sleep journal entry

 my nose was stuffed by the time i climbed into bed, and i had difficulty getting enough oxygen the entire night. i struggled to get out of bed and i feel as if i slept well, and didn't sleep at all, at the same time.

patience is a virtue signal

"patience my ass, i'm gonna kill somebody" - the vulture

 i must be getting better, because it's almost 1am and i'm only now getting ready to go to bed. one of my nostrils is a noticeably blocked, but otherwise i'm doing okay. for now...

the next meeting was run by the guy responsible for my current project, but related to an aspect of my previous project, which is owned by a team that doesn't really know anything about it. he mumbles, and even if he didn't mumble it would still be difficult to understand him - not the greatest communicator. and the team lead who didn't know why she was in the meeting doesn't have the best english, so i was amused when i saw that she'd sent me a message thanking me for summarizing - i explained that it wasn't for her, i really did need to verify that i'd understood what we were talking about for myself :P

mr smear came home, and he was absolutely taken with the bean bags; as gd pointed out, he's all cat.

i was supposed to leave the apartment at that point, but then learned that i had a meeting with my employer team. which turned out to be an hour long presentation, or sales pitch, for software i really don't care about. i was so bored by the halfway mark... it was basically an unpleasant minesweeper session for me.

i took a walk through to the courier pick-up point, which was quite a long walk, but it felt good to be out in the sun (even on such a suddenly hot day) with my brain switched off. then i caught a bus home, and between the bus and our apartment took a quick detour to hunt down gluten-free pastas for gd.

the good news is, i found some - and the spaghetti which we tried tonight was surprisingly decent! - but by the time i got to the self checkout i was already sans patience from all the tourists and leisure class people in the store and i had a really hard time keeping my cool while waiting for two women moving in slow motion and with entirely suboptimal bagging strategies.

i came home, oversaw some of mr smear's progress (he did well this afternoon) and got back to work. once done, mr smear called me over to demonstrate that he'd solved the multiplication level in human resource machine all by himself, and he was rightly proud of himself ^_^

i received a very strange email this evening, apparently from an investment research company who are offering to pay me to answer questions about my previous employer, answers which, if honest, would explicitly violate my termination agreement and i'd owe them my severance pay back. i wonder if this is a case of entrapment?

dinner and some more of dead poets society was nice, although by the time we got to dinner my patience had been worn down to nothing; i did lose my cool with my mother while trying to help her, and as much as it was partially her fault i was upset my reaction certainly wasn't appropriately measured. mr smear also did a little patience testing, but for the most part he continued behaving well.

after dinner i did a little more work on my telephony side project - i'm rather pleased with the results - and after watching a few videos i decided to allow myself some spire slaying. i've just completed my first run with the defect, so that's all the characters done (no ascensions yet), and some of the relics and cards i picked up were completely insane!

...

some good news, at least - it looks like gd's toe might be starting to heal 🤞

mid-day update

 i'm sitting here on the carpet in my little office, back against one of the nice new beanbags that finally (!) arrived this morning, in a state that's a solid mix of coronavirus light-headed dizziness and post-meeting euphoric relief.

our meeting went so much better than i could have anticipated. after i presented my findings, the boss made it clear that he believes the new data to be more accurate than the old data, and that he's happy to overrule the product team's requirements. this means that the bulk of the work i've been wrestling with simply falls away, and what's left is a very small effort for bonus points, and pulling the trigger. the only new thing that came up that needs doing happens to be something i've already built for as part of my investigations, so all-round this has been a massive windfall, a huge stroke of luck for me.

...

gd's really traumatized. she made an effort to wash her toe again this morning, and i just inspected it while she's resting and it seems to me to be looking less angry.

i just chatted with my mom, who i was delighted to discover has actually taken the day off. i hope she's able to have a good rest and recover.

...

right, now for a coffee and another meeting, and then i think i'm going to go for a walk to pick up some replacement watch straps that were just delivered to a courier pick-up point.

sleep journal entry + nerves

most of the night my nose and throat were calm, but i felt like i wasn't getting enough oxygen. i woke up with lower back / hip discomfort in the middle of the night and i had to stretch hard before i could get back to sleep.

gd's in pain and scared, her toe doesn't really look much better than before. it's deeply worrying.

...

i've spent the past hour or so adding functionality to my telephony side-project. i guess i'm distracting myself because i'm nervous about the upcoming meeting i have, in which i present a whole lot of information that i neither fully understand nor care about. i mean, it's not fair to say i don't fully understand it, but from what i've read it's two ways of looking at similar data that give different results, and my take-away is that the whole marketing industry is mostly based on a load of horseshit and hand-waving.

...

in the middle of the night i had a thought: metacognition is the ability or skill that protects someone from being caught up in a cult or modernist ideology

a moment of semi-clarity

 today was psychologically tougher than it was physically. i'm fucking done.

trying to be supportive of gd while protecting her from her own terror almost got me sent to sleep on the couch instead of her (she has to sleep on the couch so she's less likely to injure her toe while she's unconscious).

trying to get mr smear into bed on time was simply impossible; i'm still trying to figure out where the hour and a half went between finishing dinner and saying good night to my mom and actually saying good night to him and having to explain the word c*nt and subsequently learning that he heard it in a video gd showed him 🤦‍♂️

i hope i can sleep tonight. i pray i don't get sicker. as i type this i'm developing a bit of a headache...

...

i finally got the network issues sorted out, hopefully for more than a while (one of our neighbors must have triggered a channel conflict). also, the above facepalm emoji was done with a keyboard shortcut, i finally figured out how to get karabiner to map a "globe" key from my windows keyboard!

sleep journal entry

i spent most of the night coughing and barely able to breathe. i did get a couple of hours' sleep before waking up.

gd's unwrapped her nail and is soaking it, the pad seems to have fused to the wound, though, and isn't coming off :(

i'm now trying to rush mr smear out the door after he did another negative test. and then i have to head to the clinic to get a doctor's permission for my work (first time in my civilian life), and inform my client that i'm sick, and that i was sick yesterday.

and i already sent a message to our old neighbor that we ran into yesterday to inform her as well :(

of ******* course

 

aaaaand it's covid.

it's difficult to wage war on reality...

 ... because reality always has the home team advantage.

it's been a long day, but not unpleasant - bar the lower back / hip issues that usually plague me at night, which today, after leaving me in peace last night, came back with a vengeance and harried me all afternoon.

i generated a comic this morning that i'm pleased with, and another one this evening that i'm somewhat pleased with.

i arrived at work a minute late for my team's daily, and i regaled them with the tale i'd been planning on telling our manager, with which they could all identify. i very fortunately was able to keep my head down and work hard today, and ask the right questions, and by the time i had my meeting with my manager i not only had real progress to report, but also additional information that i'd luckily stumbled upon that made the required business decisions much clearer.

it's a mess, but it's clearly a mess, and my manager understands why i've been struggled and what our options are. i took full responsibility for "falling in the bin", as we say in hebrew, by being caught out again following documentation and paying attention to what other developers and managers say. the saddest part is that aside from getting through my own poor AI usage, the architecture, the data and the code are all completely misaligned.

i guess if there's one thing to be grateful for - assuming they like me and don't terminate my contract before i do - it's that this is one hell of a training ground for learning to work with AI when the stakes are low and the state of the entire organization's a complete disaster with or without me :P

my mother took our hypochondriac mr smear to the museum today, though he was "too sick"to go to the museum she wanted to go to (but managed to walk a while after they got lost on the way there). he just did a RAT and it came out conclusively negative, he spent a good chunk of his time before bed trying to convince us that the control line showing clearly means he's done for 🤣

my neck's been giving me trouble, i'm hoping my time with the massager makes a positive difference. it certainly feels good, at least.

dinner was great, progress with starship troopers was great, bedtime was particularly great - not just laughing at the colour of magic, but segwaying into a talk about sacrifice, cain and abel, and the value of the old testament (and our mission as a people to carry it into eternity, just like shakespeare's sonnets).

and now, physically and psychologically, i'm about ready for bed. which means another couple of hours of reading, gaming, possibly torturing myself by watching the news for the first time in at least a few days.

artificial unintelligence

 an anxiety has been stirring. i've written about it a fair amount the last few days, and it's crystallizing.

AI is making me dumber. lazier, more than dumber, but a laziness that's rendering it harder and harder to activate my brain.

it's not *just* all the leaning on AI, though. it's also the fact that my life is being constantly railroaded and derailed by all sorts of unexpected, mandatory, urgent side-quests that are nobody's fault, but that put everything on my shoulders.

and then, when i finally manage to get part of my sleep issues sorted out, i get hit with this horrible sinusitis bullshit. so i'm completely exhausted and i don't have the energy to sit and focus and climb out of this hole.

i hope it's not covid again.

...

i read comics, played more slay the spire 2, made at least two attempts to make some progress on AI harnesses, went for a walk with my mom and mr smear, rearranged our bookshelves, and went for a walk with my mom around the soulless neighborhood next door before saying good night to mr smear, posting this, hopping in the shower, and praying for an easier night.

easy

 well, today was definitely a day.  the morning went as planned, although my doctor's appointment was a bit odd. my hand isn't healed, but it was feeling better this morning than it had in at least a week, of course. and i started telling her about my four months of post-covid snottiness, which i almost instantly regretted as it's no longer worth taking meds for. and i feel awkward now about going for a chest x-ray when i've explained to her that my chest is fine, and that i've been doing a fair amount of sport lately.

we then talked about gd's "career evaluation", which social security asked her to do, but which apparently isn't possible for anyone other than a social security representative to arrange.

the funny thing is that the meds she prescribed are mostly things i'm taking regularly for my allergies anyway.

i met my family on the way to the bus, and we took a bus down to the shuk where we met up with wp. we went to a coffee shop we're familiar with, and enjoyed a really nice hour before wp and i had to run off to our respective meetings.

i arrived ten minutes late for the "lecture", which was... ahem... eye opening. it was about the "hawk" method of training your eyes to perfect vision. which is a new take on the bates method. everything sounded pretty legitimate, but when i posted an update to let my teammates know what they'd missed i learned that the bates method has been thoroughly debunked as pseudoscience.

so that was a waste of a big chunk of my morning.

i returned home, making two awkward scenes on the bus regarding kids with their feet up (the first's feet weren't on the seats, which made telling the second whose were on the seats really uncomfortable).

breakfast, a meeting with a coworker, working hard until we all went out to take mr smear to his hebrew tutor. i worked at the coffee shop / bakery while my mom and gd talked, and then we picked mr smear up and returned home.

it was pretty hot by that stage.

the rest of the afternoon was quite a grind, but i was happy with the work once i'd pushed it. my body was all over the place, though, and by the time mr smear and i were heading out to the climbing wall i suddenly felt really bad and had to bail. so instead, the two of us watched most of battlefield earth before dinner.

i'm really glad he's enjoying it as much as i am. i'm also glad that so far there's only been one age-inappropriate moment - the psychlo with the long tongue - which i quickly explained away as "ugh, that's weird, it must be a psychlo thing". i know the movie cleaned up as 2001's "worst movie ever", but i've never really understood why. i mean, i agree that almost everything about it is ridiculous, but it's legitimately so much fun!

haters' gonna hate.

the evening was pleasant, and i've spent some time playing inscryption, and i'll probably try a little more disco elysium before i go to bed. it's a big relief that my mother's here for a number of reasons, two of which being that she's physically in less danger in tel aviv than in cape town and that she's actually able to get some rest (she works stupidly hard). it's helping me relax into my own sort of holiday, even if i'm still working.

it also helps that i'm enjoying my job.

months later

four hostages have just been rescued! it's an enormous relief, even while there are still so many left...

...

this story still isn't over, apparently. i had sinus pain on thursday, and yesterday, and while it seems to have calmed down a bit my nose is still pretty stuffy. is it allergies? is it the same covid? is it covid again?

...

yesterday was pretty productive. i got mr smear to school, and gd joined me on a mission to exchange the shitty rollerblade pads and buy a wallet. none of their pads were any good, so i exchanged for a basic basketball instead.

the bus ride there was bad, because there was something particularly wrong with the buses suspension and we had to get off early and walk off the motion sickness. the bus ride back was awful, because there was an old easily-misgenderable person with a small dog who was clearly abused and their treatment of the dog was rough, but ambiguously so. gd and i were both upset by the experience.

mr smear called us from school trying to get us to bring him home early, because he urgently needed to poop and is disgusted by the state of the school toilets. i tried and failed to get him to go there, and fortunately (for him) he managed to hold it in until he got home, after which i gave him a simulation in using filthy public toilets. i hope he gets over this and doesn't a) get sick or b) have an accident at school :/

we had a bit of homework drama, but things calmed down and he got everything done. his hebrew's improving at a steady pace, but i'm impressed by how well the prodigy math game is serving him.

in the evening before kiddush / dinner time, i played some more portal, and mr smear "gave me a hand" and became *really* excited about it ^_^

today:

mr smear got up really early and brushed his teeth without instruction, because he really wanted to play portal again. i obliged, and that's how we started our day - he began from the beginning, and got further than i had. there was a level (android hell) where i had to step in, but by and large i was impressed by how well he did on his own! at some point i had to walk away, though, because although i can play by myself without motion sickness, there's something about how mr smear manipulates the mouse that makes me very queasy.

otherwise, i had an interesting chat with horseman, read some more of the hobbit graphic novel, and i've been really tired and taking quick naps every now and again. right now i'm busy setting up keybase after having had to reset my account, although i'm not sure it has much value, and i'm simultaneously doing the production deployment of my side project before settling down to watch spirited away again.

that's the plan, at any rate.

a better day

 the bug from the sunday continued to drive me crazy until the early afternoon, when my boss told me to just do what the AWS representative advised. i didn't think it was the right thing to do, and i expressed my opinions, but i began implementing it as instructed.

just one last test.

fortunately, my tests were pretty solid and i finally had some real data to work with - and i discovered that the "fix" suggested by the professional would have opened a massive security hole! while i struggled to wrap my head around what was actually happening, i managed to find a solution that appears to be not only viable, but correct, and i'm now waiting to see the proof in the puddingproduction environment.

i was more shocked by how backwards the AWS implementation is than relieved that i've found a solution...

...

on sunday night, i scratched my head a bit, and a bit of my head came off. last night a dermatologist called me back and advised that i go see someone in person. gd (and dr google) think i may have developed psoriasis. i hope it's not psoriasis :(

mr smear had a much better day yesterday. the day started off awkwardly because we were both invited to talk with the school councillor; mr smear was in trouble for skipping classes on sunday (when we were having a tough morning), and i was in trouble for not warning his teacher that he was having a tough morning. gd managed to get him to his hebrew tutor and through his homework.

so: winning.

on sunday morning, i managed to install the ceiling attachment points for the shower curtain rail, but i accidentally pushed one of the screws through the ceiling and needed to wait 24 hours for the "putty" i used to fix it to dry. yesterday, when it was ready, i finally set about putting up the curtain rail... only to discover that in the month or two since i bought the damned thing and haven't been able to put it up, some of the parts went missing.

#$@!.

so now we have to wait for a handyman to swing by and see if he can help us out.

gd's really having a hard time psychologically, primarily with the war and the international response to it, on top of her daily struggle with pain which seems to have gotten worse since she's been coughing so much in the weeks we've been dealing with covid.

my mom managed to track down a couple of copies of the hebrew workbooks we had when i was a kid! it's been so long that apparently on one or two teachers even remembered the name (מדרגות or madregot), and i'm hoping that the song i still have stuck in my head is in one of them.

יש לי אח גדול

בן עשרים אולי

הוא יכול לעשות הכל

וקוראים לו שי

שי חייל והוא גיבור

אמא נורא דואגת

right, it's time to get moving.

thursday

 the day started pretty well. on the way to dropping mr smear off at school i recounted a story about a bunch of my officer's course platoon laughing in the bathroom, and i'm praying that i wrote down what initially triggered that laughter and that i'm able to find it. [was it this? that can't have been it, surely?]

the work day was very relaxed, my boss and coworker returned from their trip and had lots of stories to share. my yemenite coworker unwittingly putting loads of carolina reaper hot sauce on his food right after i started calming down from my own intense experience with it.

a video chat with our community rep and gd, and offering to meet with the rest of the leadership and the offending parties. just offering set off my anxiety, and i'm now writing this after getting up in the middle of the night - an hour or more ago - and tossing and turning while imagining addressing them.

the CEO forgetting me when ordering sweets for our "happy hour" and feeling really bad about it.

my nostrils hurting - both of them - because i can't clean them properly while working on repairing the tear. my stomach doing a number on me all day.

dropping my gear off at home after work and walking to mr smear's best friend's for a sushi night, which was both social and delicious. eventually getting home with a very full belly and getting mr smear into bed around 10.30pm...

upgrade

 the looney tunes show episode 25, muh-muh-muh-murder, is literally jaw-droppingly shocking. and not even slightly funny. holy fuck, i was horrified, and not in the least because everything about it was completely inappropriate for an eight year old.

wtaf.

mr smear and i both simultaneously agreed that we're done with that series.

...

yesterday:

another work from home day, gd was (and still is) feeling terrible and needed me to handle some things. also, i started off the day (again) at the clinic, this time to see a doctor about the tear inside my nostril. the doctor wasn't particularly phased about it, though, and i've been using a cream which seems to be helping.

gd finished watching walk on water, and although i wasn't really paying attention i did see the ending; i totally didn't expect it to trigger a catch in my throat.

the work day wasn't hard, but it was a struggle nonetheless as i really didn't know what i was doing, nor supposed to be doing. having said that, i did learn quite a bit and established a good starting point for today's labor.

today:

another difficult night. they've been difficult for a long time.

today i returned to the office for the first time in two weeks. we got to put the protocol i established to the test, and so far it's looking pretty solid. i got really good support from my coworkers in that and the confusing task from yesterday, and i'm pretty sure i've plugged an important potential security hole.

my nose is still hurting, but less.

we have new office chairs! and they're good chairs. even though i've been at home for two weeks, sitting down on my new chair was a physical relief.

it was a pretty good day, but i (we) got hit with a shitty feeling just before dinner when i checked my messages and learned that our community in cape town is under attack from within, jews who are very angry with the leadership for not taking an anti-israel stance.

i can't not think of the jews during the holocaust who voluntarily collaborated with the nazis.

...

mr smear and i have been having some really good conversations the past couple of days. however things play out, i'm a lot more optimistic about how he's coping.

off

 i took yesterday off. i wasn't planning on it, but i needed it. i'm still not used to taking sick days, even if i now officially have covid. having said that, gd and i both did RATs yesterday and hers came out negative.

*shrug*

yesterday:

the wake up was not good. mr smear messed around until i carried him out his room, then insisted on claiming that he didn't know how he got from his bed to the corridor, and neither of us believed him. maybe he was telling the truth. either way, not a good vibe to start the day.

at some point on wednesday one of our main water pipes developed a tiny hole, and we began our day with unexplained flooding around the washing machine. we assumed it was the washing machine, and resolved to take care of it as soon as we returned from dropping off mr smear and taking care of some stuff at the clinic. on the way out of the building there was a distinctly unpleasant smell in the stairwell.

about an hour later, as we arrived at the entrance to our building, we noticed the source of the bad smell - our building's sewerage tank had clogged up and was leaking. i then wondered if the cause of our flooding wasn't the washing machine per se, but rather that the pipes were backed up all the way down.

then gd opened the (literal) water closet for the first time since we moved in, and we found ourselves looking into an absolutely revolting portrait of landlords' neglect. panicking, i tried to put insulation tape over the hole using chopsticks so as not to scratch myself on the mildewed rust, but the pipe was completely inaccessible.

it would take another three hours for the plumber to arrive, and the hunt to figure out how to turn the water off at the mains was more complicated than it should have been.

i interpreted each and every syllable out of the plumber's mouth from the moment he set eyes on the closet as "ka-ching!". he needed an assistant to patch the hole for the weekend, and he was nervous about it. we were (and are) exceedingly grateful that he'd arrived in time for us not to be stuck without water for a whole weekend.

i was feeling much better physically than i had in a week, but i was still struggling very much with the runny nose and coughing.

as the plumber left, i rushed out to pick mr smear up from school. i happened to see our neighbors - the ones with the neurotic dogs who left our building a couple of months ago - wheeling a stroller ahead, and i didn't want to get close but was happy to be able to send them our congratulations :)

mr smear came running to me when i arrived, and unfortunately our joyful reunion was marred by the fact that his teeth accidentally met my shoulder and it really hurt him. otherwise, we had a pleasant walk home.

the afternoon, just like every afternoon this week, involved long, drawn-out discussions and arguments about mr smear's homework. once he gets himself over the "i don't wanna", he does just fine, but getting him over the "i don't wanna" is really hard.

today:

woke up still not good in the nose and throat and chest departments. mr smear's wakeup went much better. after dropping him off at school, i came back for gd and we headed to the clinic to see if there was a nurse on duty who could help her out - we were worried she'd developed bronchitis again.

the clinic took a long time, but it looks like gd's (relatively) okay and we hopped over to the pharmacy to pick up meds. that took a long time too.

we picked up a breakfast bagel and a sandwich along the way, then came home and settled in to watch some of mivtza savta, which i'm very glad that gd is enjoying so far. then we went to pick up mr smear, and came home for a very relaxed day. at least until homework time, where we repeated the now-daily dance, but there wasn't a lot to do and he eventually did it well.

the sun has set, and i'm about to do the dishes. i really hope that i'll be clearer tomorrow.

...

today i completed all the free-to-play levels in bloons adventure time. i took the opportunity to sync my phone with my copy on steam, and ended up writing a review. that led to me looking up how many hours i've played, and it turns out that after an entire month averaging 2.5 hours a day, i'm on about 75 hours. and this is my second time playing, because i got pretty far in 2018/2019 when i first discovered the game.

huh.

mid-week madness

i've got to go to bed soon, this week has been ridiculous so far.

FIRST THINGS FIRST! as of this morning, my wife and son both appear in my population registry record and my son has his israeli id number! next stop, getting gd's status updated - we're hoping to make some progress on sunday morning.

my mom's been here with us since saturday morning, and it's been really great having her here ^_^

on sunday morning i went to the courts and managed to pick up copies of the judgement.

my bank situation's a real mess, i spent an hour yesterday morning with them figuring out how to send money, but a day later and it's now clear to me that i have no access to my credit card account or any human support, and i literally don't have access to my own money at this point :/

i've been over covid since friday, but it took me until today to get clearance certificates from the doctors.

work has been challenging and fun. we're gearing up for (an anticipated) re-org. my coworkers were really impressed by the voiceover i did for our hackathon presentation :)

boy, was i wrong. hello, covid.

 so it turns out i *did* have covid. and i've no idea where i managed to pick it up. runny nose aside, i was feeling fine until thursday morning, during which i was decidedly unfocused. then i took a walk with mr smear to drop off the rented video as an excuse to be outside, got back home and felt so utterly lousy i actually had to call in sick.

i proceeded to feel progressively worse, very "man-flu"-ish, and on friday morning i took my meds and slugged a cup of coffee and fast-walked ('cause i was running late) to a covid test so that we could be certain for mr smear's birthday party on sunday.

let me tell you, i was beginning to feel a little better on saturday morning, so when i got a call from the doc that afternoon informing me i'd tested positive i was stunned. frantic retracing of steps (with brain-fog) and reporting my test result to my contacts, followed by lots more time in bed and staying as far away from my family as is reasonable considering we all live in a tiny space together.

i was still feeling uncertain on my feet (dizzy and fatigued) until sunday night, but monday morning came around and three things had changed: 

1. i was feeling pretty good for the first time in days

2. my lower back nerve pain had fired up again for the first time in a long time

3. gd hadn't slept well and was beginning to struggle with her own covid experience

i spent a lot of yesterday working on my personal project, mostly because it was an unpressured thing to do and i'm still supposed to be resting and taking it easy. i eventually managed to put in a couple of paid work hours too, which was satisfying.

today was difficult. gd was in excruciating pain, so it was on me to manage mr smear while trying to take care of small things around the house and get a little work done. some of it was fun! some, not so much. we've been really fortunate to have a community volunteer looking after us, after this morning's report they sent a nurse to look at gd and she was heartbroken, we called the doctor together and i took gd off to the hospital.

while she was being treated there, i took mr smear back home and we did our things until she was ready to be picked up again. just as we were leaving his best friend's mother dropped off a huge bag of gifts, we picked up gd, and after dropping them home i had to go off to the pharmacy for an outside pickup.

the rest of the afternoon / evening has been a juggling act of working, chores, entertaining / exercising with / feeding mr smear, with the usual shower / bedtime routine ending just before 10pm.

lesson of the day: i'm a complete stranger in my own kitchen. i'm also tired and nervous about taking a week of leave that i won't get paid for. the downside to contracting...

thing that has helped the most to maintain sanity over the course of the last few days? alugalug cat 2.0.

vaccine news!

i almost forgot! gd and i are booked for our first jabs.