getting stuff done

 it's been a busy morning! we failed to get gd's canadian crypto account reactivated (their verification is broken), but i managed to get my israeli one sorted out. this was after discovering yesterday that ethereum gas fees have finally normalized after all the upgrades, making it worthwhile transferring money, and that compound has been generating far less interest than promised.

i mean, with our amounts of money it didn't make a huge difference, but still.

while doing that, i managed to get the blast window for our shelter roped up so that gd can close it herself in case of emergency. gd and mr smear cleaned the house yesterday, specifically worried about all of us (including my sister and potentially mr smear's friend) having to sleep in our shelter bedroom together. apparently things are heating up, though i've been completely disconnected from the news cycle these days.

then i called and made an appointment for her to see the dentist, because of course she's in pain after her root canal and crown were done... at least her stomach seems to be doing a bit better today.

i think i've sent my insurance broker the documents she wanted - turns out my previous employer forgot to update the insurance companies that i wasn't working for them any more 🤔

finally, gd found our boxing gear (whew!) and i posted the mongoose's guitar hero guitars on the facebook marketplace.

so, all in all, it's been a morning.

[chokes on a raisin bran raisin]

nervous juggling

 i already forgot how i slept on wednesday night, but i can say that last night wasn't bad. the last hour and a half in bed trying and failing to sleep was a bit of a drag, but overall it was alright.

yesterday was a really, really long work day. and i was manic - i guess i've been manic for a couple of days now - and doing a lot of nervous juggling while being bombarded with interesting information by the guy next to me (dx).

i spent two hours in the morning on my autodoc project before going to the office. for our team daily, i spent a lot of it trying to nudge my new manager without being imposing. then i spent the day trying to understand the existing ai infrastructure, and pitching my agentic skills (in zip format) to the vp tech, and reviving and reconstructing old golang services (everyone's too scared to touch them), and finally (finally!) getting most of my data to land that i've been working on for so many weeks now...

... and pitching my vision to random strangers (and getting buy-in ^_^), and discovering that my blockchain hackathon idea from 2021 (which i've subsequently tried to pitch to a number of people) has dx so excited that he's decided it's his "fable project" for the weekend - it would be so cool if he managed to pull it off!

between getting home and dinner, i gave mr smear the choice of rollerblading or walking. i was disappointed that he didn't want to get on his wheels, but i was surprised that he decided he wanted to walk all the way to the comics library (without any intention of actually going into the library). so off we went, for a very pleasant walk, discussing some horror game ideas he's had which are actually pretty damned good.

we got home and sat down for dinner, and finished watching guardians of the galaxy. what a brilliant movie. drax definitely gets some of the greatest lines.

after getting mr smear into bed, and in spite of the creeping tiredness, i continued working on my autodoc project for another two hours, before finally crawling into bed just before midnight.

...

now to dive back in until we all go out for the friday morning shopping.

opportunity

 well, my shoulder's hurting this morning, but my eyes are feeling slightly less irritated and my teeth are feeling slightly less sensitive, so overall i guess i'm doing okay.

i'm feeling quite offended right now that putting money into mr smear and my shared compound account costs far more than we'll earn in compound interest over the next few years. i'm offended because crypto's been a big thing for so long already and it still doesn't make any sense for small players. and our physical banks don't have any incentive to compete.

mr smear just freaked out and dumped a really cool animation he made in flipaclip (after much struggling to determine that bluestacks still sucks and that flipaclip's pricing is extortion), but i got him to reattempt and learn what he should have done and he did. so at least one parenting win for the morning, not including him playing or singing iron maiden's two minutes to midnight every time he thinks something's going to be in two minutes :P

...

i walked into the office yesterday and sat down for a while with bigtalk to help him strategize. that was followed by a morning full of random shit, mostly frustrating, and i felt like my brain was melting (like i was maybe coming down with something, but in retrospect i think i was just tired and depressed).

the biggest downer was learning that bigtalk's definition of "fine-tuning" is completely out of sync with mine. he's been promising to deliver the Big Important Thing "today or tomorrow" since last week already and i'm just getting more and more frustrated.

the company retro was interesting, and i felt useful and needed. which makes me feel a bit weird about my position in the new org chart, where i'm just a devops and my "coach" is someone with less experience than me...

happy hour turning into an opportunity for a conversation about determining company culture (documentation and being remote-first), but that conversation led to someone even more important which was me determining the root cause for our algo team's difficulties and getting buy-in for my proposed solution from our de-facto tech chief.

and then i came home, without any issues with protestors (thankfully i don't have a car), and the evening was pleasant and we all went to bed pretty early. fortunately i was the only person who was awoken by the protestors flooding our neighborhood...

the recovery

i didn't sleep particularly well last night, but i did sleep better than the night before.

this morning didn't get off to a great start, mr smear's been slowing down with waking up again and it gets under everyone's (specifically gd's) nerves. but the walk to school was good, at least. the walk back was a bit tense, though, because we had a traffic jam throughout our neighborhood and all the drivers were being assholes.

it was a slower morning compared to the rest of the week, i did a little bit of housekeeping and got gd started on stander while i did some work on my telephony project.

the office was remarkably quiet this morning. my two achievements before i returned home for lunch were taking a tiny step towards working with dune analytics (a hot mess of a platform in terms of UX and documentation - and possibly data - but with lots of potential), and coaching a coworker on the dos and don'ts of getting tattoos (along with some personal opinions thrown in for good measure).

i arrived home just in time to accompany gd to pick mr smear up from school, and i begrudgingly did so even though i was tired and just wanted to rest a few minutes :/

everything was going fine until we were almost home, when mr smear decided (again) that he didn't want to go to mma. unfortunately for him, that's not negotiable right now, and we double-teamed him pretty well. i had lunch while he calmed down with a book, then did some work while he practiced on the keyboard before we left for his jiujitsu class.

the way there was pleasant, i grabbed a coffee on the way, and we arrived on time for class. he gave me some shit about putting on his belt, but i handled it, and then i watched him bow out of the warmup and had to give him a "pep talk". from there he did well, things went smoothly for a while and he was even enjoying himself, until suddenly he was "injured".

in his defense, his ankle / heel / whatever might have legitimately been hurting, but i believe he was hamming it up. his foot looked fine to me, but his coach was concerned, so after getting him to "test it out" (he couldn't touch the floor without wincing... apparently...) we got our stuff together and he hopped out holding onto my arm on our way to the doctor.

i informed him, very clearly, that if he's legitimately injured he'll get all the care and sympathy he needs, but if the doctor doesn't find anything wrong with him there'll be hell to pay.

miraculously, his foot began healing within seconds, and by the time we got to the street he was perfectly fine 🤦

at least we didn't have to go through the emergency doctor routine, i guess 🤷

the rest of the evening went much better, i got a tiny bit more work done (although i'm not sure it's of much value) and after putting mr smear to bed early, gd and i settled in to watch the rest of stander, or at least get most of the way through before gd passed out.

at the same time, i'd managed to lock out mr smear's phone completely because a band in the middle of his touchscreen stopped working, and once that happens there's really nothing you can do. so i factory reset the phone, and after about an hour of google/android/huawei shenanigans finally managed to reinstall it and get it functioning well enough that he can use it to communicate and ride the bus until we get him a new phone.

i can't believe we're going to have to get him a new phone 🤦

anyway, it's been a long day, it's been an exceptionally long week, and i think i'm going to bed soon.