negative, i am a meat proxy

 i guess today wasn't great? from a work perspective, at least. i mean, i'm learning a lot and things are moving, but i missed my deadline and that doesn't feel good :/

i read some more evangelion this morning, asuka and shinji fighting together was really fun :)

i made some design progress on the game i'm working on, and put the finishing touches on daily challenges in my sudoku game. i'm really pleased with how it's feeling, and i've made design choices i'm proud of, some of which i think are leveling me up all-round.

as i arrived at the office, i received a phone call from someone from the transport authority, who assured me that we haven't fallen through the cracks and agreed that if we can get power of attorney from our landlord they'll have no problem interfacing with us instead. so that's a huge relief.

after lunch (which was preceded by a too-long group meeting followed by a rush on the toilets), i spoke to the coordinator for the arts track. over the course of the next twenty minutes, i managed to walk her through mr smear's story, why his behavior is understandable, and how we all need to deal with the situation. she was understanding and appears to be on board. immediately after we finished talking, she sent me an update from today's art class teacher who reported a dramatic improvement since he faced an actual consequence yesterday, and it was an enormous, validating relief.

i made the mistake of eating a "go" vegan yoghurt, and i'm now convinced that it upsets my stomach. i have to check its ingredients to see if i can figure out what, but i'm definitely not eating it again.

i applied for the license renewal on monday, and it was authorized and sent today! i'm still in delighted shock, that's another weight off our shoulders (and money in our pockets).

ironically, the money we save will go directly to paying the next person who contacted me. in may, we were asked to reach out to an psychology clinic to manage mr smear's inappropriate behaviors. in june, i asked for intervention by the school councillor because they weren't reachable. just over a month ago they finally contacted me and asked us to fill out forms. this evening they called to get a description, and direct us to one of their therapists. so i guess things are actually moving now...

i took mr smear to the park to play frisbee, though it was a bit dark and less fun. on the way home we had a serious talk about the stuff that's been going on, and i explained to him that our main focus right now is teaching him discipline, and that him doing stuff he doesn't want to is really the whole point of the exercises we're going to be giving him (specifically in art and music).

dinner and a weird episode of the fall and rise of reggie dinkins, and then getting mr smear into bed (still reading the light fantastic), and then having a long conversation with my sister, who i think might be struggling more than we are...

it's too late and i'm too tired to do anything functional, so i'm going to just chill a little and go to bed and try to get stuff done in the morning.

all in all, today was a pretty good day.

...

stupid thoughts for the day:

laid out

 i - did - not -sleep. holy shit. like, at all. i skipped my first coffee, sat outside scribbling furiously, apparently coming up with a pretty compelling game design. said goodbye to mr smear, reminding him to be a cooperative student as we usually do, and then dove in to a bunch of chores.

i seem to have successfully applied for gd's license renewal, which was no mean feat... at least partially because my password manager had the incorrect credentials for her account 🤦‍♂️

i didn't feel i had enough time to head to the bank and the phone repair place before my team daily, then discovered around the time of the daily that it had been cancelled a couple of hours prior. i got a good chunk of work done instead, and then left the apartment for a "long lunch" involving bus rides there and back, and 45 minutes waiting politely. i was still buzzing from last night's coffee when i sat down, but halfway through the wait i crashed. hard.

then, when the two old people ahead of me finally finished and left, my "personal" teller checked my ID, heard me out, and regretted to inform me that there was absolutely nothing he could help me with.

*sigh*

i crossed the road, paid for my phone repair (mr smear's smashed screen couldn't be replaced), and came home.

i sipped coffee and lay down for a twenty minute nap, augmented with some dub. then i dragged myself to my desk and put in an hour's work, and then signed in to an hour and a bit of a talk by a coworker in thailand who's constructed a fascinating setup with grokbot that i'm thoroughly convinced is a dangerous, very expensive mistake.

i work with AI a lot, and i do not believe for one second that it's a good idea to take my eyes off the code entirely. also, my best senior engineer refused to use AI for one week. by friday, he said something nobody on the team wanted to hear.. i've been thinking about it a lot since i read it. i think it's spot on.

i was interrupted twice during that talk, for the same thing: the first was gd yelling at mr smear over the phone, the second was his teacher calling me to discuss his behavior. after the talk we had a family meeting, and things didn't seem too bad, and then his teacher got hold of me again and they seemed very bad. someone's apparently having a massive regression and doesn't remember how being a student works.

we have a lice protocol, now we have a behavior monitoring protocol. at least the teachers seem to be doing their part this time, actually making an effort to inform us and involve us 🙄

i took mr smear to the comics library, which was as much an opportunity for a little exercise and fresh air as to discuss his behavior, and gd's response to his behavior, and how i feel.

i'm excited about the books i took out: the second evangelion volume, the first volume of hellsing, and - hidden away from mr smear - book one of kick-ass. i flipped through it while there, it's hardcore.

we got home in time for dinner, with gd's delicious not-sushi rice-paper rolls, spoke to my mom, unpacked the groceries, showered, put mr smear to bed, and (after i spent some time thinking about stuff, after spending a little more time researching stuff) gd and i tried to watch an episode of ludwig, but we both passed out on the couch and i only realized it when i came around again and found myself aware enough to laugh at something, then noticed gd wasn't laughing :P

i've just finished my tea, i've written all this, and i'm going to try to catch up on last night's sleep.

a path less travelled

 maybe i am stupid.

i mean, this certainly isn't the first time i've mused on this, but the fact of the matter is that most of my life - honestly, some of the biggest moments of my life - is based on dramatic series of poor decisions. in most cases, i've kind of come out on top alright, but not for any particularly good reason. providence, i guess.

here i am, it's saturday morning, early enough that the streets are mostly empty and i'm surrounded by the blind-friendly ticking of a pedestrian crossing and occasional engine noises* and a glorious orange-cloud sunrise, the air calm and cool enough for me to be wearing a vest, and gd and mr smear (apparently) asleep.

* a surprising number of non-electric vehicles, which feels weird after yesterday's spectacular reveal of tesla's "flying" "roadster".

here i am, trying to do damage control and figure my way out of living beyond my means, struggling to make a decision because my resume can't handle me looking for a new job right now, but also i can't professionally and in good conscience leave a new contract i've barely begun without burning my employer, and moving apartments right now would be a nightmare, and it's unlikely to find a viable one in tel aviv that's cheaper anyway, and we can't leave tel aviv without pulling mr smear out of a school that's legitimately good for him both socially and artistically...

a sports car zooms by, a crow cries, and here i am, typing this up and sipping on my coffee and wondering whether i have what it takes to pull myself up by my bootstraps - an apt expression for the sheer impossibility that it seems to be - and find a way forward.

...

here comes the sun.

...

thursday:

thursday was a work from home day. while wednesday was fulling of hitting walls, thursday was awkwardly, slowly, sliding up and around them. my AI context seems a lot more reliable, but being thorough demands running a lot of long prompt sessions which means a lot of (human) evaluation, recalibration, and then a lot more waiting until the next cycle of the loop. it makes for long days, and an almost arbitrary level of productivity, but i did feel like i ended the day with a sense of accomplishment.

...

in the early afternoon, the landlord's air conditioner guy arrived. he checked out the ducts, and arrived at the conclusion that we don't have a mold problem, just a dust problem, and i *hope* his assessment is correct. either way, his explanation of our experience made sense, so we're going to follow the new protocol and see how it goes: for heat, air conditioner only goes on *cold*, colder than outside and colder than 24°, and immediately afterwards we use fan mode to keep the humidity out of the ducts from condensing.

i still haven't received a response from the landlord after i sent him an update.

...

i still haven't received a response from the pain clinic doctor regarding the cannabis license renewal. i guess we're going to have to make an appointment.

...

the tax return situation: i acted on a couple of recommendations, and got good responses. it turns out the 15% fee the not-quite-nigerian scammer eventually settled on is a standard fee. i ended up going with dod's guy, hopefully they'll find something.

...

we watch the wonder years' "how i'm spending my summer vacation" over dinner, continuing to solidify what a remarkable, wonderful, helpful series it is. mr smear gets really upset by kevin arnold's behavior, so much so that he just wants us to turn it off...

yesterday.

... but then, like yesterday, it turns out to provide a perfect analogy to explain to him why his own behavior is problematic. halfway through the day i lost my temper with him because he started telling me off for not helping him with his chores, while i'm trying desperately to keep my shit together to find ways to feed my family. a little later, when i'd calmed down, gd suggested that it was kind of like how kevin was focused on his little problems while others' worlds were burning, and i sat down with mr smear to calmly discuss it. as soon as i talked about last night's episode he *got* it, and immediately thanked me (and gd) for making is clear :)

...

that was only one thing that upset me, though. i spent most of the morning and early afternoon upset with mr smear about something else... for years now, i've been telling him to keep his phone in his bag when he's not actively using it, and he's been refusing to listen. a few months ago mr smear cost us a phone by washing it after dropping it in a urinal - this was upsetting enough before we learned that we're in financial distress - yesterday morning his friend shoved him (or something) and he dropped his phone and it died.

oh, fuck :/

...

gd and i bussed to a supermarket in yad eliyahu (i don't think i've ever been there before) for friday shopping (and to use the gift card i received before the holidays), and i'm pretty confident it's the best one in the city. we had a pretty good experience getting what we needed, caught a bus home (a long ride, with stress after we'd been talking about potentially having to move house again), and then bussed to pick mr smear up from school.

i took with me a couple of our old phones, and after picking mr smear up (and being frustrated by him making us wait outside for ten minutes and then eventually go in looking for him) we caught a bus to a phone repair store, which turned out to be the guy from my old (pre-canada) neighborhood who i thought had closed shop, but had merely moved to the other side of the road.

of the phones i brought with, one didn't need any work done (it suddenly sprang back to life with 70+% battery after we plugged it in), two of them i left with him for evaluation, and the rest (i don't remember if that's one or two) he told us weren't worth the cost of trying to fix. what worked out well for us is that the one that came back to life was mr smear's previous phone (from before our experiment to use paybox before understanding that it's a scam), so after only a little bit if fiddling i was able to hand it to him, fully useable.

...

i spent most of the afternoon just processing and thinking, while experimenting with freecad and blender. by late afternoon i'd managed to hook them up to AI and gotten results that weren't amazing, but were pretty damned good nonetheless.

...

before sundown, i took mr smear to the park and we threw the frisbee around. with everything else that's going on, it was fantastic. we both got some exercise, we both had fun, and mr smear actually did surprisingly well. it was an experience to treasure.

...

after getting home and getting showered, it was time for kiddush with my mom. gd's gnocci dinner was great, we watched some interesting nature "documentaries" on youtube, and after we'd all eating our fill, we settled down to watch the original total recall.

i read through some of the other reviews, and apparently remembered this movie with less than total recall, because i decided my 11 year old could handle it.

let's address the sexual stuff first: there's so much, from the get-go, and it's SO inappropriate. not just inappropriate for an 11 year old, inappropriate for real human beings - from the hyper-sexual wife responding to her husband's nightmares and literally anything else, to the relationship between  ironside's character and his wife, to the cabby fondling the woman's breasts while waiting for quaid. it's weird, and boy, did that lead to a couple of conversations.

but then there's the violence. we're usually not that concerned with violence, but total recall goes far beyond what i remembered and is truly hardcore. gratuitous and extreme.

it's a phenomenal movie, really fun, full of iconic moments and with lots to think about, but i do wish we'd waited a few more years.

i put mr smear to bed afterwards; he wasn't that bothered by the sex and violence, but the mutants in the movie freaked him out 🙄

friction and the not-quite-nigerian scam

 today was messy. i slept pretty well, and loved reading some more of akira before screen time.

i'm really struggling with my various side projects, not only to make time to work on them, but to find mental bandwidth. add to that the stress of having paid the larger amount which adds pressure to make good use of it, and i'm... doing... great...

i fired off an email to gd's pain doctor regarding prescribed doses, and i'm hoping we don't have to go see him in person 🤞

the work day was long, and difficult. it felt like every round of PR reviewing and updating was backfiring worse than the round before, and it was only in the afternoon, having pitched my setup to one of my team, that i learned that my AI tooling setup was ignoring something critical that really could have made all the difference :/

so as much progress as i felt i was making yesterday, today i felt like i'd hit a wall.

the only positive work day experience was a tech circle meeting in which i actually was able to contribute. that was a huge relief.

...

a while back i received an offer of assistance with tax refunds, and this morning i responded. the guy called me up, and asked for a whole lot of my personal details, and i was starting to wonder if i was being scammed when he divulged that he's actually nigerian... nigerian iraqi, living up north, and according to everything i've seen his business is legit. but. he takes enormous percentages from his clients, so i'm trying to find someone whose terms and conditions are a little less unreasonable.

...

back and forth with the air conditioner guy, and this evening he was saying "it would only take ten minutes", and i suddenly realized we were not talking about the same thing. he then spoke to our landlord, and then the landlord sent me a flurry of upset messages because he's having a hard time financially too and he was not expecting such a huge cost, and he's (understandably) pissed off that he paid a lot of money for a mold clean that didn't clean all the mold.

...

mr smear went to a friend's after school today, which he said was a super-short visit and that most of their time together had been spent on the bus there, awkwardly not really speaking.

kids these days.

gd and i had to threaten him with pretty severe punishments to get him to finish his book report, but he did do it, and he did a really good job.

then it was dinner time, gd having celebrated us getting our stove back, with four hot sauces and two episodes of evangelion. it was a good dinner.

after showering and brushing teeth, i read some more of the light fantastic to mr smear, then sat down in front of my computer to poke the AI and do not much of value.

now i'm drinking my last tea and planning on climbing into bed.

momentum

 whatever else is going on, i woke up feeling better this morning. i started my day reading akira, the artwork is stunning and the story is... a bit different from what i remember from the movie, but i haven't seen the movie in forever so...

i began my functional day ordering hand-vacuum filters off of ali express, and unboxing the reflective straps i picked up yesterday. we found our sharpies, but then i discovered that sharpies and white-out don't mix, and then gd realized that she could mix up acrylic paint and did an excellent job of color-matching on our bathroom tiles 👍

[pausing to go and watch gd eating sunflower seeds, i was honestly convinced that she was somehow doing it wrong and now i'm trying to figure out how i've never seen her eating them before]

i walked to work a little anxiously, expecting another cyclist/motorcyclist incident in the walkway and identifying more with the poor old guy who was so angry about it a couple of weeks ago.

there were no signs, nothing indicating that there was a problem with the road i normally cross to get into the office, and i splashed down into what was either mud, or cement, and it went into my sandals.

i - was - pissed.

i tried not to track whatever it was into the office, which was nigh impossible, and found myself awkwardly and embarrassingly standing on a bunch of paper towels while washing my sandals off in the bathroom sink. not the greatest start to the workday.

work itself was fine, though. i made progress, and am feeling a bit of momentum, i had a pleasant roadmap meeting with my mentor, lunch was good (my onboarding buddy and i had a long chat about the differences in professional culture and work/life balance between the big companies), and i'm feeling pretty solid about my dev setup and the task i'm doing.

oh, and i had coffee with my old friend from the officer's course, and learned that's he's doing really cool hobbyist stuff with home automation and 3D printing. like, really cool stuff.

...

i received a call from the medical cannabis people, apparently there isn't an issue with gd getting a larger quantity per month. i really, really hope that's true 🤞

...

it sucked that the air conditioner guy couldn't make it this afternoon - or tomorrow, either - but it did give me the opportunity to go and hear eli sharabi speak. holy shit, that was an intense hour and a half. the fact that he's doing what he's doing and is maintaining the attitude that he's maintaining is nothing short of miraculous. there's no detail of his story that isn't devastating and heartbreaking.

...

i came home in time for dinner, and after discussing what i'd heard we dived in to another episode of evangelion. mr smear actually ate most of the chili, i didn't cry when i took too much carolina reaper sauce, and then it was shower / teeth / bedtime and i read a bit more of the light fantastic.

i couldn't figure out how i was feeling and i certainly wasn't being focused, so gd and i watched another episode of fauda, and i think i'm going to try for a (relatively) early night.

gremlins

i took a puff last night, or two, and it helped me get to sleep but i still spent some of the night awake and uncomfortable. where did i see a video about humming affecting the vagus nerve and reducing anxiety yesterday? i don't know, but i tried it and i'm not sure if it worked or not.

yesterday's hospital mission went surprisingly smoothly, and mr smear was able to go to school afterwards. i worked hard the whole afternoon, mostly battling to make sense of the AI agents telling me contradicting things and revising my plans in a way that i hope makes sense.

i managed to have an actual conversation with our landlord yesterday, which may not have resolved all the issues but it was an enormous relief nonetheless.

in the evening i took mr smear rollerblading, it was an absolutely gorgeous sunset / twilight along the yarkon river, so that was great.

after reading more of the light fantastic to mr smear i napped on the couch before i went to bed last night. so i didn't get much done, and i certainly didn't use my token reset like i'd planned.

it's been a week.

this morning we woke up to find both our stove and our dishwasher not working. i managed to get an electrician in early, and he checked everything out and it looks like the wiring is fine, so gd and i have named the gremlins in our house and i'm struggling to get technicians in. the stove guy will come on thursday. that's a lot of meals without cooking... fuck.

unexpected things

i jump-started my day yesterday by taking the rosh hashana cards mr smear forgot to deliver on tuesday to the school.

on the way, our bus was stalled by a homeless guy who literally stood in front of the bus, smoking a cigarette and trying to goad the driver into a fight. the driver kept edging towards him, with his fucking bus. the homeless guy didn't give a fuck. then, suddenly, another bus pulled in front of us and the homeless guy ran into it with his lit cigarette to go and terrorize the poor people on it :/

i stopped at the pharmacy on my way home to pick up gd's meds (a long wait, but less long that usual), then came home for breakfast and to begin working.

...

it was my first group meeting with my client, and i was unpleasantly surprised to be asking to introduce myself to the group immediately after the manager had given me a pretty robust introduction. in retrospect i should have probably focused on the personal aspects of my life rather than the professional 🙄

regardless, two people reached out to me privately as a result of my introduction: the first, a fellow contractor who i didn't realize was in the same group. the second? a guy from the officer's course i haven't seen in almost sixteen years, who i happened to be thinking about on wednesday because we were last together at the same place our company status was held!

...

the work-from-home day went alright, but for two things:

the first, that i had a real snacking problem yesterday, and by "snacking" i mean "i ate a few more actual meals than i should have". so it's not that the quality of the food was questionable, but the quantity was out of control.

the second, that at the beginning of my meeting with my lead he asked me to pause the recording, and after a congenial personal sync during which he wanted to know how i was feeling about things, i asked him for feedback and learned that there is a point regarding my progress on which he's disappointed.

i spent the rest of the day heavily focused on resolving that, and i believe i finished the day having made good progress.

...

gd had a big day yesterday: she finally got the haircut she's been longing for for months (she had to postpone her appointment until we were sure we were through the lice incident, and the incident caused her to cut her own hair in a way that bothered her), and she finally got it cut short which i've been suggesting for years. so we're both happier now :)

in the afternoon we went to two stores to do the grocery shopping, and by the second we found what we needed for the long weekend and, specifically, her experimental kebab dinner.

...

while i didn't enjoy the experimental kebabs, the episode of spider-noir we watched along with it was great (i *love* the cameo musical phrase appearances borrowed from all the other spider-man movies). after dinner / showering and brushing teeth, we sat down to watch the second half of judge dredd. overall: it's a bit childish, standard 90s action fare with one-dimensional characters and some heavy character assassination by wedged in "romance", but the concept of megacity one, and the ABC warbot and mean machine, was great and we all had fun.

two puffs before bed (my lower back and hip flexors were doing their thing), and it helped.

...

i woke up this morning to a coffee on the balcony (no comics, no computer) while thinking about my tarot game (i'm feeling quite lost, actually, when it comes to the actual game mechanics), and i've since spent the past few hours working through my open work in my auto-doc project and my employer's spec project. i'm done with the former and just about (i think) done with the latter, and now gd and i are leaving our heavily coughing mr smear at home to go to the mall and find a board game that she's interested in playing.

cleaning the filters

 i slept like shit last night, but at least i woke up without the headache. and gd got her shit, so that's okay.

it was a long day, beginning with me leaving the apartment with mr smear and going to the clinic, only to discover that i didn't actually have an acupuncture appointment today. i took care of a bunch of admin and chores when i returned home, then dived into the troubleshooting session that i walked out of the office on yesterday, which i resolved at roughly the same time that a guy came to clean our air conditioner and vents.

oh! and i spoke to one of the async game jam guys for half an hour today, mainly encouraging him and assuring him that there are no rules or guidelines regarding which tech we use :)

the cleaner was very respectful, and didn't make a lot of mess, but it still demanded a lot of running after him and then cleaning up once he left. he did a great job, but there's mold in the tubes and he explained to us that it'll cost us more to clean them than to replace them...

so that's a fight for another day, at least i know how to take care of the superficial cleaning myself now and harassing the landlord about the tubes is for later.

poor guy (our landlord) is currently dealing with his father developing dementia, so definitely not today.

the rest of the work day was spent onboarding / setting up my dev env for my new client, which was mostly successful by the time i called it a day and headed out to the school for the parents' evening.

i walked into the school with firefighter and his wife, who were very interested in my mom's aliyah story. i mentioned it to her when we spoke a bit later, and now i'm concerned that she's not moving on it...

the arts track for the sixth graders just got serious, and their program sounds amazing. i was stressed about not having known about the arts stream whatsapp group - were we supposed to have joined it last year? - but then i learned i wasn't the only parent worried and that we were only supposed to find out about it today :P

the class meeting was a bit awkward, but peak awkward was the crazy mom yelling and putting on a show because she's - apparently - the only parent who doesn't want there to be a class whatsapp group with the teacher 🙄

there was a big deal made about which parents would be on the class council this year, and i think everyone was rooting for the teacher who was using every trick in the book to prevent the crazy mom from being on it. i really didn't want to volunteer, but in retrospect i think i should have.

it was already 9pm by the time we walked out the classroom, and i felt awkward, so i walked straight out and took the light rail and bus home, said good night to mr smear, ate and then spat out some leftovers that i think were bad, had a whole other bowl of chili (just like i did at lunchtime), didn't join big data for a game of fluxx (it was too late by then), showered, and am now drinking a cup of tea and writing this before i spend a little time trying to make sense of the world before going to bed.

undo not disturb

gd's phone tends to beep all night, which disturbs me but not her. so a few days ago i set up do not disturb on her phone, with exceptions for when anyone calls more than once during a short period.

i noticed that this didn't really stop the notifications, but whatever. tonight, though, it made big drama - gd was waiting for a delivery of something, and her phone never rang. it's clear from the suppressed notifications that it *should* have rung.

fucking samsung.

so now she's pissed, but also terrified that she'll be blacklisted for putting a delivery person through this :(

...

i wasn't sleeping well, but now i'm not sleeping at all. and my head's still aching.

the first day of fall

 things that upset me in the middle of the night: looking at my phone's notifications, and then finding myself scrolling on instagram, and coming across these two self-hating jews discussing the ugliness of a rigged system that is everything anti-capitalists claim capitalism is: the opposite of a free market.

...

i'm regretting taking a puff before bed last night, partially because i'm feeling totally exhausted right now and it's almost 8pm and i'm drinking a fourth cup of coffee in order to be able to go rollerblading, partially because i passed in and out of conciousness earlier while listening to my new client's all-hands and i realized at some point that i'm not breathing with my whole lungs and when i do, it feels... smoky. like, tight and sticky.

i hope i don't regret this coffee.

mr smear surprised us by getting up and being ready on time for school, and then away he went. i took care of a bunch of first-of-the-month admin, and then suddenly it was time to go to work.

overall, i'm really impressed. the offices feel good, everyone i met seems relaxed and organized, even though they all described the work as anything but. during my first daily with the team mr smear called me, twice, while i was introducing myself - turned out he was worried that he couldn't find his meds, when he finished taking them yesterday already 🙄

i spent most of my day setting up my new machine and accounts and beginning the onboarding process, and talking to people, and i was *really* surprised to learn that my client offers catered lunches that include vegan options that are pretty darned good.

in the all-hands, i was literally amazed to hear them discussion employee retention and training, and making their approach very clear, and their approach is stellar. to go from a company continually laying off good workers to one making a point of developing theirs is quite a relief!

i guess mr smear and i shouldn't have eaten when i got home, because we also ate at dinner time and we both stuffed ourselves on gd's sushi while watching an episode of the simpsons that irritated me because its premise revolved around everyone in town being a total moron.

yes, yes, i know.

anyway, here we are. mr smear apparently had a great day at school, i'm going to at least try to go rollerblading tonight, and gd seems to be doing alright herself, so... 🤷‍♂️

rituals

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

official

 i didn't take a puff on sunday night, but i slept pretty well nonetheless. i started my day completing my favorite thing is monsters volume ii.

the artwork is no less phenomenal than the first volume, but overall it just isn't as satisfying, none of the elements that were "wrapped up" make much sense, and there are a bunch of events that were more focused on being anachronistically inclusive and less on the actual characters and story.

it's full of wonderful creations and interesting moments, though, and ultimately I enjoyed it a lot.

...

a significant chunk of my morning and evening were spent worrying about finances. we're barely scraping through this month, and as a result of gd's panic (and her refusal to use cheap, effective but gross solutions) we've spent an enormous amount of next month's money on lice treatments that may or may not work.

it's not clear right now if we're done with this super-lice saga yet. we've established a protocol that we're going to stick to, wartime or peacetime, and we're going to hope for the best.

...

i started listening to the audible* audiobook of marty cagan's transformed yesterday on my way to the office, at 1.5x speed and trying to skip as much fluff as possible. so far, my biggest takeaways are that transformations are whole-org things that require buy-in from everyone, and that *gasp* small, frequent release cycles and CI/CD need to happen together or they're meaningless.

* i think audible should consider selling lifetime memberships and then charging a small amount per audiobook, rather than huge amounts per audiobook on top of expensive memberships.

...

a truck just drove past and made a sound like a quiet sneeze.

...

my first encounter in the office was dx, and when i shared my thoughts on the map generator lessons from sunday night and what i thought might be the next step, he told me something encouraging: "i wouldn't be surprised if that's what everybody's doing in a few months from now". so now i'm motivating to figure out a good way to make a spec library so that i can tell my agents to insert a <pattern> in whatever project i'm working on and have it pre-loaded with everything it needs to ask instead of having to describe what i want from scratch.

...

i was sitting with my new manager, and we were discussing how we were both taken by surprise by yesterday's news that this is my last week, when my previous manager from bulgaria suddenly walked up and joined us - i've never met him in real life before! so that was cool.

the work day was mostly scrambling, because that's what this week is all about, to close up everything. and a break for an employer's group meeting. and another break to talk to one of the data guys after learning that a bunch of them have just been retrenched*. and, towards the evening, buying tickets to gd's and my first date night since my mom visited last year.

* i referenced the town hall here, but couldn't easily find my immediate thoughts on it, which were all around gratitude that this is my client and not my employer, because i would not have felt in the least bit safe.

i got home relatively late, and we watched the wonder years over gd's second delicious attempt at daal, and after catching up with and saying good night to my mom we did the shower and lice protocol thing and then settled down to watch about half of crocodile dundee together.

i was tired, which usually meant going to bed early and then waking up for hours in the middle of the night, so i took a puff, and actually slept well until morning.

first and second blood

 i've been distracting myself all morning, now that i need to get to work i just realized i haven't posted anything and i'd like to "clear my desk" before i get started, so:

yesterday we watched the first two rambo movies (first blood, and first blood part ii). which were both enjoyed immensely, and both discussed heavily.

additionally, i took mr smear out on our rollerblades and he's improved dramatically, which was great fun to see.

otherwise, i spent a whole bunch of hours working on and writing up my map seed generator algorithm, and fixing a bunch of incidental bugs, so i feel like we made some progress on mr smear's game and that i have something to show for the past couple of weeks of being all over the place.

i took a puff last night, and i slept well, in spite of the fact that i went to bed with hurting hip flexors and i'm also struggling with them now.

this morning began with now-routine comics and coffee on the balcony, then i accompanied gd to her new dentist and did some work while i waited. she had a good experience, it looks like we've found our new clinic.

aaaand scene.

anxiously quiet

 we did a lice treatment last night before showering and going to bed very late, a very oily treatment, and my eyes are still irritated and they feel oily :(

yesterday morning was all about the pharmacy mission and weekend shopping. and monitoring and responding to the comments on gd's post, some of which were very angry at gd's observations on the neglect of children's hygiene, and some of which were very validating.

i ended up spending a good chunk of the day* on the auto-doc project, and then a very little bit of time before dinner on the map generator's seed algorithm before dinner. while that was happening, i also got mr smear to draw a couple of sketches of me because i want him challenging himself and practicing portraits, and hopefully i'll be able to get him to do that again today.

* i mean, a legit work day's worth of hours, though a lot of working with AI is firing off a prompt, switching to youtube, and then reviewing the results a few minutes later. but i also used a "teach-me" skill i've been working with since thursday (inspired by one of the guys at the game dev meetup), and i used it to verify that one of the big changes i've made to my auto-doc project actually makes sense.

[goes away, comes back a bit later, eyes feeling a little bit of relief]

the two puffs i took last night were very effective, and i slept.

today so far: reading some more of my favorite thing is monsters, doing a little more cleaning of the top of the kitchen cabinet (the third round in eight months, making progress), and then a whole bunch of nothing (minesweeper while "catching up" on youtube), now it's breakfast time and then... who knows?

the end of a week

 i took a puff last night before bed, but it didn't make me sleepy and i ended up waking up much earlier than i wanted to. but i didn't struggle with my back or hip flexors, whether that's because of the acupuncture or because of the weed doesn't really matter.

i was actually going to try the medication the doctor prescribed me, which sounds great on paper but turned out to be an anticholinergic, and i'd quite frankly rather continue with my possible sleep-deprivation path to dementia than take a practically guaranteed path. just sayin'.

...

most of my work day revolved around completing the backfill, and discovering that an external tool that's recently been introduced has been starving the processes, slowing everything down and then killing them when they hit an arbitrary timeout 🙄

one of my client team came to me to discuss the fact that i'm leaving - he'd just found out - but later the boss told me everyone had been informed on tuesday. i don't know what's going on, but whatever. dx and i discussed a game idea he had when he was a teenager that's absolutely brilliant, hopefully one day we'll collaborate on it :)

i got home, emptied my bag and took mr smear to the school to pick up his books for the next year. on the way home, we came across a really nice kitchen store and i found mugs!

the bus ride back was apparently mr smear's best ever, mainly because he was so excited about how modern and clean it was :P

we arrived just in time for dinner, and the simpsons, followed by a conversation with my mom (including teaching her some AI fundamentals) and... letting mr smear play plague inc before showering and then going to bed just as late as we did...

...

so i got up early this morning, and enjoyed my coffee while reading more of my favorite thing is monsters on the balcony, put together the new fan, freaked myself out by looking at our financial situation, and am now getting ready to make myself breakfast [i got distracted, now it's eaten already] and do some game dev / ai experimentation.

...

"super lice". of course. fan-freaking-tastic. gd's just sent a warning to the class parents' group which basically feels like posting a sign on mr smear's back :/

circles

having barely slept the night before, and with my hip flexors threatening, i took a puff. i'm still tired from the sleep deficit, but i slept really well. it's weird to sleep well and not remember dreaming.

i got up, had a coffee, looked for an didn't find my last MRI, then i walked to the bus stop and went to the clinic for an acupuncture session. my body was profoundly calm for most of the duration of the treatment, though i did develop a random itch that made my leg twitch, and i've just gotten home (trying hard to stay in the "comfort" bubble in spite of the world around me, i think next time i'll walk instead of taking a bus) and am having a quick breakfast before heading to the office.

...

i made some progress on the map generator problem before going to the office, and the work day was mostly completing the backfill (it still required some fixing). i came home for lunch, then returned for a talk by a south african "CTO" that turned out to be a thorough waste of 45 minutes of my life that i'll never get back. the title of the talk had been misleading: i thought it was going to be around organizing a company's structures around AI, and instead it was about how a junior dev became a senior dev with a fancy title and how the south african tech industry is years behind us in terms of working with AI.

a little later i walked past my client team and inquired after the weirdness that was going on - my client / the boss was standing there with tears streaming down his face, and i was offered a piece of a little yellow pepper to try.

it turned out to be a reaper that the boss had home grown. the first little piece i took hit me hard in the throat, but i barely noticed it in my mouth. the second piece was substantially thicker and full of seeds, and i made a point of chewing it thoroughly. it had a delayed action, and i ended up regretting it. it must have taken about an hour to completely stop burning...

i had a good sync with my manager, and on my way out made a suggestion to dx for the problem he was stuck with, which i hope helped.

i came home early, and walked with mr smear to the library to switch out a couple of his books. while there, i had a fun conversation with the librarian, who lit up when i talked about how we'd just finished the eighth season of the simpsons and the importance of monoculture especially with regards bridging the communication gap between parents and their children.

the walk there and back was full of interesting conversation, and by the time we got home i'd put in 17K steps in addition to the hour and a half of rollerblading the night before. i stretched a bit before dinner, after which i had a little too much dessert and some arak for good measure. i was ready to go to bed, but i still had to wait about an hour for mr smear to shower and brush his teeth 🤦‍♂️

...

well, the calm has been slowly seeping away and i'm feeling my "wry neck" again. oh, well.

token cheat

 i slept alright last night, though i got up for bit and then tried to sleep in after, and was woken at 7.17am by an enthusiastic city worker to be informed that they'd cleared the dead rat from the sidewalk that i reported yesterday.

they honestly didn't need to call :/

my first hour or two were spent putting together a summary of my last six months for my recruiter, while simultaneously continuing the auto-doc work i'd begun yesterday afternoon (an endless back-and-forth gen-eval loop between opencode's bigpickle and codex luna) which literally took the entire day to complete.

[takes a moment to do that just-one-more-thing]

to be honest, i have only the vaguest notion of what was being done all day. there were a couple of points where i had to get involved and clarify some principles, but by and large it was a lot of uninteresting crap and a lot of breaking one thing while fixing another...

budget AI is, well, budget.

once i got the summary sent off, i took mr smear with me to the pharmacy to pick up gd's prescription. he read while keeping an eye on the queue numbers, i did a bit of shopping, completely forgetting the mug mission we'd been on on friday, until we were already home :P

we must have been there an hour or so, and i was feeling worryingly faint. not sure if sick, or just sleep deprived. i just had to look up the term sleep deprived.

once we returned home, i finally started looking at client work. i spent a few hours trying to establish a baseline cost estimate for the backfill i'm supposed to be starting this week, which took forever and ended with me encountering bad source data and having to make my jobs more tolerant. i feel like i cheated, because i used the databricks AI for the real work and my own tokens just to validate it.

the inexplicable cost jump from last week reared its ugly head, and led me to dive deep to try and figure out what was going on... which led me to the not-exactly-verifiable conclusion that mlflow tracing was the prime culprit. removing its artifacts seemed to make my later verification efforts vastly cheaper, but in any event i'm no longer even trying to use the company AI to get any actual work done.

during one of mr smear's downtimes, i set him to cleaning our standing fans. i had to guide him a bit at first, but the second one he did all by himself and he really did do a good job 🙌

another win was getting him to use another of his downtimes to practice drawing backgrounds, and he appears to be quite excited by the results, though i cannot verify what he's been up to because he's being unusually secretive.

yet another win was getting him to come with me for a walk once i was *done* with my work day, he was happy to join me and we had a good time discussing all sorts of interesting things ^_^

[exhales]

dinner time.

self-care and kaiju

 i didn't sleep very well last night - no puff - but it wasn't nearly as bad as thursday night (or the nights before tuesday), so i wasn't a total wreck come morning. i got out of bed super early, and immediately got to work flipping between the auto-doc upgrades and the PRD my boss asked me for.

a couple of hours later, the latter was completed and delivered, and i headed out to the hospital sleep clinic to make an appointment for november, and on my way back booked an appointment for our GP to discuss blood tests and a pain clinic referral. when i got home, i booked a consultation with the complementary medicine clinic as well, which i've been meaning to do for a couple of years now.

i spent the next hour and a half working, finally putting my laptop to sleep just as mr smear and i accompanied my sister out the door and to the airport... i made the changes suggested by an article i'd read on the weekend, and so far it looks like it's made the difference, even with claude's sonnet model. so my tokenspiracy theories weren't so wrong after all 🤔

gd couldn't join us, sadly, so the two of them had their emotional farewell in the entrance instead.

it was hot and muggy today, it seems like the heat wave warning we got a few days ago wasn't for nothing.

once we got my sister to security, we said our goodbyes and then went downstairs to find a quiet place for me to talk to my client, who'd been trying to get hold of me ever since we'd left the apartment. while mr smear kept a table and read, i had a fifteen minute chat with him that was very positive; i don't know what he was expecting, but he was kinda thrown by how "maturely" i was taking it... i mean, this is not my first consulting rodeo, so... 🤷‍♂️

what did surprise me was that my notice period is a month and a half, which is longer than the other guy.

mr smear was hungry, and the airport bakery was all dairy, so we agreed i'd get him hummus. i had some of it myself, so i can attest that it was brilliant, and that i understand why he felt the need to inform the guy that it was the greatest hummus he's ever had. it wasn't the best hummus i've ever had, but it was pretty damned good, and he even enjoyed the chickpeas themselves which he usually doesn't.

so that was cool.

we came back via azrieli, which involved a lot of stairs up to the mall and a rush to wash my hands of whatever wetness some stranger managed to bestow on one of them 🤮

then we caught a bus home, both of us having had our fill of the sweaty, jam-packed, no-sense-of-personal-space masses. i was absolutely exhausted, but i'd been exhausted all day, so i chugged a coffee and worked hard until i was done (waiting on a review), and then crashed on the couch for a while.

when i came to, i finished my tea and did a little auto-doc work while playing inscryption, then it was dinner time and we watched the simpsons, ate a delicious dinner, had a long chat with my mom, showered, and sat down on the couch to continue watching pacific rim.

pacific rim is incredible, it's gorgeous, it's wonderful, it's insane, and it's such a trip enjoying it together with my son!

now he's gone to bed (he's been reading himself to sleep the past while, it's summer holidays), and i think i'm going to turn off and play some more before i go to bed. it's been a pretty big day.

cotton wool brain

 oh, yeah... i remember now. one of the reasons i usually avoid cannabis is that it renders me extremely slow and unmotivated. after having coffee and writing up my previous post, i tried reading some more of stranger in a strange land. that put me to sleep for another hour or so. after that, i was able to think deep-feeling thoughts about my perpetual all-consuming need to be constantly doing all the things that need to get done, but not able to think useful thoughts about it, and i played a little more inscryption and watched stuff while eating breakfast.

mr smear got up, and i agreed to join him for his inscryption time after breakfast, but after he'd played for a little bit (it was a resumed game we had no context for, and he lost) his friend called to ask him to come over then instead of later. mr smear is not exactly mr spontaneous, but gd and i both pleaded with him to go, and then threatened him, and even though he initially had a shitty attitude, by the time we walked out together he was fine, and he ended up having a really good time.

hell, his friend's mom took the two of them to see the new spiderman movie, so he had a pretty good afternoon.

the challah-peño was much hotter than usual. neither of us noticed last night at dinner, but mr smear and i both noticed this morning.

i ended up taking another long nap after dropping mr smear off, and woke up to the sounds of my sister heading out for a spell. it was only after my third coffee that my brain-fog started lifting and i slowly started getting into Doing Stuff.

later, gd ran my sister through a tarot reading, which combined with the game idea i was discussing with sailor to inspire me to design something. once i had a rough idea, i then realized that one of my problems when creating a project in unity is that i'm overly-ambitious and immediately planning the full game when what i really need to be doing is iteratively exploring building the individual mechanisms that will ultimately come together to form the end result.

so today, i focused on a menu screen for a card game. between my idea and codex's access to the code and the unity mcp, i'm very, very pleased with the result ^_^

after mr smear got home, i let him have some screen time before my sister and i took him to the beach. he moaned most of the way there, and really got on my nerves, and even using ice cream as a motivator only lasted a few minutes...

... so he sat on the beach and played with his feet in the sand, refusing to put on swimming trunks and join us, and we had a great time in the incredible water (the temperature was perfect), and then enjoyed a magnificent sunset while dragging mr smear off the beach to go and get ice creams.

i almost offed my sister when we sat down at the table, due to a misunderstanding i pulled the chair out from under her as she was sitting and barely managed to get it back in time O_o

that was when mr smear told me that he'd had a pretty good day. i gave him a fist-bump and pretended to have forgotten all the grumblings and occasional violence and general meanness... on our way out of there, though, we asked him to take a photo of us and he refused, so while fortunately a stranger was happy to help us it didn't improve my vibe much :/

the walk to the bus was pleasant. the bus itself? first, a horrible smell of a passenger who peed himself, second, escaping from that smell into the high pressure of a crowded middle section with mr smear getting stepped on.

we got off a stop early, enjoyed a nice walk home, showered, ate gd's delicious concoction, watched half an hour of pacific rim, and since then i've been writing this and upgrading my auto-doc at the same time. and in a few minutes, i'm going to bed.

...

my sister's returning to london tomorrow, and none of us - including her - want her to go. we talked about that at length this afternoon, i really hope we can figure something out.

chewing on life's gristle

omg i'm not crazy!

according to this article, claude *did* get dumber and more expensive, but it's my own fault for not reading the release notes :P

...

our upstairs friends came over for a bit - gd treated them to a preview of the sushi and onigiri, and they treated me to a bottle and a half of rather nice cider. they also offered to help us rescue my sister from ra'anana, as two of the weekend busses didn't show up and she was stuck out in the heat for over two hours while continuing to believe that one was coming... one eventually did arrive, though.

i just couldn't decide what to do with myself last night after dinner, so i continued playing inscryption and achieved a couple of minor events i'd never seen before. i didn't realize / had forgotten that you have to lose a game between getting the dagger and removing the... no spoilers... and discovered that defeating the wall of grizzlies twice and winning without meeting the final conditions leads to getting your death card pinned on the door with a little medal :P

[one run with unkillable squirrels with unkillable friends, including a black goat and an ouroboros. one run with an unkillable queen ant and an unkillable black goat. seriously OP]

i'm very grateful that last night's puff worked again. perhaps i didn't take a proper one on thursday night, i find with a vape it's hard to tell 🤷‍♂️

my sister's leaving tomorrow already, and it feels like none of us really wants her to leave...