rituals

 it's just after 6.30am, i'm sitting on the balcony with a clay-colored mug full of turkish coffee, having just woken up and performed the ritual brush gum guard - brush teeth - open windows - wipe down chairs and table, it's a beautiful morning and in about an hour i'm going to be off to my second acupuncture session.

i had a puff last night, which helped, but it didn't stop me from waking up almost an hour ago and being unable to get back to sleep. i'm still feeling a bit tired, but overall not bad, and i think the biggest thing i'm conscious of right now is how i hold my left shoulder. years ago (back in south africa) i realized that my left shoulder's always lower than my right, and when i remember and i make an effort to bring it forward my neck hurts less. but holding it forward is conscious effort, and if i get too comfortable and forget then i go right back to where i started...

i noticed last night that my mattress dips deeply in the middle. i don't know if this is good for me or not.

...

huh, i just noticed: someone put the word ritual in spirituality.

...

i started yesterday with doomsday clock, which so far isn't bad, but... it's not watchmen. and it's weird, in a not-good way. it's not bad, though, as i said, so i'm going to keep going and hope to not be disappointed.

i've been listening to marty cagan's transformed, at high speed and with skipping, and it's got enough interesting stuff in it to make it worthwhile. i think i'd prefer a summary, though. i mean, a book on this stuff seems a bit much.

the work day involved a lot of waiting (PR frustration on my second-to-last day!) but the results were worth it - five months down the line, a ridiculous number of lessons learned, and the "new" analytics data is being delivered and rendered almost exactly like the "old" data, but via a completely different technology stack. it's arguably better, definitely cheaper, and i've managed to overcome insane obstacles (mostly self-inflicted by the organization) and deliver just before my last day.

there is absolutely no way i'd have been able to do this without AI. this was a massive up-skill with big lessons in corporate engineering bureaucracy, and i'm really, really glad that i'm delivering the solution with a repo full of handover documentation and useful scripts for testing and generating reports. working with a project repo turned out to be one of the most important things i did.

...

on my way out the building, i chatted with two of the guys about a sensitive topic: the guy who disappeared almost two months ago (though it feels like only a few weeks) was fired mere days after his wedding. which reminded me of an incident a couple of years ago when a coworker was fired right after his wedding, and though i can't find my post about the actual layoffs (which is weird) i made sure to talk about my feelings on the matter.

i only realized that i'd essentially bad-mouthed my client after i'd described the behavior as cruel, and impossible not to take personally whether it's personal or not 😫

having walked, rollerbladed and then barely slept the night before, i was too tired to do anything physical when i got home. in any event, i came home right in time for a big sushi dinner and the wonder years, and after the bedtime ritual we sat down to finish crocodile dundee.

*SPOILERS* we were all upset by sue's shenanigans, but also puzzled by the question of "why in hell would either of them think that taking mick to new york would be a good idea?". we see him being led through the city and put on display in the rudest, most disrespectful way... but then i had a revelation: it's the australians who've made the movie, which means that the movie is actually as case of the australians treating the americans like weird creatures in a zoo, and our mick's as much the curious visitor as he is the curiosity. *END SPOILERS*

and then it was bedtime. now i'm off to my acupuncture appointment, and then it's on to my very last day with the client i've been working with for the past eight months.

scratched record

it's almost 1am, and the last 4 hours have been a thorough waste of an attempt to sleep. partially because of indigestion - i'm still feeling the laffa i ate for dinner - and partially because of my hips :/

is this also not the mattress for me?

...

the day began alright, i left one time to catch a different bus to ra'anana than the one i'd planned on, and i ended up arriving ten minutes early instead of a little late. which gave me the opportunity to sit down with the older devops guy i'd been teamed up with during the course a while back, which ended up being fascinating as his mode changed from laughing about tailscale and bash to unpacking his entire life story.

then we were all herded in to the presentation, and that's when my phone started buzzing. mr smear complaining about me not unlocking his phone for his art class. then proceeding to whining and begging, even though i was making it very clear that he was disturbing me "at work" and that he was going to get punished if he didn't back off. then incrementally punishing him until he lost all his privileges (again) until next week, and then shutting his whatsapp down.

after which he actually had the nerve to call me.

when we went out for a break, i called gd to tell her what had been happening and then sent her screenshots. i was livid.

the second half of the morning was a lecture about body language. it was interesting, but towards the end i was literally falling asleep and having a hard time ensuring that i wasn't snoring, or falling off my chair.

i rushed out to catch a bus back to my client's office, having to run the last fifty meters or so, and on the way back to tel aviv i spoke to gd who was just as irate as i was about the unfairness of encouraging kids to use their phones in art class. i wrote a message to his teacher to inquire, and tomorrow morning i'll be writing to the school counsellor.

i arrived at work in dire need of coffee. i spent most of the afternoon in a seemingly endless loop trying to resolve a devops issue with AI, and beginning a set of test scripts to determine whether the issue my teammate identified yesterday is real, and then gd - who's been on a "white diet" the past couple of days and had been on a proper "liquid diet" the whole day in preparation for her colonoscopy tomorrow - asked me if i could take mr smear for dinner.

mr smear, who'd called me after school to tell me that because i'd been so unfair with him, and blocked his phone for no reason, would be stone-walling me until 2027. that's kinda funny now, but omg i wanted to throttle him at the time!

i fast-walked home (mainly in response to the retard rat mix - oh! youtube music has a history page!) and we sat down for a family meeting that went pretty well, which i understand to mean that gd had had an effective talk with him when he got home. by the time we left the apartment my mood had already improved, and mr smear was cool, and we had a very pleasant dinner before skipping home in the light rain.

i tried and failed to find the skipping bit from some random comic where he talks about saving time. it's not michael mcintyre or demetri martin.

the bedtime ritual and getting everyone into bed went smoothly. but then... see the beginning of this post.

stopped

 we joined our upstairs friends for dinner last night (pot luck), and it was a lovely evening. my second drink of the day, and their couch was soooo... couch. we haven't had a couch in weeks, and i was - as the quebecois say - bean grease.

we all came downstairs and crashed hard.

...

i woke up late this morning, after a pretty full night's sleep. then i did random stuff - beginning with a painful attempt to upgrade the comics i made two weeks ago (needs a paid gemini subscription, and i couldn't find any easily-installable plugins for gimp to use AI), and then mr smear and i watched an episode of solo leveling on crunchyroll, and then i passed out for another hour and a half.

in the afternoon - aside from eating a lot - i began trying to set up paybox young for mr smear, which meant me signing up for an additional credit card of my own which i'm not happy about. but after doing the math, i discovered that just in terms of pocket money alone (plus doubling any unused for savings) he's already unwittingly earned enough money that the bank fees are covered by the compound interest, so it's worth it.

only... he has to install a different paybox app, and it can only be installed from the israeli app store, and our family account is still canadian and it's not possible to sign in to a different account on a managed phone.

*sigh*

after much digging - again - i learned that the only way to resolve this problem is to create a new family account from a different email, then migrate everyone on our family account. which isn't a huge problem, because we closed our canadian bank accounts last year so we don't really need to be on the canadian store any more, but it's really annoying because child accounts can only be transferred after a one-week waiting period. because reasons.

so i've done half the migration, and i guess we'll see how things go next week.

mr smear and i took a pleasant walk around our "backyard" park - park hayarkon - and after eventually extricating mr smear from the exercise machines we stumbled across what appeared to be a juggling school, which was quite fun to watch.

then we returned home, and i jumped on a call with protoplasm for our first catch-up in forever, and then it was dinner time, and getting mr smear into bed a half an hour late time, and then shower time, and now... i dunno, i'll probably go to bed soon.

costume shopping rescue

did i sleep well? not really. but i definitely slept better. i'll take it.

today started with dubstep, setting up gd's sewing station / mr smear's keyboard station. i don't know where the power adapter for the synthesizer is 🤦

i had a positive service experience with the municipality regarding mr smear's school fees, and then an awful one with the car rental service - i still don't know if i was talking to an AI chatbot, or a really dumb human.

work today was difficult, in a different way. an entire workday spent shut up in a phone booth on a really, really boring call that i only occasionally had anything to contribute to. i would say my biggest contributions for the day included writing up a review of my previous explorer on glassdoor, and reading reviews on my current employer, and using AI to dig up some really worrying stuff in the codebase i'm working on.

i mean, in addition to the really worrying stuff that my team was finding along the way.

i feel bad for not joining the team at the farewell lunch for the guy whose last day today was - though my vegan presence would probably have complicated things for them - and i feel bad that the new guy who joined today seeing my help-i'm-trapped-in-a-cage face that i was incapable of taking off my face all day.

there was some stuff that i should have paid more attention to in our never-ending meeting, though, i regret not being present for the random gems.

i left early, and came home to pick up mr smear and head to dizengoff center to look for purim costume stuff. he wants to be harry potter - in addition to our love for the franchise, apparently some of the kids in his class call him that, between his glasses and his hair - and we were disappointed by what we found. i mean, mr smear was disappointed, because we found a proper set of robes but he didn't like that the gryffindor symbol didn't match the movie.

at least we both enjoyed onigiri on the way. and there's a new "retro gaming" store with a very expensive arcade cabinet with three thousand classic games...

he insisted that we go to azrieli to the harry potter pop-up store, so we hopped on a bus (and took a short walk) and arrived to discover that the store's been closed :/

but in any event i'd warned him that i wasn't going to spend stupid amounts of money on a purim costume.

fortunately, the shitty costume pop-up store at the center of the mall had a harry potter set! just a tie and fake round glasses (and a wand), but i took a dracula-style cape and mr smear was happy, so who cares?

(gd cares. she's not the one wearing the costume, but she's upset by the red collar and wants to cut it off. gods help me)

we then took a stupidly packed bus back to dizengoff, getting off a stop early because mr smear was suffering so much.

on a whim, i took him into "the fairy forest" and asked if they had any harry potter merch - they did. the young woman working in the "magic" store who hasn't read or watched any harry potter (!) unlocked a disorganized cabinet and we managed to find a "proper" gryffindor brooch, and we were done!

we went down to the vegan market (i'd intentionally gone with mr smear on a wednesday for this), and mr smear selected a bowl with surprisingly healthy home-cooked foods, along with two giant kubeh. the kubeh really weren't nice - too hard, and not very tasty - but we both tucked into the healthy stuff and enjoyed it immensely, even though it contained a few things mr smear usually despises :P

we did a little home center shopping, took a look at another new "game" store (gambling and claw machines), and then picked up a chocolate from vegantino. again (i picked up an egg last time, which was amazing). long story short: the chocolate is beyond decadent, it's expensive but absolutely worth every agurah, and omg mr smear and i were in dessert heaven and dessert hell at the same time, both trying desperately to make the exquisite experience last as long as possible.

our old landlords sent transfer confirmation of our deposit! ^_^

after all that, it was time to catch a bus home, shower, and get into bed. big data came downstairs to pick up something of his, and informed us that everyone's preparing to take shelter... we prepared our bedroom (shutting the steel window, readying our go-bag and a bottle of water), and then i crashed soon afterwards.

i woke up a couple of hours ago, and after watching some random videos and writing all this down, i think i'm almost ready to go back to bed.

feedback

 alright, let's see what i can remember from today:

i did rest a bit after finally returning to bed, but obviously not enough.

i finished mr smear's pancakes this morning, surprised that they had vegan goat cheese inside. i still feel a little bit betrayed.

mr smear's been begging me to let him use google during his art classes for inspiration. i don't know why it took so long, but i connected all our calendars and set up his schedule so that i could set alerts before and after his art classes accordingly. and evening alarms to go through his browser history with him...

that was significant effort.

once again, i arrived at the office *just* in time for my team's daily. there were issues with yesterday's deployment, and i was briefed on them, and i met a new teammate. one of my client team brought his beautiful two year old giant puppy lab. most of my day was a mix of wasting time trying to get java tooling working for one of the projects, advising one of my teammates (apparently finding the root cause of the issue), tweaking monitoring dashboards, and mentoring a junior in the client team.

then there was the "family day" present. i was very confused when i learned i'd been registered for "fondue" (that doesn't sound vegan), then there was a whole story about whether the dark chocolate was actually vegan or not. and then i had to carry the basket home, which was awkward and heavy (oh, poor me).

i came home early after dealing with a discipline issue with mr smear over the phone - he'd been messing around with homework and gd was getting upset - and spent the next hour gearing up for the call with my client.

the call went surprisingly well. he thanked me for the direct and open feedback, explained the context for the craziness, assured me that we're aligned in where things should be, and informed me that i appear to be having a positive effect on my bulgarian teammates, which i take as high praise.

so that's good, and i feel grateful to be in a position where i have a team (my employer) behind me.

i immediately caught a bus to the mattress store - pausing only to report to the municipality what appeared to be a massive human poop about 50m away that was causing an eye-watering smell all the way to our apartment building - on which there was almost an incident as some big guy with a shit attitude got in someone's face, allegedly for staring at him.

i got to the store just in time, and lay down on the mattress. it seemed less aggressively anti-me, so i confirmed that i was willing to give it a try. the delivery guy arrived, and making arrangements for tomorrow got complicated, but i was pleased when he called me back from my way to the bus stop to ask if he could give me and the mattress a ride home right then and there.

i enthusiastically agreed, and we stopped at a gas station so i could draw the extortion money for the mattress and the delivery, and then we made the switch, and then a worker from the municipality called to inform me that the poop had been taken care of - he sounded traumatized, and sending me photographic evidence that it was cleaned seemed important to him - and mr smear completed his homework with much pride and joy, and then it was shower time [remembers to turn off the boiler because we had cool showers], and then dinner, and reading time / admin time, and a short attempt to rest, and now this, and then who knows?

three for three

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

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

...

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

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

phone calls there and back: clinic, municipality

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

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

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

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

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

forgery: doc editing and printing issues

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

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

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

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

more of the colour of magic at bedtime

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

...

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

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

nagging (feelings)

 today was... calmer? i mean, gd and i were not vibing this morning, she was upset with me for asking her to do two things outside (that she had to do, but we ended up deferring the misrad hapnim visit), and i was upset with her for harassing me about building furniture.

the weird typo is on gemini☝️

...

i killed another silverfish last night, which led to me doing a lot of research. we're currently serving their favorite meals - books and clothing sandwiched in cardboard boxes :/

so i began my day building a malm desk of drawers and one of its drawers, then off to work i went.

work was weird. firstly, i arrived late for a meeting that had been extended, and i must have joined just after the others signed off, so i was basically alone in a zoom meeting for a while.

then i resumed my investigation, quickly determining that there was a chain of services doing a lot of very silly things. i explained my findings to my client team, who asked me to verify them with my teammate who was also on the case.

"i have good news, and i have bad news."

"we're a bit overwhelmed right now, i only have bandwidth for the good news."

"the good news is that my teammate and i came to the same conclusions. that's also the bad news."

my salad lunch was boring, after i'd been frustrating getting it by crowds of inefficient people (including one guy who was trying to evenly shake canned tuna over the top of his salad).

i excitedly shared my new comic and process with my client team, then made myself a coffee, and then did relatively little (reviewing PRs, mainly) until i realized that i didn't have much to do, but also that i had a small window to pay the mattress store a visit.

the guy tried to convince me that what i'm missing for a good night's sleep is coffee with turmeric and honey before bed. i tried a bunch of mattresses, but had a difficult time determining the harder from the softer ones, and eventually he put in an order for what we have, but customized with something called "super soft".

it took a while to get out of there - he kept chaining his (interesting) stories together, even after i explained that i really needed to go - and i bussed home in time to put together another drawer. mr smear, who had irritatingly refused to take the bus home from the library, arrived just in time for us to grab a cab to gd's dentist appointment.

we waited a long time. we played, roughhoused, and napped in the waiting room. mr smear farted while a woman on the next couch was tried to rest, and she almost immediately got up to get some fresher air 🤣

the secretary who helped us was very kind and helpful, and she explained things clearly, and gd has a treatment plan that seems to be on a reasonable timeline.

we caught the bus home, had a delicious* dinner from jars and bowls, and a long chat with my mom, and a pretty smooth but late bedtime ritual.

* mostly delicious, the mexican bean stew was a little too heavy on the liquid smoke and i overcompensated with hot sauces

i have no idea how tonight's going to go. hopefully alright.

the night is long and full of tossing and turning

when you're so tired you can't get up, but your bed is actively hurting you and you no longer have a couch to escape to.

via GIPHY

it's been a long night, so far. i don't know what to do.

post-birthday different-kind-of-special

 dinner last night was nice - gd's first home-cooked meal in about a week. a little slower to cook with the borrowed plates, but it didn't bother me or mr smear.

the rest of the evening was all about getting into bed as quickly as possible, the shower was amazing, and i crashed pretty much immediately after.

in the middle of the night, i awoke from a sequence of nightmares: nightmares of being trapped trying to get home from work in a cavernous escape room (that was part of the office on a bond-like villain's mountain fortress), then of living at the docks and catching mr smear skipping school to hide amongst cargo loading equipment to play on his phone.

so that was me getting up at 3.45am with my nervous system on fire, raging at the afterimage of my dream son fucking up his imaginary life.

i did get back to sleep, a bit, but then i spent most of the rest of my time until alarm o'clock uncomfortable, and ultimately woke up with a stiff neck and the dizziness that often accompanies it. i mean, i might just be sick - gd's feeling similar today, in addition to the stuff that's been messing with her for months already - but still.

i think she might have been right on friday, that i shouldn't have let the mattress guy convince me to give it another week or two.

at least gd's happy with her side of the bed.

over coffee, i started putting together an article about producing comics with AI, but then i spent a large chunk of the morning sorting out address changes. and struggling - not for the first time - with the fact that we have money in our bank account but are unable to use our credit cards because we can't pay them off whenever we want.

not right now, but i think we need to consider finding ourselves a new bank.

on the way to the office i called social security, who informed me that the unemployment office hadn't updated them as they're reported. at the office, i remembered that nobody goes to the office on sundays, and according to the cleaning staff there was some kind of power outage as well. on my way back from the office i called the unemployment office, who after a very long time informed me that social security was lying. so then i called social security again, and the agent told me that the unemployment office was lying, and then i got really upset. eventually i got through to a manager, who "helped" me by directing me to the website to request that they look into it 🤦‍♂️

all the while in pain and dizzy.

i spent the rest of the day - until now - fixing the first iteration of my changes and learning how to test them. and eating and snacking a lot; i guess after yesterday's exercise (on top of the past week's) my body really needed more calories.

aside from pain and dizziness, my only real distractions were the electric hob installation (hooray!) and getting mr smear and his friend to come home on his way to the comic library to return the books (today was the deadline), and on their way from here i managed to catch them heading to bat yam by mistake in time for them to turn around.

parenting in 2026 is hard. navigating screen time, inappropriate content, lack of exposure to nature…

… but holy shit, being able to see where my kid is on a map, and know that i need to intervene so that he doesn’t end up in a different city by accident? priceless.

it's dark, the two of them should be making their way back soon, god knows how i'm going to get his friend home 🤷‍♂️

...

i have to say, slowly but surely our new home's starting to make sense. and it's huge compared to our last one, or at least it's much, much longer, because i've discovered over the past day or two that it's more sensible to call gd on whatsapp than to try to yell to each other, or get up from whatever i'm doing :P

shabbos

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

moving day

moving day was yesterday , and a bit of today as well. it began with a long walk to the (actual) 24/7 for mr smear's breakfast and lunch that should have been a bus or a taxi ride. then coffee, saying goodbye to mr smear and launching into a day that was full madness.

- finally getting to the van to find it with a flat tire just as the movers arrived

- the movers finding half the furniture they needed to move covered in items

- giving the movers a run for their money, i'm in better shape than i thought i was. but i am *really* tired and sore

- being dehydrated and particularly dry all day (i suspect i'm cooking something.

- dealing with cuts on a prominent finger of each hand all day

- lots and lots of stresses and fighting but also lots of calming things down and reconciliation

- the new mattresses arriving in time

- losing 100 nis but covering both movers somehow

- getting the paint mixture right the first time, but failing the second. doing a lot of painting. a lot.

- and mold cleaning. a lot.

- our favorite vegan cafe doesn't deliver to our new apartment, so delivering to our old and taking it back with us.

- gd discovering some horrible things about our bathroom. all the bathrooms have real issues. our plumber is an asshole.

- the electric hob never arrived, i called and they never called me back

- having trouble finding the next van at reading. GPS getting lost in all the detours at 00:55 with 10% battery and me miraculously recalling / figuring out my way without it

- a complicated shower, finally getting into bed after 2am.

now it's 6.30am and i'm about to arrive at the parking lot for today's van, we still have at least a full load to take care of before handover.

and gd hasn't slept a wink, in spite of her pain and exhaustion, because in addition to horrible bathroom smells we killed two... silverfish? millipedes?

trying to remember to breathe

 ooooomgomgomgomg

i slept kind of alright last night. gd barely slept at all - she was completely devastated. convinced that we couldn't have a pet in the new apartment, and convinced that the new apartment is a must-have, she was torn and deeply unhappy.

at one point i said to her that if we couldn't convince him otherwise, we should probably move on.

so i sent him a carefully-worded message first thing, and we then spent the next two hours fretting anxiously because it didn't make sense to take any further action without an answer. we were discussing the situation with my mom when he finally called back.

i told him that the clause was deeply problematic for us, after a brief preamble, and he immediately cut me off to make it clear that the clause was a mistake, and that he has absolutely no issue with animals.

*phew*

also, that he wants to do the contract for a year and a half, not half a year, which i'd completely misunderstood.

*also phew*

so i put together messages for our current landlords (who got back to us complaining how their son was sick, and that they needed to think about how to screw things up for us and themselves), and for our neighbors, and had breakfast quickly, and then left to the shops, where i once again failed to get a refund for a bunch of useless bowls we bought - it took a long time to not get the service i thought we'd been promised - and pick up a gorgeous gift for the mongoose's daughter's third birthday, and then we returned home, dropped off the things we needed to drop off, and headed out again to take a bus to meet with mr smear.

by that stage, the city had warmed up and wearing a sweater or a coat proved to be a mistake.

he met us at the light rail station and we continued on to allenby, but i received a call from the movers and we missed our stop, ending up at elifelet - just perfect :/

fortunately, our experience there was much smoother than my last one, and we managed to get on a train back within ten minutes. we then walked to the mattress store for a reunion, and after a lot of lying down decided that we both wanted the same mattress - the one mr smear has - but we're still ordering them as singles (that are supposed to fit on the queen-sized base we currently have) and if one of us is unhappy that doesn't need to affect the other.

we walked a bit and caught a bus to the mongoose's, getting off early in the hopes of finding some food. we happened to go past and into the very expensive, very touristy cafexoho, which is fortunately quite vegan-friendly.

mr smear was still hungry when we left, so i let him have some of my really good sesame bagel. mr smear has always had a thing about sesame seeds - he can't stand the texture - and he loved it.

[a pause to deal with the discovery that mr smear picked his scabs again after we just had a whole thing about not doing that, and he has a proper wound on his hand again]

we arrived at the mongoose's, and met up with his parents for the first time since we've been in israel. of course, i fumbled his mom's name (i was close, but it was embarrassing). anyway, we had a really nice afternoon, the gift seems to have been well-received, and we all talked a lot.

then suddenly it was time to go. we ended up walking home, stopping for ice-cream along the way (way more sugar than any of us needed), picked up a bottle of wine and some tubs of ice-cream for tonight, came home, and began preparing the challah-peño. we used a lot of jalapeño, the dough ended up really wet, i hope it comes out well.

...

the stress of the previous weeks combined with the stress of the coming weeks is overwhelming. absolutely overwhelming.

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.

gimme an f

 yesterday:

the clinic told me i had to make a doctor's appointment, so i did. then i went to the pain clinic and got gd's appointment moved. then i walked through the sarona market to get to the office, stopping to pick up a coffee and help someone with a demo along the way, and picking up potato spice and two bottles of scorpion pepper sauce.

most of yesterday's work was shit, our security team's boss invented some really stupid manual work in the name of compliance and i spent half my day cloning vaults secret by secret.

in addition to that, i supported my teammates and realigned (again) with bigtalk.

i rushed out at 5.30pm, in time to get home and hear gd throwing a kitchen tantrum about mayonnaise. i went out for a walk with my mom and mr smear, and we ended up on a shopping mission for vegan mayonnaise with mixed success.

then we came home, had a really nice dinner, followed by a massive fight about the mayonnaise (okay, that's not fair - it was about what the mayonnaise represents, including the fact that gd is *really* not interested in being vegan and it's not just about eggs) and going to bed was a pretty bitter affair.

today:

and then i woke up around midnight in pain, and couldn't get it out of my head that i haven't had a decent night's sleep in years because gd refused to sleep in two separate beds when the only beds she can sleep in actively hurt me.

i spent the rest of the night on the couch, only some of which i slept through.

i had a bunch of stuff to do in the morning, some of which got done, and gd and i had a Talk and we've both got stuff to process.

then i went to the office and had a really difficult experience with bigtalk, who *still* hadn't understood what it was i expected from him. and when he did finally understand, he realized why i'd told him a week ago that it should have taken a few hours and he was over-engineering the solution.

with great pain, i took him aside and explained to him exactly what i wanted, finally got him to agree, then wrote out a particularly explicit ticket and made sure he understood what it's instructing him to do. then i began working on the next ticket, which we'll make sure to talk through before he begins.

oh, boy.

i was then sent on a hunt for a computer that doesn't exist to support a new surprise urgent installation, after which i had to leave to get the dentist for a first aid appointment.

the dentist took some x-rays, then showed me where both sides of my mouth have urgent filling issues. then i rushed off to get full imaging done (14 very uncomfortable plates), then i came home and had lunch, worked a little and then returned to the clinic for the ingrown toenail appointment. now i have two sets of antibiotics, a useless piece of cotton wool under my toenail (it's not the front edge of the toenail that's a problem), and another appointment to make.

on the way home i received a call from skippity, who's having trouble with a deployment and who's actively making things worse for himself and everyone he brings in to try and fix it.

at the same time, another deployment has been going wrong so i tried to take it over, but after more than two hours i'm at a loss as to where the real issue is and i'm struggling to really care.

and all throughout this i was supporting one of our external contractors. and having to push hard to get mr smear to do his reading homework with me.

i'm so over today.

opposite of blues / pre-procedure

i managed to sleep on my mattress topper the whole night last night. mr smear was pretty cool this morning. we left on time to get him to the school's annual race in memory of the kid who was run over and killed four and a half years ago on yom kippur.

on the way there, we hopped on a bus that was absolutely packed, and after getting to the middle and finding a place to stand i realized that i needed to go back to the driver to scan mr smear's card. i squeezed all the way there, and as i raised my hand to scan the card i bumped against a railing and the card flew out of my hands, seemingly in slow motion, right across the driver and into the space between his console and the windscreen.

good lord.

he stopped at the next stop, and made an incredible effort to retrieve the card... and he did, and it still seems miraculous. very grateful and embarrassed, i took the card and tried to swipe it. that was the point at which he informed me that the machine was broken.

...

i got him to his class just on time, put sunscreen on him for the first time in forever, and then walked around, feeling offended that there wasn't any coffee for the parents. but then i realized that there weren't a lot of other parents hanging around, so i found his homeroom teacher and she informed me that not only was i free to go, but encouraged to do so too, and that the kids would be bussed back to the school after the race.

win!!!

i was so busy saying goodbye to mr smear while returning his bus card to its right place, that by the time i was too far away to turn back i realized that i had no idea what i'd done with it (i just checked now, it's where it should be).

i came home, and struggled a bit to get into my work (i had a number of tasks on my plate and plenty of opportunities for distraction). i started to find my feet a little while before heading out to pick up mr smear and take him to his hebrew tutor, and we had time for a good chat on the way. and i filed a report to the municipality concerning the infestation of mosquitoes that were feasting on us.

i found a nice little bakery/coffee shop close by, and enjoyed an excitingly productive cup of coffee. then i picked him up, receiving a good report on his progress, and we picked up a couple of groceries on the way home, including a special pesach treat.

"dad? can we have that when we get home? you know, to celebrate buying it?"

genius.

so we did, although i'm the only one who ended up really enjoying it :P (it was far too sweet for gd, and mr smear decided he wasn't into them after his third one)

the remainder of the afternoon can be summarized as a series of successes, with lots of intensity in between. by the time i signed off, i had just enough time to play a game of bloons adventure time, do the dishes, and play some lego harry potter with mr smear before dinner. i honestly don't even know which year we're playing right now :P

we've just had a brief but intense electric storm, which i wasn't expecting. last night there was a crazy storm in cape town, my mom showed us the back gate of her building falling off :S

mr smear went to bed much later than he should have, and the same for me. i barely had it in me to brush my teeth and shower, and now i'm sitting with a cup of cinnamon tea, which i may or may not finish before going to bed.

...

tomorrow gd's undergoing another nerve block. not a moment too soon, as she's been really struggling since yesterday. this next week's going to be... i hope it's going to be okay.

looming

yesterday:

i slept pretty well. there was some unpleasantness in the morning, though we got over it. i'm very happy that i was in good enough shape to rollerblade to work, but i'm a bit concerned about one of the clips on my new blades.

the work day was full of mixed feelings: a lot of stress due to a new release with some issues, but a lot of satisfaction completing two big tasks and learning a lot of small but important things along the way.

twin peaks is interesting and entertaining, but it's also a phenomenally effective sedative.

today:

i slept pretty well again. otherwise, i should mention that today began with a lot of stress, and a lot of the day could be described by the phrase "everything is broken".

i was responsible for waking up mr smear this morning, and it went better than yesterday. he didn't move particularly quickly, but quickly enough that i had time to help him revise for his geometry test. which he aced, so we're all feeling good about it.

i rushed off to work early this morning in order to be able to accompany gd to a social security appointment regarding upskilling assistance, it was an interesting meeting and i'm very curious to hear what the "vocational doctor" has to say.

on the way there, everyone in tel aviv's GPS went haywire, so that was messy. and iran's threatening to attack us, so that's... fun.

some of the work day was good, but some of it was very frustrating. the happy-hour vegan "crêpes" wasn't good, but the whiskey made up for it. i got a good amount of grocery shopping done on the way home, which will make tomorrow's pre-shabbat run much easier.

now to play some more bloons adventure time on my way to bed.

who's the motherflippin'?

monday:

another night waking up in pain in the middle to move to the couch.

well, i'm pleased to report that mr smear did, in fact, complete his homework - both for sunday and monday - but it wasn't without some extra-added encouragement. i worked from home, and i'm still amused that my ex-montreal coworker had to answer the door in the middle of a video call and decided that *that* was the appropriate time to put pants on 🤣

aside from a visit to the hospital and clinic to sort out authorization for gd's nerve block next week, i didn't get out the house. i was surprised when my coworker signed off at 7.30, because i had no idea it was so late...

funny moments: mr smear bashing his foot on the couch leg (not funny), then yelling "i need a break!" in exactly gd's usual tone. also, mr smear becoming very frustrated with a boss in the prodigy math game, arguing with me when i suggested that he might want to change tactics, finally winning and - in joyful celebration - repeatedly yelling "I'M THE MOTHERFLIPPING!" 🤣

(technically) yesterday:

another night waking up in pain in the middle to move to the couch.

today was a difficult wakeup (again), but once mr smear got going it was fine. gd and i enjoyed a peaceful start to the day, and at the office i managed to solve two big problems (both with github actions) before home-time in spite of a lengthy work meeting as well as a parent-guidance session in the middle.

it felt really nice to leave the office before dark, and in really pleasant weather.

mr smear was good for homework again (yay!), and so the evening was mostly relaxing (and watching is it cak3? over dinner). i read a bit more of the prisoner of azkaban to mr smear at bedtime,  then put on my new blades and headed out to join the group for the first time in at least half a year (between winter and the war...)

it was a relaxed route, and really nice (aside from a few points where we went through construction or the nasty bricks we call ackershtein), but it was hard on my body and i went from parched and dehydrated by the time we finally got a break directly to having had too much fruit juice and sugar from the ice-lollie.

anyway, i had a great time and i'm really happy i went. i've been home for an hour now, i'm good-sore, i'm showered, and i'm ready for bed.

now to see what the damned mosquito that's been bothering gd all night is up to.

test nerves

yesterday was a pretty relaxed day. i continued working really hard on the tool, i'm almost done and it's looking good.

halfway through the day i got a phone call: mr smear had a bit of an anxiety attack when the test was put in front of him :(

but i also got a really nice message from his teacher informing me that he was generally behaving well and cooperating :)

falafel for lunch with the team and one of my coworkers' very pregnant wife, i brought the vinegar but the chips were for the table (i should have ordered my own).

happy hour shenanigans: the boss ordered a vegan ice cream for me, but it was only a thin layer over non-vegan ice cream. he was pissed off, but i just had great whiskey instead.

...

i actually slept alright on the mattress topper last night, but we were all particularly tired this morning as we'd lost an hour due to the time change. i dropped mr smear off at school, picked up the last of the post-hospitalization laundry and a disappointing bagel, then headed out to nes tziona on a mission for new rollerblades.

firstly, i really appreciated the owner letting me ride around to get a feel for the different models. i ended up taking the first offered, the very pricey ones, but only because both of the cheaper models i tried hurt me in different ways. i think these ones are good - the tempish wenox top 100. and the sale experience was worth travelling two or three hours by bus.

while i was there, my mom called me in hysterics because our xth-cousin yth-removed (we say sixth, but i've no idea how we're related) got the job she was praying for by eating pasta every day >D

i've spent most of the afternoon napping or snacking, although i did have a good chat with horseman. mr smear's friend just left after an intense gaming session, and i'm now drinking a green tea and hoping that tonight will be a good (internal) clock reset.

i don't know if gd's overly sensitive, or sufficiently sensitive, but this is the fourth bag of flour she's thrown out and i can't smell anything wrong with it. anyway, happy wife happy life...

mr smear hadn't done any of his homework yesterday, so he's completing it right now - rushing to get it done before sunset so that he doesn't lose shabbat privileges :P

topper of the morning

tuesday:

mr smear not wanting to get out of bed, massive drama getting him out of bed but then gd figuring out why - he was upset by some girls who'd pointed and laughed at his eye on his last day at school.

a good start to the work on the really interesting tool i've been tasked with building. a building "whiskey tasting" event followed by an all-hands with better whiskey.

excitedly picking up the mattress topper on the way home.

the fight over fighting and spillover/leftovers from february's events, with me taking a walk and us eventually "agreeing to disagree".

watching the first half of the first episode of twin peaks. terrible acting, but very interesting nonetheless.

sleeping on the mattress topper: not bad, not as comfortable as the couch, but i did sleep.

yesterday:

a good start to the day, and a very focused day working on the tool. finishing the day constructing a monitor arm, trying to pick up laundry on the way home but getting there too late, and successfully getting mr smear through math test prep.

a pleasant evening, finishing the first episode of twin peaks, crashing.

waking up in pain in the middle of the night to move to the couch :(

almost-weekend stress

 it's going to be an intense day today. on my way out my boss and i synced on how out-of-sync we were, so today i'm going to do what i can to achieve all the stretch goals before the weekend so that i can start something new on sunday and help him feel ready for his parental leave.

my scalp's already feeling much better after three days of shampooing, but i'm going to pick up the treatment on my way to work today anyway.

mr smear's definitely on the mend. hopefully he'll be back at school soon.

i slept on the couch last night. i slept well. i'm now confident that most of my sleep disruptions over the past years have been due to sleeping on the wrong beds. like, i'm actually feeling functional today.

holy shit: yesterday i suggested to a coworker that maybe one day someone will figure out how to remove herpes using CRISPR. this morning i opened my browser to look for something and this article on removing HIV with CRISPR popped up out of nowhere.