stretch

 today was almost entirely spent hiding at home with the A/C on, aside from a few minutes taking mr smear to the corner store to pick up some stuff, most importantly tortit ice creams.

if it wasn't for the discomfort in my neck and legs - possibly a sympathetic response to gd's difficulties - it was a quiet day. we all watched american pop together, which is an absolute masterpiece. there were two moments in the entire movie which were a little too edgy for mr smear, but overall it was thoroughly brilliant, beautifully animated, and wonderful.

before we made kiddush - this is becoming a tradition - mr smear and i played through another level in starcraft ii. he *really* wants to skip to the zerg, though, while i want to play the story through sequentially, so we agreed that next time we'll take turns between zerg and humans.

over dinner and until (late) bedtime, we started watching the doctor who reboot. great experience, and now we're back into mr smear needing to be brave at bedtime because he found some elements disturbing...

the good and the bad

 i don't remember how well or poorly i slept on thursday night, but last night was alright... until about 4 or 5am, when my hips started hurting but i was too exhausted to physically get out of bed and try to sort myself out.

bigtalk and i actually had a conversation about sleeping yesterday, he suffers from PTSD and he takes ritalin for ADHD and he was proposing melatonin, when i told him some of my stories about treating my RLS-like issues he was mortified - there's no feeling quite like winning the victim olympics :/

...

i woke up to a message from my boss letting me know that he's initiating a process to let bigtalk go.

i feel bad for him, but it's a relief. it's also scary, because the longer the week's worn on the less predictable he's become, and he's a security expert, and i'm nervous that might be able to do a lot of damage once he finds out. so when i got up this morning and spent twenty minutes writing up a protocol for his "offboarding".

still...

i really like the guy, but if you put a gun to my head i wouldn't be able to make a call as to whether he's for real or not. i want to mentor him, but at the same time i don't feel he's capable of receiving advice that doesn't already fit into his very narrow view of our field.

...

mr smear and i accompanied gd to the pharmacy on our way to the office in the sweltering heat. we moved from airconditioner to airconditioner, we took the light rail, and we arrived to find my vegan avo bagel untouched. so mr smear had a solid breakfast (parenting score!) and thoroughly enjoyed it :)

...

the big effort of the day was trying to deploy with bigtalk's new system, and trying to fix it, and becoming more and more convinced that this was an incredibly bad idea. the deal-breaker for me - the final, tiny straw amongst a host of others - was discovering that all of his work wasn't even based on our original scripts and didn't account for some very important behavior.

for anyone who works with code, the above is real, and it's not even the worst part.

that all came to a head - me explaining to him that we weren't going to merge, and that we were going to park his PR and rebuild a solution piece by piece that can hopefully salvage it for parts - while mr smear (remarkably patiently) waited for me to go and get him some lunch. the ensuing argument was painful, and went on for about half an hour, with him continuing to try to convince us that we were making a mistake.

...

mr smear put together a good salad, and enthusiastically demolished it. later, at our happy hour, the two of us hovered over the vegan sushi platter. at first, i handled feeding him with chopsticks, but at some point i managed to convince him to give them a try. he followed the instructions, and within minutes he'd got the hang of it!!

i don't know which of us was more excited ^_^

i didn't really get to participate in the game hacking event because it was a thursday evening and i was busy breaking our test site with a new release candidate. it was the perfectly horrible ending to a perfectly horrible day (for me), but mr smear had overall had a great time and even participated along with the two guys who were doing the game dev (although he got them into trouble with chatgpt because one of his proposed ideas wasn't safe for work :P)

we came home pretty late, and found gd in a rough state - she's basically been bedridden since yesterday morning due to nerve pain in her back that's radiating into her chest :(

after getting mr smear into bed, i played some slay the spire and then went to bed (relatively) early myself.

crash

 i woke up early to go to the hygienist. the experience was less painful than i anticipated. apparently i need to use a softer brush.

i bussed (very actively enjoying my music) to work, where i made the regrettably awkward decision to not go for coffee with our CEO because i'd just been at the hygienist (like, i didn't have to buy anything).

my new coworker and i spent a good ten minutes troubleshooting the coffee machine, and i was shocked to discover that he'd been unwilling to toss the extra trial-and-error coffees so he was drinking them (O_o)

i spent a chunk of the day completing the 1am story, and for the most part it looks like i succeeded. and, for the first part, it looks like the work i was doing before i encountered that stuff was good. the central part of the work day was a meeting for our algo team that i'd initiated, which was generally productive. unfortunately, bigtalk kept suggesting solutions to problems nobody has, which was a bit awkward.

amusingly, i found myself unwittingly describing the act of connecting, enabling and disconnecting as "tune in, turn on, drop out". two people in the meeting laughed, for everyone else it went over their heads , which would have been fine but they demanded an explanation. fortunately that was only a little bit awkward and passed quickly enough :P

the salad group's salad was great. the post-salad leftover chocolate-and-peanut-butter cake was also great. i feel like i'm doing a pretty good job of getting others to help me with it.

the most important piece of the work was a bit intimidating, so as part of gearing up for it i made myself a non-caffeinated drink; the only one i could find that tasted good was a vanilla chamomile tea, and then all of a sudden (probably because drinking chamomile is my go-to i'm-going-to-bed-soon move) i felt really drowsy as the previous couple of days caught up with me all at once.

so i left early.

it was hot.

the tech ops guy called me as i was about to get home, already feeling faint, with more problems.

i was feeling faint, and in desperate need of a nap, but i was so sweaty from the ride home that i had to shower before i could nap. i napped to the first episode of hunter x hunter, and woke up to mr smear playing insanely difficult levels he configured for himself in spiderheck.

dinner was delicious. afterwards, while mr smear prepared for bed, i ran tech support for my mom whose old email address had suddenly stopped working. we eventually came right, but not without some big feelings. then i read some more of the neverending story to mr smear and gd, and then arsed around as an excuse to drink another chamomile before finally going to bed.

...

and then getting up at 3.30am after being restless for a fairly long while.

...

the incoming manager reached out to me for an update, and i found myself in the weird position of trying to explain to him that the situation with bigtalk isn't entirely straightforward. i think i have a pretty good handle on him, he's not a bad guy and his work - when he understands the requirements - is excellent. but his ability to understand the requirements is clouded by his ego and inexperience, and his second-languageness in both hebrew and english, and his attention disorder. while at present it's safe to say he's better off as a one-man show, it's not going to be good for him in the long run to not have proper mentorship.

slowdown

i slept a bit better, but still not great.

today began busily. we started off on a mission to get mr smear's gear for the new school year, and neither i nor the poor kid at the stationery store could make heads or tails of some of the items on the list. mr smear and i had a really good conversation on our way into the mall, and if he remembers any of it i think he's going to have a much better year.

mr smear got really excited about vine leaves and cauliflower schnitzel, so we splurged. it was outrageously expensive, but i kinda wanna encourage him anyways.

after getting home and eating a bit, we all took his bike to the repair shop. it was a long, long walk in the heat, which hasn't been this oppressive since my mother left... i had an unpleasant and weird moment with a woman who arrived after us, but cut in front of us. if i'm honest with myself, i shouldn't have been waiting so politely for someone to get to me. anyway, we left them the bike and my phone number, not a clue when they'll get back to me.

on the way home we stopped for lemonade and to get mr smear a half-pita of falafel, which he thoroughly enjoyed. gd says he's entering his "eating" phase. if that's true, i'm good with that.

the afternoon was spent very lazily. we tried watching my dinner with andre, which i found somewhat interesting before i passed out and which gd walked out on pretty quickly. i invited mr smear to join me as i played through the ending of inscryption, and we both enjoyed that. we ended up watching quite a few videos about it, and i'm now playing through act ii again just to get an achievement i missed, and there's a final kaycee's mod achievement that i missed as well...

in the evening, i tricked mr smear into watching some of fantasia with us, which he enjoyed a lot more than he thought he would.

we just finished a late kiddush / dinner, and everyone's getting ready to go to bed.

inspiration

 yesterday:

the exhibit was very interesting. getting there was a story, i don't know if there was a GPS issue or not but my bus app was playing silly buggers and i ended up making some lucky guesses to get there on time.

on the way i bumped into a combat fitness instructor (identified by her shirt), who was happy to answer questions that i had on behalf of someone online who's trying to get into that role and asked me if i could help. so that was convenient :)

the first part of the exhibit was very, very long. and there were no seats. and as a not-journalist, i found myself both amused and frustrated by the differences in calibre of the people in the group with me. some of the things i saw were new, one piece of footage of an unsuspecting victim driving straight into the firing line of a rocket launcher was unsettling.

not as unsettling as being in the same room as the actual trowel that was used to behead a thai worker, though. the room was filled with weapons, documents and clothing, along with certificates from hamas' kids' training camps, and the more information we were exposed to the deeper and darker the picture it paints.

it was a look into the abyss of the darkest recesses of the human spirit.

eventually we moved to a screening of footage from october 7th, and although i'd braced myself, all i needed to hear was the vague description of what we were about to see and "nope" the fuck on out of there. i understand the journalists having an obligation to bear witness, but i didn't need to see it with my eyes or hear it with my ears.

just the description alone was more than enough to rattle me.

in a completely different vein, the conversations outside on the way out and home were riveting, constructive, and encouraging. i feel less alone, and i'm warmed by the enthusiasm which some of the group who "get" what we're facing embraced my vision.

it was also cool seeing gco again. and i gave a pep talk to a couple of cadets who were on duty as guards.

i was utterly bombed (poor choice of words) by the time i got back home. i passed out for a while, woke up to a small fight with mr smear about his homework - gd did a great job coming to the rescue - and then mr smear, my mom and i went out to dizengoff center and the shuk for what ended up amounting to a nice, but rather hot, walk before dinner.

inscryption, then bed.

today:

i definitely slept better. i worked from home today, and actually got stuff done in spite of my noisy family all around me. mr smear's synth practice this morning was very impressive, and on the whole mr smear was very cool today. including at the climbing wall in the evening, even though he was really unhappy about the heat. it was ridiculously hot today.

otherwise, my mom and i took him to his hebrew tutor and i ran a quick half-hour errand in the heat to the post office depot to pick up what turned out to be nothing but a single sharpie :/

ali express ftw...

anyway.

two amusing things at the wall: i made a deal with mr smear but worded it badly, and he thoroughly enjoyed following my instructions to the letter in precisely the opposite of the spirit in which they were clearly intended. i conceded graciously, we had fun, and he'd already done a lot of good climbing anyway :)

the second was a harley rider driving by taking himself very seriously. mr smear: "i love it when motorcycles sound like farts" 🤣🤣🤣

it's late, and the next few days are full of Business. i'm probably going to go to bed soon.

...

my mom and her best friend were talking today, and a thought suddenly struck me - they're both aware that they need to get out of south africa, and they're both nervous about where to go and how to manage. so why not make aliyah together, be close to their families, and provide each other with a good buffer and support while settling?

seder

 we got to the car on time, but as we did so i began to feel like i might need to pee shortly, so after inspecting for damage and connecting my phone i stopped across the road from our apartment and made it to our bathroom just as it became an emergency.

i was worried that that was going to be a feature of our drive - an hour or so on the road - but fortunately that was it.

the evening was a bit surreal. it was wonderful and comforting to have most of the family together, even though kc's brother-n-law had been called up for reserve duty so we only saw him briefly via video chat. kc's two week-old and kc's sister's two month old were both there, and it was quite special to meet them. mr smear was being aggressively / unpleasantly shy and awkward, though he did participate in the singing of ma nishtanah and very enthusiastically joined his cousins on the hunt for the afikoman before it had even been hidden.

he was weird about the "prize" - he didn't want to take the twenty shekels from kc's dad - but yesterday he informed me that it was because he felt that it was unfair to him 😂

he also got angry with a little girl for "stealing", even though he had no real evidence that that's what had taken place.

the seder itself was mostly "the usual" for that side of the family, very loud and fun, but we made space both physically and emotionally for the hostages, even singing along to habayita (which triggered a fair amount of tears around the room).

the drive home was a bit mad, it was long, with heavy traffic and scary drivers on the road, but we made it to tel aviv safely and got home around 1.30am after dropping off the lady who'd helped in the kitchen.

yesterday:

i didn't sleep well, and i was exhausted and lazy for most of the day. i finally got mr smear's phone account sorted out in the morning, at least. in the afternoon, we went out for a walk to the park by the beach, which began with ice cream, ended with chips, and its middle was full of whining because mr smear wanted a sandwich and it's passover, where a) we don't do bread and b) passover bread is horrible.

anyway.

i bumped into an old friend at the park with some friends of his, and i was very awkward. or they were. maybe we all were. oh, well...

at dinner we watched more of the magic prank show, which is just amazing.

after putting mr smear to bed - after he very proudly called my mom from his own phone to say good night - gd and i watched another fallout episode.

today:

i slept much better, but started off the day all wrong. otherwise, it was a pretty good morning, but very hot; we're experiencing a heat wave right now, and it was an oven-like 37 degrees this afternoon with more of the same promised for tomrorow. the work day was good, but a bit weird. the thing i'm thinking about a lot is that a few of us had a particularly heated debate the other day, and after diving a bit deeper today i discovered that two of us were decidedly wrong - an apology is in order to the third, but he's on vacation for a week.

it was nigh impossible to find lunch today, it bothers me that the salad places are all closed down for passover. so i ended up getting hummus from an arab place, which turned out to be the best hummus in the area by far. after waiting twenty minutes in the line in the extreme heat, i ordered something that turned out to be with meat in it, and i was embarrassed and disappointed. i had planned to just take it out of my dish and give it to my teammates, but in the end we discovered that it wasn't meat after all, just really nicely-made fava beans :P

the wework management provided matzah and chocolate spreads, but nothing vegan, so one of them disappeared into their storeroom and returned with a whole slab of panda chocolate for me ^_^

at dinner we finished watching the magic prank show, and after getting mr smear into bed we watched the season finale of the fallout series. holy shit, they really did an amazing job and we both thoroughly enjoyed it! i'm really pleased that gd can now appreciate a world i've been so captivated by for over two decades ^_^