weekend incoming

 i still haven't fully recovered from tuesday and wednesday's dairy incident (i suspect my lactose intolerance has evolved into an actual allergy), so having a beer this afternoon has hit me surprisingly hard...

today got whole lots better. i was still a bit down in the dumps when gd and i left for the morning shopping run, but we found a nice little spot for coffee and relaxed and enjoyed ourselves, and the walk back to the shops and subsequent shopping trip were not unpleasant.

then we came home and had a nice, quiet, relaxing early afternoon as mr smear had gone to one of his friends (one of the two that he got physical with, the south tel aviv one). i was a bit nervous about picking him up and bringing him home on a friday afternoon, but the buses are running until relatively late now that it's summer.

the ride there was a bit stressful - some shitty kids for the first half, and lots of unwashed people for the second - and i was in a mode for the fifteen minute walk from the bus, partially because of the area (though it was fine, chilled, much less aggressive than the time i bladed through on a saturday) and partially because i was listening to slipknot.

i picked him up, and he appears to have been well-behaved and had a good time. we got to the bus stop in time, and everything was going just fine until halfway home he did something shitty and the entire week's issues with him came crashing home. we discussed it, we discussed my feelings and why i feel the way i do, but morale was pretty low for both of us by the time we returned home.

i dove into my AI "harness" - which, since yesterday morning's inspiration, has now been demoted to my MCP eavesdropper - and it's now feature complete and ready to be published. but not without some irritation: i blew through the rest of my github copilot credits and further into an additional budget i approved, and i didn't even have much to show for it.

i've parked the work for the day, and tomorrow i'll set about doing two things: the first, getting a local AI running again, and the second, publishing my extension. once that's done, i'll be more than ready to begin working on the actual harness i now have a design in mind for.

...

shabbat incoming. i feel almost surprised to have made it to this point in the week.

not according to plan

 so! i have an explanation for yesterday evening, last night, and this morning. also, today, and still now to a degree.

i didn't mention that when i took mr smear out yesterday, my belly was doing a bit of aching. i didn't really think much on it, but in retrospect that was the warning sign. then last night's feeling horrible, and this morning still feeling horrible, primarily with a low-intensity headache and an unusual dizziness.

i was still in post-rollerblade "recovery" mode, and i grabbed a petit beurre from the jar on my way to my desk. i'd had a few yesterday; they don't always have them, but every now and again i help myself to a couple when they do. but yesterday, and today, it tasted a bit different... richer... and while i managed to put that aside yesterday, the way i was feeling today made me suddenly paranoid. enough to go back and look again, more carefully, and realize that unlike the standard petit beurre in israel (osem), this was a different brand. so i looked up the brand's ingredients.

dairy.

in the "vegan"-labelled cookie jar, looking almost identical to the osem one which is legitimately vegan.

so i had my answer - the tale of last night, in its entirety, was me eating a handful of dairy biscuits yesterday afternoon, and then feeling extremely heavy effects all through the night and most of the morning. then there was an hour or so's reprieve, before this morning's biscuit kicked in and set off a pounding headache.

a coworker gave me a couple of headache tablets, which eventually took the edge off but never quite managed to lift the fog.

...

with that all happening, i had some important project work to do today. it took me a while to get into it properly - i had to deal with a few bureaucratic distractions, and i wasn't exactly operating at peak performance - and by the time i got started i was fortunate to realize that some else had overwritten my work yesterday before i triggered a mistake i might not have been able to take back.

i got in touch, and coached him through merge my changes into his (it's quite frustrating to have to guide experienced, intelligent developers through basic git manipulations because they refuse to use graph visualizations), and eventually we managed to get everything in sync.

but by that stage, i'd already been dragged into an investigation for an incident that had begun the night before and hadn't rung any alarm bells. suddenly, me the contractor who's working on a high-pressured over-deadline damage control project, had to take charge of the situation and lead the team through hours of resolution and troubleshooting.

so much for wednesday.

it looks like we did it in the end, and relatively well (i argued for combining mitigation with some elementary protections for the next set of surprises), and while monitoring the fixes not only fixed up the dashboards, but exported them to a versioned repo and demonstrated the advantage (apparently convincingly) to the others.

...

i left the office really late, stopped at the shops to pick up a couple of things, including soy milk for gd. you see, we found out months ago that she's probably celiac, and had some amazing success with her going gluten-free, but recently some of the symptoms have been creeping back. turns out, she's been drinking oat milk this whole time, thinking that it was gluten-free 🙄

...

dinner was excellent - gd made another large round of sushi and we ate the lot - and we watched some more of cool runnings. the evening was feeling like it was going great, so it was a rather undigestible surprise when the mother of one of mr smear's "friends" called to discuss him getting violent with her boy.

gd had suspected something had happened when he'd come home this afternoon, and he'd brushed her off, and it took a lot for us to extract even a little bit of the story from him. when i called the mother back to talk about it, it turned out that there was more to the story, but mr smear swears blind that that was everything. gd and i are extremely concerned, and we're both having trouble dealing with this.

...

oh, yeah - and this morning's AI usage, which was really basic, blew through more than half of my monthly budget. well, i've been complaining about the AI providers putting on the squeeze for a while now...

so all-in-all it's been a bit of a shit day, with only the slightest sprinkling of glitter over the incident resolution and the few minutes where i got to enjoy dinner with my family before everything fell apart for real.

i'm - fucking - tired.

asshole accumulation

today - post posting - continued with four assholes. i called the jewish agency to find out something for my mother, and was stuck with their hold muzak while running around the supermarket looking for a product that they didn't stock. as i gave up and arrived at the self-checkout, an agent answered and promptly refused to answer my general question because my mother wasn't with me. while i was being pissed off about that, the checkout assistant came over and insisted on interrupting my call to tell me about a special on one of the items i was purchasing, to which i responded sharply "i really don't care" but i really wanted to scream it. the answer i got from the agent was basically that the people in cape town are continuing to waste my mother's time. i tried to reset emotionally, but almost got run over by an irresponsible cyclist as i stepped onto a crosswalk (he was coming up behind me, and decided to go around in front of me instead of behind me. or slow down a moment, as i had right of way. a few seconds later the crosswalk was blocked by an impatient taxi driver while it was still green for me to cross, and he got angry with me for indicating that he was doing something wrong.

later, i'd learn that half the kids in mr smear's class are sick with covid so tonight's lag b'omer bonfire isn't happening, so that was all for nought...

working from the office wasn't unpleasant, though i was very frustrated by the coffee machine situation. not only do people move the pipes between the dairy and non-dairy milks without cleaning them, and leave milk pouring onto the grid our cups are supposed to go on, but there's no decaf coffee anywhere.

my work day was... well, it was successful in the sense that i eventually managed to run the tests i needed to run (and that i arguably should have run weeks ago). it was unsuccessful in that i uncovered even more of a hot mess beneath the surface than i already thought there was. i worked a longer day than usual, and my last findings before stopping for the night stressed me out. i've sent an update to my manager so that he's not surprised, and i'm overall feeling pretty shit about it.

...

anyways. i came home for lunch, primarily because krybabie's widow (what a weird thing to type, even years later) had come over to pick up some stuff my mother brought with her. it was nice to see her, and it seems like she and the kids are doing quite well.

it turns out she recently met up with some old mutual friends, and that they have pictures of teenage me at summer camp, so i've just awkwardly reached out to them to ask if they'd do me a favor and send me a few of them... i don't have much from before i made aliyah, a handful of photos from my party days is just about everything.

...

mr smear once again came home without having done what i asked him, and i gave him the twenty minutes it took for me to get home from the office to rectify the situation. i spent some of the walk home wracking my brains trying to think of an appropriate and effective punishment if he didn't, and i was deeply grateful that he managed to get his assignment off one of his friends and i didn't have to come up with a solution to the problem 😅

dinner was great, as was the evening in general, but he started coughing just at bedtime and i'm hoping he's not doing the covid thing himself. i actually suspect that that's what my last week was about, and that perhaps mr smear was patient zero when we sent him back to school a couple of weeks ago because he only had symptoms when getting out of bed.

...

i don't have energy or bandwidth to be functional tonight. i'm really enjoying starship troopers and slay the spire 2, one (or both) of them will suffice.

a power day

 well, the next part of the day was pretty rough - but in a fun way, i guess? it certainly was an experience. 

firstly, mr smear is now full-on into counter-strike, and it's nice to see him not giving up and getting excited by his successes. so it was a cool tone to set before we head out to his regular allergist checkup.

but we headed out right in the heaviest part of a massive thunderstorm. fortunately, we both had our big-enough rain boots on, the water levels were high everywhere and my waterproof shoes would have been flooded from the top. and we had a time avoiding cars spraying water onto the sidewalks, and we got pelleted with hail (his first time outside in hail), and the walk from the bus to the hospital was just ridiculous - a real urban jungle adventure - and of course, the sun came out just as we arrived at our destination.

from that point on it became impossible to close my umbrella...

there was a bit of confusion (which was to be expected) at the reception, but we made it through the bureaucratic gauntlet and went upstairs to the allergy clinic. it was war-time very quiet and there were only two other kids there, surprisingly calm and extremely cute children, so off the bat it was a much less stressful time with mr smear. at that point my tiredness and lack of caffeine began catching up with me, but the allergist and her nurse were efficient and mr smear managed to distract himself from the prick-test itching with games on his phone, and pretty soon we were discussing the results.

it seems like, sadly, his allergy level is stabilizing rather than going away, we'll know better in the next year or two. but even so, the level it's stabilizing at is far less dramatic than before, so while he'll still need an epipen and to be careful not to consume dairy, we don't need to be so scared of accidental contact.

it's / it should be fine.

we went through the hospital mall, where i picked up an emergency coffee just as the attack warning sounded. considering the fact that the roof is made of glass, i get why the safe area was three floors below ground... there was nowhere comfortable to sit, so the two of us walked around the parking lot full of people occupying themselves on their phones and amused ourselves playing word association games.

then we returned to pick up a couple of things at the supermarket, and a couple of bottles of sublingual b12 at the pharmacy (while waiting in the uncomfortably crowded aisle for the self-service checkout, gd called twice while i was holding an umbrella that refused to stay closed, a cup of coffee, and two bottles of b12. i was not in my happy place.

mr smear and i took a bus home - to his chagrin, he always wants to walk these days to get some exercise - and he signed on to his remote classes while i finally got wednesday's code review approved and got started on the follow-up improvement. gd has managed to schedule me a haircut, so a short while late i headed out to catch a bus to sheinkin.

i had some time to spare, so i got a little more work done and drank a coffee that i must assume was soy milk (because they said so, and i honestly can't tell). i arrived just on time for my haircut appointment, and another attack warning. everyone headed across the road to a hotel shelter (the same hotel my cousin threw his farewell party in on mr smear's birthday), which was an interesting experience, and then we returned to get into it. i thought the coffee would keep me from nodding in the chair, but...

... i'm really happy with the haircut. gd's happy with it too. i'm very enthusiastically grateful that i'm no longer sporting my jew-fro / isro :P

it took a long time to get home (i shouldn't have gotten off the bus when i did), and while i waited for the connection mr smear had an accident while helping gd and the two of them had to deal with a smashed plate. so that happened.

the evening was me completing the work and studying a bit (data engineering), and mr smear playing more counter-strike, and then a pretty intensive training in which mr smear admirably demonstrated that he not only could STFU when being given instructions, but that he could redirect his anger and frustration energy into the drill we were doing (a liver shot combo) (even if he did feel the need to tell me that he was imagining that he was hitting me), into continuing the work through discomfort, into stepping into his first impact training (feather-light touch from me, but a big deal for him), into pushing himself through difficult post-training exercises (like planking, diamond push-ups, crunches and burpees), into taekwondo-style stretching.

all the while holding himself in check, even when it was clear he was emotionally at the edge. when we were done, his pride was quiet but visible, and he didn't argue with me the first couple of times i told him how proud i was (he did a bit later, though :P).

a great dinner (double yo-egg, both types as a very successful pre-pesach experiment), and everyone into the merch episode of strip search with lots of pausing to discuss. shower-time and tooth-brushing time were very positive (gd and i were loving him singing along to my playlist at the top of his voice), and his bedtime was earlier than it's been for a while and much more peaceful.

after saying good night, i went on a hunt for vitamin d resources that someone asked me for regarding testing / screening and dosage:

there're a lot of studies that discuss the unreliability of testing - this one's pretty clear - check out the "sources cited" button beneath this video (it's really worth watching). 

see also the "accuracy of screening tests" section of the US preventive services task force report.

and then i watched a whole lot of youtube videos (war news interspersed with random shit), and now this, and then... maybe i'll go to bed soon.

[attack warning]

less but not gone

 we all arrived at the hospital more-or-less on time, to discover that the woman who'd called me last week to arrange the challenge apparently hadn't registered it properly in the system. they let us go up anyway, and what followed was a couple of hours of various stages of the challenge along with a spirometer (lung capacity test).

he had subjective reactions - itchiness - but not objective ones; after the fourth increment (which he was totally grossed out by) the allergist stopped us and kept him (and gd) there for the following two hours for observation.

in short: he's allergic, and we'll still have to carry around his epipen and avoid dairy, but if he accidentally ingests any we don't need to panic. more than anything else, he no longer needs to worry about other kids eating around him or not washing their hands properly.

and i don't have to worry about him wanting to consume dairy products, he was thoroughly grossed out.

...

i arrived at the office just in time to be swarmed by our new hires who needed some accounts configured. the rest of the day was a mix of telling my life story to two of my coworkers, strategizing with my british coworker and our tech ops guy, and discussing a moonshot problem that i've been fantasizing about solving.

...

i ate some kabukim today and they really hurt my back teeth. i hope i haven't stripped a filling or something.

...

then i came home, theoretically in time for dinner if mr smear hadn't been busy dragging his feet on his homework... anyway, dinner was good, bedtime was alright, and i spent the next couple of hours doing a mission in shadowrun.

now i'm going to try to get some sleep.

shadowrunning

 i slept alright, but got up early and dived back in to shadowrun: hong kong. if i'm honest with myself, i legitimately spent far too many hours playing it today, but it's a fantastic story, i'm enjoying the mechanics (even if i am playing on easy), and fuck it, we're all just resting today.

mr smear's biggest complaint today was about how "unfair" it is that i spent all day on the windows machine, while he was relegated to the macbook :P

in the afternoon, i took mr smear out for a walk and ended up joining the mongoose for a while. eventually mr smear and i made our way back, stopping at jars and bowls to pick up dinner. we got home quite late, so i regretted having promised him he could play half an hour of portal when we got home, but he was really cool while we were out and he never looked at his phone once, so...

once we got him into bed, it was back into shadowrun, and i've now just stopped (right before a run i recall being particularly intense) and am getting ready to go to bed myself, in preparation for what we expect to be a big day tomorrow.

mr smear's dairy allergy test.

doing it wrong

 i barely slept last night, (and) my lower back's messed up. gd's in an even worse state.

we got up at 6am in order to get mr smear to his new classroom by 7.30am. gd forgot that his dairy challenge was scheduled for wednesday, and gave him an antihistamine, so now we have to postpone that and it's usually months before there's a slot available.

gd wasn't able to come with to his first day in the new school.

he was very awkward, but the general vibe and other parents were cool, the school is (as is to be expected) completely different in every way. but some of the adjustments are hard. and me having to handle the admin side of things, and then walk into the office only to realize someone cruelly scheduled an interview on the first morning of the school year, broke me.

it didn't help that there was little oxygen in the room - i really don't handle the meeting rooms well at all.

i left the hour and a half interview and went straight back to the school to pick up mr smear, and then spend more than half an hour waiting in line for his books. then i taught him how to open his locker (i'm sure it'll be a struggle for a while, it's an old-school combination lock) and we went to the light rail together.

and then i got off at my stop and let him go the rest of the way home by himself for the very first time. that wasn't stressful at all.

the next couple of hours was mostly spent getting the team aligned with our new priorities, and then i went into another interview. more interesting than the first, but i still had trouble staying awake by the end of it.

the last hour was torture. and i think i made one of the new guys feel bad. i'm pretty sure i'm making a bad impression on everyone lately, because i'm just burned out and every interruption has become a thing and i'm finding it really hard to display a positive attitude.

i'm fucking tired.

but i'm also tired because i have to handle all the new-school shit on my own, which includes the parent groups as well as figuring out how to get mr smear into the music track, which until today we had no idea required a history of formal lessons.

godsdammit.

anyway, at least mr smear is happy so far. on the other hand, our friend's daughter / his classmate decided not to leave the school, and is apparently deeply regretting it.

just before dinner, i managed to get in touch with someone in his old school who didn't register for their book program, so he took over mr smear's books and i'm grateful that it didn't cost us double.

...

there's some huge insect or something that was flying around our living room earlier, but it hasn't shown itself since. i'm going to bed now. i hope those two statements don't clash at any point.

gurgle splat (and a review of our son)

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

drama allergy

 well, shit. today was pretty dramatic, my workday isn't over yet but i need to do a quick mind dump to free up some bandwidth for what remains...

yesterday:

i slept better on sunday night. i'm wondering if the alpha lipoic acid the doctor recommended is having an immediate effect. seems too good to be true, but if it's working i'll take it.

i rushed to the office early to return the keys i'd accidentally left with, and started the day on a zoom call with gd and mr smear's therapist which was generally optimistic.

the work day itself was tough, and i got home pretty frustrated.

mr smear did some good reading with me, and as a reward for doing it with a good attitude i started teaching him how to play minesweeper :)

after dinner i managed to make a little progress on a dev tool before settling down to watch an episode of monk with gd, after which i watched a few random youtube videos until realizing i needed to go to bed.

today:

i slept relatively well last night. lots of dreaming.

today started off pretty well, between the time mr smear left for school and the time gd and i left to meet up with him and his teacher i managed to make a bunch of appointments (from sunday's meeting with the doc).

the meeting started off awkwardly, as they wanted mr smear to introduce himself and tell us how he's doing. my gods, i wouldn't have been comfortable being put on the spot like that either, certainly not at his age, but after a brief silence we got things moving forward and lots of things were said.

in summary: mr smear's teacher seems really solid, and they appear to be off to a good start. i think we covered all the things that have been going on, where he's coming from and what he's been learning to deal with, and it was pretty optimistic. once he'd left the room, we talked about some of the heavier stuff.

of particular note was the councillor informing me that she received a call yesterday from the organization i spoke to, and she was offended that i'd reported that we didn't feel like they were doing anything. i made it very clear that our second complaint was about bullying, violence and harassment, and that until i informed the principal that we intend to go to the police the next time mr smear is injured we never saw any real response from the school. we talked about that in depth, and i think both the councillor and his new teacher understand where we stand and what's at stake.

i managed to keep my mouth shut when the councillor told us how important communication is, when we're the ones who've been begging them to communicate...

from there i went off to work. my lead and i came up with a plan, but my boss' request to prepare what i've been working on for a third party took up most of my day. and random conversations surround our procedures and practices too, i guess.

...

after lunch, though, was when all hell broke loose: mr smear's teacher dropped a bomb on the parents by demanding no dairy in the mishloah manot that the kids are supposed to bring tomorrow, and a lot of the parents were furious. not just because they'd already invested in and prepared the packages, but on principle, too.

my immediate reaction was flat panic because we do not want the parents or the other kids to resent us or mr smear due to his allergy. let me tell you, it's very difficult to navigate a situation like that tactfully when you want the teacher to know that what she's doing is appreciated (and correct, considering dairy is supposed to be banned on school grounds just like peanuts) but you also want the parents to not hate you.

i sent a message to the teacher to that effect, then i posted in the parents' group that i'd done so and that we had no intention of making everyone's lives difficult.

what followed was surprising: the mother of the bully from last week reached out to me, along with another parent, and both of them were stunned to learn that his allergy is a real danger and that he's been isolated from the other children because he's (justifiably) too scared to eat with or near them. i spoke to the mother on the phone, and she almost brought me to tears: she remembers being an isolated olah chadasha when she arrived, and she was deeply upset that mr smear has had to deal with the food thing on top of everything else. she's determined to use this story as a way to teach her son, and insisted on putting together mishloah manot specifically for mr smear.

she also convinced me to clear things up for the other parents. so i wrote a post in the group as follows:

hi everyone, i just spoke to some of you and realized that <mr smear>'s situation wasn't so clear until now.

<mr smear> has a severe allergy to dairy products. not a sensitivity - an allergy - at a life-threatening level. he has to carry an epipen with him at all times, and he is (rightly) afraid of other people's food that contains or may contain dairy products, so he usually avoids eating with the other kids in class or stays away from them because he is afraid that there might be an incident.

there are even kids in the class who take advantage of this fear to hurt him. just so you know.

we are very grateful to the parents who are considering the social implications of this, and those who contacted us - you touched us deeply. those of you who already understood and always cared - we thank you very much.

we're happy that <the teacher> is taking this matter seriously, but i promise that it is not our intention to make things difficult for you or your children. this is not an easy situation, for both us and you, and i hope we will continue to cooperate (and tolerate as much as possible) so that we can all be as comfortable as possible ❤️

the responses that followed were positive. and even if only some of the parents are with us and supportive, that's huge, and for the first time we don't feel so alone with this and we understand that the lack of consideration has mostly been from ignorance, not apathy. and now there's a bit of competitive overcompensation going on and it looks like a bunch of kids might be bringing vegan mishloah manot for mr smear tomorrow, so of all the directions today could have gone in i ended up having to give him a talk about showing gratitude for any gifts he receives even if they're from kids he doesn't like.

to underscore the first lesson, though, when i discussed it with mr smear after i got home he told me that he'd been really angry to learn that most of his class - after three and a half years with him - didn't understand what an allergy was. so today mr smear and their new teacher taught them. and maybe some of their parents learned, too.

...

that whole story took about two hours out of my work day, i went from terrified to overcome with gratitude to awkward and anxious and it took quite a while to come back to earth and be able to do some work. and then it was time to come home (late), i was supposed to help mr smear with his homework but between our talk and his stomache really hurting that didn't happen.

he'd better be doing okay by tomorrow morning. his best friend sent photos of himself hand-making oznei haman with pistachio cream for him. holy shit.

the sufganya

 today was completely insane.

it began around 2.40am, where the missile alert sirens sounded, and we all struggled to get out and into the shelter, barely making it before the booms. i didn't realize until the afternoon that a school building near nystire was destroyed. mr smear couldn't get back to sleep after that, so i stayed with him... uncomfortably... for a couple of hours until i was reasonably sure he was actually going to sleep.

...

1. same wakeup pattern, but this time i was feeling completely broken, and no screen time for me either. i read desolation jones and we listened to music, and it was nice.

2. mr smear was complaining that he didn't feel well enough to go to school. he agreed to abide by the outcome determined by the thermometer. the thermometer suggested he was a bit warm, and so he stayed home. having reviewed his math homework dashboard, i'm satisfied that he's at or above his grade level, and apparently he did his other extra homework well, too.

3. on my way to the mall i received a call about a job. everything was sounding good, but before i agreed to come in to meet them i made sure that they could afford me. they can't, so... oh, well.

4. i'm glad i did a little research last night on kindles. i walked into the store, bought the right model (the basic 11th gen, the only one they had) at the right price (in ten instalments), and the experience was quick and painless. and then, for the cherry on top, i managed to pick up a bunch of soy yoghurts while they've been sold out everywhere for weeks.

5. my manager came in sick and coughing. again. it's really, really grating my cheese.

6. we had an all-hands today, which affirmed that the situation isn't dire. in honor of chanukah being next week, we had sufganyot. the ceo assumed that the one i got was vegan, and i took a chance - expecting it to maybe have egg, not dairy.

it was made with $#@!ing dairy butter.

that was around 11.30 this morning, and my stomache's only just started settling a couple of hours ago. for the first few hours after i had headaches and was really, really tired... so tired, in fact, that during an important conversation i fell asleep a couple of times and even dreamed. my coworkers found it hilarious that i tried to participate in the conversation when i woke up, even if i did have something to contribute :P

7. before the dairy took effect, i at least managed to finish my lunch. i'd walked past the hummusia on my way to work and just the memory of the smell made it a must.

8. in spite of everything, i managed to get the job i've been working on done by the end of the day.

9. i came home, just in time for a chat with an HR rep about another gig. it went well.

10. dinner was late, but we managed to squeeze in a simpsons episode before the new 8pm cut-off. dinner was ratatouille, gd's first attempt, and it was great. 

i can't explain why, but gd had informed me that a friend of hers wanted to lend us a hand financially, and i was inspired to do grace after the meal.

overall, the bedtime routine part of the evening went smoothly.

11. a two hour conversation with gd's friend, the conversation was all over the place but we graciously accepted the offer of help and he sent it to us in the form of some bitcoin. now i have to figure out how to withdraw that bitcoin into our bank account so that i can use it to pay off some debt...

12. that was just before midnight, when i realized that our sink was an absolute mess and in danger of triggering a blocked drain. i angrily un-jenga'ed everything and got the drain guard back in place, then sat down with my tea to post this.

i have a new kindle, and it's already set up. i think i'm going to read a bit before going to bed.