getting it over with

a lot more presentation work, and then lunch with the AI guys relating all the things i've been learning about to my client's systems. very interesting stuff.

then a couple of hours trying to make sense of my project work, but ten minutes to presentation and discovering a glaring issue with my slides.

getting through the presentation by waffling poorly for the first half, only picking up steam towards the second. i feel bad for everyone i was talking to.

leaving the office late on a bit of a low note, as i was stuck on stuff that really doesn't make sense.

i ate a lot of dinner in spite of arriving home without much appetite. zootopia 2 is awful writing, but the jokes are excellent.

drama at bedtime: gd struggling to make her peace that we might not be able to afford a dog.

most of an episode of ludwig, absent-mindedly watching and playing for a while, now considering going to bed soon.

life is like a permeable shower curtain

 aren't shower curtains supposed to be impermeable? why can we not find plastic shower curtains anywhere?

1. getting up early was rough - i was still in dream-fugue for a while after our alarms sounded - but getting mr smear out of bed was even rougher. at least, after the initial shock and resentment, things were okay.

2. accompanying gd to the dentist for the second part of her root canal, and taking mr smear for breakfast. i tried to get some work done while he read. the vegan breakfast looked great, but was mediocre at best. i mean, at least he ate the "eggs", which were more curry than eggs, and he doesn't really like curry. but we both had too much of the pickled garlic. a tiny amount was too much, and haunted us both for quite a while after.

pg's folks walked in while i was in the middle of my team's daily, and didn't get the hint that i was in a meeting and couldn't say hi, which was amusingly awkward both for me and my teammates. i had a very nice chat with them afterwards, though.

then gd joined us, met pg's introduced herself to pg's parents. gd had walked into the coffee shop carrying a broom, and pg's mom asked her where she was flying 🤣

3. we caught a bus home, getting off early and paying the hardware store a visit. we picked up a shower curtain. then we stopped by a nature store, and mr smear found a bag of panda's dubai-style vegan chocolate. which i've been wanting to try for a while. i also needed something to calm the garlic-ness.

it was great. i wouldn't pay huge sums of money for it, but it was great.

4. mr smear joined his last two online classes until the end of the pesach break, i tried to work. "tried to work" is the theme of the day, because i - was - a - wreck. i was tired, unmotivated, and everything was a struggle.

also, physically uncomfortable. and i snacked constantly.

i did finish reading ghost in the shell during a lunch break. it's fascinating. it's very clever. it's got 80's israel and mossad references that are as amusing as they are darkly disquieting.

i made mr smear outline a map of israel and hunt down major cities. he did a disappointingly half-assed job of it.

5. after mr smear completed his chores - he's been helping gd a lot lately - we took out the recycling and took a short walk to see if we could find a bath mat. correction - we took a short skip. i introduced mr smear to sheng wang's bit about skipping a while back and he's taken it to heart. also, it's hard not to smile as i let him drag me into it, because otherwise he gets too far ahead of me >D

we first discovered that gd had somehow missed an entire row of frozen vegan dumplings at the store. then we went to a supermarket and found the garbage bags gd and i like (this is how we know we're getting older). mr smear and i tired and failed to find the watermelon ice-creams we love so much, even at a weird new commercial ice-cream store. i mean, an entire store devotes to the ice creams that are sold at various kiosks.

finally, we went in to a container store. i didn't have much in the way of expectations, but we found a nice bath mat!

6. we came back home just in time for dinner. we watched strip search's fifth elimination, and then mr smear decided that we should try having the dubai-style chocolate with marshmallow. i thought that sounded ridiculous, but i decided to give it a try anyway. i didn't want to overpower the chocolate, so i took a bite of chocolate and then nibbled the marshmallow until the proportions were right.

a short while later i came back to reality. i'm glad i gave it a chance.

7. i used the "new" shower first. i preferred the overall experience - it's more comfortable than the bath in the awkwardly triangular master bathroom - but the water pressure's not as good. then mr smear got in the shower.

just before he was done, i checked in on him and found a large puddle of water outside the shower. immediately panicking, i checked the sides and i checked above, and i couldn't see the source of all the water! and then it hit me - literally - the water was spraying straight through the polyester shower curtain.

gd called it - we now know precisely how the bottom of the wooden doorway rotted.

8. after gd and i had a chat with my mom* - lots of drama surrounding my sister and nephew and my niece - gd and i had a chat about gd's friend, who's life-long battle with reality has left him suicidal. gd's really upset, and i explained to her that she's not doing him any favors by pretending that she's okay with what he's doing or planning on doing.

* i'd called her earlier, and my godmother was with her. i was waving to my mom, and then suddenly she was in the frame, and i think we were both equally uncomfortable. thank god gd wasn't with me.

it's not early by any stretch of the imagination, but i'm just finishing up a cup of tea and then going to bed, with a feeling like it's early.

these are strange days. the politics of this war and the noises from all sides of the media are distracting, confusing, and messy. we're doing really well, considering, and we're doing much better than a lot of people here, but my gods these days are taking a psychological toll in a middle different ways.

rough edges

 rough night. still better than with the previous beds, but having mr smear in the bed with us is just uncomfortable enough to make the sleep... not good. there were only two or three attacks last night, but there's no way to know whether it's worth sending him back to his bed or not because we can't tell when the next attack is coming.

and what sleep i did get was filled with disturbing dreams. i can't describe them better than "commando prostitute". and from that i woke up to a message asking for donations for two families from mr smear's school who live near it, and lost their homes in one of the attacks during the first first week of the war.

i haven't sipped my coffee yet, but i just spent way too long moving my mouse around, patiently and sadly, waiting for my computer to wake up - but it wasn't plugged in yet.

in addition to everything else, mr smear and i had to get up early this morning because i'm taking him for the allergy test. i had the presence of mind to ask gd if he'd had any antihistamines these past few days, even if i hadn't had the presence of mind to set reminders for him not to take any.

he had one yesterday.

so now we're going to the hospital to meet with the doctor anyway, but we can't do any tests.

...

at least yesterday evening went well. we had a good mma / taekwondo session, and we both felt sufficiently exercised by the end of it. we enjoyed another episode of strip search, and when mr smear "went to bed" (reading) gd and i shared a local beer (a bit too blonde for my tastes, but not bad flavor) and i watched a really comedy set that i've seen before (it's kellen erksine, it must have been republished), and then went straight to bed.

discomfort zones

 yesterday morning started off bitter, then got a little better (gd and mr smear had had a talk about being kinder to me). mr smear telling me i needed to stop clinging to bad feelings stung a little, but he wasn't wrong.

over breakfast, i read the veldt to him, which was an interesting experience. he was firmly on the side of the parents, and railing against the spoiled children, but there was just a moment when i was talking about how it maps to screen time and addiction that he got defensive - then i finished my thought that his entire generation was suffering from this stuff, as well as all the adults, and he was back on board :P

a little after he went to school, i completed the base of the chest of drawers and gd and i left for misrad hapnim. this time it was open, and we got numbers and sat down to wait, but immediately gd started feeling terrible and we soon had to leave and come home.

that was a very frustrating and disappointing experience, and also a complete waste of time.

i had breakfast and went to work, arriving in time for a lengthy discussion with my bulgarian teammates as i described my redesign while one of them diagramed it, and once we were done they were totally on my side - "this is how it should have been made in the first place" 💪

what followed was a few hours jumping between reviewing the results of the previous day's rollout - discovering later that i'd been instructed to look at an intermediate file, which explained the conflicting results - and reviewing large quantities of code (ultimately deferring to the AI review bots because i didn't have bandwidth and we were in a hurry), getting buy-in for the redesign, and then working on the redesign itself.

that last part was mostly - hours - me fighting with java tooling and an AI that helped in some ways, but for the most part insisted on "fixing" the problems by either breaking things, or injecting obvious security risks into the code 🤦‍♂️

...

on the one hand, i really want to impress my client and represent my employer in a way that makes them look good. on the other, my client is behaving in a disturbing way and it's uncomfortable for me. i'm working with technology that i want to be learning to work with, and it's an interesting technical challenge, but i'm working with a team whose only member with tribal knowledge is leaving in a week or two and whose other members were nowhere to be found during a week of a massive, highly sensitive rollout in the middle of which they handed everything over to a contractor without context and without any real guidance.

WTAF.

...

by the time i was ready to deliver my part of the solution to my teammate, in the hopes that it wasn't hot garbage because i hadn't had any way to properly test it, i had just enough time to go home, spend twenty minutes with my family, unblock a toilet, and head to the ozen bar for a surprisingly intimate (~50 people) show of yohay sponder, alone because gd was still feeling too ill to come with and mr smear's too young.

the show was a lot of fun. very awkward, both because of the crowd and because he was testing new material, but some of it was hilarious and a fair amount of things that amused me when he said them made me laugh later as i was on my way home.

when he got to the end and invited questions from the audience, things were a bit too silent for a bit too long, so i took a chance and asked a question that i thought he might find funny. i caught him off-guard, and was completely blown away that he didn't get the reference for the question (from his own set), and while he responded with a pretty clever comeback (after asking me why i had to bring the show down) i remain with the hope that he has a revelatory moment later where he suddenly gets it 🤣

i came home just in time to say good night to mr smear (who'd gone to bed much later than he should have), ate a lot (the leftovers from dinner were great, and yo egg on toast was a jolly good idea), and then had a cool shower (that was disappointing), and pretty soon after went to bed.

i guess i slept alright, relatively, at least.

the morning began with a stupidly shit vibe (mr smear "intentionally" doing something wrong instead of just accepting a minor correction, gd pissed off at a person rather than a situation - although she came around eventually), and i completed yesterday's chest of drawers so i can now being on the last one before moving on to the wardrobes. i need new tools, which is another source of frustration.

anyway, i've had some relaxed time, and i'm shocked to discover that i'm down to 76kg, and i have a ton of stuff to do this morning...

adulting

 the interview was a bit weird.

firstly, the office is much closer to home than i expected. it's in ramat gan, not tel aviv, and i think it's the first time i've been up in a tall building in the area because the views were surprisingly spectacular.

secondly,  the moment we sat down for the interview itself my interviewers were shocked that i hadn't brought my laptop with me. i'd actually thought about bringing it with me, funnily enough, but it's such an odd thing to do i'd decided against it.

the interview itself may or may not have gone well. mainly because it took me a while to get to what they were looking for, but the conversation we had along the way was a real conversation, and interesting, so hopefully that satisfied them.

i was pleased to get a phone call from my mentor, after i emailed him a post-interview update, in which he was furious about them expecting me to bring a laptop :P [as we both agreed: it wouldn't have been unreasonable if they'd asked me to, but they didn't]

after i got home, put together a quick diagram and sent it, and spoke to my mentor, mr smear left for the comics library to go and read chainsaw man, which i'd told him i didn't want him reading. i took care of a bunch of random things, and then all of a sudden i got a call from him, on his way home, explaining that he'd put back chainsaw man after deciding it really was inappropriate because the protagonist was behaving badly and was intending to act in a way that's he felt was sexual assault.

so i'm relieved, and gd and i are both very proud of him.

he got home, i passed out on the couch, gd went to the dentist for first aid.

she came back early, having been at the dentists' office at the right time to be able to make an appointment to see one tomorrow morning (as opposed to waiting hours for first aid). so that's cool.

mr smear and i fired up oxygen not included together (i kibbitzed), and we both had a great experience!

in the evening, the three of us hopped on a bus to meet up with the mongoose and his daughter at the mall. we discovered, when we got to the lego store, that he was shopping for a late birthday present for mr smear, who ended up with the very exciting monster book of monsters!

we spent the next half hour or so struggling to find a place to eat, because everywhere we thought of was closed already. eventually, we ended up at lampur, which had excellent options for veganizing dishes, and although it was quite pricey the food was excellent and we all had a great time :)

afterwards, we all took a short stroll through the park, and then we got a ride home, and it was very late by the time mr smear finally got into bed.

now it's very late and i'm deciding whether i should be getting into bed, or playing a bit first...

...

oh! on the way out this evening we did something we haven't felt able / been inclined to do in forever - we booked tickets to a comedy show! in february. on a school night. with no intention of hiring a babysitter.

(to be fair, it's an early show)

nerves

i barely slept last night, not sure why.

i was supposed to supervise mr smear on the bus this morning, but we were so wrapped up in our discussion of how to tell jokes across different mediums (and the importance of panel layout, he's got strong opinions on swamp thing) that we auto-piloted to the light rail instead :P

i spent a couple of hours preparing for my phone screen, after which it turned out to be just a non-tech introduction. but it was positive nonetheless, and immediately afterwards i heard back from the outsourcing form, who's skipping a step with me and has invited me to what might be the final round! i'm legitimately excited about this one, i really hope it all comes together.

after that, my eyes were giving me trouble and i was feeling quite antsy, and i decided to take a walk with my kindle. i found a nice spot in a nearby park and read a little, but after a couple of pages i realized i just didn't have the focus. i walked a little further, found a surprisingly nice little fountain hidden away next to the park that i've never noticed in the three and a half years we've lived right next door, and then returned home just in time for a call from swordschool.

jesus, fuck, he's been going through some difficult shit. we talked for quite a while, so long that i almost entirely missed urchin's visit (we literally had a couple of minutes to chat before she left), and we're going to continue the conversation tomorrow. i'm planning on giving him a boost with one of his ideas and hopefully we'll enjoy some quick success 🤞

mr smear arrived around the time urchin left, and we dove straight in to math homework. well, he did - he didn't really need my help, so i got some of the dishes done.

mr smear has been repeating some mightily inappropriate shit recently, directly from his new friends at school. i'm trying to impress upon him, just in case, that friends don't pressure friends into doing anything they're not comfortable with, and that if he does find himself compromised, he needs to tell us so we can help him out of whatever shit he gets into...

a short while later, we all left for the hospital complex, picked up some meds and then accompanied gd to the pain clinic for her nerve block. after getting her ready for the doctor - which took a while, but much less time than usual - mr smear and i went through his hebrew reading homework. he did really well, but there were a couple of moments that reduced my patience, and then his behavior afterwards (he didn't want to do anything that wasn't on his phone, including not doing anything at all) reduced it further.

getting gd home after the procedure was pretty straightforward, and after a brief chat with my mom i took mr smear with me to go pick up dinner. some of the walk was unpleasant - my patience had pretty much bottomed out by that point - but most of it was us talking. a lot of the talk was about heavy stuff (aging, illness and death), which was fine except for the bit where i said something so heavy it upset him and i immediately regretted it...

we picked up... too much food. like, two of the dishes we could've left behind, and it was quite an expensive meal. having said that, the meals were delicious.

there were some negative feelings around bedtime (the usual), but otherwise it's been a smooth evening.

tomorrow morning i've got an appointment with the israeli employment service...

first rain

 this morning started out alright. i accompanied mr smear to school, taking turns to carefully carry his miniature sukkah. i proceeded to the ministry of the interior offices to pick up a replacement cover for my id card, which went pleasantly smoothly.

i continued on to the electronics store with the intention to purchase a gaming machine, but halfway there realized that they weren't open yet.

i returned home, bumping into the irish ze german for a catch-up, and then accompanied gd to the hospital to make an appointment for her shoulder. we managed to get one for december :/

on the way back, we stopped by the clinic to secure authorization, and i headed up to the nurse's offices for a flu shot. i was surprised to not feel it going in at all!

almost home, the skies opened, and we got caught in a downpour. the first rain of the season was intense.

the afternoon was spent resting, and starting to read peter watts' blindsight (i had to skip the description in gomel's the end of humanism, part 2 because of spoilers), and then...

... we received a photo from mr smear, who on his way out of class found that someone had destroyed his miniature sukkah before his teacher even got to see it 💔

we never even thought to take photos of it before :(

we're trying to console him, and keep reminding him that at least we got to appreciate it, and that he did a great job. but that really sucks.

...

we all went to the dentist together for gd's scan. afterwards, we opened a table at the hummusia, and then enjoyed a pleasant evening walk home. the evening went smoothly.

i've spent the past while re-watching bill hicks' sane man. now... probably going to bed soon.

a good filling in a disturbing sandwich

 i just woke up a short while ago, and i'm sitting here nursing a coffee and a sore lower back. i barely slept last night due to a combination of physical discomfort and insomnia, i was just uncomfortable throughout. and when i did sleep, i had deeply disturbing dreams.

one of those dreams was like an action movie, where we were defending our company from terrorists trying to take over. i don't recall the precise reasoning or sequence of events towards the end, but i used the new sharp knife in the office and decapitated a few people, who then subsequently came back to life and convinced me that i'd lost my mind.

...

i was woken up yesterday morning by a sharp "tic tic tic" sounds coming out of the wall, and i grumpily, foggily posted a video to our neighbor's group. two minutes later, i opened the window and realized that it was the sounds of water dripping from upstairs, so i wrote in the group that it was dripping from above.

hours later, our upstairs neighbor sent me message saying there's nobody else it could have been, and that i could have just messaged him privately. i only saw that message hours after that, so i scrambled to assure him that i hadn't known where it was from at the time and hadn't intended to call him out passive aggressively, and i've been carrying that shit in my chest ever since.

...

aside from "the usual" random shit over the course of the day: i read some more nightwood (a few pages, and then passed out on the couch), gd beat me at battleship in spite of the fact that she dropped all her pegs (it was the third time she accidentally bumped the game 🤣), mr smear and i walked to the park and played frisbee for a while*, and we decided that mr smear's old enough and watched ace ventura last night. of course he's talking out of his ass now :P

* after yesterday's incident, i discussed with him that i think that a big part of a dad's job is to force a child through all the necessary small traumas in life so that they can grow up strong enough to handle the big traumas. and get over themselves and get good at things that don't come naturally to them.

i went to bed early, after taking a short look at some ideas for the interview i'm doing today.

...

i'm tired. like, burnout tired. i'm sore. i'm a little bit resentful that i'm not on vacation today.

the perfect beach day

yesterday:

we all went off to dizengoff, which was a lot less festive than anticipated. having said that, there was plenty festive outside, and it was a gorgeous day. we took care of a couple of minor things, including picking up a bunch of hebrew comic books, and then took a slow meander up to dizengoff square, where we stopped for a very nice lunch.

we all enjoyed the food, and we all had a good experience.

then we caught a bus home and had a pretty relaxing afternoon.

in the evening i took mr smear to the synagogue, he came without a fuss and in addition to some generally pleasant talks along the way, we had a pretty serious conversation about the weekly portion (which includes the story of the golden calf), why we're supposed to pray so often (specifically, the shema), and how those two both ultimately have the same moral: no matter how smart we may think we are, that we *get* the lessons from the torah, we're descended from the same morons who *forgot* about god after witnessing his miracles directly, after hearing his voice directly, and we need to keep playing our history on repeat so that we don't forget it and lose our way.

today:

i slept horribly last night. i hadn't taken my new nightly pill (alpha lipoic acid) and my hips hurt constantly, so i was in a lot of discomfort and i barely got any rest.

i started the day a bit antisocially trying to catch up with private instagram messages - the result of ignoring them for most of the week - and then i put down for satisfactory which is on sale right now and sat with mr smear while he got into it. so far, pretty damned awesome.

without a fight - remarkably - we began moving out for our ride to the beach around 10.30am as planned. it did take us about 45 minutes to actually start riding, but there were no bad feelings and it was turning out to be another beautiful day.

we enjoyed a good ride to the beach, which was easier now that half of arlozorov is open again and with decent bike lanes, found a good shady spot, completed the sunscreen ritual and headed into the water. the side of the beach we were sitting on was too rocky and cold, so we went to the other side which was easier on the feet but absolutely freezing.

we had fun in the water for a little while, then returned to our spot where mr smear insisted on me burying him a couple of times (it's his favorite thing), and after a lot of time trying to convince him to come into the shade i got to lie down for a bit. after we had agreed that it was a good time to go and find food (and coffee for me), it took about an hour to get him into the water to rinse off some of the sand, then out of the water, then through the showers, and eventually we were ready to ride again.

we tried a very busy coffee shop near the corner of dizengoff and ben gurion, but the service was shit and the menu vegan-unfriendly so we pushed on to eazy cafe, for our favorite salad and a generally good vibe.

we eventually got home quite late, took turns showering and then chilled the remainder of the afternoon away. the evening was pleasant, dinner was good, and after getting mr smear into bed gd and i watched a lot of andrew schultz - life, which is mostly just amusing but does has some really good stuff in it. we're a bit disappointed that monk's been taken off...

...

i'm on a water-only fast now for blood tests in the morning. i hope i sleep alright.

pool day

 it was a regular saturday morning, we played games and i stop-started doing something in preparation for a project (i created a facebook group), and then nystire got in touch and invited us to join them at the beach.

we were planning on taking the bike out anyway, so why not combine the two?

the bike ride to the beach began with the discovery that the back tire has a puncture. i'm really glad we figured that out before we left the building. very soon, mr smear decided he didn't want to ride, and started walking his bike instead.

it took forever to get to a kiosk, where i bribed him to get back on the bike with an ice lollie. but he had to finish the ice lollie first. omg.

the rest of the way to the beach was pretty good - just a lot of little stops along the way - but by the time we arrived nystire and co had just left.

it was a beautiful day, so i suggested we go to the beach anyway, but he wasn't interested. he was, however, interested in getting chips. we went to mike's place, the first time i've been there since just before my 31st birthday.

the vegan burger was good, the bucket of chips was satisfactory and they were kind enough to provide a serving of vinegar, and we enjoyed the meal together. the best part of the visit, though, was him showing an interest in the pool table!

today i taught my son to play pool, and he enjoyed himself and started to get the hang of it by the end. he actually decided that he was happier getting to clear the table after losing than he would have been winning >D

i made a big mistake on the way home by putting my rollerblades back on, because he walked almost the entire distance. and then, in addition to the puncture, the chain came off when we got to dizengoff circle. twice. i treated myself to a coffee after getting most of the grease off my hands, and then we continued the excruciatingly long not-ride home.

i showered immediately, synced with my mom, and then we tried to watch the original mary poppins movie (i'd read an interesting analysis of it in the morning, and i was kinda enjoying it by the time my family decided to nix it and move on). we watched a breakdown of virtual insanity, and then we all laughed hysterically at james acaster not lying. and then we gave the amazing digital circus a try.

it's pretty good.

i was inspired to play portal, and made some good progress before beginning to wonder if i was going to get motion sickness in spite of wearing my glasses to play. which i did because i'm wondering if it helps, if perhaps a part of the motion sickness isn't to do with my eyes operating at completely different distances.

dinner, gd getting mr smear showered and toothbrushed, and now i'm going to say goodnight.

back back

 my lower back and bum are really sore today, i'm having both muscular and nerve trouble and it's distracting. of course, it's friday morning and we're about to have a busy day doing groceries and shopping for a bike helmet (amongst other things)...

wednesday:

who is america rewatch: the first episode is just ridiculous.

a work day full of distractions, but successfully clearing the second stage by the end of it.

yesterday:

who is america rewatch: gd and i watched the second episode, it's nuts. 

yesterday was a struggle, but i managed to complete my task about two minutes before picking up mr smear from his therapy session. it was complicated. yesterday was the kind of day that made me appreciate home offices, it was tough working with the ambient noises and interruptions at home and it was tough working from mr smear's gym...

we had an incident with mr smear last night before bedtime, and that sucked. at least he woke up in good spirits, though, and we're going to fine-tune our approach accordingly...

...

i'm feeling inspired by the space shooter games to build my own, one that isn't all about milking money out of the users. i'm sad that unity is being ridiculous about their pricing model changes, but apparently they're listening.

the fix

 i took a puff on thursday night, and it helped. i took another puff last night, and it helped. i'm going to take another puff tonight, and hopefully my sleep clock will stabilize. i'm actually surprised by how little affected i was - aside from the sleeping itself - i didn't feel messed up going to sleep, nor waking up. this is good.

...

right now, my fingers and hands are sore. i'm really excited to report that i finally got on the climbing wall with mr smear this evening, and not only was it a great experience climbing together but i did way better than i thought i would after more than eight years. i had no trouble getting to the top, nor climbing a lot, and aside from the first attempt i made a point of only doing routes.

...

this post interrupted by yet another protest against our new neighbor. i complained about last night's one in the neighborhood facebook group and learned that i'm not alone in not appreciating their shenanigans. i'm actually surprised that mr smear hasn't woken up yet, but some of our neighbors haven't been so lucky :(

...

friday morning went much better than the previous week. gd and i did a quick grocery shopping as soon as mr smear was in school, then watched randy feltface - smug druggles (it's brilliant). then i picked up mr smear, brought him home, dragged him to the istore* and then rushed through to his therapist, picking up a delicious falafel along the way (he was very happy about that).

* where i learned that i cannot trade in or even submit for recycling our old ipad and my "old" macbook that i picked up from sailor

while he had his session i sat outside the coffee shop and worked on an article while three different places (including the coffee shop) competed for the loudest, most annoying music. it was lovely.

yesterday afternoon / evening was pretty chill, as was this morning. we started off the day with home alone, which was actually better and more interesting than i remembered. then, after a significant downtime, mr smear convinced gd to play goodcritters with us, and while the start was a bit rough we all ended up having a great time!

i agreed to give mr smear another chance and we watched some more of the live action one piece. it's just gorgeous!

mr smear and i had an unpleasant incident on the way to the wall this evening, but ultimately we got things figured out and i feel like i got through to him. the fact that we managed to have a great time after that feels like significant progress on both our parts.

the gauntlet

 this whole interviewing thing feels just a bit ridiculous at this point. i received an email today informing me that the people i spoke to on thursday morning aren't interested - to be fair, i wasn't interested either. it was a weird conversation. the other company i thought i was progressing with still hasn't gotten back to me. the interview this evening seemed to go well - kind of? and it's not the last. that's the... fourth one, so far. holy shit.

apparently mr smear had another good day at school today, i'm nervously hopeful this is a new trend. at least he seems to like the teacher...

today's work was a huge last-push effort, i hit a few snags and ended up so personally invested that it was only around 11.30pm when i finally pushed what i believe is ready to go. intellectually, i know that i need to move on; but for the first time since i signed on i'm actually enjoying what i'm doing.

i watched dan cummins: trying to get better while i worked (well, while waiting for tests to run) - refreshingly intelligent and funny!

and then i dived in to a long session of crying suns. i'm really enjoying it. i love the mechanics and i love the story so far (i don't actually know how far i am right now, somewhere between the middle and the end of chapter 2).

good sabbath

 today got off to a rough start - i'd gone to bed around 2am, and four hours later i was paged for some nonsense. fortunately, it was similar nonsense to tuesday night's incident, so i knew where to look. by the time i was on the case the problem had already resolved itself, i'm just a bit irritated that things were broken for about an hour before the alarms went off :/

anyway, we all had a nice, slow morning. i completed steamworld heist for the first time, and i have to say that i've really enjoyed it from beginning to end. the final boss kicked my ass the first time, but by the second i had a simple strategy that held up the entire way through.

a little later we all settled in to watch short circuit. i fell asleep for a good chunk of it, but what a surprisingly fun, entertaining and wholesome film! of particular interest is just how similar wall-e is to no. 5...

we then followed that with a full viewing of funny people; i don't know how much was staged or how to identify what was staged, but the upside-down living room is for sure one of the greatest prank ideas ever conceived!

afterwards, it was a bit of a chore to get mr smear to come outside, but we went to the climbing wall, had a great session, came home for him to shower, then walked to our local vegan coffee shop for dinner. mr smear and i had interesting conversations the whole way, bumped into his best friend's mother and sister along the way, and an old friend of mine from rollerblading when we ate.

it really was a good day. i'm tired, and this weekend was very different from how i thought it would go, but i'm feeling really good about it and i think i'm just about ready to go to bed.

hyperviper is down

 "the faster the harder the louder the darker the better"

this time it *is* too dark, hyperviper, RIP. your stories will live on as legends (and, often, warnings to our children) and while i believe they're going to let you in upstairs, there're going to be some angels hiding behind the furniture when they do.

...

i haven't heard from hyperviper in a few months, the last real conversation i had with him was after a close friend of his passed away young. i'm still stunned by his passing this morning.

...

i don't understand how it's been an entire week with no posting, when it's been a really crazy week. oh, wait - i do have a suspicion about why i haven't posted. this week's story started on sunday morning. i dropped mr smear off at school, and then accompanied gd to the ER. well, to a weird barrier about 50 feet from the ER entrance. the hospital's waiting list for doing an allergy "challenge" is half a year and they won't do one for cannabis, so we followed our doc's unofficial instructions and administered it ourselves.

gd took a puff. i opened my laptop, trying to be productive. a couple of minutes passed, gd wasn't feeling anything and wanted to take another puff. i suggested she wait a few more minutes.

now, i don't know how long she actually waited, but she took another puff and then suddenly realized that she needed to sit down on a bench. we made it about five steps before she fell over (fortunately i managed to catch her). we tried again, didn't get very far. then a kind english-speaking religious man darted over to help us, and helped me get her onto the bench.

i tried to get her to lie down. at this point her eyes rolled in the back of her head, and her entire body was locked like when someone gets knocked out brutally in a fight. the kind man kept repeating that we needed an ambulance. then he suggested using a taxi. there was a taxi just pulling out of the bus stop we were at, and i flagged him down. we managed to get gd into the cab and the cab driver drove us through the barrier and dropped us off at the ER.

i've never had to find a wheelchair and wheel my wife around before, i had to work to prevent her from falling out of it.

triage. i knew i had to tell them the truth from the get-go. it was awkward, though.

blood tests. it's hard taking blood from someone who can't control their own body.

an ER ward bed.

gd was shaking, she could barely control her limbs. we (mostly i) told and retold the details to the various doctors and nurses in turns. they did an electrocardiogram.

gd started having a panic attack. while they went looking for an ativan, she managed to breathe herself out of it.

slowly, she began to feel better. slowly, we began to realize that it was entirely possible that we had rushed her to the ER because she was just really... REALLY stoned.

there was no anaphylaxis. there was no stroke or paralysis. gd was just fine, and much more sensitive to medical-grade cannabis than we could have expected.

...

it took forever to get out of there. we cabbed back home and i spent most of the day working where i could keep an eye on gd, checking every now and again that she was still breathing.

so... it's school holidays. most of this week, gd's been at home. i worked from home the first couple of days, from the office the rest. gd's been taking the occasional puff with the windows open, which is fine, but that last-one-before-bed puff after mr smear's been put to bed and it's too cold to leave the windows open? most nights this week i've gone to bed early feeling a bit stoned.

and i've been sleeping much better than i have in ages.

...

on sunday night, netanyahu fired gallant and our entire country erupted. on monday, he pulled back and postponed the judicial reform until after the passover holidays. so the story's not over, but everything feels calmer now and it's a huge relief. one sad thing in particular on monday morning sparked optimism, and that was the crestfallen face of one of my coworkers who's been a staunch bibi supporter until the firing. if he can see the cracks in bibi's facade, there's hope for our country yet.

to all the protestors: i'm very grateful to be proven wrong. even if it's only temporary, it's a real relief that the judicial reform has been put on hold for pesach.

it's just as big a relief that netanyahu has played his cards so brazenly that even his supporters are beginning to see through the cracks that he's willing to burn everything and everyone in pursuit of power and his will to stay out of prison.

bibi's not interested in the well-being of our nation or our country. he never has been.

i find it intriguing that he's been forced to capitulate to ben gvir, who's very quickly demonstrated both how power-hungry he is and how politically naive he is.

i just want to take this opportunity to say that this is precisely what's wrong with coalition governments. a coalition government is a group of political parties that, individually, did not get enough votes to rule, but that are now in a position to rule us anyway and can get away with pretty much whatever they want.

that's not very democratic. and it doesn't matter if it's a right-wing coalition or a left-wing one.

...

on sunday night we had the final round of my script. it was complicated, but ultimately successful.

on monday evening i had the weekly meeting with my boss. it began with an unpleasant surprise - he had accidentally tagged our CTO when asking if i was ready for the meeting, and i was suddenly sure that i was about to be let go... i had mentioned that i wanted to take a long weekend in lieu of the two fridays that i'd had to give up, and things got awkward. maybe it was just me. i hope it was just me. either way, there's no compensation for time during a crisis in a startup, and i guess i wasn't really expecting there to be. and he made a good point that nobody's watching the clock anyway. and that i'm just about to mark a full year with the company, at which point my options will vest, and then it'll be "my" company too. i explained (truthfully) that i wanted the company to succeed regardless. i remembered how grateful i am to have a job that i (mostly) enjoy, with people that i like. it was good motivation.

the rest of the week was a bit weird. i guess it's not even over yet. we've had a couple of surprising new issues with our ci/cd pipelines (which i'm responsible for), and we've been having trouble with costs. every time i fix one broken thing i discovered another, and it's been a long week trying to catch each falling domino before it hits another one...

...

mr smear has been generally cool and calm this week. we had an interesting breakthrough yesterday, as i waited with him outside the school for the gates to open. he opened up to me about a dynamic between him and a couple of the kids in his class that's really toxic, and he appears to have actually taken my advice. a part of the advice was "letting us in" and telling me and gd about what happens at school so that we can help him when he's struggling, and when i got home from the office in the evening he did just that. it looks like my advice helped him get out of a situation with the slow kid who harasses him a lot, and i'm hoping that this week's lesson will stick!

...

last night i watched bert kreischer: razzle dazzle, and it was hilarious. i convinced gd to watch it this morning, and she enjoyed it too. last night we watched most of hey big boy, and it's great in spite of my being familiar with some of the material.

i ditched work early this afternoon to grab a coffee with spot and his wife and "smaller" child. the kid's two and a half and bigger than an average four year old! it was a fun coffee, and getting a ride home was an amusing little adventure.

we're slowly making our way through season 5 of adventure time. mr smear is loving the bfg. we gave up on danny the champion of the world because as brilliant as i remember the book being, both mr smear and myself are uncomfortable with the heroics involving killing animals even if that's not really the point of the story... this week mr smear showed me a little booklet that he made, more of a pamphlet trying to convince others to not eat animals. it's evident that he's trying to be encouraging rather than forceful, which is heartwarming.

purim sameach!

yesterday (monday) began with a scare, during sunday's housecleaning labor it appears that i managed to tweak one or two things in my back and i spent the morning on the verge of a massive spasm. fortunately i managed to get mr smear to school without incident and gd smeared deep heat (bengay) and hammered me until everything softened up a bit. it continued to threaten for the rest of the day, but the threats were comparatively mild.

it was a busy workday. i enjoyed great successes with some sadness sandwiched in between, but sadly was unable to push my changes before the end of the day as one of my coworkers broke something important. i took today off for purim and i'm hoping they didn't push anything too interesting on my day off...

today was great! it started with a rough wakeup, but quickly smoothed out. gd assisted me with the remaining mold areas and we're pretty much complete, there are difficult-to-reach parts of the apartment (of our windows in particular) that look like nobody's cleaned them in eighteen years...

a cousin from england is here for a week and we bussed through to have brunch with her. we had a really nice time (and i ate far too much), it was all gravy until mr smear decided he was bored... no matter. we went past dizengoff center and stopped at the grocery store, we would have picked up a vegan burger for mr smear at the burger king but there was something wrong with their order systems.

once home, mr smear continued playing minecraft education edition while gd and i watched chris rock's new netflix special, which isn't very funny but is 100% on point and well worth watching.

afterwards, i took mr smear for a walk to and around the museum grounds. on the way we had a "tickle fight", something which had become a point of contention a long time ago (he would consistently use it at the worst possible times as an attention-grabbing device), and we've had enough of a break that i was finally able to relax my guard and we both enjoyed ourselves. we then had a special treat dinner on the way home - i picked up a laffa with salads at one shop and a packet of falafel balls at another, and we stuffed the falafel into the laffa for him while i ate a regular falafel pita. we got home in time to watch an episode of adventure time, and i ended up having time to read to him before heading out to join TAR purim.

it's been a decade...

the evening was fun, and was more of a reunion than anything else! i managed the route in my finn the human onesie with the hood over my eyes (some people managed it in outrageously complex costumes, so not much of an achievement), ending the evening with incredible vegan ice-cream from leggenda.

i've stretched, showered, and posted this, now to find out if i'm going to be able to sleep or not considering i needed a late coffee just to be able to get my blades on in the first place :P

i'm REALLY glad that i took today off. today was an awesome day.

$25 to see the end of louis ck

 i watched louis ck | back to the garden last night.

a few months ago, we purchased his new special, sorry, along with all his other specials for $25. it was brilliant. it was louis ck doing what he does best, and doing so while acknowledging his behavior and (pretty much) apologizing for it.

let me very clear: what he did was awful, and i was (and am) disappointed in him as a human being.

at the same time, he didn't manage - in my entirely subjective opinion - to cross the boundary where i could no longer separate the art from the artist*. his whole schtick is that he's always been a bit of a piece of shit, and his comedy has always been absolutely brilliant. although, now that i think about it, his 2017 special didn't really strike my funny bone, so let's say that his comedy has mostly always been brilliant.

* only two artists have managed to cross that boundary in my eyes: ian watkins, the voice behind shinobi vs dragon ninja which i can no longer listen to without being filled with disgust, and marilyn manson, who turned from hero to zero and took all of his music with him a few years back when it turned out his personal corruption matches what he's been singing about all along.

anyway, aside from the 2017 special i was able to enjoy it even while he himself made me uncomfortable, and his older work is mostly fantastic.

back to louis ck | back to the garden.

the first disappointment: i could skip past the jazz, but not the two decidedly uncharismatic, unfunny comedians he wheeled out to open for him. this was just like bill burr presents: friends who kill: did bill burr actually perform? i couldn't make it through the opening acts. where did they find these people? why do these events smell like great artists selling out? wtf is going on?!

but this time, i pushed through, and i bore witness to each and every excruciating minute of louis ck's performance. it was... it was louis ck, and it was louis ck doing louis ck-style bits. but he just didn't have any funny. he didn't have that light shining out of his eyes. his jokes... his jokes weren't funny. they weren't even interesting. there were three minor chuckles in the entire set, and then an almost-clever bible reading bit, and then nothing less than a resounding disappointment.

the staycation: over

i'm starting this post at 2.15am on tuesday morning. i've spent more than two hours lying in bed, the first hour or so reading and the last stretch just trying uncomfortably to sleep.

friday:

we went to the tomorrow exhibit at the ramat gan museum. the AI-assisted videos were mostly amazing, but we could have experienced that at home on youtube. the female pop icon NFT thing (women ape yacht club?) was dramatically unimpressive and the icons themselves so remarkably uninteresting that we rolled on by, the VR experience was interesting for all of two minutes (the games we've played on the mongoose's setup were incredible, this seemed like an attempt to suck the joy out of the technology), and the "classics" stuff was hebrew-only; one section was boring, the other was cool for gd and me but unnerving for mr smear.

i hard napped when we got home, then dragged myself out of bed to walk with mr smear to the beach to join cm and his family. we had a really great time!

overall, it was an excellent day.

saturday:

we started walking to the port to meet up with ric and his family, but a quarter of the way there gd realized she was in too much pain so i walked back to pick up a car and we drove there instead.

driving in tel aviv? not recommended.

we enjoyed our outing with them, their little one's super cute. mr smear was mostly cool until just before we left, and we ended up with a bad vibe on the way home.

we stopped at home for a short while, then i took mr smear to ra'anana to meet up with dod* and his family. mr smear wasn't being particularly social (we have to teach him that the concept of "strangers" in israel works a little differently), but he thoroughly enjoyed the ninja obstacle course.

* divan orange dude. i've just learned that le divan orange closed down a few years ago and that makes me a bit sad

we left just after a gangly kid wearing glasses tried to run up the side of the ramp mr smear had been using, and i looked on in horror as he slipped and smashed his glasses into his eye socket. dod and his wife helped tend to him while his grandparents made phone calls, the cut looked awful and i hope his eye's still functioning.

sunday:

sunday was accompany gd to the pain clinic day. it was a long day of doctors and bureaucrats. some of it felt constructive and promising. between clinic visits she got her nose piercing switching out and mr smear and i had a huge hummus breakfast at mashawsha. it was expensive but delicious.

monday:

back to work! aside from a tedious day of completing reports (two down, one to go) interspersed with multiple distractions, it was a good day and i must admit that it feels good to feel welcomed and appreciated.

gd had a rough day (feeling nauseous), but i was pleased to hear that mr smear had a very successful playdate.

...

the other day we watched a compilation of child comedians on the got talent shows, and mr smear is trying very hard to be funny, with results that are sometimes hilarious but usually for the wrong reasons...

...

i've been re-reading neuromancer for the last while, there's soooo much i'd forgotten and it's really, really amazing in spite of the anachronisms. during the staycation i also started reading the elements of eloquence, and it's very enjoyable!

...

of course, i got side-tracked writing this. i wonder if i'll be able to get to sleep soon.

monday already

thursday/friday:

long days at the "office" (my mom's), although not all the hours were paid for. at least one of them was spent brainstorming about a really exciting new ARG concept with swordschool, another was spent walking with sailor, who informed me of the awful things going on in ethiopia on the day i booked our tickets through addis ababa and then inspired me with an amazing use-case for the phone software i've been using/building over the past few years.

one thing about the paid gig, though - i seem to be the new expert for two critical elements of our solution, and my manager seems happy with this. some of the last week was frustrating, but a lot of the work was pretty gratifying. the last thing i was working on was so intriguing that i had to make a conscious effort to not work on it over the weekend.

saturday:

after the morning service i was absolutely exhausted, and passed in and out of consciousness on a number of occasions while playing little big planet 3 or watching avatar: the last airbender (the original anime, we didn't enjoy the movie) with mr smear.

i found the right screwdriver to fix my rollerblades without having to go shopping. win!

we expected loadshedding, and i used it as an excuse to get mr smear outside for a walk without a fight.

i watched pete davidson: alive from new york and was surprised by how much i enjoyed it in spite of his delivery... i mean, eventually he just won me over, delivery included.

"yesterday":

i started my day early by documenting all the things that need doing before and when we leave. it's helped a bit with my overall anxiety. 

we were going to take mr smear to a friend of his' birthday party, but then realized that at least one of the group of bullies from the previous two years was going to be there and we agreed to just drop off a gift some other time.

we booked tickets, picked up my mom and went through to hout bay to do a seal island cruise. it turned out to be a great day for it, except that mr smear and i felt... a bit green... as the waves were really choppy. at least we all enjoyed the first half of the trip, and mr smear was really excited to see all the seals ^_^

we had a nice lunch at a market in hout bay, it was a bit of a relief to find a good vegan option and i was surprised by how much i ate (or the fact that i ate at all, considering).

i was so tired i actually misjudged the length of my car while parking and bashed into a pole. i'm VERY grateful that there doesn't appear to be any damage.

a bunch of us saw my sister off at the airport this afternoon, she's off to london to live with her daughter and i really hope she finds a new employer once she's there (her current employer's a real bastard).

shower/bedtime went very well.

i've just managed to deploy an updated version of my "side-project" web portal: hours spent upgrading one of the components because heaven forbid the react peeps would release a new version without significant breaking changes... anyway, the final version i deployed is working really nicely so i feel it was time well spent.

now:

it's almost 00:30. i'm going to bed.

borat subsequent moviefilm

no way. but... i mean, of course. then again, no way.

sbc is not the hero anyone wants, but he's definitely the hero they need. and i'm just as impressed by maria bakalova who deserves at least as much credit!