unexpected things

i jump-started my day yesterday by taking the rosh hashana cards mr smear forgot to deliver on tuesday to the school.

on the way, our bus was stalled by a homeless guy who literally stood in front of the bus, smoking a cigarette and trying to goad the driver into a fight. the driver kept edging towards him, with his fucking bus. the homeless guy didn't give a fuck. then, suddenly, another bus pulled in front of us and the homeless guy ran into it with his lit cigarette to go and terrorize the poor people on it :/

i stopped at the pharmacy on my way home to pick up gd's meds (a long wait, but less long that usual), then came home for breakfast and to begin working.

...

it was my first group meeting with my client, and i was unpleasantly surprised to be asking to introduce myself to the group immediately after the manager had given me a pretty robust introduction. in retrospect i should have probably focused on the personal aspects of my life rather than the professional 🙄

regardless, two people reached out to me privately as a result of my introduction: the first, a fellow contractor who i didn't realize was in the same group. the second? a guy from the officer's course i haven't seen in almost sixteen years, who i happened to be thinking about on wednesday because we were last together at the same place our company status was held!

...

the work-from-home day went alright, but for two things:

the first, that i had a real snacking problem yesterday, and by "snacking" i mean "i ate a few more actual meals than i should have". so it's not that the quality of the food was questionable, but the quantity was out of control.

the second, that at the beginning of my meeting with my lead he asked me to pause the recording, and after a congenial personal sync during which he wanted to know how i was feeling about things, i asked him for feedback and learned that there is a point regarding my progress on which he's disappointed.

i spent the rest of the day heavily focused on resolving that, and i believe i finished the day having made good progress.

...

gd had a big day yesterday: she finally got the haircut she's been longing for for months (she had to postpone her appointment until we were sure we were through the lice incident, and the incident caused her to cut her own hair in a way that bothered her), and she finally got it cut short which i've been suggesting for years. so we're both happier now :)

in the afternoon we went to two stores to do the grocery shopping, and by the second we found what we needed for the long weekend and, specifically, her experimental kebab dinner.

...

while i didn't enjoy the experimental kebabs, the episode of spider-noir we watched along with it was great (i *love* the cameo musical phrase appearances borrowed from all the other spider-man movies). after dinner / showering and brushing teeth, we sat down to watch the second half of judge dredd. overall: it's a bit childish, standard 90s action fare with one-dimensional characters and some heavy character assassination by wedged in "romance", but the concept of megacity one, and the ABC warbot and mean machine, was great and we all had fun.

two puffs before bed (my lower back and hip flexors were doing their thing), and it helped.

...

i woke up this morning to a coffee on the balcony (no comics, no computer) while thinking about my tarot game (i'm feeling quite lost, actually, when it comes to the actual game mechanics), and i've since spent the past few hours working through my open work in my auto-doc project and my employer's spec project. i'm done with the former and just about (i think) done with the latter, and now gd and i are leaving our heavily coughing mr smear at home to go to the mall and find a board game that she's interested in playing.

it's not supposed to be work

 last night was great! dinner was delicious (and quick), although once again the challah-peño was too hot for poor mr smear... mr smear and i sampled the individual mochi (the vanilla one was good, but neither was worth the expense compared to regular ice cream), gd packed up the gift mochi and i headed out to hail a taxi. over the past couple of years tahoma's husband has been using their bomb shelter time to develop a whole lot of cocktails, and over the course of the evening i had two of them, and the two of them were sufficient to do a real number on me.

otherwise, it was a lovely couple of hours spent with them and nystire and a guy i haven't seen since a pride march around 2008 / 2009 :)

aside from a half an hour or so of lower back pain waking me up in the middle, i slept pretty soundly.

i woke up pretty early, considering, and i spent most of the morning and early afternoon feeling pretty tired. i read a bit of my favorite thing is monsters, which is phenomenal, and cleaned the balcony, and eventually managed to get myself motivated enough to spend a few hours investigating alternative AI harness and model options, while simultaneously testing them on my auto-doc project and the tarot game.

i'm still going, though i've had some success it overall feels tragically like real work, stressful, frustrating and not at all fun. heavy limitations on AI usage take something that's painful enough as it is - working with an idiot that needs a lot of babysitting to not fuck up your shit - and making it essentially impossible. in addition to that, i'm no longer in the least bit interested in doing the coding work manually like a peasant, and none of the tools (specifically codex and opencode, i've given up on pi for now) have any of the plugins, workflows or options that i need to operate effectively.

everything is broken.

i took a break to play uno with gd, which was great fun for us but left a bitter taste after mr smear had not only refused, but ended up being rude enough to lose rather a lot of screen time :/

after that, we went out on our rollerblades. he complained for a while about his ankle hurting, but i think i sorted it out by tightening the straps... also, by incentivizing him with a drink, because we went back up and through the park on the way home and he was doing fine.

along the way we encountered the horrible homeless woman, who's very aggressive and started walking towards us while calling us names. i discussed how we were handling it with mr smear, avoiding her and trying not to provoke her, but in retrospect i think i should have called the police - i think it was a week ago that she was doing the same to gd, and i'm quite over the stress of whether or not i'm going to have to get physical with this unpredictable maniac in order to protect my family.

mr smear and i both had cold* showers, and i got stuck in to an hour of troubleshooting a ridiculous unity license issue (the AI broke it trying to run tests in sandbox mode, and it took a lot of experimentation and grilling gemini to give me a useful answer), then i stopped for dinner.

* cold-ish, in this weather the coldest water is more cool than cold

dinner was great, after which we had another discussion about gaming, and why we need to compromise, and gd - in a show of great magnanimity - chose to play fluxx in spite of the fact that she doesn't like it.

well.

mr smear, oblivious to gd's rising anger, enjoyed himself in spite of his protests, and did really well. gd, on the other hand... i've told her it's up to her to find a game that she wants to play.

after wishing mr smear a good night, i jumped back into to the game dev, with a little auto-doc on the side, and i've managed to catch the menu system vibe i wanted, which is pretty exciting.

and i've only used ten percent of my weekly limit...

i think i'm about ready for bed, now. tomorrow's gonna be an interesting week 🤷‍♂️

entering overtime (again)

 it took me a while to get to bed last night, and i think i slept alright. my wakeup, however, was startling.

mr smear got up early, brushed his teeth, and made himself breakfast.

i literally had to bite my lip to keep from saying "who are you and what have you done with my son?", gd woke up in even worse shape than before and he really made our morning so much easier.

i knew that rewarding him with screen time was the right thing to do, and he appreciated it, but i also know that that's a slippery slope...

... meanwhile, he installed something all by himself and it was a panicky few minutes making sure it wasn't malware :/

i walked him to school, then returned home, and barely had time for anything before gd and i joined our scheduled parental guidance session.

considering how wild the previous week had been, we had a lot to talk about. some of the conversation was tough, but i feel like we both got a lot out of it.

i then immediately left to pick mr smear up from school and take him to the doctor. i managed to get some work done while waiting, mainly because the doctor was running about half an hour late. she took one look at his eye and told me we need to carry on the treatment... i don't think we really needed an appointment for that.

i dropped him off at home, had a quick breakfast, then hopped on a bus to work. most of the bus ride was spent breathing into my arm and staying as far away as possible from the smelly homeless guy who was arguing with himself.

the work day was... not bad, i guess. but i've got urgent stuff to catch up on tonight, and it's 11pm already :(

homework time wasn't perfect, but we got through it. dinner was nice. watching most of the first episode of slow horses while trying to help gd with her back was fantastic. listening to these two videos of eric weinstein while doing the dishes was.. comforting. people are understanding.

* eric weinstein sees something in hamas’s strategy no one else sees

* you’re in a war (and you don’t even know it

and now that i've typed this all out, back to wrestling with cdktf.

overflow

 i boiled over this morning, i'm doing what i can to take this afternoon as easy as possible.

the day began pretty simply, we got up, had coffee, i played through bloons: adventure time quests and caught up on stuff. then we woke mr smear up, fed him, and we left for the shuk. on the way to the bus, we ran into our old neighbor and his now six-month old son, and we had a good chat. i mean, the subject matter was tough, but it was nice talking to him.

the bad feelings began on the bus. not because the driver was driving recklessly (and throwing us about) - though that didn't help - but because there was a bunch of young people and nobody would give up their seats for the old people who climbed in.

and then it was a fight to get off the bus because of all the idiots blocking the doors, and it took a little while to start calming down. but by then we were in the shuk itself, and we were realizing that we weren't going to find what we were looking for, and then all the people around us were doing what mall people (yes, same thing) do, and then that started stressing me out...

then we walked down king george, but first we encountered an old rollerblading friend and i completely blanked on his name and got super weird and uncomfortable. we walked down to dizengoff center, where the security guard insisted on shaking my hand before letting us in.

*shakes head*

king george was unusually empty - obviously because lots of people are scared or scared away - but the mall was pretty full.

first a pit stop, then finding food, all through mall people. that part was good, and the tourist group doing a headphone party activity was amusing.

we hit the sports store and found gd a swimming cap, then took mr smear into the toysrus to see if there was anything he wanted for his birthday. this time i was the one who became overwhelmed, and progressively desperate for a cold drink and coffee. eventually, on the point of losing it, i rushed everyone out, very grateful for gd being in full support mode.

we got some cool drinks, then crossed the road to ozen hashlishi and sat down. i approached the baristas, who informed me that... that their coffee machine had broken down. the big man i'd assumed was a barista was actually the technician. i looked her in the eyes, and explained that i was desperate, and would settle for a turkish coffee if they had any.

they did.

and just as she was about to start preparing it for me, the technician announced that the machine was back in working order.

*relief*

still very anxious, we sat outside and i slowly calmed down over my latte, and then we hopped on a bus home.

i still had some leftovers and a bagel from our mall breakfast, so i figured i'd give it away if we came across anyone in need. there's an older homeless woman who i've seen a lot in the area lately - the last time i saw her she was fighting with some garbage men about *her* trash can - and i asked if she was interested. she said no, but told me there was another woman walking around who would be, and so i left it on the bench and said it was for that woman.

she began yelling at me. i tried to walk away, but she picked up the package and ran over to me because "she's got enough trouble of her own, she can't be helping other homeless people".

wtaf.

*sigh*

anyway, we came home, and i rested, and the rest of the afternoon's been all about playing games: inscryption (act ii of the story mode), and i roped mr smear into playing shivers with me because he wouldn't stop going on about scary games. overall, we had a fun experience together, and while the atmosphere totally creeped him out the jump scare (which i'd warned him was coming) didn't bother him too much. i think the proprietor's corpse was a bit much for him, though, but reading about the hieroglyphs seemed to distract him sufficiently.

...

now praying for a quiet weekend.