unroutine

 oh. it's 00.28 as i begin writing this. i went to bed about an hour and a half ago, and i've been lying uncomfortably awake for the past half hour or so trying desperately to claw back the unconsciousness. my belly's been doing a thin all evening (again in the evening, again no idea what's triggered it), and my lower back's been doing a thing since i stopped sleeping, and my brain's been doing a thing since...

yesterday (saturday):

i wasn't very productive yesterday, mostly on purpose. i thoroughly enjoyed witnessing mr smear playing battlezone on the PSVR, and i tooled around most of the day arbitrarily, and i enjoyed a good afternoon nap.

in the late afternoon - around 4.30pm - my sister and i dragged mr smear out ("i don't want to go to the beach!") and we walked, in the not-too-unpleasant heat, down to the beachfront golda. after the ice cream break, we walked back up to the hilton beach, and enjoyed a lovely evening; unable to get mr smear out of the water, of course, and dragging his feet to leave the beach :P

after catching an outrageously packed bus home, and showering in turns, gd treated us to a great dinner and we all crashed.

today:

another reasonable night's sleep (only tonight breaks the streak). very reasonable, in fact. my sister left really early again (she went to tour the gaza envelope and see the nova site), mr smear slept in until around 11am and was annoyed that i'd bothered him (twice) because i think he should have some semblance of routine in spite of it being summer holidays.

i began my day on the balcony, then spent my work day in my office. the actual meaningful work i did was minimal, primarily because the people i need to approve my work are either on weekend time or enjoying the fact that nobody's work is properly monitored on sundays.

i burned a ridiculous amount of tokens improving dashboards and making an ai status tool look cleaner.

mr smear and i - and then gd - had a massive fight about music practice*, which eventually resulted in him actually practicing with a good attitude in spite of the emotional rollercoaster and having lost hours of screen time for being disrespectful.

* that he has to put his heart into it, not just get through it. and that he needs to treat it like a rage game.

we side-stepped the punishment by going upstairs to play settlers of catan, mr smear's first encounter with the game.

he enjoyed it!

aside from being vengeful (really just against me) and myself having a pretty rough game, we all had a good time and played pretty well. there was one incident which i still think is hilarious, but awkwardly so: big data's son got confused and thought that his dad had moved the robber to block him and mr smear, when it was actually me. but he was unshakeable, so i piled on against big data, at which point - in spite of my laughing - mr smear got caught up. this went on for a minute or two before i put a stop to it and admitted that it was me, which threw both the kids completely 😂

we got home at roughly the same time my sister did, and soon settled down for dinner. post-dinner i was becoming a bit frustrated with getting mr smear into the bedtime ritual, but i made good progress with the auto-doc project (i'm having a much better experience with codex than claude) and then read alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear, which put me to sleep more than him.

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.

groans, good and bad

what was next was me reading count zero in bed until i passed out, which didn't take very long. i'm enjoying it, but i'm not getting very far :P

in the middle of the night i awoke from a hyper-realistic zombie nightmare which began with me leaving a group of strangers huddling around a reservoir to go to a lecture in an underground facility with what looked like bleachers (grandstands), finding a seat at the back of the class and realizing that i wasn't wearing a shirt and the people in front of me were making a thing of it and taking (or pretending to take) photos.

then someone sitting a couple of meters to my left said something, and i responded by making a kind of popping sound with my lips, and unwittingly and accidentally spat at him. so that was awkward.

and then all hell broke loose further into the darkness, and it became apparent that some kind of riot was taking place, and i joined the people fleeing through the bleachers and up towards the light. i woke up just as i stumbled across a guy lying curled up on the steps, seriously wounded and looking like his guts had been pulled out of his ass.

i got up and spent a little time imagining what i could have / would have done for the poor guy under the circumstances (circumstance being trying to save my own life, not wanting to go near him but not wanting to leave him to die or be trampled).

i spent the next couple of hours researching printing services, compiling a table of costs and scaling, and eventually returned to bed having picked out two viable options.

the dream resumed from a later point in time. i was coming in from the outside, with someone else, and there was an enemy of some kind behind us. the compound seemed abandoned, but as i reached into a medical cabinet for a spray that would somehow serve as a zombie-repellent, i considered that the zombies must have been sensitive to light and that the "riot" may have been confined to the darkest depths.

i got up, caffeined myself, and began trying to put the test prints together. one of the services' sign up process is completely broken, so that leaves a single service, lulu. i tried reading through the guide, but as soon as i realized that i was out of my depth i sent it to mr cat to ask him if he can make heads or tails of it (in theory, it's his field of expertise).

mr smear has finally decided on a birthday present: battlezone gold edition. i played a little myself, and it's gorgeous.