more rollercoaster

 i think i slept well last night. i'm already beginning to nod off now, but i wanna post this and drink a cup of chamomile before hitting the hay.

...

the US election took up the majority of my brain-space this morning:

omg i never thought i'd feel so relieved to hear a US election result, and especially to see trump returning to the white house. america, you and the free world just dodged, not a bullet, but an RPG.

i expect all the UN ambassadors from their anti-west totalitarian regimes must be feeling deeply disappointed right now. i don't know how much trump will get done over the next four years, but at least this gives us a window to take down the ayatollahs and make peace in the middle east an actual possibility.

assuming *we* don't manage to screw this up, of course. best of luck to us all 🫡

i was a little distracted still by the election noise when i got to work, but i managed to find my groove. a couple of new companies have moved in to our floor, so it's much brighter and more welcoming.

...

everything was fine until lunch. on my way to joining my coworkers, i received a call from mr smear's class assistant - he was having a very scary asthma attack, and he'd apparently told her he didn't have his pump. in retrospect, i think he misunderstood the questions, but i told her it was in his bag and immediately alerted gd that she'd need to hurry to the school.

then another panicked call - she couldn't figure out which pump to use.

so i called gd, also panicking, and she told me, and i called back and told her. also, i told her it should take a few minutes to work.

more panic, because it didn't working. at this point i was sitting at the table, staring into the distance, praying for my son and thinking about a guy a couple of years ahead of me in school, one of my youth movement councillors, who just suddenly died in his sleep one night from an asthma attack.

fortunately, i got a call soon afterwards informing me that it did seem to be working, and that his coughing fit was calming down, and he was able to breathe between coughs.

holy shit, that was terrifying. truly terrifying.

...

i was still unsettled an hour later, when i went to go and make myself a cup of turkish coffee. i poured the boiling water into the glass, and heard a *crack*. some of the coffee was seeping onto the counter. nystire has a thing about cups cracking due to temperature differences, so, relieved that it hadn't been worse, i took a step back and pulled out my phone to take a photo for him

just as i did that, the glass exploded. i was fortunately just out of range, so aside from the shock i only had to worry about cleaning up the mess (how did the coffee get under the counter ledge??), find a safe way to dispose of all the shards, and then making myself a much safer mug of instant coffee.

...

i was - understandably, i think - restless for the remainder of the work day. at least i feel like i got a couple of important things done.

at some point in the afternoon i received another report from mr smear's teacher: apparently, he's understood the mission. today was a really good day for him, asthma attack notwithstanding, and he was cooperative and worked well!

i did some quick shopping on the way home, mainly for toilet paper but gd's really scared about her other fragile tooth cracking so i picked her up some soya yoghurts and desserts. puddings. or, in our family's parlance, pudignes.

anyhoo, i came home, hugged my son tightly (to his chagrine, he was playing minecraft online), and overall the evening went smoothly. and gd made her delicious new cottage pie recipe (mushrooms and leaks and beans), and we watched some x-men, and then it was bedtime for mr smear.

i, on the other hand, spent the last couple of hours doing another run of kaycee's mod, and then working on using notebooklm and chatgpt to produce a useful summary booklet for anatomy of an epidemic and translate it into hebrew. i don't understand why the translation of the 12 pages would take hours, but that's what i was told so i'm hanging in. i also discovered that you can (now) prompt notebooklm when generating an audio discussion, and that's really powerful!

personal wars trump big wars

yesterday:

rollercoaster continued. mr smear stayed home because of his cough again, and a ridiculous amount of the day was dedicated to gd's private response to the rabbi she'd yelled at the evening before.

it's amazing how much more anxiety we've been experiencing from the open letter i wrote and its fallout, than that for the new round of iranian threats.

by the time she finally sent it, it was pretty powerful. the response she got back did an excellent job of not addressing it and playing off our feelings as "an ideological disagreement", but the important thing (in my opinion, at any rate) is that she said what needed to be said.

aside from that, i don't recall much. we took mr smear to the doctor and got him some extra medication, and in the evening i accompanied them to the eye doctor, which ultimately i didn't need to. he's got a new prescription, and apparently it makes quite the difference.

oh! i actually managed to get to the minimum requirements on the ticket i was working on, which considering everything else, and the fact that it wasn't trivial stuff at all, feels quite miraculous.

someone from gd's conversion class got whatsapp hacked, and their hacker tried to take me too. what a freaking nightmare! she was so grateful that we called to check on her, i hope she's got her account back by now.

today(-ish):

i took mr smear to school, and while he wasn't happy about something (i "distracted" him while he was trying to count) and he really didn't feel that he needed to go, by the time we arrived he was in better spirits and we were cool.

i continued on the post office, arriving just in time to pick up gd's heavy shoes in addition to the 3D glasses i ordered.

the work day started off alright, but then i received a call from gd and learned she'd just cracked a tooth (in a particularly nasty way) that her dentist had warned her about, but that we couldn't afford to do anything about.

well, i guess we're going to have to find a way to afford it now.

she went off to first aid, and i was very excited to hear afterwards that she'd managed to get sorted with an actual appointment with a receptionist who couldn't speak a word of english! that's pretty big, so we were both rather proud of her ^_^

...

during the morning i received a disheartening message from mr smear's teacher that he'd been completely uncooperative the entire morning.

after a big lunch, i walked to the school (i don't know why i didn't take a bus), picked up mr smear and walked through to the dental clinic. on the way, i told him about the art school that we want to register him for, and explained to him that if he doesn't "turn the ship around" and be on his best behavior for the next two months, then his current school's report may well prevent us from being able to move him to the next school.

i'm pretty sure that it's true, and i'm also pretty confident that if anything's going to motivate him, this will do it.

so that's the carrot. the stick is no screen time until i get a good report from his teacher.

...

we waited for gd for a while, and it turned out to be a really good thing that i'd taken my boss's advice and joined her - she needed imaging done, pronto. so we all caught a bus to ichilov, picked a floor (there're three imaging centers in the building), and were surprised by how quick and painless it was.

someone i was on the community council with reached out to me to thank me for the open letter, which she said cited the exact reasons she gave up on them. the responses have all been very validating, and i haven't got the expression "shul capture" out of my head since i heard it on sunday.

we walked home, picking up a couple of onion bagels along the way, and mr smear dived in to his homework (including hebrew reading, which we were informed today can't be comics) while i did a little more work.

mr smear and i put his duvet in the duvet cover this evening. after wishing him a good night, i spent some time doing nothing until i was ready to pass out early.

...

and then woke up a couple of hours ago, restless and with a sore neck and shoulder, and i eventually got up to write this and try to entertain myself until i'm sleepy again. i've been watching a lot of youtube videos - we're praying that trump takes the US election, and we're waiting for iran's "imminent" attack - but i haven't been able to get into any games lately (although i did play through act's ii and iii of inscryption again last week). and i guess my reading streak is broken. maybe i'll try to get that going again.