a bundle of nerves

 i mostly didn't sleep last night. i was tired, restless, and struggling with anxiety all night. i did have a few brief periods where i slept deeply enough to dream, but for the most part i just lay awake, uncomfortable, all night.

my gods, life is hard right now. and it's Big Stuff. i'm riddled with anxiety and my stomach's roiling with it, and i'm struggling to catch my breath. i have so much to be grateful for, but i'm having a lot of trouble seeing the wood for the trees, and two trees in particular are beating me with their branches.

the first tree is my job. we're living beyond our means, and that obviously needs to stop as soon as possible, but the only way out is to find another job. as i'm a contractor and on contract, if i do find another gig i'm going to be screwing over my employer and my client. if i don't, i'm going to be living on borrowed funds (time). i've got to find a side-gig that makes money, or gd has to, but until any of those conditions are met we're basically a ticking time bomb.

the second tree is our home. gd turned on the air conditioner yesterday and we didn't smell anything, which was an enormous relief. then she turned it on last night and it was blasting mold smell everywhere (it's central), and our landlord doesn't want to spend more money and has been out of communication for about a month already. on top of that, he's supposed to authorize the fixes to the windows and doors that the transit authority is offering to protect us from the construction noise, and i don't think he's done that.

...

yesterday was a monumental fuck-up regarding the holidays. i don't know where everyone else gets their information from, or if the holidays document i got was updated and i just missed the memo, but i only found out yesterday afternoon that mr smear was supposed to return to school yesterday morning. and this morning, he's missing school because i'm taking him to appointments at the hospital. so 🤷‍♂️

i also confused my workday schedules, and didn't realize until i joined the team daily by zoom that everyone was supposed to be in the office yesterday, so i scrambled to get there once the meeting was done.

the work day was pretty okay. i took the leftover challah-peño, which almost nobody wanted to try, and in the afternoon managed to guilt two of my team mates into trying, and then another became intrigued, but i still ended up eating most of it by myself :P

i merged my first PR yesterday, and then spent the remainder of the day buggering about with an indecisive/self-contradicting AI. my team introduced me to the spend dashboard, i was pleasantly surprised to find that my AI spend is very reasonable, and shocked to see some of the bigger numbers on the board.

after work, i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear to the comics library, where we returned the broken judgement on gotham and i was relieved to find that it was clear to the librarian what had happened and that we weren't at fault. mr smear took a while to figure out which books he wanted to borrow, but i discovered akira and evangelion.

i don't know if i'll sound as dumb to you as i do to myself, but with all the frustration of being disappointed by the reboot and annoyed with the series revisions because i don't know what's canon, nor what any of it is supposed to mean, it never occurred to me to seek out the original text!

we watched another great episode of the wonder years over dinner - it's amazing how well that series holds up - and then i read a little of the light fantastic to mr smear at bedtime, but i started nodding off and he took over and read to me, and then he switched to reading from the grimm fairy tales, and at some point i realized it was late and that we both needed to get into bed.

which, for me, was clearly a mistake. i couldn't sleep in bed, so i moved to the couch, where i didn't sleep very well either, but also found myself constantly overheating and sweaty.

...

it's now just after 7.30am, and i'm going to have to take mr smear to his appointments today, so i guess i should get some work done before we leave...

happy 5787!

 our puzzle and board game mission was successful, gd and i picked up a gorgeous zozoville puzzle and a copy of cascadia, which hopefully will be interesting for all three of us 🤞

on the way home we did a last-minute grocery shopping for some items we missed yesterday, and then we returned home.

i upgraded my codex subscription in order to experiment with astra, and the experience of generating my trauma game has been pretty good so far - i initialized it with astra, and have been using terra and luna for the tweaking.

really good news: the work i've been doing on my boss's pet project was accepted this afternoon, with a recommendation to open an upstream PR for it as well 🙌

[pauses to help gd in the kitchen. i've now made two round challot, one choc-chip and the other chilli-choc-chip, and prepared the vegan meatballs]

there was a bit of drama in the kitchen earlier (mr smear wasn't helping gd in a particularly helpful way), but we're just about ready to head upstairs.

shana tova and chag sameach! hopefully this next year will be calmer and more reasonable 🙏

side quests

 i have got practically nothing done today! i accompanied my sister to her meeting with her friends, then returned home via the hardware store (for bird repellant), meeting up with gd and mr smear and doing a friday morning shopping run, which really is one of my least favorite things. it's been hot, i missed my second coffee, and i arrived home slow and tired and quite hungry. i helped gd make challah-peño to take with us tonight, started the process of locating the PSVR components because mr smear has been harassing me for a couple of days now to set it up.

then we left for the shuk, to meet up with my sister, and went up and down the market... mr smear and i feel very similarly about mall people, and shuk people are even worse. he held my hand and walked in lock-step behind me, and we came out relatively unscathed.

relatively, because our visit to the shuk began with him being pooped on by a bird 🙄

getting the bus home took more walking and time that anticipated, and i filed a complaint against the bus driver who almost injured us with his aggressive driving, but we came inside in good spirits and launched into uprising at full blast. then i set up my IDE to work with openai's codex, after which i spent the next while wiring up the PSVR.

and realizing that i, once again, had booked a car for no good reason and it was too late to cancel it without paying the full amount :(

i managed to get the PSVR set up, and mr smear got to play battlezone, and i called sailor for an hour long argument over what kind of "market research" is valid when you're trying to make a video game.

now it's evening, and we're getting ready to leave in an hour for dinner with our cousins.

delicacy

 night has fallen, the candles are lit, the challah-peño dough is rising. i have a shot glass of rum i'm slowly sipping, and tool's lateralus album is playing, and mr smear is on the couch behind me reading moon knight after having finished the hebrew translation of lightfall.

nobody knows what's happening with iran and china tonight, or tomorrow night, or next week, but we're happy and grateful to have a calm moment right here, right now.

...

mr smear struggled last night and all day with a stuffy nose, but we had a really nice morning together and he was well enough to go to school. then someone came to look at the apartment and decided she wanted to proceed - coming in on the 1st was a problem, but gd and i talked it over and we agreed that the 15th was acceptable. not only does it mean someone taking over our obligations, but it gives us a couple of weeks' breathing room which is meaningful.

gd and i took a bus to the school, which was packed with families milling around appreciating all the artwork. mr smear guided us through his grade's stuff, he only had two pieces on display but they were really good, and we were amazed by a lot of what we saw - there're a lot of really talented kids there.

aside from the awkward horror of watching one of his friends' train-wreck family in action, and a couple of awkward moments with some other parents as well, it was a very good experience for all.

and then i managed to corner mr smear's teacher for an impromptu parent-teacher discussion, and confirmed that she's noticed and is appreciative of mr smear's efforts to sort himself out over the past week or two 🙏

mr smear got gd to point and laugh just as a bunch of his classmates were told "NO" when they were trying to leave early without adult supervision, and it was awkward for everyone.

we took the light rail to the hospital complex on the way home, stumbling upon an actual spar along the way and buying delicious candy-like dried strawberries, amongst other things, and then it was time for pharmacy and shopping. the pharmacy took a ridiculously long time, but mr smear set himself up in the food court and worked on his new comic idea.

once gd and i were done, we had lunch (i'd been passing out from exhaustion, but i managed to scarf down 

[pause mid-sentence to fight with my wife over "letting" mr smear read moon knight - he just asked me what "evisceration" means - after i explained that i already told him i haven't read it and i don't approve of him reading it. i can't force him. gd just asked if there's any sex stuff in it, and he said no, so she just raised her hands and gave up]

a really good falafel pita (mr smear had a "salad pita", gd sampled the rice with peas and dill she bought for the weekend) and then we walked home.

the rest of the afternoon had been pretty relaxed, and hopefully the shabbat will be too 🤞🙏

...

right, those dried strawberries aren't going to eat themselves.

not enough drama!

 it's late, and i was already tired a while ago, but i've spent the past couple of hours putting together messages for our current and future landlords and i'll send them in the morning.

...

last night would have been far less stressful if i hadn't seen the response from our current landlords to my earlier message, which was offensively stupid. i wish i hadn't seen it then, and i wish i hadn't read it to gd, because we were both shocked and furious. we rushed to get to our friends (soon-to-be neighbors) with the freshly baked challah-peño (it was a bit of a flop - great challah texture but unexciting taste), realized when we finally got there that we'd left the ice cream at home, so i rushed back to grab it and chatted with my mom along the way.

the evening was great, largely cathartic, dinner was excellent and i drank just enough wine for my nervous system to calm down a bit. mr smear had a great time with the kids, all was well.

we got home late, and sleepy, and everyone went to bed pretty quickly.

today:

this morning i got up early-ish, pretty much finished ping-pong (it's great) and got most of the dishes done. gd and i were both surprised when mr smear woke up and informed me that he wanted to go to the swimming pool. NOT by bike.

so i had a quick breakfast, grabbed my second coffee and off we went. it was a very nice walk there, through a park we weren't familiar with, and we spent about an hour and a half in the pool, mostly just splashing about. before we left the pool to brave the cold air between the pool area and the locker room in order to shower, mr smear told me he might be willing to go back to jiujitsu training if he doesn't have to do mma.

i'll take it.

the showers there are great. once we were done mr smear decided that he really wanted a laffa for lunch (breakfast, really), and the only place open was the shuwarma place by the port.

it was a loooong but entertaining walk to the port, and then we had two huge laffot, preceded by mr smear eating pickled carrots without complaining  (he usually hates carrots) and even about half of a really hot hot pepper.

[omg my hands are so freaking dry, my skin's cracking all over]

halfway through my laffa i had a suspicion that i may have overpayed - google pay doesn't show you the amount when it verifies - and after an only-slightly uncomfortable back-and-forth we determined that he'd charged me 200 shekels for an 80 shekel meal... at least i caught it while still there.

we both enjoyed the meal, but mr smear really shouldn't have forced himself to finish his. we had a long walk home (with a couple of minor incidents of being rained on), most of which was him complaining about a sore stomach...

gd prepared the bath before we arrived, and he warmed up and soaked for a long while. then scrapper's niece came by to pick up his bass guitar and amp, which i'm sad to say i've barely touched since he left it with me, and after sorting out mr smear's toenails scrapper called, and we both had a lot to talk about (during which time, i later realized, mr smear was sitting in his room, drawing and listening to tool on his phone). then it was dishes time, during which time we discovered a really gross mold situation that needed a lot of cleaning, and then i cleaned the area where the guitar had been sitting for ages and accidentally pulled out one of the hooks for the fibre cable.

neither mr smear nor i really needed dinner, so we ate some fruit and the three of us played pictionary for a while before he had to go to bed.

another really good saturday together, he said ^_^

now it's my turn. tomorrow's scaring me, hopefully i'll get some rest before it begins.

...

the situation in iran is horrifying. the fact that nobody's swooping in to help the persians is horrifying.

extra steps

 after getting home soaked yesterday, we took turns showering, after which i recall very little of the afternoon. i'm pretty sure i napped under layers of blankets, i read a bit of taiyo matsumoto's ping pong, and i helped gd prepare the challah-peño taking our neighborhood baker's advice.

it came out much better quality in terms of the challah itself, but it didn't taste quite as good (intense) as it smelled :(

dinner was really nice, and the late night was mostly due to watching iran revolution-related stuff and tool / a perfect circle reactions.

i slept alright.

this morning was a lot of reading, and watching stuff, and then mr smear woke up (late) and we got into breakfast time. did i nap before we went out, or afterwards? i don't know. but we did go out for a nice walk (we were going to join nystire and co. but they got rained in) without argument, during which i convinced mr smear to draw a comic he's been thinking of.

he did that when we got back - oh! that's when i napped - and the outcome was excellent (and funny) but he doesn't want it published and he won't tell me why... *pouts*

i finally sat down to work on reviewing a whole bunch of the AI-generated code in my side project, uncovering really strange hallucinations (eg. a nonce that's generated immediately before being checked within the same function) and fixing a few actual bugs, and then suddenly it was 3pm and mr smear and i geared up, grabbed the vegan hot dogs gd had prepared for us, and walked to my new employer's office for his friend's laser tag birthday party.

most of the parents dropped their kids off, but i'd walked so i hung around for the almost three hours chatting with mr smear's friend's parents (good talks) and at one point putting in a few minutes of productive work on my side project. i didn't actually go into my office, though, because i felt very uncomfortable figuring out the alarm system over a weekend when i had no real justification for using the office :P

it was a long walk there, and a long walk back, but those were two long walks with good father-son talks, and we both had an enjoyable day overall. also, it helped that it didn't rain on us.

we got home pretty late, which meant that after all the shower/toenail stuff mr smear got to bed very late, and i'm already feeling like i'm going to crash soon even though i know i've got tons of stuff to do and i haven't been doing any of it...

...

"the revolution is being streamed, not televised" - tousi tv, "pahlavi announces plan to return to iran - declares final battle"

firstly, "media" outlets like the BBC are exposing themselves clearer than ever as nothing more than propaganda shills for oppressive, tyrannical, anti-west* regimes like iran, qatar, russia, and china.

(also anti-semitic)

secondly, anyone notice how the iranian people, resisting after fifty years of REAL occupation and REAL oppression, aren't raping women or murdering children?

dump

 the comic recommendation session was fun! and i learned a whole bunch of cool things. also, i encountered an art teacher from mr smear's previous school who was amused to put together two and two and get four regarding mr smear's artistic influences :)

i was up late playing around with kubernetes tooling, and watching news on iran, and just before bed my heart sank as i came across a photo of my old team dressed-to-impress and opening the TASE.

i should have been there, ringing the bell, and i should have been able to start looking to buy a home. instead, i'm anxiously avoiding getting started on looking for our next rental, and being confused about the pittance of unemployment that social security is sending me.

[and then, today when i pulled off my previous employer's sticker from the back of my phone, the entire back of the phone separated from the rest of the frame]

...

today started off alright, after mr smear left for school i dived in to my kubernetes tooling experiment and ending up publishing an article just before leaving to do some errands. we stopped by the baker to get feedback on the challah-peño - he liked the concept but wasn't happy with our execution of the actual challah - and he gave us some really constructive feedback which we're going to try to implement today.

the supermarket refused to accept a return that their customer support had told us they'd take, and now their customer support is assuring me that they're in the wrong and that we should be able to try again. then gd and i found a quiet corner to consult with our paediatrician cousin about mr smear, which was fine until halfway through when an obnoxiously loud family started dragging chairs and talking loudly and playing music right next to us.

and then, while we waited for mr smear to join us after school, the skies opened.

we went around the back of the mall to rescue him and his friend, arriving just as the skies cleared. both myself and mr smear's teacher had told him to bring his history book home for a test they have next week, which he assured me he had, and we walked and sploshed back home, with me complaining that gd has misled me into wearing sneakers instead of galoshes...

we arrived home, absolutely soaked, and peeled off our wet clothing and prepared for a quiet afternoon indoors with the air-conditioning on. that was when i opened mr smear's bag to remove all the wet items inside, and discovered that he'd brought home his empty history notebook instead of the textbook.

he can't be that dumb. 🤦

i very coolly lost my shit, and we redressed in the wet clothing, and i put on my massive galoshes, and we rushed out in an attempt to get to the school before they locked the gates for the weekend. 

it was a long, wet journey by bus and light rail, and mr smear left his phone behind so i also had to pay for four extra fares, but we arrived at the school to find the gates locked.

so we turned around and headed back home. it was on the second leg of our return that it began bucketing down, with high strength winds trying to rip our umbrellas from our hands and successfully (thankfully only momentarily) turning them inside out. we were thoroughly soaked by the time we got back home.

...

have i mentioned that i'm tired? i'm fucking tired.

jalapeño-powered

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

spicy

i type this post with burning fingers. i used gloves on the carolina reaper, so i'm pretty confident that it's the jalapeño i prepared before...

yesterday:

i woke up from a disturbing dream yesterday morning: my mom and i on a pier in a massive storm, me in the car and her standing about 20ft away. i yell "look at the horses!" and then realize we have a massive tsunami incoming, i yell at her to get in the car and she makes it just as the wave hits. and then the car is pushed right over the edge of the pier and i wake up as we're falling, trying to recall how to not get trapped in an underwater vehicle

i began the day publishing the article on git worktrees and devcontainers, then mr smear and i accompanied gd to the neurosurgeon to look at her shoulder. we had about an hour and a half to wait, which i used to finally start preparing for my client meeting.

the doctor was pleasant, and he tried to be helpful, but gd left very discouraged and feeling like he didn't hear her (although, in my opinion, he did). i hope we get to the bottom of whatever's giving her trouble sooner rather than later, but it's already becoming a process...

after that we came home, and i spent the hour i had until my meeting preparing some more.

the meeting itself seems to have gone well, and i was glad to get good feedback from my lead. having said that, i was a little surprised to learn that i'm going to have to go through a proper technical interview with them on monday - i'm a little bummed out, too, because i didn't realize i'd need to spend another couple of my "unemployment" days doing work.

at least my employer's agreed to pay me for my preparation hours, but i was kinda hoping to have a few weeks off :/

after the meeting, i ate some food in preparation for the next big item on my agenda: the eating of my first carolina reaper.

OMFG. i just asked mr smear to record a reaction video to me eating a carolina reaper, i thought it would be a fun father/son activity. i survived - i only took a couple of nibbles, that was enough pain to convince me that eating the whole thing may have incapacitated me - and now that my system's calmed down (and i can breathe not-fire again) i just learned that he somehow lost the more than five minutes recording of me struggling 🤦😭

so... that happened.

it took an hour or so for my mouth and stomach to calm down after that, and between the meeting (and its prep) and the previous days' not sleeping enough and the reaper, i was completely exhausted. all i remember from the rest of the day was passing out watching an episode of jujutsu kaisen with mr smear, and gd deciding she doesn't like dinosaurs after we watched episode 7 ("family challenge"), and going to bed right after reading some more of the ocean at the end of the lane to mr smear.

today:

lots of weird dreams. it feels like it's been a while.

after a long chat with horseman - we talked about AI and game dev, but more about internet psychosis - we all went to the mall to pick up some groceries, and then the corner market, and then mr smear played among us online with his friend while i watched educational content (ha ha - most of the stuff i watched today was trash), and then i did the dishes so that gd and i could make the challot together; we have our first challah-lina reaper incoming :D

i was reading a bit more of the department of truth when i got the sudden urge to write this, so here we are.

i'm tiiiired. and we're going out to our friends tonight. i should nap a bit.

from the AI warning to the sea

 the rest of yesterday was pretty relaxed. gd and i made extra-strength challah-peño, which really just means extra-delicious, and we finished watching eddie murphy's dr dolittle which - in spite of some spectacularly lazy writing - quite entertaining.

last night before going to bed, mr smear let me know that he'd decided that he did want to finish watching the matrix after all.

today:

gd hasn't been sleeping well, and i've been kind on/off the past weeks, with last night being one where i definitely slept some. but i woke up very early, and finished reading the first percy jackson novel.

extremely underrated.

on the one hand, it pains me to think that i only just discovered percy jackson. on the other, i've just had the distinct pleasure of discovering percy jackson! this is top shelf stuff, a brilliant, exciting blend of modern fantasy and ancient tales.

the first highlight of the day was settling in to watch the second half of the matrix. with AI tech being where it is, it's never been more relevant, and seeing my boy's face light up* as he encountered bullet time and neo's superavatar powers was so much fun!

* as well as his body twitch involuntarily, he's wired different

i spent most of the early part of the day alternating between the second percy jackson book, trying to write up manacher's algorithm in a readable way, and napping.

i'd made a pact with mr smear about going to the beach in the afternoon, which he sealed by doing something that lost him privileges (he has a compulsion that causes him to scratch himself until he has holes in his skin, and that's unfortunately the only tool we have to get it to stop) so he didn't have anything better to do...

so that became the second highlight of the day: we walked across to the promenade to meet up with a couple of ze germans, enjoyed a pleasant walk with them, then separated to go into the sea. the weather was absolutely amazing all day (hot, but dry), the sea was calm (except for very small waves crossing each other), and we chilled in the water as the sun sank lower and eventually set.

it was a glorious evening.

there was - as usual - a little unpleasantness getting mr smear out of the water again, and then out of the sand, and then across to and through the showers, but otherwise everything was cool and we enjoyed a pleasant walk-and-talk until we happened to find an open hummusia.

we opened a table and ate too much, and it was excellent.

by the time we got out of there the buses were running.

while waiting for the bus, my son blew my mind with a suggestion to reinvent the question mark.

we arrived home fairly quickly, and showered, and then i passed out on the couch, as much from the post-hummus food coma as from the day in the sun. i got dragged off the couch to say goodnight to mr smear (i'm starting to give up on keeping his door closed when putting him to bed), then tried and failed to get back to sleep even though i was half-asleep the entire time.

and then suddenly i wasn't, so i've written all of this and am now going to try to tire myself out again with youtube and minesweeper...

dog day halloween

 i'm still feeling tired, weak and fatigued. at least tahoma's halloween party last night gave me a proper excuse :P

...

yesterday morning started at the park with the school's "dog day". there were dogs, and it was a day. the sun was beating down (it was surprisingly bright and hot), and mr smear and i arrived a few minutes early, just in time for me to be awkward with a couple of other dads before everyone began setting up the picnic.

highlights:

mr smear's teacher sitting down next to us and reporting that mr smear has really turned things around over the course of the past couple of days. please god it holds.

the angry mother from the previous week refused to make eye contact. gd and i have been laughing about the fact that both of us were responsible for bringing a specific vegan cheese spread, so we  childishly brought two in order to "show her up" 🤣

i asked mr smear not to tell anyone that we were going to a private birthday party afterwards. he made sure to tell everyone. loudly.

everything on the table was vegan because of the allergy requirements, which was a first for us at a school event. cake for breakfast.

...

from there, the relevant parents and kids snuck out and the birthday boy's mom gave us ride to the country club. it was a perfect day for it, beautiful weather, hardly anybody else around. the downside was spending a fair amount of time fending off crows, egyptian geese and myna birds, but most of the afternoon was spent watching the kids have a great time together both in the water and out, having long and interesting conversations with the other parents (there were only three of us), and quietly recovering from the madness of the previous weeks (and months).

we were not expecting the gift giving, because our previous school and social circle culture is so different. the gifts were custom, and really impressive, and we're going to need to do something about that this week.

oh! and his eye seems to be clear, so i don't think the pool - certainly not this one - is directly contributing to his outbreaks.

...

we got a ride home, and showered, and immediately jumped in to some of the math homework mr smear hadn't done during the week. it wasn't all smooth, but it never got dramatic, and even for me it wasn't trivial (it's working with square roots and ranges of answers, neither of which he's used to). by the time we were done, we'd both had good exercise and i was quite proud of him.

we made an particularly potent challah-peño, my face caught a bit of it (fortunately not my eyes!) and my fingers burned for hours in spite of washing them thoroughly and even doing a whole sink of dishes.

but it came out delicious.

dinner on call with my mom was nice. afterwards, we did have a repeat of the usual fight about mr smear going out with me on saturdays, but at least it ended softly. then i left for the halloween party.

...

nystire and nyah nyah and partners, as well as the linguist we served with, were there, the place was packed with interesting-looking people and the decorations were really something. it was a really fun evening, there was lots of alcohol, and the conversations migrated from work to parenting to language as the night wore on.

by the time i left i was practically falling over from exhaustion - at least i'd made an effort to drink a fair amount of non-alcoholic liquids along the way - and i hailed a taxi home and climbed into bed. i got a particularly warm and fuzzy feeling from ending a night of good company and entertainment with a heart-to-heart with a taxi driver about the state of the nation that left him profusely thanking me for the conversation (which i'd very much enjoyed too).

it didn't take long for me to climb into bed (having thankfully received authorization from my wife that i didn't need to shower again first) and i mostly slept well, and late. it's been a slow and pleasant morning, we've talked and i've read (i'm halfway through blindsight) and now i've posted this, and gd and i are on our way to the shop quickly to pick up flour in honor of friends coming over for lunch.

out of air

 i didn't get much sleep last night. i've been having difficulty breathing and my stomache's been upside down all day from the anxiety.

i accompanied mr smear to school this morning, mainly for the fresh air and our usual banter, but also to keep him on track with his school council election slogan. apparently he ended up doing it properly.

my way home was essentially me running through scenarios with the team leads and running through possible conversations with my boss. by the time i got home and sent him a message asking him to call me, i was practically hyperventilating.

but he did call, and i said everything i meant to say and then some. because it turned out that requesting brutal feedback from him was a good idea, and i now understand the trap that i set for myself months ago: i took on all the shit, background, thankless work that nobody else is interested in in order to enable the rest of the team to focus on real stuff, and i've been managing the devops guys (some well, some not so well), and it now looks like i haven't actually delivered anything of value.

not only that, but nobody likes a policeman, and all the things i've been responsible for have required alignment from all the teams...

so now that i understand all that, i realize that how i've handled the situation was fundamentally flawed: instead of spending all day every day being interrupted by context switches, what i needed to do was dump the various responsibilities on other people so that each person would only get hurt a little bit.

i also made it clear to him that as much as i stand by what i said yesterday and recommend that we keep an eye on the new captain, as long as the current situation is what it is i'll be giving him all the support he needs to succeed.

unfortunately for the british guy, there's no way out of his dilemma; either he plays nicely with a manager he abhors, or he leaves. which makes me sad both for him and for the company.

anyway, i'm really glad that i spoke to my boss, both for the clarity on my side and because he was happy to hear what i had to say. having said that, i'm still processing, still running through scenarios, still struggling to breathe properly.

what will be will be.

...

perpetual anxiety aside, the rest of the day was great. i took gd to find a pair of shoes, and she found a pair she's happy with, we got decent coffee and waited for mr smear and another new friend to finish school. we all came home together, then gd and i left for a pharmacy / grocery mission (i would have gotten shoes, but the only ones that made sense were twice the price i was willing to pay), picked up some stuff from the bakery on the way home, and walked in to find the kids playing 99 nights in the forest :/

(they both knew that roblox was supposed to be off the table)

for me, the afternoon was a mix of reading, napping, playing shadowrun: hong kong. for the boys, it was computer games, card games (!), and then his friend convinced him to go outside to one of the parks (!!!) for a while. so that happened.

on his way out, mr smear told me that his friend's father was apparently a famous singer, so we checked it out when he'd left and holy shit he's a cultural icon :P

the late afternoon / evening was all about dishes, baking challah-peño (and finally understanding why some of them haven't been rising properly - too much flour), a little more shadowrun, and then dinner. which was going well - we're still watching disney's hercules - until mr smear started scratching another hole in his leg so his screentime is done until that's healed🤦

anyway, the last hour before bedtime was pleasant, bedtime itself was smooth*, and i've been playing shadowrun since... until i became overwhelmed by intrusive work-related thoughts again and had to stop to post this.

* he really wanted to read call of cthulu which i organized for him, but i wouldn't let him read it right before bed.

...

at least i can say that i'm loving shadowrun: hong kong. i'm playing it on easy so i can focus on the story, but even easy isn't that easy and the story and mechanics are great as always.

nature nurture

 this was a BIG weekend.

yesterday:

it was a very rushed morning. i dropped mr smear off at school, then took the light rail to the hospital mall where i picked up a bunch of stuff for the camping, especially the two bags of large vegan marshmallows. i carried the shopping home, then spent the next while helping gd knead the six large challot, including one giant challah-peño.

between rising/baking sessions, i rushed out to pick mr smear up from school, stopping at the office on the way to pick up my sunglasses which i hadn't been sure if i'd left there by mistake. i only had a few minutes to get out of there, so of course it was on me to discover that the alarm hadn't been set the night before and that there was some kind of issue with it... i managed to shift that off to my CEO before heading out again, arriving a few minutes late to meet mr smear at the station and take a walk to yuka monsters.

we picked up our copy of the day everything changed, then jumped on a light rail to return home, help gd with the last of the challot, and furiously pack everything. it was far later than planned when i finally went to pick up the car, return to load it, and get me and mr smear on our way to the "fairy forest".

mr smear was very excited about riding up front for the first time in his life, and he did a pretty good job as navigator keeping track of waze and relaying data. it's also been years since it was just the two of us in a car together, so we blasted his playlist, and overall it was a good ride.

minus us leaving the three coconut waters i'd bought for the trip in the fridge at home :/

the camp site was really nice. the tent we rented was way bigger than expected (it said "two man", but we could easily have fit four full-sized mattresses in there with space for bags). the tap water was potable, though it didn't taste very good, so mr smear didn't drink enough :/

in general, the class kids have a good energy together and for the most part mr smear gets along with them. with a couple of them better than the rest, which is positive.

one of the parents - a linguist - started telling mr smear that he didn't need to learn hebrew, which upset me... i tried to remain polite while making it very clear that she was doing something inappropriate, but she just didn't give a shit and it wasn't until this morning that an opportunity presented to share a bit of mr smear's history and make it clear that we (finally) actually have a handle on the language issue...

dinner was quite an occasion, gd's challot were a great success, and challah-peño received a lot of welcome praise. afterwards, mr smear's new friend's dad set up a gas stove so that we could toast marshmallows, which for mr smear was an amazing experience, while for me it was a mixture of excitement and trauma trying to fairly dole out a limited number of marshmallows to a swarm of greedy kids of various ages and cuteness levels.

and then, we realized that that whole time there'd been another family nearby with lots of marshmallows - non-vegan ones - so they could have handled a lot of the load instead :/

mr smear and i hit the sleeping bags relatively early (normal bedtime for him), and he was very excited to not be going to sleep alone. we both fell asleep pretty quickly.

i must have woken up half an hour to an hour later. the sleeping bags we bought are good. and warm. and i suddenly realized that i hadn't showered, and that i'd needed to shower. and then the restlessness settled in, and it wasn't until very late (i'm guessing around 2/3am according to what i heard later) when everyone else had finally gone to sleep that i finally managed to fall asleep again.

today:

so mr smear had a great night's sleep; me, not so much.

we got up with the sun, brushed our teeth, and i somehow succeeded in coercing mr smear to come shower with me. i explained to him that if there wasn't hot water, i'd be going first and have to suffer the longest, and when we entered the stalls we discovered that there wasn't any hot water, and i understood what all the previous evening's screams had all been about.

but the weather was good, so the moment i'd dried off the sun began heating me up. mr smear did not want to get in - i mean, neither did i, really - but he eventually did it and got through it, and once he was dry he also felt amazing.

great success!

i'm quite proud of myself for taking the towels back to the car and using them to ensure that the front seats and steering wheel weren't hellishly hot when we left - not only did that work well, but the towels were also bone dry by then.

he convinced me to start our day with hal's kettle-fried jalapeño chips, then it was breakfast / coffee / him and his friend inventing an activity that involved eating painful things (including the chips) that none of the other kids went for, then a pass-the-parcel game which he eventually joined (and took away a squishy-ball prize he was excited about), and then we assembled for a hike.

it was a much tougher hike than i expected, but it was good, and we got through it. it took a little while to break camp - mostly due to helping other parents and getting into a conversation about age-appropriate gaming - and then we were off.

our biggest issue on the way home was that the UX of the car radio is awful, and we couldn't charge the phone and listen to music simultaneously. so we charged it for the first half, and listened to music for the second half, and by the time we arrived home we were both exhausted, hot, and hungry.

the rest of the afternoon was spent showering, eating, and resting (or napping, in my case), dinner and more of twins was good, and then bedtime was a bit rough because last night reset all the bedtime ritual progress we've made 🤦

anyway, it was overall a fantastic first camping experience for mr smear, and an excellent bonding weekend for both of us, and hopefully i'll catch up on some sleep tonight.

circus

 today was emotionally zombifying. it began with a massive fight with mr smear (his usual shit that we've been dealing with over the past few weeks) right before his friend arrived and we all went to the circus together. i'm embarrassed that i lost my temper, but goddamn - as i explained to him then and later - when your kid fucks with you in the same ways, over and over, day after day, week after week, year after year, it adds up.

the circus (circo circo) wasn't the most amazing circus experience, but it did have a lot of nail-bitingly good acts. one of which mr smear didn't see, because the scantily-clad rollerskater was too naked for him and he covered his eyes the entire act. the clowns were impressive, the trapeze artists / acrobats did some crazy things, and the dirt bike ball was just crazy.

when we came home we resumed (at a slightly lower intensity) the morning's issues in order to try and resolve them, interrupted by a nerve-wracking fifteen minutes of trying to locate his friend who'd said goodbye and gone home, but forgotten to turn the ringer of his phone back on :/

and then we all hopped in a taxi and went to the emergency clinic to get gd some help with her weird eyelid thing. we were there for two hours before the doctor could see us. we did some of mr smear's math homework, and me and him read comics for most of the wait. gd got a prescription, and we taxied to the pharmacy to pick it up, but the pharmacy was closed :/

so we walked home and i immediately got stuck in to doing all the dishes because our friend and her kids were coming over for dinner. this week, instead of challah-peño, we made challah-banero. it was also really good, but a bit different, not least of which being that the heat, while minor, hangs around longer...

dinner was great, the kids played nicely (on screens, but whatever) and had a good time, and our only complaint was that two of the kids were sporting a nasty cough and gd's terrified of having to deal with another bout of bronchitis :(

it's now 1am, everyone's in bed (finally!) and i've got a little bit of proper me-time for the first time in a while. which i have to take advantage of because tomorrow's looking to be busy.

payoff

tuesday night:

i finally managed to coax the deployment to succeed, but without a sense of success.

wednesday:

the day began with me learning that i hadn't been invited to the previous night's deployment debriefing, and i suspected that that was intentional on skippity's part to prevent me raising a bunch of issues he knew shouldn't have been. so i awkwardly gatecrashed, and took a number of opportunities to interrupt with my opinions.

it was entirely gratifying to get so much enthusiastic support from the other participants, and i felt really validated for jumping in because nobody else was saying what i was saying.

i had a potentially "final straw" moment with bigtalk, discovering once again that in spite of the extremely explicit ticket and discussion around it, he still hadn't followed the instructions. "you never said that!" he responded, at which point i showed him exactly how it was written in the ticket. "oh."

anyway, by the time the day was over, after a few more iterations, we considered his work ready to merge and we pulled the trigger. the first thing i did after he left was ask a couple of other devs to give it a try, and before i left i'd opened a PR for some minor improvements, but by and large we'd crossed the line and were ready to move on to the next thing.

which made me super nervous, because the next thing is the really hard thing.

gd and my mom made pastries with "chunk" fake meats for dinner. it's creepily close to a real meat experience.

yesterday:

the work day began with a pleasant conversation with skippity that made me feel like there were no hard feelings, and then i synced with bigtalk to make sure he understood what was required of him. i think it's understandable how skeptical i was feeling.

the day was overall pretty productive, with lots of noise (a fair amount of good noise) and a lot of me actively protecting bigtalk from distractions.

an hour before happy hour, bigtalk stood up and announced that he was done with his proof of concept.

i literally didn't believe him.

i sat next to him, he walked me through what he'd done and how he'd done it, and i was literally stunned, half disbelieving and half almost in tears (of joy and relief).

for me, the rest of the day was a celebration. i made sure that bigtalk understood what a big deal this is, and i discussed the implications with anyone who showed even the remotest interest, and i made sure that our boss was in on how things are going.

it feels like after a week (or few) of stress and suffering, we finally got a massive payoff.

i got home, walked with my mom and mr smear to the liquor store (rum and gin, and whiskey for a gift), and got home to another pastry dinner (everyone's really excited about vegan pastries, while mr smear is concerned about becoming chubby).

today:

gd's at her sewing lesson, we're off now to my surgeon appointment for my ingrown toenail while i feel like i'm recovering from a hard night of i-shouldn't-have-had-alcohol-with-my-antibiotics indigestion and fatigue.

but i feel good about how this week concluded. really, really good.

entrances and exits

 friday afternoon is coming to a close. [as of me beginning to write this] we're waiting for the challah dough to rise, which for the first time i helped (inspired by the big family cooking showdown. some of the contestants made me feel that if they can do it, so can i). mr smear has just put together the most gorgeous pixel art sprites (he was originally going to try his hand and making harry potter, but got distracted), because we now want to make some kind of 8-bit harry potter game. we're still reading prisoner of azkaban, and he's now understanding just how different the book is from the movies. i had to explain to him why they're so different, and that it's okay, and i think he gets it.

i was also inspired to read the first book to gd, because she has difficulties reading for long enough periods of time. so far, she's also beginning to understand the difference and is really enjoying it.

my only issue with this arrangement is that i find it incredibly difficult to read out loud without reading myself to sleep. every goddamned time.

wednesday:

wednesday's workday began with an argument with my boss, and there was a lot of back-and-forth before we reached the conclusions that a) i need to tone down my enthusiasm, because every time i broke through a wall and thought i was almost done i reported that i was almost done and b) i needed to split my ticket every time a new required sidequest entered the arena and c) i needed to write more tests.

in any event, i finally managed to get the task complete by the afternoon. like, for reals. and it looks really good.

i did that while organizing a spa voucher birthday present for my mother, who spent her day on her feet volunteering (as usual) with the DA for the south african elections.

yesterday:

the morning started off rough, but mr smear had a good day in spite of it and was actually able to let go of it when he got home and remembered. the afternoon with him was positive.

it was my mother's birthday. mr smear made a really nice card, and by the time she got the voucher she was feeling the results of the previous day's on-her-feet-ness and the gift was even more relevant :)

on the way to work, i accompanied gd to the bank to pick up her new credit card, which went pretty smoothly.

i was on-call, and had an annoying task first thing. i left the office around lunchtime to have breakfast at home, and gd and i watched my cousin's funeral together on zoom. we now know that our original suspicions were incorrect, and that he got through his surgery and was recovering well. then he got up to go to the bathroom and collapsed, and that was the end of him.

at least he didn't suffer, but was a devastating blow to his immediate family, and to the rest of us.

in a way, it's kind of brought a lot of the cousins together (also literally, in a whatsapp group), and it's a little weird to be in a group with both my brother and my big sister. (it's funny how little things like cheating an inheritance can split a family)

the funeral notwithstanding, i found it very hard to concentrate. all day.

this morning:

i had a long chat with our kibbutz cousin, she's really having a hard time, especially as a travel agent in the current circumstances. they have about 25 displaced families on their kibbutz, so there are things about the war that are front-and-center for them which we aren't always thinking about down in our little tel aviv bubble...

i took a really big step this morning, and decided to just go ahead and post the videos i've put together on the war on the west so far. on tiktok, and on youtube. am i doing this right? i don't know if i'm doing this right, but i have to do something.

i'm really nervous about putting myself out there like this.

mr smear had a pretty good day at school, in spite of the fact that another kid showed him something scary and apparently he's now learned to stay away from the dark stuff (which is what i've been explicitly suggesting for days now). overall, i have to say he's doing okay. we're doing okay.