nerve bump

i managed to get a surprising amount of work done yesterday, especially considering a couple of rounds of parenting drama revolving around my son being sneaky and dishonest about his screen time violations. dinner was nice - we're continuing with chocolat, and i was very pleased to hear mr smear commenting about what a great movie it is "even if it is really calm and slow" - and then we were invited upstairs for some fluxx.

a lot of the hour or so we were there was fun, but for two things: big data being mean to his youngest (he's really impatient with him), and mr smear being a really bad sport :(

i actually slept really well last night (i only had two coffees yesterday, and i forgot to take my magnesium supplement), but i was woken at 6am by mr smear's traumatizingly loud and aggressive alarm. which turned out to be a good thing, once my nerves calmed a little, because i have to go in a couple of minutes and i had a fair amount to do.

...

tahoma sent me a link to unfortunately, you need to know what the jevons paradox is yesterday, which i happen to have seen the day before. it's absolutely brilliant.

it pours

i'm so freaking tired.

it was another rough day, tweaking AI skills and configurations and my PRs, and going around in the inevitable circles.

i went out in the evening for a short walk (the excuse was to buy another double-adapter, but i really did need real movement and my hip flexors had been agitated all day), and went i got home i was surprised to find that mr smear hadn't arrived yet - he'd missed his stop, and gotten off when he was almost at the next city.

my son learned some navigation skills today, and hopefully a little common sense. i went to retrieve him, and he made me lose my temper while i was trying to locate him by not only not answering my questions, but by telling me what i *should* have asked him when those answers wouldn't have helped me in the slightest 🤦‍♂️

when we finally met up, his lip began to tremble and i thought he was going to laugh, which made me giggle, but then he burst into tears instead - he'd been legitimately afraid. it wasn't until we finally got home that i realized *just* how lucky we'd been: when we came inside, his phone battery was at 1%. without family link's location service and a whole lot of phone time, i might have been able to guess which general direction he'd gone in but i have no idea how we would even have begun searching for him 🤯

so that happened.

on our way into the building we bumped into big data, who subsequently came down and managed to clear the cement at the entrance to the drain. then he had a beer and we chatted, and then it was our dinner time. we watched some of the first episode of the highlander series, and then it was bedtime for mr smear...

... and then, after i read to him for a bit and had had a shower myself, i saw that big data and another upstairs neighbor had done another experiment, and i saw that there was some water pooling above the drain. also, it turns out our A/C drips and had been doing damage downstairs.

FFS.

i had stuff i wanted to do tonight, but i'm so damned over it. i'm going to try going to bed now and i'm praying for a reasonable night's sleep.

forced pause

 this weekend has been a trip.

yesterday:

yesterday morning began with us sending mr smear off to school, and me (after reading a bit of watchmen) settling down to get a whole lot of work done because it's been piling up and the deadlines are looming.

so, of course, i received an urgent phone call from mr smear's paediatrician to say that according to the radiologist there *is* a crack in mr smear's wrist, and she sent us a referral to immediately return to the hospital. gd and i rushed to get out the door to pick him up from the school, upset that the doctors would release him and upset that they could make such a dramatic error, then took him to the children's hospital, where we fortunately were immediately ushered into the ER and seen to very quickly.

it didn't take long for their trauma specialist to study the x-rays and inform us that the orthopaedic surgeon that had seen him the night before was right, that the radiologist had misread the images, and that our morning had been thoroughly disrupted for no good reason. and mr smear was bummed out because he was explicitly instructed not to use his phone or kindle or play games with his right hand, which he's been struggling to comply with...

during the course of the running around, i'd contacted my teammate for help, having figured out a piece of my project that could be easily delegated. i was very pleased and grateful to see that by the afternoon he'd managed to make some progress!

once we got home, i spent the rest of the day doing research and preparation for a lecture, and putting together and publishing a tool for migrating MCP configurations between AI harnesses, and watching a good chunk of monty python and the holy grail (mr smear got bored, but he's still quoting some of it anyway) and the gamers (the director's cut) which he found hilarious ^_^

oh, yes, and we took a walk in the evening to the special recycling facility and then to pick up some snacks.

dinner was great, and we finished watching grease, but the enjoyment was significantly diminished by some drama - mr smear, apparently unintentionally, was quite disrespectful to gd and it took some time for the situation to calm down.

today:

i woke up relatively late, after a pretty reasonable night's sleep. after a little more watchmen reading and cleaning the balcony, we put on the golden child which both gd and i remembered fondly. mr smear walked out the room halfway through, i passed out for bits of it, and overall gd and i were both saddened by how disappointing the experience was.

i'd spent some time the night before writing an article arguing the necessity of introducing our kids to the pop culture we grew up with, and this afternoon i sat outside and finished it. i said a lot of things i'm quite proud of, but only after publishing did i realized that the title's all wrong and it's too late to do much about it.

getting gemini to produce coherent images for the article was hard.

our second movie today (because of mr smear's arm, you see) was gremlins 2, which we watched beginning to end and all thoroughly enjoyed :)

i took mr smear for an exercise walk in the park, after which i had a long chat with my sister who's struggling with a whole bunch of difficult stuff right now. that's the sad stuff. the good stuff is that it looks like there's a good chance she'll be able to pay us a visit in the coming months! i didn't realize that we haven't seen her for almost half of mr smear's life, in my head we sent her off just a few years ago 🤯

i said goodbye thinking we were about to have dinner, but that plan was derailed by a sudden flood of water on our balcony threatening to come into our apartment. we set up a barrier, sent photos and requests to our neighbors to please stop whatever they were doing, and big data came downstairs to lend us a hand (or do the lion's share of the work) in trying to clear the blockage. it's a good thing i could lend him my proper galoshes, it was messy work and it was late by the time we stopped and agreed to resume in the morning.

i started on my dinner while while mr smear and his daughter (who'd brought some stuff down) finished theirs, and then it was time for getting mr smear ready and into bed. i'm sure i've left out some important stuff, but tomorrow's a big day (as is every day in the upcoming week or two) and i think i'm done for now.

location matters

 i'm still feeling tired, after an hour and a half on the couch occasionally sipping my first coffee and almost passing out while reading stranger in a strange land. 

yesterday was a half-day of work for me, though a full day off for my israeli coworkers and my son. i spent it doing two important things: the first, determining that most of the current round of work i had tickets for could be safely discarded. the second, figuring out a way to share agent skills across different accounts and devices without checking anything in.

once i was essentially done with the work day, i took mr smear with me and we did a round of pre-chag shopping. there was a literal back-and-forth and we hunted down the more esoteric items on gd's list, but we got most of what we wanted in the end.

we came home, had lunch (and a really funny fight / battle over the mixed leftovers), and then big data came downstairs to help me install the blinds and shelf my mom and i picked up from ikea a couple of weeks ago. we didn't move very fast, but we did a good job, andwe now have good-looking blackout blinds in our living room and can consume media on our failing projector during the day 🤘

then the rest of his family came downstairs for a visit. gd wasn't too happy seeing us drinking beers - we need to find her gluten-free beers now, although in general we don't really drink beer at all - but we enjoyed a pleasant afternoon while the kids... well, their kids watched my kid playing video games. he begrudgingly gave them turns whenever i intervened, but i think he was just taking advantage of them being as desperate as him to have any kind of screen time whatsoever :/

the kids stayed over longer than their parents, during which time they entertained themselves playing fluxx, which mr smear insists that he hates (he's just not very practiced with it) so he antisocially read his kindle. meanwhile, i worked on an article describing my skill-sharing adventures, and then it was dinner time for everyone.

we watched - for the second evening in a row - infinity train, which is really fun!

mr smear's bedtime took a while and ruffled gd's feathers, but once in bed on a non-school night (it's shavuot, though, and i feel a bit weird about not doing anything special) i (finally) read some more of the colour of magic (we're so close to the end!) and then continued writing that article and researching better ways to sync.

i climbed into bed pretty late last night, just after 2am, after publishing a piece i was pretty happy with. and i may be tired, but i slept pretty well for the second night in a row.

this is good.

finding out

 i think i had plans for tonight. like, real ones, i was excited. but after a really long day - accompanying mr smear to school while practicing the sign language for FAFO and singing nant's ingonyama bagithi baba, trying to console gd who's stomach's messed up again, investigating weird messages from my mobile provider, long hours working with AI*, a huge, delicious vegan lunch from an unfamiliar place, more hard work, picking up mr smear while "participating" in an hour and a half zoom workshop that i didn't need, lots more hard work, losing my temper trying to help mr smear with his homework (him claiming to not understand a thing after successfully doing pages of the same stuff), sitting down with big data (and then his family) over a utility app he wants to build, a great dinner and ready player one followed by the terrible mistake of trying to eat 99% chocolate (why TF does it exist?!) followed by a rather shit bedtime, followed by more hard work.

* and understanding that AI is really teaching us to be better mentors and instructors to juniors

oh, and i saw and killed a fucking flea this afternoon. we have no idea where it could have come from. fuck.

i mean, at least i managed to sleep a bit last night. i wonder if i'll be so lucky tonight.

distractions

 well, the good news is that it wasn't our apartment, someone drove into a power line yesterday and the delayed effect was destabilizing the power for everyone on our block. fortunately, the electric company had everything back online by 9pm, though we did end up having to order food and eat it in the dark.

we started watching ready player one, though. so that was cool. and at least mr smear had showered already.

while i was starting to wind down for the evening, trying not to pay too much mind to mr smear not winding down (but at least making an effort, so it was much easier to be patient about it), big data asked me about using twilio to make an app with a button to open our parking gate. so instead of going to bed early, i'm busy playing with that...

wtf monday

 wtf monday.

we all got up early (my hip's still locked, but not quite as badly as yesterday) so that we could accompany gd to her dental first aid appointment. we arrived on time. her dentist was running late. after we'd been there about an hour, gd decided she didn't really need to be there after all.

i raced to find an appropriate spot to join my team's daily, but realized too late that where we'd settled wasn't one. at least the coffee was good. i hope the little white bits falling all over the place weren't from dried bird poop.

we then caught a bus home, on the way doing a bit of hardware shopping.

once home, i was somehow dragged in to trying to diagnose an issue my teammates had been working on but abandoned due to their holidays. i spent the following hours trying to make sense of things - mostly asking AI to investigate a variety of things - and eventually i was able to suggest something that seemed reasonable.

only to be informed by the devops team that that's just what they'd been thinking. so why the hell didn't they do something about it without getting me involved?!

gd received her shoes, which cost half again as much due to customs.

i took a break to be assisted by big data, who began the work of installing proper ethernet outlets. it was very stressful, and i have no idea how he managed to get the clip wired up properly. finally, just before he had to run off, we discovered that one of the pieces i ordered was replaced by something incompatible :/

after closing up my work for the day, i headed out to the local store again, this time for a stack of dark chocolate, because apparently it's a good iron source. the more i try to do the math, though, the less sense that claim makes.

it gave me an opportunity to chat with my mom, though.

after returning home, it was time for dinner, two episodes of strip search (we're down to the last episode!), a family chat with my mom, shower and sketch time for mr smear, and now that he's in bed i'm posting this and getting my evening squared away before climbing into bed myself.

...

mr smear has seen some of the last halloween before, tonight i bought it and another book of abby's on kindle. i was a bit disappointed by the merch available, though. i wanted Stuff.

the masses move through the tent city

 the nights have been relatively quiet the past few days, but i've been sleeping worse. physical nerve discomfort, primarily, but also mental disquiet.

we got up yesterday morning at 10am, which felt wrong somehow. it was only in the evening that we learned that it was wrong, because daylight savings time. it took us a remarkably long time to get out the house, by which stage the weather had turned to cold and wet.

we were nervous about traveling across the city and getting caught in an attack while outside, but fortunately we were caught once while at the mall, and the second time while waiting for the bus home, so we had time to get down into the parking lot.

man, the tent city is an experience.

between the mobs of mall people, and mr smear being generally disagreeable, and a siren catching us before i managed to get myself a second coffee when i was already feeling twitchy desperate, i had zero patience by the time we left. but we had managed to get the two things we needed the most: a kettle cord* and a smaller (and less permeable) shower curtain.

* how the hell did we end up with one less than we have appliances that need them?!

and gd's hair-care products, and also a large container of cholent, which mr smear finally tried and liked ^_^

once we got home, i spoke to two cousins, declining the still-open invitation to a pesach seder because there's no way we're traveling far with the war still on.

big data's been doing a lot of work on the building these days, and in the afternoon he came over with his tools to give me a hand with putting up a shelf to tidy up our modem / router situation. not only was he a great help with getting the shelf up easily and neatly, but he had a brilliant idea of attaching our sound bar underneath it, and we now have the solution we should have had for the past four years - it's awesome!

unfortunately, while we did get the projector set up "well enough" (using polystyrene from the electric hob's box that we hadn't tossed yet), it's clear that it's seen better days and that at some point we're going to need to upgrade it :(

i mean, it's served us well for a decade already...

a bit later we went upstairs to join them for dinner. good food and plenty of it, and aside from some issues with mr smear we all had a very pleasant evening. it was very late by the time we finally went to bed**, but between the achievements of the day, the company, and a fair amount of alcohol, i went to bed feeling quite relaxed.

** after watching the first episode of rick and morty with gd so that she could be reminded of why mr smear shouldn't have seen it

so it would have been nice if i'd been able to sleep better.

...

it's been a peaceful morning so far. i sorted out the playstation in preparation for mr smear's friend coming over, and i've watched some random things, and maybe i'll do something productive now or maybe i won't.

inside

 everyone had a rough night last night, but in our case it was having mr smear in our bed for much too long and plenty of siren disruptions.

the day began well, i managed to get a lot of my ideas down and read through some of what i needed to read through, and mr smear and i came up with another game design.

big data and his daughter came down for a visit; mr smear was being antisocial, but big data and i ran through a whole bunch of possibilities for the network disruptions and he found the bug: a bad ethernet cable 🤯

so now we have great network all throughout the apartment. i guess i'm going to be asking for a refund of the new network device.

i spent most of the rest of the day working on side projects, and then did another deal with mr smear (kick boxing for screen time). it went well! again!

we decided to watch strip search with mr smear tonight. i hope we don't regret this :P

...

here's a pretty good playlist of funk AI covers by conhuir. we were disappointed by most of the slipknot covers, but the metallica ones are awesome!

heavy dust

it's the end of the weekend, and i'm feeling totally drained. my brain's pretty much offline, and i'm praying that i'll get some decent sleep tonight.

we had a massive dust storm today, so bad we put masking tape over the wonky balcony door. the only time anyone went outside was to take out recycling or trash.

today was, for the most part, about constructing two wardrobes. i started the first one by myself, mainly because i didn't feel comfortable asking big data for help before i knew what was required, and then i kinda got into the mode of doing it. i completed most of the build with a little help from mr smear, invited big data (and his son) to help, and the rest of the build and the next one went relatively fast.

with minor breaks, for vegan cookies his son made, and for gd to angrily wash the floor again after mr smear forgot to take his shoes off when coming into the house (in his defense, he's not used to not wearing shoes in this apartment).

gd and i had an argument over punishing mr smear for sneaking upstairs to play roblox (when neither of the kids was supposed to be on screens), and i compromised. i hope the two day punishment doesn't detract from the lesson 🤞

i have to say that in addition to making my wife happy and enabling us to move forward with the unpacking, it's remarkable how much space there seems to be in this apartment now that our stuff's in here. it felt much smaller before.

...

my legs are hurting in a way they haven't for a while. is my body regretting not maintaining last week's insane level of physical activity?

i'm a bit nervous about this coming week. financially (closing our accounts and getting our deposit for the old apartment back), health-wise (gd's going to the doctor tomorrow), and work-wise (i've got to figure out how to manage this weirdness, and i'm praying that the code i delivered was actually good enough).

...

i don't know if it'll help, but i've put the three sets of imagine (the amazing youtube channel that was deleted) AI covers up for torrenting. i feel like i've become the keeper of a sacred artifact from a parallel universe, like something out of the movie yesterday:

imagine - the battles.torrent

imagine - boogie sabbath.torrent

imagine - synthknot.torrent

hot water

 omg i'm tired. and i just realized, while on a call with my mom, that mr smear had been in the shower for a VERY long time and i now have to wait for more water to heat up so that i don't have to have another cool shower 😡

...

it was a very long day. aside from doing some weekend shopping with gd, and building the last of the chests of drawers (with the help of big data and his younger son), i walked mr smear to his class picnic at the bird park. although he arrived straight into his usual antisocial routine, he soon chilled because one of his - and i quote, along with his airquotes - "clique" was there. he even made his own pita bread on a tava over the fire. we hadn't warned them we were coming, and the other allergic kid wasn't there, so the kids were covered with / covered everything with labaneh and nutella, so we had to be as careful as if he was with his previous class...

i tried to record a jackal that was just chilling as we passed, but my phone decided i wanted a photo instead and i captured exactly nothing :/

mr smear's been a bit rude this evening, but mostly alright. gd's really not feeling well... hopefully we won't have any shabbat emergencies 🤞

moving day +1

 okay, this is going to be a combination of point form and whatever-the-fuck, but i have to start with the fact that i'm typing this looking out over a major intersection that's been under heavy downpour for an hour or so, after three days of unseasonably warm and dry weather that was absolutely perfect for our move. i'm also nursing a throat infection (that i've clearly been cooking since at least sunday morning) and i might be nursing an eye infection that could be caused by many things over the past day, but probably dirty sawdust from me and - i think i'm going to start calling our friend from upstairs "big data" - big data attempting to use a jigsaw to cut out the bottom from the hob space.

...

which i'd forgotten i'd asked our landlord permission for already, so that was an embarrassing conversation. but not as embarrassing as the guy who delivered the electric hob this morning. by 8.30 - key handover time - gd and i still had quite a bit to do, and while we were scrambling, exhausted and sans caffeine, i got a call from the delivery guy saying he'd arrived. i told him i should expect to be back at the new apartment within twenty minutes, but twenty minutes later i called him to say i'd need more time and he wasn't answering.

meanwhile, we'd handed over the keys, i'd warned the landlady that "airing out the cupboards" wasn't enough to prevent mold from coming in through the walls and that they'd need to remove them entirely, and i'd warned her to deal with the pipes which miraculously held even as we held our breaths for two years, and gd was staying in the apartment to finalize the packing and finish tidying up without letting the auto-close door lock us out.

so around 8.50 i hopped in the van with a load, and on my way got hold of the guy. this time he was upset, and i reminded him that he hadn't warned me he was coming and he hadn't contacted me at all to set a delivery time. this was where the argument went off the rails, because he claimed he did arrange with me to meet at 9am, and i don't remember this happening.

okay, shit, now it's my fault. then i realize, to my horror, that my wallet is empty and i need to pay him cash. so i'm panicking, he's freaking out, he's waited half an hour for me and he's not going to come back later to get paid... i suddenly remember that we now live near a gas station, so i drove there and ran inside the shop asking desperately for the ATM. they told me where to go,  i went around the back, and... it wouldn't let me insert my card.

after a wasted minute with that, i came running back into the shop like a madman, begging them to let me buy something and give me a 100 shekel note as change. i don't know what they were thinking, but it was all very dramatic. the manager kindly explained that i could use their tills as ATMs, i went through an painstaking but brief identification process, got my hundred and ran out the door thanking them profusely.

i arrived at 9.05 - so technically only five minutes late, handed the miserably lug the money, took the plate, and thanked my stars he didn't want to fight me for yelling at him when i was at fault.

BUT.

later i checked my phone records, and now i think he was gaslighting me. i don't think we ever spoke the day before.

...

when i picked up the van, it had a lot of recorded damage, the most shocking of which was that the side-mirror and window controls sections had been ripped out. during the haul, however, emergency icons started lighting up on the dashboard, and then this message:

i still had one last haul to go. i prayed, and raced to the old apartment. i'd been carrying heavy things up and down too many stairs for too many hours over a span of two days, and my back was sore and my legs hurt and i was exhausted. every time i took the stairs they seemed to get steeper.

i picked up coffee for me and gd, regaling our neighborhood coffee shop owner barista with our morning tale as if she was a bartender, and returned to carry down two more heavy sets of boxes and items.

gd made a video of the apartment before we stood together in the hallway and locked the door for the last time, having spent a week slowly-then-rapidly peeling back layers of our last four years and thanking the apartment for providing us safe haven from the storm of early '22.

...

we returned the van, complained about it's unroadworthy state, and demanded a refund and a small car to do our ikea run. they sent us a taxi, and after we arrived at the parking lot we walked to a coffee shop, used their facilities, and stopped for breakfast and coffee. then we drove to netanya, which didn't take too long.

but time dilates in ikea. we were pretty good, we didn't get distracted, we had a budget (the relief from getting our last two months' cheques from the landlady was palpable), but we also got turned around a couple of times and it was a while before we made it downstairs to the warehouse.

after everything we'd been through, that i'd put my body through, what followed was madness. three trolleys filled with HEAVY boxes, an insane workout even when i was in good shape. gd was worried i'd injure myself, or have a heart attack considering i was running exclusively on fumes and adrenaline.

...

after a long time in the line (making friends), we got hit with a new cashier. and an enormous bill, and i'm still embarrassed that i said the amount out loud to gd in front of other shoppers. and then both our credit cards were declined. twice. i called my visa service, and learned that it was simply a case of not having enough credit left, and what's infuriating is that in israel you can't just pay off a credit card even if you have the cash. and i was panicking, because mr smear was out of school already, we were in netanya, and it was the only day we had to do the shopping.

then i thought - cash! they had an ATM, so i withdrew my daily limit. then i thought, i wonder if gd can draw the same limit even though we share the same account? so she did, and it worked! just as i was being informed by the manager, after they'd carefully counted out a stack of bills, that over a certain amount ikea will only accept ten percent of the amount due in cash 🤦‍♂️

fortunately, after much drama, we could at least split the amounts so between gd's card, the ten percent cash, and my card, we managed to complete the purchase.

but then we had to run the customer service gauntlet.

on the one hand, if we'd had a van we could have just grabbed everything and left, on the other - there's no way i would have managed that without injuring myself, so it was a blessing in disguise that the van we'd rented had been in such poor condition.

i was terrified, because i know that customer service can take forever. while we waited, we texted and called furiously between mr smear and our friends upstairs, and all of a sudden our number was called!! i jumped to the counter, and was informed that if we wanted delivery, we had to pay upfront and take whatever time slot was allotted to us. and if that didn't work for us, then we'd have no recourse.

i don't understand how that can be a thing.

but also, delivery in one to two days, but helping construct everything up to three weeks? never mind that part, then. so i paid for delivery, and after struggling to get the illiterate cashier to find our address wrote it down for her, and then we were off, just as the weather was beginning to turn.

...

at this point i was afraid of the traffic into tel aviv, which i see every evening from my client's offices, and i was surprised and unbelieving when waze told me it would take 38 minutes. we let mr smear and our friends know that we were on our way, and zoomed through to tel aviv, arriving at our apartment literally about one minute before mr smear arrived!

i took a break for twenty minutes to charge my phone (it was almost dead), and stumble around with gd with neither of us knowing what we were doing, and then driving the car back to the parking lot. it took longer to get to the parking lot than it had to get home from netanya, and i was having a hard time keeping my eyes open.

i felt like i was driving home on a come-down after a festival.

after a ridiculous series of chaotic events, obstructions and miracles, i made it safely to the parking lot, took a light rail and a bus home, and we'd officially (essentially) gotten through the move. our apartment is complete chaos, and everything is going to be hard and complicated for a while, but we're home.

after a good hummus dinner, making more noise than i'm comfortable with with big data and the jigsaw (i felt like he was parenting me, which was cool but weird, but the experience itself was fun), showering and climbing into bed, i finally got myself a decent amount of sleep.

nose, throat and eyes notwithstanding. my eyes seemed to have calmed down a bit since i got up earlier 🤞, i've managed to get all this down, i'm trying to get hold of a handyman to do the hob preparation for me (i'm amazed i managed to find my old post for a handyman on facebook), gd's gotten coffee made and mr smear has just left for school, and the sun's coming out.