intensity

> there were some minor incidents, but according to him he handled them well.

he did not handle them well. i woke up this morning to a message from the girl's mother and learned that mr smear had handled the incident particularly poorly. horribly, in fact. so most of the morning was invested in dealing with that.

the irony: he prepared himself to apologize to her, but he didn't recall what she looked like so his super-shy self awkwardly approached every single girl in his class to ask "are you <insert name here>?"

at least, from my brief talk with her, the girl's mother seems cool.

...

shit start to the day aside...

i didn't sleep well, but i definitely slept better.

it was a long work day. with some very intense feelings during meetings. with some badly-handled interruptions. with some success, but not enough success.

i lost my temper with gd last night because she's injured and insists on doing things that interfere with her recovering, on pretext of not wanting to make my life difficult.

i've spent a good chunk of the last couple of hours of restlessness worrying about mr smear's expectations regarding the survivalist activity this afternoon.

the tension

 my morning... did not go well. on the way to the office i talked to my mother about krybabie's wife whose been coerced into paying for and arranging an english police clearance for a child who was four months old when they left london, which makes my blood boil.

on the back of that, a couple of us spoke to lipgirl about the marketing lecture we'd been invited to on wednesday afternoon.

and then one of my coworkers dropped a bombshell - our tech ops manager is hiring someone to do a job that's essentially devops, in addition to "owning" the entire data pipel... nevermind the details. i tried to talk to her about it - this is after giving bigtalk a lecture about how we approach her - but she's a bit weird, and refused to talk face to face, and when i put everything in writing i tried to carefully step around the eggshells (and copied my text to my boss so he'd know what i said and how i said it), but i still managed to step on a landmine.

fuck.

so that happened. our boss has set up a meeting for the three of us on sunday, hopefully we'll resolve this.

it was a very busy day, with a few big meetings, but the end of it saw us quite successfully merging in the work from wednesday night and i got everyone excited about me interviewing the founders and first employees to start putting together our company origin story.

i happy-hour'ed a little too hard (from a sweets point of view), and i shouldn't have brought the knaffeh back home - i ended up being the only one to eat any.

about halfway through dinner one of my coworkers called me, and it took almost an hour to get him sorted out, by which time i was completely exhausted and had almost missed wishing mr smear a good night :(

the last thing that i recall from last night was a back-and-forth with a coworker who inexplicably refused to understand that the thing he did to solve a problem we didn't actually have breaks our deployments.

today so far:

i slept late, and relatively well. i've just finished my first coffee, helped mr smear enjoy his glow-in-the-dark lego that he just pulled out of somewhere forgotten, informed him that his bully's leaving the country before the new school year, and we're getting ready to roll our way to the swimming pool.

near misses

 i arrived just in time for my appointment, which started on time, and i felt attended to by the neurologist and validated (especially regarding the mild narcolepsy concern). the tests she did before referring me to a proper sleep doctor were fine, although i was a bit uncomfortable with the fact that she warned me that her foot nerve test would be ticklish and it wasn't.

she then handed me a referral and a prescription, i went downstairs to the pharmacy and barely had to wait before picking up the meds and walking out to hop on a bus.

...

the meds were pregabalin. what followed was gd freaking out (for hours) that i would take it regardless of her warnings (we've been having a long-running fight about trust issues that have nothing to do with me), and she sent me the following:

1. lucy thought her prescribed pain drug was safe

2. lyrica is another brand name for pregabalin

3. pregabalin side effects

hard pass.

...

the work day was alright, but a highlight was having the conversation with my boss and coming up with a couple of satisfying strategies. i'm still not sure what bigtalk is up to, i really hope he delivers something soon.

i left the office early to go to the dentist. on the way, the bus driver slammed on the brakes to narrowly avoid running over a child that had run across the street. i'd been facing the back with my headphones in so it took me a little while to figure out what had been going on, and a part of the drama was that one woman was yelling at the bus driver while he was still freaking out that he'd almost killed someone. before getting off i took the time to thank him for his quick response and to assure him that he didn't need to pay attention to people who don't know much about life.

the dentist experience was better than last week (same dentist), and i feel like he's done a good job. he's also reassured me that as things stand i don't really need to worry about root canals and crowns, which is an enormous relief.

on the bus ride home i had an awkward conversation with an american woman who were scarfing down a pizza; i asked them to please be careful because dairy allergies are a real thing and she responded sympathetically, but with an unexpected interrogation when i just wanted to move on to the back of the bus...

when i got home read a bit more of the neverending story with mr smear before dinner. dinner turned into a massive fight over my inability to not eat the food on my plate (which was too tough and chewy for my new filling) and then over my family bullying me about my mr. burns-level sensitivity to nail filing.

so that happened. by mr smear's (late) bedtime we were okay, at least. then i hopped into a meeting to coach a coworker on a deployment, which went on until almost midnight.

...

right, it's been a pretty relaxed morning (minus the trust thing over the meds again) and i'm off to pick up a mystery package (probably a book).

bully for berlin!

 omg i forgot that on friday night we heard some excellent news - mr smear's main bully isn't going to be in his class any more! we haven't told him, and it's not the only bullying situation, but it's a relief nonetheless. in just-as-good news, his teacher from the last half a year is staying in spite of the pay cut, for which we're all very grateful.

and mr smear's on the waiting list for the art school. so... 🤞🙏

not broken!

 everything is broken, and ai isn't helping. i'm now spending an enormous amount of time fiddling with eslint and typescript configurations that are all designed to be as non-interoperable as possible, and this is what i'm doing on *my* time.

...

i struggled to get out of bed this morning (again).

we had a parental guidance session this morning that went well.

i managed to register mr smear for summer camp. it's ridiculously expensive, but it seems amazing and they even have a shuttle to our area, which may be expensive but not as expensive as me or gd having to pick him up here and there. and the timing is fantastic, because he starts going the day after my mother returns to SA. and, also, we're out of debt and we can (kind of) afford it.

i think i may have done something useful at work today, although i'm not confident.

i mean, aside from bringing home the black salt (kala namak) which has been offending some of my coworkers every time i use it. meanwhile, i'm not complaining about them microwaving fish in the communal kitchen. i did, however, complain about breakfast being all dairy except for lots of delicious bread, i'm not losing any weight...

and getting a recommendation for an interesting-sounding book (tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow), and convinced myself that a replay of the (three primary) daniel mullins games is in order.

there was a bullying incident at school today, it's still not clear what happened but it sounds like the english teacher just shrugged her shoulders and gave up on taking any action.

i had a long chat with mr smear's art therapy teacher, who scared the shit of me (as she does every year) by calling mid-morning out of the blue and making me worry that there'd been an incident.

i don't know if i've just got really dry skin or if i'm being attacked by something, so i had a vinegar bath and i'm using moisturizer and hoping for the best.

i asked gd to prepare a "go bag" in case of iranian attack, it looks like things may be heating up. i'm praying we get on with it and attack them for real and shut the IRGC shit down. also, making greta thunberg watch hamas atrocities is a stroke of genius.

[OMFG i finally figured out the configurations and things are working 🥳]

the real puppetmasters

mr smear woke me up this morning with a surprisingly long talk about dealing with life, and school, and bullying. amazingly, he seemed genuinely open to what i was saying and appeared to appreciate how i tied it into how video games work*, even if he was a little confused at first :P

* that our emotions dictating our behavior make us like an NPC, and that he's been taking more and more control of his character's actions and learning how to navigate the world

mr smear woke up coughing again today, but we medicated him heavily and sent him off to school. i got a bunch of small things done, then arrived at the office with my biggest goal being to wait before tucking in to the breakfast. fasting is harder when the FOMO kicks in.

the day was an interesting, exciting, and sometimes confusing mix of tasks, but there was a common thread between a bunch of them and over the course of a few conversations we may have hit on a viable solution to something that's been gnawing at me for a while.

there was a little drama when i got pulled out of call by a notification that i couldn't make sense of, then pulled into a reference call for a candidate that i had nothing to contribute to, and then the next meeting ended with me trying to be calm and rational and end the call quickly because i suddenly and violently needed to pee.

i arrived at a plan of action in time to rush home and take mr smear out for a "walk"; literally just to the electronic recycling across the road as an excuse to talk about his day, but he derailed that plan with his favorite new game of trying to come up with dumb ideas. he liked my idea of "cold sauce", but i liked the idea of a digital broken telephone even more :P

we watched some more asterix & obelix - the big fight (it's really good!), and while mr smear got ready for bed i ordered the next two illustrated harry potter books (did they only publish up to book no. 5?), and once mr smear was in bed and i'd watched random shit and showered i sat down to do some work.

i was displeased to have to explain to a coworker how to extricate himself from a mess of his own device - well, a bunch of devs, but all of them doing stuff i've explicitly informed them is undesirable and dangerous - so it seems like we're going to have "a talk" tomorrow. but i was pleased to stumble (pretty quickly) on a solution to the most immediate issue that was much simpler than what i had in mind.

score!

the rest of the evening would have been very quiet had my mother not sent me and gd something politically triggering, and after the argument gd and i had yesterday i immediately called her to explain the situation... we're living in what feels like the end times, where being jewish is unsafe no matter where you are in the world, the jihadis have taken control of the media, and even patriotic israelis who should know better have become mouthpieces for jihadi propaganda.

plus, the south african situation is spinning faster out of control than ever.

i think i need to go to bed soon.

sleep deficit

i certainly could have used some more sleep. i say that, but it's approaching midnight again... one of my bosses asked this afternoon if not sleeping could be making him stupid. i suggested that not getting sufficient REM sleep prevents our brains from processing information.

"so... you're saying i am stupid?"

aside from getting mr smear up and to school in good spirits (and reading my kindle instead of looking at screens), i managed to get some work done and have a meeting with my (direct) boss before gd and i headed out for our meeting.

the meeting went pretty well. gd had a couple of emotional moments, one positive (the new principal gave her a hug) and one negative (the old principal got a lambasting in absentia, with gd comparing her to a "hair on a soup"). we learned that mr smear's chief bully is on the spectrum and mr smear takes it personally when he makes faces and noises that - allegedly - are him self-regulating 🤦

we've agreed that mr smear's current shit class is probably the best place for him, primarily because they made the other classes sound even worse. i'm not sure how i feel about that.

i walked gd home, then continued on to work, completely forgetting to help her prepare to cut mr smear's hair after school. which in retrospect must have been a good thing, because the washing machine technician arrived a day early to examine it and decide that gd had simply been using too much soap 🤣

most of the work day - the bits that i was in the office for - were straightforward and productive, though i am a bit unsure as to whether what i'm doing really qualifies as meeting my deadlines. and i received my first full payslip today, which was less than i was expecting. i had to go over it earlier this evening and i'm hoping my insurance broker will agree with my assessment...

between my morning chat with my boss and an afternoon chat with our (unofficial) head of communications, i feel like that was the most productive part of my day.

i left the office early to meet gd at the orthopaedist's offices. we arrived early enough to buy new pillows and get a few groceries, and eventually found the clinic itself. the examination was brief, and now we're on to the next specialist (the one we knew from the beginning she needed to see).

we got home just as the play therapist was leaving, and after unpacking the groceries that had been delivered i sat down with mr smear to continue The Homework. but that took longer than anticipated, mainly because we had a couple of in-depth talks about All The Things.

the simpsons over dinner - gd's experiment with making vegan chopped liver for passover was a complete success - and then a fairly relaxed bedtime / finishing john wick (it's a well-executed 80's-style action film) / run on kaycee's mod / and now this before going to bed.

blame it on someone else

so the past couple of days have been all about imposter syndrome. i've been working very superficially with our tech stack, and i'm now knee-deep in shit with no idea where the shit is coming from. i did some studying today and i'm currently running scripts in the background, over and over, tweaking what chatgpt and claude have been giving me and praying that they're not running me in circles.

because today has not been a great day for AI for me. i tried making a simple game in the morning using claude - "vibe coding" - and all i got was a thorough waste of my time. i'm now repeating that attempt on base44.com, hopefully that'll be better.

thursday:

i slept poorly.

i went to work early, while gd went to get her foot x-rayed. it was a weird day, it included some really good conversations but not a lot of success. and by not a lot of success, i mean if i look back at the chats with my lead, i feel completely useless.

at least i managed to get something done before shabbat, though, and i seem to be understanding a lot more tonight.

happy hour was... happy. the big announcement was excellent news, but it's weird to me that we skipped another announcement that was just as big to me - my previous CEO has signed on with us, and if i understand correctly he's going to be my new CEO as well. that's pretty good news :)

yesterday:

i slept poorly again.

yesterday was exhausting. not only did i get up with a significant to-do list looming over my head (and it still is), but we had a couple of real issues with mr smear.

i walked him to school, talking him through which buildings to run to if a siren goes off and what to do if their doors are closed. then i picked up some snacks at the grocery store and came home, dropped them off and caught a bus to ramat aviv because that's where our clothing order ended up. so that burned an hour of my friday morning, and all the while i was stressed about how long it was taking because i expected mr smear to call me about his juggling class.

he called me *just* as i hopped off the bus next to our apartment. i grabbed a banana (to prevent hanger) and walked to the school.

he was sitting with his best friend and his little sister, and it was extremely difficult to convince mr smear to try a different class when the sister was doing her best to convince me that mr smear really likes being at home and i should take him with me 🙄

i eventually - magically, almost - managed to get him to try photography. he claims that he enjoyed it, but now that i think about it there's a good chance he might not have actually gone.

i say this because at the end of school, he called me to report that the kid who'd bullied him a couple of weeks ago had attacked him again. this time getting physical.

just before mr smear arrived home, he explained to me what happened and i sent a message to the boy's mother. she responded that it sounded like there had been an incident, but that it wasn't his instigation. his friend's dad dropped him off, so i scrambled downstairs and asked him if he could describe what happened... and the story came out, well, different.

family meeting.

it didn't take long to get the full story out of mr smear, at which point i was thoroughly embarrassed both by his behavior and by his lying to me about it and by having written what i wrote to the boy's mother. so we called them up, and mr smear apologized.

it wasn't the most authentic-sounding apology, but it was good enough.

...

the rest of the afternoon was alright, i guess. i managed to get him through a couple of pages of homework, and he came to shul without any fuss. the experience was pretty good, and the walks there and back were good. and we had a very pleasant evening.

today:

i slept a bit better, but not well.

it was a slow day, and it was another day of stomach issues. but we did re-watch the original rocky, and although most of it was too slow or adult-themed for mr smear's sensibilities, he did join us for the iconic training montages and the fight, and he really enjoyed those.

i took mr smear out for quite a walk this afternoon, it was almost all good and he agreed that the lotus cream and salted oreo ice cream was worth it :)

after getting mr smear into bed, gd finally watched the second half of the first slow horses episode (i've now seen the first half three times), and it's political angle that i'd successfully ignored on my first watch really got under gd's skin, and now it's under mine, and sonofabitch i'm out.

goddamnit.

...

it's past 1am and i'm still seeing red on my deployment attempts. i'm calling it a night. thanks for nothing, AI. or... thanks for not enough, AI. i should be grateful for all the assistance, but it would probably be better for me to just have struggled with documentation and tutorials instead of leaning on a perpetual sense of false hope.

gurgle splat (and a review of our son)

 i did get a (literal) couple of hours' sleep before my alarm went off this morning. most of them, anyway.

mr smear was great this morning. he was rewarded accordingly, with multiple reminders that it's a special treat. gods help us.

the skin under my fingernail is splitting again. this is the third or fourth time since winter started and i'm so over it.

gd is very much over her damaged toe, but she insisted on not going to the clinic and instead going to her sewing lesson ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the work day was a struggle and a half, it was very frustrating and a lot of what i had issues with made me feel rather dumb. otherwise, i had a couple of good syncs with coworkers, i finally got to sumsum for lunch (one of the syncs in question, fascinating talk), and my stomach gave me trouble pretty much the entire day. also, i'm regaining weight... i have definitely not been eating responsibly.

...

in the late afternoon gd and i met with the guy who did mr smear's psych evaluation for a feedback session. it was very comforting hearing that we've already got a good understanding of his abilities and his struggles, though it's heartbreaking that so much of his hardship is trauma response, primarily from immigrating and bullying (but also his fear of coming into contact with dairy).

we've been given some helpful recommendations and we'll continue doing what we can. and the school has absolutely no validation for medicating our child.

...

i left work pretty late, but got to enjoy some of my leftovers dinner (i avoided tonight's pizza) with gd and mr smear, and after we got mr smear into bed the two of us watched about half of john wick (neither of us have seen it before). and then i got back to working, after forty minutes deciding that i'd had enough.

i suspect that tomorrow's going to be a reckoning of sorts.

blowin' in the wind

thursday:

i was right about thursday morning being intense, but we didn't expect it to begin at 4am with another rocket attack.

i spent a good chunk of my morning trying to get midjourney to make me a picture like this one, but with the right number of toes so i could do this:

my favorite failure of the bunch:

i took mr smear to school, and then accompanied gd to misrad hapnim to apply for her new passport. at least the coffee was good... we arrived on time, waited a short while, and then discovered that i'd made a big mistake by not checking what we needed to bring. we didn't have gd's expired passport with us.

she had a doctor's appointment right after that, and we both understood from the clerk assisting us that i could just come back later with the passport itself, so i made sure she got on the right bus and i stopped off at home, picked up mr smear's meds, rushed to the school gate, administered the meds, rushed back home, scarfed down a bowl of muesli, and headed back to that counter with gd's passport.

i may not have had to make an appointment, but i did have to wait about half an hour for the clerk to finish with the previous couple, by which point i was way later for work than i thought i'd be. and then, to make things even better, the clerk looked at me in astonishment when he realized that gd wasn't with me.

...

so we have to go back again one of these mornings 🤦

...

the work day was crazy. it began with an all-hands with a lot of interesting news, not least of which being that i'm going to need to go through a polygraph experience again. on the one hand, i'm okay with that. on the other hand, i'm not okay with that. this is going to be... an experience. but i guess it's best to get into it and over it as quickly as possible.

...

i completed the thing i'd been working on, and moved on to other stuff, beginning to work "organized" for the first time in ages - not only getting into the new ticketing system (notion-based, it's kinda weird but not bad) but starting to track my hours like i did when i last worked as a contractor. really more for me to understand what i've been doing and how much time i've spent doing it,.

i don't know if it was wise to drink a beer at happy hour, but i definitely felt it and my lead's comment about reviewing code after a beer seemed less funny when i was actually doing that :/

[i don't recall much about the evening]

yesterday:

i spent a good chunk of yesterday updating an old encryption package i maintain, most of the effort being rewriting code "the right way" only to discover that that's still unsupported by modern browsers and needing to revert it :P

gd and i took mr smear to the doctor in the morning, which got weird because i couldn't make heads or tails of what the doctor was trying to tell us and she laughed at my confusion. gd seems to understand what was happening, at least. we did some shopping and came home, and we were all in the mood to not get up again for the rest of the day.

but then i learned that mr smear hadn't brought his homework books home, so we ended up having to walk to the school to pick them up. we ended up having a massive fight, which started because he didn't want to do any homework in the first place but ended up getting really ugly. i ended up walking out of the school without him, but i called gd and she talked me down and i returned to give him another chance.

it took a little while for us to get through things - we were both feeling hurt and angry - but we did, and the rest of the afternoon was quiet. and we even had a positive experience with the homework.

gd has been having trouble with her back lately (i mean she's always have trouble, it's just been worse than usual) and we ended up ordering dinner, which is very complicated on a friday night. it worked out alright, though.

afterwards, everybody crashed.

today:

the weather wasn't nice at all today, so we all stayed in. i got some stuff done in the morning, and the big event of the day was us watching the original karate kid movie. and boy, did i feel dumb: i haven't seen the movie itself in decades, and at some point after the bro mitzvah, i guess i started believing the troll about larusso being the movie's villain.

anyway, not only did mr smear really enjoy it, but there are strong parallels between larusso's experiences and his own, and i think that might prove helpful.

over dinner we began rewatching the fifth harry potter movie. the last few hours have mostly been me trying to build a set of scripts for work, stopping when i felt too tired to carry on, finishing a run of kaycee's mod that i began recently (water tribe, with a mighty ouroboros with double-strike), posting this, and now going to bed praying that we don't have to run for the shelter tonight.

dreams and nightmares

 i slept horribly last night. like, way worse than usual. i was wired and restless, physically uncomfortable, and the entire experience sucked. i even got up in the middle of the night and faffed around for an hour or two, but the remaining hours of the morning before getting up weren't much better for it.

i vaguely recall the morning going alright. [gets to the end of the post and remembers that the ceasefire ended this morning. i'm grateful we got some of the hostages back, but we always knew that this was just a ploy by hamas to stall and survive and mess with us some more]

i walked mr smear to school, returned home, and then all of a sudden it was later than i thought and i had to rush to get to the sleep lab to return the equipment.

fortunately, i was only a few minutes late. i dropped off the gear, then hopped on an unfamiliar bus to work. it worked out fine.

...

my work day was intense, but overall great. it started awkwardly with me trying to help the new guy get his computer sorted out and not understanding that he was calling a thumb drive "DOK", proceeded with me starting to execute a plan my lead and i had come up with together, and before lunch we were treated to a surprise visit and talk by one of our customers. it was eye-opening.

after lunch, i finally got hold of one of the guys whose name everyone knows and we sat down to chat. his story was riveting, as is his job. mind-blowingly cool.

i got good work done in the afternoon, and was getting ready to go home when one of my coworkers caught me for a five minute conversation that turned into an hour-long intense discussion. although i was very eager to get out of there (which was duly noted), i feel like it was a really good discussion and that i managed to bridge two decidedly different approaches and attitudes.

...

i raced home, way too late for dinner, and scarfed down some of the leftovers. mr smear told me about some bullying that happened - on top of the fact that his best friend refused to go to school today because he's being bullied too - so that was that first bit of a shit feeling to bring me down from my work-high. then mr smear was a bit rude to my mom during their good-night chat, and another bullying incident surfaced that he'd handled poorly, which brought me down a bit more.

and then we discovered that he's having another herpes outbreak - it's been a year and four days since the first proper one - and that just brought the house down.

...

after saying good night to him i complained about how the evening had turned out, which gd misinterpreted, and then we had a fight. it took a while to get out of the fight, a part of which was gd remembering how distraught she's been since the morning news about the war resuming. we had a good talk about where we are and how the world looks right now, which turned to spirituality and religion.

and then a conversation about how the day went. and now... it's past 11pm and i don't know if i'm going to be able to sleep or not, but i'm pretty confident i'm not feeling like doing anything constructive right now. i kinda wanted to go to the purim (post-purim) rollerblade, but between all the emotions and the slight chance of rain i just couldn't.

and, of course, my eyes are feeling itchy now.

the FO part

it's the middle of the night, i got up to transition from couch to bed and i just had to get this down first.

it's been a day.

...

i slept about half the night last night, which is half the night more than i expected to be able to sleep. around 6am i jumped out of bed in a combination of fear and rage, and the first thing i did as soon as i was able was to sit down with mr smear and review his report of what happened the previous day. i got him to demonstrate what he experienced, and i understood exactly what happened.

i sent an update to his teacher, and i wrote that i'm beginning to understand that they're listening more to the bullies than to the victims, and that mr smear isn't merely inventing things to be afraid of.

i was supposed to have a call with my doctor this morning about my sleep issues, but gd and i were in such a state that i missed it and had to reschedule. she had just raised a really good point - everything we're going through is precisely what everyone the world over is trying to call attention to: we all say "no bullying" and "no violence", but when it's right in front of us we want to believe that it's not happening right until it's too late and there's an injury or worse.

i called the anti-bullying org we spoke to a few weeks ago, and the councillor assured me that they would speak to the school, but also gave me advice about how to help mr smear directly. which was reassuring, because it's stuff that we're already doing as much as we can.

after trying to write (and arguing about) the right message in french to yesterday's bully's mother (because then gd and her could communicate in mother tongue) for a while, i took over and sent the following:

hi ___, i hope you're all well

we are aware that [your son] and [mr smear] are not getting along, but recently [your son] has been more focused on him and yesterday he threatened him with violence. we would really appreciate it if you could talk to him before things get out of hand 🙏

so... let me tell you that it was a very pleasant surprise when she responded in a way that made it clear that she would be dealing with this. 

i updated mr smear's therapist right before entering my office, and tried to focus on my work.

...

it was a really nice morning, weather-wise. i went to work without a sweater and i was comfortable. hello, march!

the new guy and i got a tour of the "warehouse" this morning. on exiting the warehouse, our guide let our a loud fart and i immediately responded with a "bless you", and i spent the next couple of minutes being amused that the other guys were being cool about it too 🤣

it was a productive morning, and i merged my first complete PR by lunchtime.

...

lunch began socially, but was immediately interrupted with full-scale drama. with everything else that's been going on, gd and i had forgotten that mr smear needed to leave school early today for a rescheduled appointment with his therapist, and so i needed to get the message to him even though he's not allowed to use his phone. at the same time, gd needed to drop her lunch and rush to the school because the security guard wouldn't let him out without a parent.

what happened next was a total clusterfuck.

mr smear got the message, but by the time gd arrived at the school he'd been let out without supervision and had disappeared. we use family link to keep track of him, and that was when we discovered that he'd left his phone at home this morning 🤦

gd was in pain (her legs are hurting a lot) and in a flat panic, and i sent her to check if he'd gone to his tutor by mistake while i packed up my lunch and got ready to rent a vehicle to go searching the streets for him.

i was putting on my shoes when she called to say she'd found him - he had indeed gone to his tutor's.

jesus fucking christ.

i was a shell of a man by the time i got back to the lunch table, trying to process what had just happened and follow the conversations and be sociable when demanded of me.

holy shit.

anyway.

...

follow-up drama: gd dropped him off at his therapist - on time - but then got lost trying to take a bus somewhere after i'd told her to take a taxi. at this point she was so upset that she didn't want to go to her therapist, but i convinced her that of all the times to skip a therapy appointment, this was NOT the time. i'm very glad she listened.

...

i picked mr smear up from his appointment and talked to him about what we'd all been through. i took him to my office, where one of my coworkers immediately jumped on the opportunity to show him some of our toys, which was really cool! right until he got into trouble for flying a drone in the office, but mr smear got a drone's eye view of our workstations before that happened and he definitely enjoyed it :)

overall, having him in the office was a positive experience even though we weren't prepared for it and he spent (in my opinion) way too much time on the phones (although i did get him to switch from games to reading by the end). and he even helped me a little with setting up one of the computers :)

the rest of my work day was setting up a computer that we'd thought was DOA, completing the first iteration of the scripts i've been working on and finally testing them out before handing over the remainder of the deployment to my lead. it was a real deployment that needs to be installed soon, and although it didn't go smoothly, i proved myself up to the challenge and i felt appreciated afterwards.

my lead and i drove each other crazy for a little bit, too, but it felt good-natured and we got everything working in the end.

i really do feel like i'm where i need to be.

...

mr smear and i had a pleasant time getting home, with him leading for the most part. we got home just in time for dinner and a delicious in dungeon episode, and a long chat with my mom while eating too much dessert* that i truly feel i deserved.

* not just salted oreos, but salted oreos with vegan marshmallows squished on top

...

between getting mr smear into bed and falling asleep watching another episode of monk, i had a long chat with mr smear's homeroom teacher and it was quite reassuring. when interrogated, the bully admitted to what he did and he received a very stern warning. additionally, it sounds like my message to the principal and contact from the org i spoke to have lit a fire under their asses, and it looks like the school's going to be taking additional measures to ensure the kids' safety.

we'll see, of course, but it's encouraging nonetheless.

...

it's been a day.

parents vs the school vs the bullies

 holy fuck. today was a mostly positive day, but it's been overshadowed by mr smear's bullying situation and i can't stop fretting and second-guessing how we're handling it (or how we've been handling it).

parenting is fucking hard.

so in today's entry in the bullying saga, one of the kids who was harrassing mr smear on friday tried to kick a football to his face. fortunately mr smear managed to dodge, but the fact that there was no staff around when they know there's a violence issue just blows my mind.

i wrote a letter to the new principal to warn her that from this point onwards, if any kid hurts my child physically we're going straight to the police. tomorrow morning we're going to send the same warning to the bully's mother (in french, because she's french so it's easier for gd to "connect").

*heavy sigh*

this is so fucked up. and i keep thinking of the kind of fuckery we saw in the series black space.

...

the above kinda takes the wind outta my sails, but i'll try to express how good today was anyway. i mean, it started shitty, with a fight with mr smear because he didn't understand that i didn't understand that his mouth was in pain from waiting for me to wash my hands when he hadn't finished brushing my teeth. we got through that, but it was unpleasant, and then on the way to school he started whining (as usual) that he was too sick to go (his cough has mostly gone, so i don't know if he was putting on a show or coughing for real at the time).

but it was the class party to say farewell to their homeroom teacher, so he couldn't miss it.

it also ended on a shitty note (separate from the bullying stuff) because he didn't want to do his homework, also as usual. but gd and i both threatened him, and yelled at him, and then yelled and threatened that if he doesn't learn how to learn and cooperate he not going to be able to do any of the crazy stuff he wants to do, and he eventually - sulkily - got through it.

brilliantly, i might add. learning math in a different language is hard, and when he stops fighting he's actually really good with the material. it would just be a lot easier for everyone if we didn't need to go through a shit ceremony every day.

parenting is fucking hard.

...

right, now i can finally talk about the good stuff. i've hit a kind of internal reset button, and i've got my mind around where i am and what i need to do. and what i need to do is work hard, and extra. that... that feels different.

lesson one: being amongst the earliest in the office in the morning means that the coffee machine doesn't coffee because it's not warmed up.

i had a meeting with my boss and lead, and both of them seemed happy with what i'm doing and how i'm doing it, which was very reassuring. i had a 1-on-1 with the woman who sits next to me, and aside from getting a handle on what she's about she was very appreciative of my approach to things, which was very reassuring.

over lunch i learned the ages of some of my coworkers, and one of them may have been slightly offended by me referring to them as "children"... but by the end of the day i was pretty sure we're cool. partially because i passed on the earworm for dumb ways to die which someone else had given me earlier.

i made really good progress, and i ended the day essentially having achieved my stated goal for the day. amongst other things. that felt really good. not least of which because the article i published two days ago proved crucial to understanding the problem i needed to solve 🤘

...

oh, and today i came up with a programming dad joke in hebrew that i'm particularly proud of:

אם אתה דופק את הקומפיילר, זה אומר שאתה מהדרפאקר?

...

i'm tired, but i've watched a fun episode of monk with gd and i'm going to try to make some script magic before going to bed. god knows if i'll be able to sleep tonight anyway.

...

while trying to publish this post, i received a message from mr smear's teacher, who claims that this is just another case of mr smear misinterpreting an "accident".

not today.

dust in, dust out

the jackals are howling again - they've been a lot more brazen the past few days, and they've been going at it at all hours. also, very confrontational with dogs being walked even during daylight (O_o)

should we be worried about mr smear?

yesterday:

yesterday began with a fight - kind of the usual - between gd and mr smear about getting out of bed. and then mr smear stayed home again, i tried to take him to school but he threw up just outside the gate (ewww!) and so we turned around and walked back home, stopping on a bench for a good talk.

oh, yeah - and a handyman came in to clean up the underside of our kitchen sink, which entailed us clearing out, cleaning and repacking everything while simultaneously getting mr smear ready for school. the fun part was using sealant on a lifted edge of the sink :P

i started my word day cleaning the dust off everything after the workers were supposed to be done, but within a very short while it was clear that they were far from done, and all of our belongings and our lungs were coated with yet another layer of dust that i'm praying doesn't include asbestos.

it was a frustrating day of tweaking kubernetes installations and annoying the guy i'm reporting to, who was working remotely which made it feel worse. but i was also involved in some product discussions and i feel like i contributed.

eventually i hit partial success, just in time to interview another coworker and dig in to the all-hands / happy hour treats.

i didn't have another "nap attack" episode yesterday, but i did make an appointment to discuss them with my doctor.

as has become standard practice, i came home and sat with mr smear for his maths and reading. unfortunately, he got frustrated with how i explained a word to him and gd - who'd been holding on to the morning's grievance, amongst other things - completely lost it.

the day ended with a different kind of fight, or family meeting, or family meeting with lots of yelling, but it feels like we got through to mr smear and gd expressed some stuff that's obviously been hurting her for a long time. as she said - sometimes it's only when you start to heal from something that you really begin to realize the depths of the trauma.

anyway, it wasn't a fun experience for anyone but i feel like we all were in a better place by the time mr smear left the table to brush his teeth and climb into bed.

...

i passed out watching monk, dragged myself to bed when gd went, and slept fitfully through the night, dreaming a lot of very realistic dreams about returning to the army.

today:

this time mr smear actually went to school, and i went in after him to find someone to help me understand why it was so hard for him to get to his friday juggling classes. eventually i got some hints, and i sent them to mr smear on whatsapp, and i returned home.

gd went to her sewing class, and i spent much of my morning trying to do something constructive* while my stomache did flips for no apparent reason. or maybe it's related to the fact that i seem to be coming down with something - i don't think my sinuses and throat are going haywire just from the dust exposure.

* i surprised myself by actually succeeding, i published an article about apt-key being deprecated

until i received a phone call from mr smear, telling me that he'd been in a classroom by himself (he hadn't seen / had chosen not to see my messages) and was accosted by two of the bullies in his class. understanding the worst, i managed to get him to go to his juggling class in spite of how furious i was with him for giving anyone an opportunity to hurt him (not as furious as i was with the bullies, and not that i was blaming him, which i explained to him later), and on my way to the school to pick him up i consulted with my mom about whether it makes sense to go to the police when the school's clearly not willing or able to protect our children.

i think that's exactly what i'm going to do from now on.

fortunately, when i sat him down and got the details out of him it turned out that the bullying was only harassment, not assault, which was a huge relief. and aside from that incident it appears that he actually had a pretty good day.

we walked home, and the two bullies were walking across the road from us. i awkwardly gave them angry side-eye, which they noticed, with my tongue between my teeth. in retrospect, i handled that wrong and i should have been giving them an evil smile instead.

next time.

mr smear switched bags* and we caught a bus to azrieli to meet up with gd and buy underwear. and snacks. oh! on the way back from dropping mr smear off at school this morning i picked up a couple of things, one of which being pistachio-covered cashews. which seems ridiculous, but even more ridiculous is how much like cookies it tastes.

* one day, we pray, he's not going to need to carry an epipen around with him wherever he goes

the rest of the afternoon has been pretty quiet, only slightly interrupted by a call with ze german who i've been trying to help... it's not that i don't want to help him, but i'm completely out of bandwidth while he doesn't really have anyone else for what i'm assisting him with.

...

i've spent a lot of time these past couple of weeks trying to get my head around what i'm doing for work, who i'm working with, what the expectations are. it's been a difficult time personally, but i feel like i'm going to need to start opening the throttle and doing a lot more than my nine-to-five. it's also been made clear that i'm expected to go on-site occasionally, which i've assured gd won't be unsafe even though i'm not entirely confident that that's true.

...

politically it was a difficult week, or couple of weeks. between the stories (and eulogy) from the recently released hostages to the amount of disinformation online - specifically mastodon and vimeo, which make it impossible to report.

more sick, less slow

 today was a long day. it was hard, but i'm proud of my achievements. not least of which was convincing my coworker / lead to persist with aws eks and (it feels like) we're now almost done getting our convoluted system working.

mr smear woke up sicker than yesterday. we started the day with delicious in dungeon before i left for work, which started off weak but has become really, really good. i've had the opening theme stuck in my head all day, and i'm not complaining.

the work day was... fighting with someone else's git rebase (and a failure with .gitignore), shadowing an interviewer, learning about our business development strategy, and battling with werf and eks. we all had lunch much later than anyone had planned because we ran into a series of mishaps with lipgirl's order, for a while i thought *i* was the one holding everyone up and it was a great relief to discover i wasn't :P

i rushed home for dinner (we had just enough time for another delicious in dungeon episode), said good night to my mom, then said good night to my wife and son and headed to the school for a parents meeting about screen time.

it was an interesting meeting, and the only negative thing was sitting two seats away from mr smear's bully's dad dad and having to avoid looking at him to try to stay civil and drama free. i wasn't up for an hour and a half of whatever we were going to be doing, but that time surprisingly flew by and i made a real impact when i spoke about gaming and a bunch of the parents had no idea how unavoidable and serious a danger that could be. a couple of parents actually asked me to give a talk about that, which i guess i'm up for.

it's late, but i kind wanna try getting a guide repo together for cdktf, which i'm really beginning to appreciate. i also want to start reading of mice and men, which i've never encountered before but which came up in an office conversation about literature this morning.

oh, and thanks, sudden shoulder spasm. i don't know what i would be doing without you :/

the rain

nationally, today was a very painful one: the bibas family's bodies were returned. i've said it before, and i'll say it again - every hostage taken is a tragedy. alive or dead, returned or not. every victim is a tragedy, and every hostage is a tragedy, and there is no outcome that will make anything that happened since october 7th a victory.

...

today began in the middle of the night, when gd caught mr smear on his phone. according to family link, he'd been playing with it for over an hour at that point... ignoring the angry disruption at the time, he was entirely uncooperative once his alarm went off so it was a double-bad morning.

in addition to waking up exhausted, i was also stressed about getting his art school application sorted out. i rushed out of the house to walk to the school with him, and managed to get past the security guard to pay the receptionist a visit.

first things first, she told me in a particularly sarcastic and condescening manner that i should've taken the lack of response to my email as a hint that i shouldn't have bothered sending the email in the first place. as much as that got under my skin, i recognized that she's the gatekeeper and managed to keep my mouth shut.

i can't tell you what my face was saying, though.

i completed the form - she did assist me, at least - and then learned that mr smear's homeroom teacher was needed to complete their one, but she had the day off. so that was a fuck-up, but she assured me that they would try to figure something out. i asked her if she could please let me know when the form was submitted to the municipality, and she told me that i'd just have to trust her to get the job done.

did i mention she's the gatekeeper, and that i knew that i needed to be polite and respectful? again, i don't know what my face was saying, but i thanked her profusely before leaving the office.

...

at that point, the skies opened, and i was caught in a thunderstorm with the rain pelting down, with no umbrella and no boots. i ran to the supermarket, getting thoroughly soaked along the way, but of course they don't sell umbrellas. i hung out there for a bit until the shower ended, then splashed home.

my toes are blue from the permanent marker washing off my sneakers. i put tea bags inside them, and i'm hoping they're okay. i guess i need to go shopping for new ones tomorrow...

...

i had a long zoom call with an insurance broker, which i pretended to be interested in even though i'm not leaving my current one. perhaps their quote will prove helpful somehow. then i left for work, this time with boots and brolly.

...

work: sweet doggo at work a plus. lots of back and forth on my task, definite learning happening. meeting a couple more coworkers, eating pad thai for a very late lunch (as part of the pastafarian prayer for mr smear's art school application), and ridiculously good vegan happy hour treats that i brought home to share with gd and mr smear.

let's call today a cheat day.

...

in the afternoon, i was relieved to receive an update from mr smear's homeroom teacher informing me that the application was delivered! in addition to giving us something to celebrate, that means that i can reframe my shoes being damaged as a reasonable cost of giving my son a chance to get into the school :P

the hebrew reading this evening wasn't great, and by that i mean that mr smear didn't cooperate, but the actual reading itself was pretty good when it happened. dinner was great, we talked about a bunch of things and one thing in particular stood out - mr smear's best friend's sister came to their class, and some of the girls in their class were really mean to her. mr smear was pleased to report that a teacher came and gave the mean girls hell, and he sent his friend a message asking if she was okay and he received a grateful one back.

so that's good.

...

post-bedtime and my own shave - toothbrush - shower time, i've played some inscryption and i'm now feeling rather tired and getting ready for bed. it's been a big day. it's been a huge week.

the first day

 i managed to sleep alright last night, but i was pretty anxious this morning. i made sure that mr smear understood what the meeting was going to be about, and i'll be honest, by the time it was done i was quite relieved that i hadn't posted anything on social media.

after quite the interrogation - including a hilarious part for which i had to bite my tongue* - we ascertained that the social boycott we thought was happening isn't really happening. but we also established that the bullying and violence is very real, and that they need to make a move on dealing with it. additionally, they pretty much convinced me that moving mr smear out of the class right now isn't the best move (mainly because his current teacher and her incoming replacement are, to their minds, the most sympathetic / best suited to deal with mr smear) and that it's worth waiting for the recommendation from the evaluation (which should be concluding this week).

* mr smear was pretty insistent on how unfair it was that his bully was recognized for doing good schoolwork, even after we'd all explained that it was irrelevant :P

the meeting didn't produce an amazing feeling by any stretch, but i walked out feeling like things were relatively okay.

the meeting ended much later than i'd hoped, so i scrambled to get to my new office as soon as i could. the morning was spent meeting lots of interesting people, getting the tour, beginning to get my computer and office access set up, joining my first standup, followed by a very long but surprisingly intelligible presentation on our architectural overview.

it's been an extremely long time since i was introduced to a system that just makes sense. it's elegant, and i feel considerably more at ease about what i'm getting into.

i went with my (for now) manager to get breakfast / lunch (it was around 3pm already), and until i tucked in i hadn't actually realized just how hungry i was. and i managed to stop eating a little after hitting the "too much" point, even though it was absolutely delicious.

after we returned, i made myself a (really strong) coffee and resumed setting up my machine, at which point gd called to inform me that she couldn't find the authorization form for her nerve block... so i sighed loudly, and rushed home to grab it and my family and walk to the pain clinic.

the process was, from start to finish, more straightforward than usual and much quicker than anticipated.

...

the taxi home, though, was completely ridiculous. we were picked up by an old lady taxi driver, who immediately took offense that she could smell that gd had just smoked cannabis, complaining that it would damage her lungs. this turned into a very weird argument, at which point i pulled out my phone and she said "you think google's going to convince me?!"

once we'd established that it wasn't dangerous, she went on a tirade about some (probably fictitious) bride in her wedding dress who refused to get in her taxi once because she smelled... weed? cigarettes? who knows. so i asked if this had occurred once, or if it had occurred many times. to which she responded: "if i told you only once, what would that mean?"

"that she had issues."

ooooh, shit. the taxi driver began berating me for daring to judge a stranger i'd never met. eventually, still very heatedly, she asked "and what difference would it make if it was many passengers?"

"that their behavior was somewhat normal, and therefore somewhat reasonable."

at that point we were approaching our street, so she slowed down very dramatically to share a "tip for life" with me: that if you're arguing with someone and they're starting to show signs of losing interest, you should stop arguing. with that, she dropped us off, and i gave her the single-star rating she deserved.

holy shit, some people should not be working in the service industry.

we got gd upstairs, mr smear showered, dinner served, discussed marijuana usage with mr smear (who'd understood most of the argument, and was surprisingly completely on my side), who assured me that he would never smoke (cigarettes) "because i made a vow to my dad", and who paid attention when i explained the risks of consuming illicit drugs while one's brain is still forming...

anyway.

we had a good good-night chat with my mom, and had enough time between dinner and bedtime for me to shower and join mr smear for some calvin & hobbes. i am soooooo glad i managed to get hold of those comics!

after putting him to bed, i continued setting up my machine, and also started a fantastic run in kaycee's mod abusing the fair-hand mechanic:

unkillable hooved tribe totem FTW.

and now it's half-past-midnight and definitely past my bedtime.

was that it?

 it's almost 3am as i begin typing this, i've just spent two or three hours watching random youtube videos and playing minesweeper (a really hard minesweeper - total minesweeper), after a really mixed friday after a rather awkward thursday.

thursday (yesterday?):

after dropping mr smear off at school, i called back the ministry of education representative who very clearly and urgently set things in motion. later, i received a phone call from the school counsillor inviting me and mr smear to an urgent meeting on sunday morning. when she reminded me what the plan for moving mr smear was, i reminded her how the plan was always to make sure that mr smear didn't disrupt anyone else after being neglected and left in a known bad situation for years.

i wrote up our experiences, and i feel like i should have posted them publicly but decided to wait on my mom's edits instead, which i sadly received yet. posting's potentially going to open us up to attack, though, which does make me a bit nervous.

thursday afternoon was shit. a lot of fighting with mr smear not doing his homework, it was a real drag and absolutely exhausting. in spite of that, whenever he did achieve or complete something he got really excited, and that was hugely rewarding.

gd had a dental appointment (i yelled at the second receptionist to try to cancel it at the last minute and then ignored me and tried to hang up when i told her to give me a moment so i could explain to gd what was going on), and i ended up having to order dinner, which worked out alright in spite of my reservations (we've been burning a lot more money these past couple of weeks than we should have).

friday (today?):

it started off well, we went to the open day at the art school and, aside from the dance demonstration, mr smear was very excited. and so were we. everything was great until we were on our way out and i was trying to summarize / translate the important bits for the two of them, which led to a simmering fight with gd that lasted the day until it became an all-out battle in the evening, which never got resolved. just ugly feelings all day.

while that was going on in the background, i went to pick up insoles for my rain boots and they seem to fit better. i'm now regretting asking the guy to order a better size for me because i really don't wear them enough to justify a whole other pair of boots...

... and then i spent the rest of the afternoon coaching mr smear through the remainder of his homework. it went much smoother than the previous days - although we did have one blowout incident in the middle - but we pushed through and rushed through together and a little after sundown we were done, with a good feeling all round.

after his shower (during which gd and i really got into it), and before dinner, we spent some quality game time together. dinner wasn't great from a vibe perspective, but it was encouraging to see mr smear being empathetic and trying to raise spirits (and not picking sides for once), and at bedtime he asked me to join him while he read calvin & hobbes out loud which was nice.

as soon as he was in bed, gd and i went to bed. i'm not sleeping well, and i'm feeling shit emotionally, and i feel like i neighbor's coughing and the jackals howling has been fitting accompaniment. i don't know what i'm up for right now, but it's not sleeping, it's not reading, and it's not playing anything.

fight or flight or both

what the hell happened today?

i've been on leave for two weeks, they're almost done, and all i've experienced is being sick and loads of unexpected and heavy adulting and parenting responsibilities. i'm not even tired right now - especially after today's drama - i'm just in shock.

...

it wasn't an easy night, mr smear woke up from a nightmare and it took a round or two of parenting to calm him down again.

otherwise, the cold, rainy day started well, and i got mr smear to school in good spirits.

i took care of some stuff (including informing ze german that i couldn't commit to anything), ate an early breakfast (i think i'm putting on weight again, but i'm struggling psychologically right now), and caught a bus to the shuk. on the way i spoke to a cousin who also wanted to start a joint venture, and had to explain to him too that i'm happy to advise but not available.

about halfway there, i was asked to please stop my conversation because i was bothering everyone on the small bus. i thought i'd been speaking in an unobtrusively low voice, but apparently i was wrong so i hurriedly ended the call and apologized to everyone...

we resumed the call when i arrived, and aside from my heart skipping a beat or two during the siren testing we had a good conversation. then i went through the shuk, and was ultimately unable to locate the bag of shirts we'd bought. so i picked up a coffee, bought another set (the guy felt sorry for me and gave me a bigger discount than before), and then walked up king george, picking up fingerless gloves for myself and mr smear and ordering inserts for my too-large rain boots.

i bussed home, relaxed for a bit watching mostly political videos on youtube with gd, then walked to the school to pick up mr smear.

on my way, a group of bigger kids went past with two of them literally in the middle of a fist fight, and it was only afterwards that i realized that i should have intervened. then i picked up mr smear, and learned that his bully had kicked him twice in his sprained foot and he hadn't been able to defend himself.

what followed was in two parts: part one, losing my cool and my "appropriate parenting language" and giving him hell for how he mishandled the situation (in particular, how he got into the situation in the first place by behaving precisely in the way his bully wanted). i wasn't communicating appropriately, but it appears (based on how he responded both immediately and later) that i was communicating effectively.

part two was me, after getting through part one, becoming absolutely enraged to the point of trembling and considering heading over to his bully's home (i have the address) to threaten his parents in person. or just beat the shit out of them. but i was also very aware of the potential consequences of doing that, and i know that if i start down that path that i'll almost certainly end up in jail, and i wouldn't do that to my family (or myself).

so the next hour or two were spent getting in touch with orgs who are now helping me file complaints against the school and move mr smear to a different one. 

all while trying (and failing) to help mr smear do his homework :/

then i rushed mr smear to his evaluation, which was apparently the second last session. the bus there got stuck in traffic, but we didn't notice because we were heavily engaged in a variety of topics - i got into the weeds of explaining what we're dealing with politically and historically, which he appeared to follow.

while he was there, i grabbed a coffee and wrote up the complaints for the two orgs. i had just enough time before being called back to pick up mr smear.

gd was at her second acupuncture session, so i decided to treat mr smear and take him somewhere in the sarona market. we ended up at mexicana, which may be fast food but it really got mr smear excited. we both loved the food, and he invested himself in experimenting with different combinations of foods and sauces which was very cool.

i was very proud of myself for stopping when i was full, and he continued on a loooong time before he was ready to pack up and go home. at that point we entered into a discussion about judaism vs christianity, which got surprisingly philosophical!

while mr smear got himself ready for bed (he's still into the hobbit ^_^) gd and i spoke to my mom, sharing the days trials and tribulations and hearing some things (specifically about my niece and her kid) that made us rather upset.

...

as i just said to gd: while mr smear's got issues that we need to work through, while he drives us crazy on all sorts of little things, if i think about the big stuff he's facing and how he's facing it his resilience is nothing short of miraculous. he's a good kid, and he's tough in ways i can't wrap my head around. his last few years have been immeasurably hard, and he deserves so much better.

i fucking love my boy. i'm fucking proud of my boy. and i'm fucking grateful that our relationship has improved so dramatically over the last year or two. he's learning to trust us, to let his guard down around us and let us in (including taking criticism well, and trying to incorporate it), and it's an amazing feeling.

...

anyway, mr smear went to bed without too much fuss, i've now finished this and am about to try help gd with her neck. for tonight, everything else is just whatever (including messages waiting for me that i'm deliberately ignoring).

down but out

 the coffee was good, but i left a bit later than i should have, couldn't find a good bus to get home with, and ended up walking the entire way (in my heavy rain boots), arriving *just* in time for the start of the meeting that was then delayed by about ten minutes...

anyway, it wasn't a waste of time after all because he sent me a form i needed, which i then sent on to my insurance broker, which set the ball in motion.

i spent some time trying to rest on the couch, but finding myself invested in apple cider vinegar which gd was watching (i jumped in in the middle of the second-to-last episode).

i was feeling like crap, still, but gd's been in trouble with her neck for a while so i went to pick mr smear up from school. him and his "granny cane", according to the bullies in his class - they teased him that he didn't need it, and in their defense, i really don't believe he did ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

as he told me what transpired and what was said to him, i offered him some suggestions for comebacks and he was both impressed and sad that he hadn't been able to come up with them on his own. i suggested he practice - briefly describing eminem's tactics from 8 mile - and i'm curious to see whether he actually does.

i took him to his therapist - again, feeling really awful - and sorted out my insurance stuff while i waited. then i picked him up, we returned home, and from that point until dinner i was responsible for overseeing his homework.

he actually did pretty well in both hebrew and math, and i was surprisingly quite pleased by his attitude. i feel like choosing a translation of harry potter for his reading is working out well, the language is sophisticated enough that i have to keep looking up words but he understands the story very well so he doesn't get lost.

[holy shit, the jackals have just started howling - they've been doing that a lot the past couple of nights, and it sounds like they're hanging out right around our building]

as for the maths, this evening was the first time i've managed to get him to check his answers before submitting, rather than (effectively) guessing, and once he got into a groove of doing that his performance was pretty solid.

after getting him into bed, gd and i settled in to watch the season finale, and it was perfectly cringy as anticipated. afterwards we watched two minutes of the 60 minutes interview with belle gibson before i decided i really didn't need to see any more. then we watched random shit on youtube for a while before gd decided it was time to go to bed, and i've just finished a run of kaycee's mod and i'm now ready for bed myself.

hopefully i'll be better in the morning.