cold sweats

 i think i slept relatively well last night. i got up early, read the last of the five asterix books we have (asterix and the banquet, i was amazed by how many of the names i remembered), and had a few naps throughout the day.

we played rayman for a while, mostly it went great but we had some pretty bad feelings at one point due to a misunderstanding... it's hard to explain to a kid how some yelling is okay :/

we played uno for while, that was fun.

we watched some more deathnote. the past few episodes really haven't enjoyed the same level of writing and i'm beginning to find myself over it. i hope it resolves well, but where we are it's a confusing mess.

i took mr smear (bike and rollerblades) to his friend's temporary home, it was extremely hot but it went well. the last uphill before i got home wrecked me, however, and i entered our apartment feeling faint (my neck had been giving me trouble for most of the ride home).

after i cooled down, i cabbed to meet tahoma in his new apartment. it's an awesome apartment in an incredible location! he convinced me to consider looking for a new apartment now and finding a sublet for our current one, i spoke to gd and hopefully we'll be able to make this happen.

we had a pizza at the green cat, and then walked to cassata - a remarkably tel avivi place - for ice cream, before eventually walking to the eliphelet station where it took me three tries to get on the right train because the signage is so bad.

...

having not realized how late i'd been out, i was caught mid-dinner by mr smear informing me that he was ready to go home. for the first time, i arranged for a taxi to pick him up, and he got home fine, but he called me from inside the taxi to say "dad - do you remember how you told me about stranger danger? i'm feeling that right now" 😰

we're definitely going to have to have a talk in the morning 🤣

farewell

 i slept alright, i guess. aside from a couple of nightmares, and the terrifying thought that if something happened to my mom i'd have to make a choice between sorting out her affairs and not leaving israel for a country with an unreasonably high risk of bad things happening.

this morning was a bit of a mess, largely trying to figure out what to do about mr smear's therapy sessions and summer camp activities for the next few weeks.

my mom and i walked to the bank to move some money around, and picked up coffee and onion bagel to share (i've never seen anyone split a bagel in two so precisely with their hands before) before heading home to prepare for her flight.

we took the train to the airport, and managed to get her through the check-in process just as i needed to join a zoom meeting for work - the first ten minutes of which i spent frustratedly trying to get zoom to connect to my bluetooth headphones.

it was a long meeting, and while i'm glad i was understood i was embarrassed by my inability to communicate my thoughts clearly, and frustrated by a general sense of the meeting being about the wrong stuff.

and that it took exactly enough time to prevent me from being able to spend time with my mother during her last hour in tel aviv.

we sent her off, and made our way to the train, and returned back home, and the rest of the afternoon was relatively peaceful and easy. i've got one book left in the asterix omnibus we bought for mr smear, the comics are just as great as i remembered and they've really aged well.

but a little too quiet without my mom. mr smear's really sad she's left.

...

after dinner, we sat mr smear down and had a very big conversation about gd's history that was triggered by a weird thing he said the other day. there's no right time to tell a child that kind of thing, but there's definitely a wrong time (like when they've found stuff out for themselves, or worse - the hard way). i think it went as well as could be expected, but gd's clearly anxious that it was the wrong thing to do.

i guess we'll find out as we go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

...

tomorrow's back to work, after taking mr smear to his therapy session, and then managing the "handylady" who's coming to fix our curtain rail(s).

i really, really hope i manage to sleep tonight.

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.

bumpy ride

 wednesday:

waking up early and sending mr smear off to school, still broken from lack of sleep

arriving to the office really early (but still with time pressure) to discover that my installation station had been stripped of all its cabling (amongst other things), and it would take about an hour and a half to get that sorted out.

at least the installation itself went relatively smoothly.

one of the aussies gave me and another aussie's cousin (he's helping out) a ride to the test site, where the story of the afternoon was hours of set up for very little payoff - not only were there loads of hardware issues, but the issue that i'd resolved by midnight the previous night turned out to be not fully solved, and it cost another three hours to understand what was wrong and resolve it.

and then cursor started bugging out, because we use devcontainers and microsoft (fuckers!) are now preventing vscode clones from using their extensions.

i don't know at this point how much of the solution to the problem is an actual solution to the problem, or a workaround for ms (and docker) fuckery.

anyway. at least i figured out the cause of one of the other issues we had (aws syncing syncs impossibly slowly if you have debug logs being printed)

anyway.

after wrestling with a bad router/switch setup, and waiting 90's download times for an OS installation, we were finally able to leave one of the machines in a state where i should have been able to continue the installation remotely, and we hopped in the car and rode back to tel aviv.

i arrived home around 11pm. signed in to attempt to finish the deployment, and discover that the machine was offline.

very frustrated, i went to bed.

yesterday:

i feel like the whole city woke up feeling more rested. mr smear went off to school again, i took care of a bunch of things that had been piling up over the course of the week, went past the clinic to get authorization for gd's procedure next week, and continued on to the coffee shop where astérix gladiateur was waiting to be picked up.

of course, i had to pick up a coffee and nurse it all the way to the office.

it was an exciting day in the office. the two most significant pieces of work i did were recording an online demo from a contractor (who threw up a little in his mouth halfway through 🤢), and taking a couple of guys with IT / devops experience into the warehouse and beginning to get a workshop set up there.

another highlight (in addition to the workshop, as opposed to the not-highlight of the demo) was a department weekly with lots of enthusiastic new faces, and a happy hour making a new convert both regarding shakespeare's sonnets and my vision for our software solution.

after putting mr smear to bed, i had a call with my boss; i suspected that i was going to be answering for having been a bit miserable the previous day, but it turned out to be a discussion about how to go about doing a deployment we'd had to defer and arguing over when to do it. we ended up settling on tomorrow night, so 🤞

today:

i guess i slept alright last night, at least better than has become usual. i was avoiding screens before mr smear left for school, and reading a canticle for leibowitz, or trying to at any rate. some of it i've really enjoyed, but the last quarter is proving to be a slog and with everything else going on i've decided to give it up.

while going through that, i realized that even if i'm not on screens i'm still focused very close to my head, so i decided to walk mr smear to school in order to give my own eyes an opportunity to "stretch". surprisingly, gd had had a similar idea simultaneously so we all walked together, which aside from an  encounter with a brazenly irresponsible dog owner was an enjoyable experience.

i had some important stuff to take care of, which generated a fight with gd that put more shitty vibes on the morning, but eventually worked through it and we hit the mall to do some grocery shopping and upgrade my phone.

it turns out the issue with my (old) phone has been that it's only got 4GB of memory, and with my "new" phone (the display unit, i got a significant discount for that) it's clear why it was so unresponsive; my baseline usage with nothing open is 4.6GB, and that's after uninstalling and disabling every app i don't need on a daily basis...

i'm a little concerned about the battery usage, but i'll give it a few days before i decide whether to complain or not.

on the way out of the mall, an older guy came out of the retirement home and lit up a cigarette while still inside the mall. i asked him to please not do that, to which he made stupid excuses and then started calling me a quibbler (not sure if the translation is good). so i called him a jerk, but he continued to act like a jerk and although i succeeded in walking away, it only takes one asshole to ruin a good day, and i'd already had some shitty experiences, and he occupied more brainspace than he had right to for the next while.

it was hot (summer's here) and i was sweaty and tired by the time we got home, but i had to rush off to pick up mr smear and help carry home all the books from his locker. i spent the next while napping on the couch listening to the audiobook of the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, waking up to gd reading asterix to mr smear.

i spent the remainder of the afternoon and most of the evening getting the new phone set up, while listening to insane AI covers like system of a crown and neon maiden.

we went to our friends for friday night dinner, which was a really pleasant evening, both for the adults and the kids.

it's now almost 1am, mr smear has just gone to bed and i'm about to jump in the shower and probably also go to bed.

retro-parenting and all the things

 this morning was a bit of a struggle (i did sleep at least, but not nearly enough), i needed to request a tami water filter technician again, have it out with a cannabis license representative (she told me which documents i need to provide and agreed that that should be clearly stated on the application forms). i ordered a bunch of asterix books in english and french and we did an online grocery shopping. and i worked a bit on the language project. then i accompanied gd to the clinic to request said documents on the way to work.

but then i realized, while at the clinic, that i'd forgotten to disconnect the tami so i had to come back home again 🤦‍♂️

anyway, work: i had a feeling that i wasn't going to get to work on my primary tasks today, and i was right. it was a bunch of distractions, not least of which being that gd needed me to go home, pick up mr smear, take him to his therapist, and then have him come to work afterwards.

at least he managed to find his way to the office by himself!

he did most of the homework there - with a little skiving off now and again - and we left the office in good spirits (although we ended up going in the traditional loops of him going to far with the trolling, which reminded me of josh wolf's big fight* and then suddenly i was transported back to the brawl with my father), and arrived home in time for dinner.

* omg there's actually a follow-up with his son.

with no screens, because he hadn't finished his homework. it was pleasant enough, though. and then we told him he'd need to finish the homework before bed. this started off alright, but we had two final questions to get through and he shut down. and we lost patience.

...

i think one of the hardest pills to swallow has been that we never set clear enough boundaries with him, and that not having a strong sense of them is literally hurting him both at home and at school, and is causing him to behave in ways that are potentially damaging to his future. so now we're scrambling to make up for it, but he's already pretty big and it's really hard to force him to face the world and do what needs to be done without things becoming... intense.

i don't know (and mostly don't care) what the neighbors think of the yelling and screaming, but i actually had to make my son properly afraid of me for what i believe is the first time in his life. he's often been angry and upset by me, sure, but not openly afraid.

strangely, once i finally got through to him and got him to accept his fate and finish the job, his mood rapidly settled and he became cooperative, and by the time he'd gotten through it he was clearly happy with himself. i talked to him (sternly) about not making us have to go through this sort of thing again, he calmly agreed and went off to shower and brush his teeth, singing to himself the whole time.

and bedtime was pleasant, too 👀

...

also strangely, i expected to be thoroughly worn out by all of that drama but i felt strangely okay. i spent a lot of the evening watching youtube videos (i really shouldn't) and playing a lot of minesweeper (i probably shouldn't), and fiddling with my computer settings (it keeps restarting randomly) and installing driver updates (which then mysteriously uninstalled themselves), and somewhere in there managed to fix the language project issue i'd been experiencing in the morning.

and now... i don't know. i should probably go to bed soon.

never a dull moment

 yesterday was perfect, right until the end. mr smear came home, we grabbed our gear and headed to the pool. he put in the work, and he's improving dramatically. he's learning how to handle showering and changing in a locker room, and after that we returned home for a calm and peaceful afternoon. he did creative stuff on the old macbook with ubuntu (he made a really cool pacman image with gimp), while i tried to repeat thursday evening's steps in unity on my windows machine. we watched the "season" finale of asterix & obelix - the big fight, which was great fun even though it's totally not canon, and right after all that wonderful stuff gd and i got into a huge row that took forever to... not quite resolve, but to bring to an end and leave lots of stuff to think about.

today:

i didn't sleep well last night, partially due to waking up in the middle of it feeling a lot of unpleasant feelings. i ended up "sleeping" quite late, and waking up with a really sore neck.

my damaged toenail flipped a bit this morning, so it was time to remove it. it... seems okay? i hope it regrows safely...

it's fair to say that i've spent most of the day watching youtube videos and doing really hard quests minesweeper.

we watched a minecraft movie together, but mr smear left half an hour in to go to his friend. i can see why he loved it so much, and it's definitely entertaining in a very jack black kind of way, but it's not quite gd or my cup of tea. so we rewatched léon: the professional after that, which i haven't seen since high school. there were three things i remembered from that movie: mathilda sitting by the stairs swinging her legs, mathilda walking with the plant, and the explosive moment that me and my friend laughed at in triumphant relief just as his dad walked in a furiously berated us for enjoying such intense violence.

i think i appreciated it much more for having read nabokov's lolita, i thought the playfulness of the two characters was beautiful and found the transformation from something sexual endearing.

in the evening, with a little help from looking at my coworker's thursday evening code, i managed to get my first unity project doing an approximation of what i'd intended, i've documented every step for myself and i'm looking forward to our next session.

one thing that i've learned, though, is that microsoft's made it complicated / against the terms of usage to use vscode extensions in windsurf and cursor, so i've now returned to the vscode fold and subscribed to copilot once again. and now that i've taken care of that, i think i'm ready to get back down to business with the language project.

the real puppetmasters

mr smear woke me up this morning with a surprisingly long talk about dealing with life, and school, and bullying. amazingly, he seemed genuinely open to what i was saying and appeared to appreciate how i tied it into how video games work*, even if he was a little confused at first :P

* that our emotions dictating our behavior make us like an NPC, and that he's been taking more and more control of his character's actions and learning how to navigate the world

mr smear woke up coughing again today, but we medicated him heavily and sent him off to school. i got a bunch of small things done, then arrived at the office with my biggest goal being to wait before tucking in to the breakfast. fasting is harder when the FOMO kicks in.

the day was an interesting, exciting, and sometimes confusing mix of tasks, but there was a common thread between a bunch of them and over the course of a few conversations we may have hit on a viable solution to something that's been gnawing at me for a while.

there was a little drama when i got pulled out of call by a notification that i couldn't make sense of, then pulled into a reference call for a candidate that i had nothing to contribute to, and then the next meeting ended with me trying to be calm and rational and end the call quickly because i suddenly and violently needed to pee.

i arrived at a plan of action in time to rush home and take mr smear out for a "walk"; literally just to the electronic recycling across the road as an excuse to talk about his day, but he derailed that plan with his favorite new game of trying to come up with dumb ideas. he liked my idea of "cold sauce", but i liked the idea of a digital broken telephone even more :P

we watched some more asterix & obelix - the big fight (it's really good!), and while mr smear got ready for bed i ordered the next two illustrated harry potter books (did they only publish up to book no. 5?), and once mr smear was in bed and i'd watched random shit and showered i sat down to do some work.

i was displeased to have to explain to a coworker how to extricate himself from a mess of his own device - well, a bunch of devs, but all of them doing stuff i've explicitly informed them is undesirable and dangerous - so it seems like we're going to have "a talk" tomorrow. but i was pleased to stumble (pretty quickly) on a solution to the most immediate issue that was much simpler than what i had in mind.

score!

the rest of the evening would have been very quiet had my mother not sent me and gd something politically triggering, and after the argument gd and i had yesterday i immediately called her to explain the situation... we're living in what feels like the end times, where being jewish is unsafe no matter where you are in the world, the jihadis have taken control of the media, and even patriotic israelis who should know better have become mouthpieces for jihadi propaganda.

plus, the south african situation is spinning faster out of control than ever.

i think i need to go to bed soon.

encouragement

alright, i'm *really* happy about how today went. mr smear and i went to the pool, and my biggest regret about purchasing 10 entries is that i should've gone in for a membership (we'll do that when the ticket runs out). our main purpose was him learning crawl, and he worked hard and made huge progress.

and we had a good time.

i do feel a bit bad for him that a part of his motivation is that he's worried about getting fat, but we've been explaining to him that the answer to that is doing sport and eating lots of good food. i mean, if that's what it takes to get him to stop hating sport on principle...

he also really enjoyed the shower there, i had to explain to him afterwards that there're certain enjoyment noises that one just doesn't make in a locker room 😂

we came home, switched clothing, and then headed out with gd to the mall. we had a delicious hummus (with vegan shuwarma) lunch, found him two types of swimming trunks (costumes as opposed to boardies), and picked up what seems to be a really good pair of sandals for me.

by the time we got home i was done. i showered, napped hard, and eventually got up to do the dishes so gd could make dinner.

then mr smear and i spent some time on MAZE (until he got bored / creeped out), which is completely insane (trying very hard to avoid any spoilers, but mapping out our paths in a text file). incredible artwork and concept!

kiddush and dinner, and watching the first two episodes of asterix & obelix - the big fight. so far? brilliant!

too - much - cake.

everyone else went to bed a while ago, i'm probably going to crash soon. we've got a BIG day tomorrow ^_^