've just made an appointment for next week in case it doesn't get better...

now i've enjoyed a chilled morning, and it's time to head out to work.

...

after a week feeling pretty shit, i rested well on the weekend. i didn't get anything productive done except recover, and i'm okay with that.

months later

four hostages have just been rescued! it's an enormous relief, even while there are still so many left...

...

this story still isn't over, apparently. i had sinus pain on thursday, and yesterday, and while it seems to have calmed down a bit my nose is still pretty stuffy. is it allergies? is it the same covid? is it covid again?

...

yesterday was pretty productive. i got mr smear to school, and gd joined me on a mission to exchange the shitty rollerblade pads and buy a wallet. none of their pads were any good, so i exchanged for a basic basketball instead.

the bus ride there was bad, because there was something particularly wrong with the buses suspension and we had to get off early and walk off the motion sickness. the bus ride back was awful, because there was an old easily-misgenderable person with a small dog who was clearly abused and their treatment of the dog was rough, but ambiguously so. gd and i were both upset by the experience.

mr smear called us from school trying to get us to bring him home early, because he urgently needed to poop and is disgusted by the state of the school toilets. i tried and failed to get him to go there, and fortunately (for him) he managed to hold it in until he got home, after which i gave him a simulation in using filthy public toilets. i hope he gets over this and doesn't a) get sick or b) have an accident at school :/

we had a bit of homework drama, but things calmed down and he got everything done. his hebrew's improving at a steady pace, but i'm impressed by how well the prodigy math game is serving him.

in the evening before kiddush / dinner time, i played some more portal, and mr smear "gave me a hand" and became *really* excited about it ^_^

today:

mr smear got up really early and brushed his teeth without instruction, because he really wanted to play portal again. i obliged, and that's how we started our day - he began from the beginning, and got further than i had. there was a level (android hell) where i had to step in, but by and large i was impressed by how well he did on his own! at some point i had to walk away, though, because although i can play by myself without motion sickness, there's something about how mr smear manipulates the mouse that makes me very queasy.

otherwise, i had an interesting chat with horseman, read some more of the hobbit graphic novel, and i've been really tired and taking quick naps every now and again. right now i'm busy setting up keybase after having had to reset my account, although i'm not sure it has much value, and i'm simultaneously doing the production deployment of my side project before settling down to watch spirited away again.

that's the plan, at any rate.

curveballs

monday:

we were all at home on monday, mr smear was sick and i worked / kept an eye on him while gd went for another distastrous dental experience.

i generally had a hard time concentrating.

in the evening mr smear's "play therapist" came over, sending me to work in the bedroom which turned into very little work but with a good initial conversation with sailor about countering psyops.

today:

another day with mr smear not going to school, gd took him to the doctor who sent him for chest x-rays, but it was so hard to organize the x-ray that gd just went back to her and picked up antibiotics instead. hopefully they'll do the trick.

mr smear's really been maturing rapidly lately. we started off the day with a talk about the dangers of the internet which he clearly was following, and in addition to his homework he helped gd quite a lot around the house and with dinner. i'm very proud and quite relieved.

we received a frontend contractor at work today, nice guy. halfway through the afternoon i realized that i was fighting a losing battle with the nivo charts, and i asked if he had any suggestions. he suggested echarts, and i'll be damned if i wasn't completely done with a much more polished result by the end of the day.

...

halfway through dinner my mom called me to inform me that my cousin just passed away, extremely unexpectedly. we're still processing.

...

after putting mr smear to bed, i felt compelled to take care of a niggling detail on my current task... and in doing so, discovered a rather insidious bug. it took a couple of hours to fully uncover and fix, and then another hour of finding and resolving other issues, and now it's approaching 1am and i'm pretty much done. and the chamomile / antihystamines are starting to kick in.