i mean... the nerves

 firstly, i'm tired, and i've just completed an hour and a half of my employer's onboarding because they're unhappy that i haven't done it yet, all the while feeling bitter that i started working for my client on the same day as my employer and i'm really overwhelmed. not to mention the fact that i'm completely ragged from all the moving things combined with handling mr smear.

to be fair, though, relative to this morning his behavior in the evening was great. he did only go to bed around 10pm, but that's because he had a lot of homework to do...

... it's amazing to us that once he was punished, he cooperated fully and had no issues with actually doing the work. i wish i could understand this.

...

the woman we were waiting for turned out to be a real piece of work. not only did she get pushy when i told her that 1pm was the cut-off, she then had the gall to start asking me why it was so important that go back to work on time!

my mom asked me why i didn't put the phone down on her at that point, to which i didn't have an immediate answer.

then she arrived literally a few minutes before 1pm. i asked her to remove her shoes, to which she responded that "it disgusts her". i explained that she's not coming into our home with her shoes on. she asked if we had animals, i said "no, but the landlords are okay with them".

"me too, but not in the house" she replied.

then she really pissed me off; she took one shoe off at the entrance, then took a step into the living room before taking off the other one. i asked her to move the shoe to the entrance, to which she rudely responded "what do you care?"

at this point, i should have kicked her out, possibly throwing her shoes out the front door and down the stairs first. but i didn't. she took a quick look around, asked a couple of questions, and then i told her it was time to go.

it was only later that i really thought about it; if it wasn't worth two months' rent to me, there's no way i would have tolerated that behavior, but in the current situation it really would be tantamount to saying "it's worth two month's rent to me to not have to deal with you."

i don't have two month's rent to burn.

anyway, later in the evening i agreed to talk to her again - i didn't want to hear her ugly, entitled, malignant-tumor-on-the-backside-of-humanity voice - and when she asked to see the apartment again, and i told her thursday morning between 8 and 9, she said that it's too difficult for her because she has to go to work...

... do you know that feeling, when you come up with the perfect response hours or days too late? that's not what happened to me. immediately, i wanted to fire back "what, do you have a meeting or something? why can't you just go later?" like she did to me.

i'm feeling extremely proud of myself for keeping my mouth shut. honestly, i hope she does want the apartment, and that our shitty landlords agree to sign her on. they all deserve each other. but at the same time, it would give me great pleasure to tell her that someone else has taken it.

but now that i think about it, it would give me even greater pleasure to wait until she and the landlords have signed, and i have our deposit in hand, to tell her "good luck, you're going to need it."

...

the rest of the work day went pretty positively, even though i was half an hour late to a half an hour meeting that i didn't realize was happening.

at 4pm i joined a meeting i'd been invited to with some guys from my employer, without understanding what it was or why i was invited. it turned out to be a game design session, and while it was an engaging meeting and they definitely appreciated my contributions, i really don't think this one in particular is for me. i also couldn't really afford the hour out of my day, especially not today.

home - homework - dinner - shower - toenail treatment (i hope i'm not imagining things, but i feel like there's some improvement) - homework - employer onboarding - posting - my brain hurts and i need to go to bed soon.

...

ran gvili's body has been recovered, his family (and the rest of us) can get a little bit of closure now that his body can be buried with dignity.

❤️💔 🇮🇱 🙏

 gd's earliest alarm woke me up around 6am, and from that point i was unable to return to sleep, not least because i was thinking about the hostage release.

the next few hours were a mess of me watching the news, then deciding not to watch the news, and then watching the news anyway. it was an intense morning, and while our little mission to the pharmacy should have provided some distraction, our pharmacy is very close to hostage square where 65,000 people were crowded, waiting for updates.

we got what we needed (gd doesn't think i made a good decision regarding mosquito repellent, we'll see*) and returned home, then glued ourselves to news feeds until all twenty living hostages were in israeli-controlled territory.

שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה.

* i went with oil of lemon eucalyptus instead of the chemicals that come with scary warnings ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hearing the helicopters overhead bringing in hostages to ichilov hospital was surreal. today's an emotional rollercoaster for sure - the hostages returning home, their families, their losses, the bodies that haven't been / won't be returned, the thousands of soldiers who were killed since the war started... and who knows what tomorrow will bring?

so we're breathing again and celebrating and mourning all at the same time. it's one hell of a time to say chag sameach

the rest of the afternoon was distractions (chores, shadowrun) while beginning to process, so lots of celebrating and lots of sobbing. someone said it beautifully: for two years now, it's been october 7th. with the last of the living hostages returned, today is october 8th. we can finally start grieving.

even though it's not quite all over. but between trump and netanyahu and all our arab neighbors, it's anyone's guess what's going to happen in the coming days, months and years.

but today was a good day. today we collectively breathe and celebrate the return of those who survived 738 days in captivity, tortured by orcs.

the horror

 today began with preparing a document for mr smear (and gd) to learn the hebrew months, and getting mr smear out of bed to do math homework. there was some tension, but nothing too serious, and we got through it. i flipped our mattresses, did some dishes, (finally) checked that we had authorization for wednesday's allergy challenge, and left for work.

after a long chat with my mom about aliyah, i entered the office for a day filled with interruptions of interruptions.

highlights/lowlights:

a) finally getting in touch with a potential partner after being assured they'd been updated by their superiors, and they hadn't.

b) discovering that our outsourced security team had updated a policy without asking for our consent, or informing us, and it disconnected everyone in rnd, some of whom were engaged in mission-critical tasks. i lost my temper - i've never cursed that much or that loudly in the office*. i informed my boss that they'd crossed a line (not exactly for the first time) and we need to bring our security in-house. i think he heard me pretty clearly this time.

* and, oddly enough, in hebrew. i don't think i've ever done that before, i've always found cursing in hebrew awkward.

c) by the end of the day, after hours battling buggy docker behavior, i finally got to the bottom of our devcontainer / vpn issues. ironically, they were caused by a misconfiguration by my british coworker when he originally tried to fix them, but for some reason everything seemed to work well for almost two weeks before wigging out.

so at least i can move forward with my real work now.

...

i travelled most of the way home with our tech ops guy (there're two now, but whatever), and i was shocked to discover that he's a jewish israeli that was born and raised here but has zero connection or comprehension of judaism. i gave him a bit of a lecture on why i think it's important for non-observant jews to understand the history of our beliefs and practices, and he was totally shocked by what i had to say.

i arrived home, picked up mr smear, and the two of us went off to the mall to buy sleeping bags for the class camping trip this weekend. heavy cigarette smell in the bus notwithstanding, we had a long conversation during which i was shocked and dismayed to learn that he'd spent a good chunk of his day on youtube, behind gd's back, watching really disturbing horror videos.

i've now seen his watch history. i mean disturbing. thanks, youtube, for managing kids' content so safely. and thanks, also, for not enabling parents to block desktop youtube over family link.

on our way home, we sat down for some really good falafel (and i awkward didn't realize why ze british german's wife looked familiar until she'd already greeted me and walked past), then picked up a sandwich for gd, and came home.

another late night for mr smear (his antivirals), but thank god getting him to sleep went smoother than anticipated. i've spent most of the night playing more shadowrun, and now i'm going to bed, trying - continuing to try, at least - not to think about the war / hostage release situation. and now that i've typed that, i'll probably check the news and fuck myself up a bit :/

challenges

don't count your hostages before they've been safely returned. i'm hoping against hope, but god knows if any of what's supposed to be happening right now is real.

...

in addition to everything else, gd's eye's been giving her trouble, and today things got serious. so we began the day accompanying her to the clinic, and then i walked them most of the way home before heading to the office.

the work day was okay, calm but a bit messy. highlights included terminating our contract with a guy who's been on retainer for months but who's been occupying himself with stuff we never asked for, probably out of boredom.

i consumed far too many calories during happy hour.

the game hacking session never happened, but me hanging around did present an opportunity for a wild AI conversation.

• AI Slop Is Destroying The Internet
• It Begins: An AI Literally Attempted Murder To Avoid Shutdown
• Using AI Makes Your Brain Lazy, Even After You Stop Using It, New Study Shows
• and it's especially creepy hearing an AI describing how we're using AI wrong: Replacing Humans with AI Has Gone Terribly Wrong | Geoffrey Hinton Explains

i came home, we had dinner (and watched an episode of futurama), and i managed to convince mr smear to draw the amazing inktober concept he'd come up with in the morning. unfortunately, we didn't get to publish it because by the time he finished inking it - and he refuses to post it without color - it was already 11pm. and then getting him to go to sleep was a whole other story...

...

tomorrow's the day we go to the circus, but also a friday that gd needs to go to the emergency clinic. oh! and i got a call from the hospital today, mr smear can do his dairy challenge next week 🤞

two years

 october 7th, two years later. i have nothing to say. that is, i have lots to say, and zero energy to even say it.

...

this morning got off to a pretty good start. reading and napping, including reading a chapter of the neverending story to my wife and child.

on our way out to ride to the swimming pool, i got stuck for almost half an hour trying to arrange tickets for circo circo for us and mr smear's best friend. we eventually got that right, so crossing fingers that friday will be smooth 🤞

the ride there was pretty chill, though i think mr smear was right about it taking much longer than i'd expected. most of our swimming experience was good, in spite of me having woken up with my neck threatening to lock (it's still threatening a bit). the toughest, drainiest part was the forty five minutes spent getting mr smear out of the pool, into the locker room, out of the shower, and out of the locker room.

we were both that special kind of tired after a sunny ride and a long time in the pool.

and that was before we had to ride all the way home...

we made it, eventually*, stopping only for a much-needed ice-cream break.

* about half an hour later

we came home with a plan, and we executed it well. drink water, shower, eat, play, and watch the first two episodes of full metal alchemist: brotherhood.

the rest of the afternoon has been switching between dirty dishes and inktober. now it's almost dinner time.

waiting quietly

 we did very little yesterday (aside from cleaning the floor). we did the puzzle (we're mostly done at this point), read / napped / played (mr smear was overjoyed to discover that subnautica runs better on my m2 macbook than on our shitty dell xps), we made challah-peño again - which was an amazing success, again - and after kiddush we ate a simple dinner and watched a couple more episodes of futurama (even gd's getting won over).

this morning has been pretty chilled so far, but i just had a realization about mr smear's screentime/downtime protocol: it's been bothering me for ages that he sets an alarm to the end of his downtime, and it bumps him out of whatever he's doing. he was just making fantastic progress on his day 4 inktober entry, and his alarm went off and he just tossed it aside to go look for a screen.

so no more downtime alarms, only screentime alarms.

we learn.

...

in political news, i've read the hamas response to trump's peace proposal and it doesn't seem like they're going to do what's being demanded of them. which isn't surprising. but i'm nervous, because if they return the hostages, we don't know what they'll do to the hostages pre- or during delivery, everything they've done has been calculated to maximize psychological harm to israel. but if all they do is mess around, at least we have clearance to go in and get the job done.

reinforced

 trump and bibi's announcement earlier was very interesting - even the ridiculous waffling was amusing, i guess that counts. my interpretation is that either hamas disintegrates now and we actually get the hostages back, or (more likely) we now officially have everyone's blessing to continue to fuck them up, rotten qatar included. either way, i see this as a win.

...

mr smear went to school by himself today. gd was more nervous about that than me, but the moment he was out of sight he was out of mind, and almost an hour later i remembered to check that he got to school alright :P

we had our final parental guidance session with the therapist, which was interesting and largely positive.

...

it was a long work day, but very constructive in spite of the fact that i developed a bit of a headache from the get-go. the new devops seems to be finding his groove, and the contractor and i had a spectacularly good day; that "unfinished" work i pushed a couple of weeks ago? we finally fixed the things that were blocking it, and it worked. seeing a completely successful run was one of those special, pivotal moments, and it unlocks a bunch of cool things* going forward.

* things that will make everyone's lives easier

i got home in time to have a pleasant chat with mr smear (and try to figure out why my computer's behaving badly), and dinner was great, and bedtime went smoothly. the past couple of hours have been quiet, and i'm now contemplating heading to bed early.

...

oh, shit! i completely forgot to mention yesterday that our company's acquired another startup in order to merge its fifteen-person development team into ours (O_o)

i guess things are going to be busy. also, that means we've just run out of space in our huge new (temporary) offices :P

the stress ball

yesterday began positively, and so far the post-privileges world is looking pretty good.

when my mother informed me last night that mr smear had reported that he'd lost his privileges forever, i was reminded that on the way to school, we'd seen a child dressed up in a costume and mr smear had asked me how long until halloween.

now, please bear in mind that my son has absolutely no concept of time, and asking him what day it is is usually a silly waste of breath, but also that on our way home on saturday i'd told him that he'd remember the 10th of may as "the last time [he] fucked with me". so when i asked him what day it was, he didn't hesitate to say "11th of may" and it took everything i had to not laugh out loud and continue with "and what month is halloween?" 🤣

the past two work days have been hard, but yesterday was the harder of the two. it was almost exclusively about planning and preparing installations, although it also included entertaining nystire for a bit, reminiscing about our late coworker with our security officer (who's also mourning, but is outsourced so hasn't been doing so as part of the organization), and interviewing a very interesting candidate (i marked him as "strong hire" when i should have marked "proceed", but there's nothing i can do and it's probably fine).

those distractions notwithstanding, it was 7.30pm when we finally had a release candidate that had been sufficiently tested to begin the first installation, and we then found ourselves doing it on unfamiliar hardware and with a very clear and unrealistic looming deadline.

i found myself alone, nursing a beer (my meal replacement) and running into the weirdest issues, until at 10.15pm i realized that i'd been battling for over an hour with a VPN misconfiguration thinking that i was having network issues - that was when i finally left the office and came home; not physically tired, but emotionally completely done.

oh, and my back having been in a spasm for most of the day didn't help much either.

...

i finally posted the following yesterday evening, which i'd been thinking about since being painfully disappointed by a post from tpj a few days ago:

a few days ago an officer that i served with, who lives in a country with some of the most toxic, antisemitic media in the world (the BBC), wrote a post describing israel as an "occupation" and our army as guilty of war crimes. such counterfactual propaganda is painful enough when other people repeat it, but it's led to me recognize that the old adage about the greatest evil being the indifference of good men needs to be revised:

the greatest evil is the amplification of evil by people who we expect to know better. 

in retrospect, our lives since october 7th have been completely overtaken by a perpetual sense of mourning. we mourn the victims of the massacre itself, and all of the traumas both personal and national that the massacre has left behind. we mourn the hostages even as we hope against hope that some of them might return, and we mourn the horrors that they've endured and continue to endure. we mourn the hopes that we've held for so long that peace was somehow just around the corner, and we mourn the decades that we spent deluding ourselves that the situation was so much simpler and less demonic than it is.

but most of all we mourn the illusion that this modern, 21st century, hi-tech world was somehow better than before, that truth and justice were shared values, that antisemitism was fringe, that the west wasn't at war with innumerable enemies who work tirelessly in underhanded ways to turn democracies against themselves. and we mourn each and every friend, relative and supposed ally who falls into the sophisticated propaganda traps and turns their back on us. even more so the jews who don't realize that they're not only unwittingly betraying us over here, but themselves, and every jew everywhere, before us and after us.

perpetual mourning and grief are hard, exhausting pills to swallow.

...

it wasn't an easy night, but at least the massage time in the morning made a big difference. i dropped mr smear off at school, then headed to a post point to collect some ali express gear for gd. i arrived half an hour before opening time, so i hunted around for a coffee shop and settled down with a vegan coffee slushie.

life was good - for all of three seconds, before my phone rang with a video call from a coworker and an unfamiliar name in desperate need of assistance because one of our systems died.

the unpleasantness continued all the way to the office, with only a few minutes' pause as i picked up the package, and for the most part i didn't feel like much of a contributor (although i quietly celebrated a moment when something i'd suggested did help).

i went straight from that to troubleshooting my own installation, which needed to be done before with could continue with any others, with a bunch of different people breathing down my neck...

ultimately, i figured out what we needed to do, delegated some annoying manual labor to the project lead, and between the two of us we managed to get (almost) everything ready by the end of the day.

which is the point at which we were informed that there would be a delay in delivery, but thank you for the effort 🙄

no matter, it's been one heck of a learning experience for the organization, so i'm good with it. i came home relatively early, we all had a very pleasant evening (and watched the first episode of the original naruto series), i've had some time to myself (including playing slay the spire), and although it's late i'm going to at least spend a little time thinking about some of tomorrow's work before hitting the massager and going to bed.

...

the bitcoin money finally landed in our bank account today, and it was enough to cover the last outstanding debt we owed to my mom. this is a very special moment for us ^_^

the retelling

friday evening:

so we watched prince of egypt on friday night, and if i recall correctly we also watched the end of paddington 2. regardless of when we watched it, i interpreted the ending the same way as this guy.

gd was going to bake challah for shabbat but suddenly realized - once the dough was ready for the oven - that we don't have a working oven... so we did what we technically should have been doing anyway, and had matzah instead :P

yesterday:

we re-watched joseph: king of dreams in the morning, and while we didn't love the songs it wasn't as bad as we remembered. but the writers really added a whole lot of unnecessary stuff to the film and laid it on so thick, that afterwards i downloaded the sefaria app and started reading the original text.

i don't recall much from yesterday afternoon.

in the early evening we picked up the car, and almost left the gift behind... which worked out, because i'd forgotten to relieve myself before heading out and considering the traffic i would've been in trouble if i hadn't.

it was heartbreaking and aggravating seeing so many people protesting on erev pesach.

we arrived in reasonable time, and the evening was very pleasant. the seder was a lot quicker than usual (and less loud), and mr smear got "stage fright" when it was his turn to sing, and i struggled with the tiny font of the unfamiliar haggadah, but it was great seeing everyone and the kids were adorable and the food was great. (i agreed to let mr smear have half an egg on account of it being a very special occasion and ironically symbolic, but it bothers me)

and the drive home - ignoring having to duck my head to avoid super-bright LED headlights - was relatively smooth.

today:

i spent a large chunk of my day napping. leftover lunch was delicious. in the afternoon i took mr smear for a long walk through the park, we talked about storytelling and workshopped an idea of his. on the way home we picked up some snacks, and hid in the entrance of a building when the sirens went off for a rocket attack.

we watched the simpsons over dinner, and i started playing slay the spire, which is really fun. mr smear went to bed rather late, in large part because i picked up a copy of asimov's i, robot and started reading it to him. we're well into the first story and really hating the parents.

i played some more, until i died, and although i have to work tomorrow i'm contemplating playing a little more now...

... uh, oh...

dreams and nightmares

 i slept horribly last night. like, way worse than usual. i was wired and restless, physically uncomfortable, and the entire experience sucked. i even got up in the middle of the night and faffed around for an hour or two, but the remaining hours of the morning before getting up weren't much better for it.

i vaguely recall the morning going alright. [gets to the end of the post and remembers that the ceasefire ended this morning. i'm grateful we got some of the hostages back, but we always knew that this was just a ploy by hamas to stall and survive and mess with us some more]

i walked mr smear to school, returned home, and then all of a sudden it was later than i thought and i had to rush to get to the sleep lab to return the equipment.

fortunately, i was only a few minutes late. i dropped off the gear, then hopped on an unfamiliar bus to work. it worked out fine.

...

my work day was intense, but overall great. it started awkwardly with me trying to help the new guy get his computer sorted out and not understanding that he was calling a thumb drive "DOK", proceeded with me starting to execute a plan my lead and i had come up with together, and before lunch we were treated to a surprise visit and talk by one of our customers. it was eye-opening.

after lunch, i finally got hold of one of the guys whose name everyone knows and we sat down to chat. his story was riveting, as is his job. mind-blowingly cool.

i got good work done in the afternoon, and was getting ready to go home when one of my coworkers caught me for a five minute conversation that turned into an hour-long intense discussion. although i was very eager to get out of there (which was duly noted), i feel like it was a really good discussion and that i managed to bridge two decidedly different approaches and attitudes.

...

i raced home, way too late for dinner, and scarfed down some of the leftovers. mr smear told me about some bullying that happened - on top of the fact that his best friend refused to go to school today because he's being bullied too - so that was that first bit of a shit feeling to bring me down from my work-high. then mr smear was a bit rude to my mom during their good-night chat, and another bullying incident surfaced that he'd handled poorly, which brought me down a bit more.

and then we discovered that he's having another herpes outbreak - it's been a year and four days since the first proper one - and that just brought the house down.

...

after saying good night to him i complained about how the evening had turned out, which gd misinterpreted, and then we had a fight. it took a while to get out of the fight, a part of which was gd remembering how distraught she's been since the morning news about the war resuming. we had a good talk about where we are and how the world looks right now, which turned to spirituality and religion.

and then a conversation about how the day went. and now... it's past 11pm and i don't know if i'm going to be able to sleep or not, but i'm pretty confident i'm not feeling like doing anything constructive right now. i kinda wanted to go to the purim (post-purim) rollerblade, but between all the emotions and the slight chance of rain i just couldn't.

and, of course, my eyes are feeling itchy now.

blowing out

after the additional depravity we witnessed [thursday], and then another attempted mass murder that was miraculously averted [thursday] night, i'm seeing a lot of antisemitism and disinformation on my feeds and it's extremely distressing.

i don't know how to digest what's been going on for the past year and a half - or, more accurately, what's been going on for decades that's finally come to light - nor where things are going, but we've already got too much to grieve for.

to everyone who's got opinions about this tiny little country but doesn't understand where those opinions are coming from: shame on you. for everyone who understands what kind of monster we're dealing with - israeli or not, jewish or not - we have to stick together. there is a great evil in this world, and its greatest trick is convincing the west that it's good, and that good is bad.

it's on us to put an end to this. god knows how, but we have to put an end to this. shabbat shalom 💔 🇮🇱 🕯🕯

in addition to everything else, someone gd believed was a good, reasonable friend sent aggressive messages last night, and that's not the first "friend" to put politics first after being drawn in by anti-west propaganda.

yesterday:

i've been really tired both yesterday and today, and napping or sleeping a lot doesn't seem to be helping. oh! that reminds me - at work on thursday, i was taking care of the dog while someone else cleaned up some broken glass when one of my coworkers walked in. i got up to greet him but standing up too fast made me start losing consciousness, and i literally had to guess where his hand was to shake it because i'd lost the lower half of my vision :/

i rested while mr smear was at school and gd at her sewing lesson. i got up to pick him up from school - he claims he couldn't find his juggling class, so his fridays are become a slack day - and we picked up the new vacuum cleaner and bussed to meet gd at azrieli. in spite of the terrible service, we found a replacement that seems much better and with that we returned home.

gd and i left mr smear to his devices (literally :P) and went to pick up supplements, shoes (to replace the ones that got washed out on thursday), and some groceries.

i was tiiiiiirrrreeeeeed and the walk back home felt loooooonnnnng.

all i remember from that point on was resting and playing pony island with mr smear. and at dinner we watched delicious in dungeon, and after dinner i crashed on the couch before mr smear had even started getting ready for bed.

today:

mr smear woke me up at our normal wake-up time (7am), but i was still feeling really sleepy. i had coffee, played some inscryption and tried not to think too much about the hostage return (apparently all the live hostages have now been returned, but i don't really believe anything about anything any more, which i guess means that in my case the "active measures" were entirely successful).

then i passed out on the couch for a while, eventually waking up for a bit of a delicious in dungeon marathon with the family. some of which i passed in and out of consciousness for.

now it's coffee and play-time again, after a solid roughhousing session that mr smear initiated and i definitely didn't have energy for. it's been a cold and cloudy day and we've no intention of going outside whatsoever.

the rain

nationally, today was a very painful one: the bibas family's bodies were returned. i've said it before, and i'll say it again - every hostage taken is a tragedy. alive or dead, returned or not. every victim is a tragedy, and every hostage is a tragedy, and there is no outcome that will make anything that happened since october 7th a victory.

...

today began in the middle of the night, when gd caught mr smear on his phone. according to family link, he'd been playing with it for over an hour at that point... ignoring the angry disruption at the time, he was entirely uncooperative once his alarm went off so it was a double-bad morning.

in addition to waking up exhausted, i was also stressed about getting his art school application sorted out. i rushed out of the house to walk to the school with him, and managed to get past the security guard to pay the receptionist a visit.

first things first, she told me in a particularly sarcastic and condescening manner that i should've taken the lack of response to my email as a hint that i shouldn't have bothered sending the email in the first place. as much as that got under my skin, i recognized that she's the gatekeeper and managed to keep my mouth shut.

i can't tell you what my face was saying, though.

i completed the form - she did assist me, at least - and then learned that mr smear's homeroom teacher was needed to complete their one, but she had the day off. so that was a fuck-up, but she assured me that they would try to figure something out. i asked her if she could please let me know when the form was submitted to the municipality, and she told me that i'd just have to trust her to get the job done.

did i mention she's the gatekeeper, and that i knew that i needed to be polite and respectful? again, i don't know what my face was saying, but i thanked her profusely before leaving the office.

...

at that point, the skies opened, and i was caught in a thunderstorm with the rain pelting down, with no umbrella and no boots. i ran to the supermarket, getting thoroughly soaked along the way, but of course they don't sell umbrellas. i hung out there for a bit until the shower ended, then splashed home.

my toes are blue from the permanent marker washing off my sneakers. i put tea bags inside them, and i'm hoping they're okay. i guess i need to go shopping for new ones tomorrow...

...

i had a long zoom call with an insurance broker, which i pretended to be interested in even though i'm not leaving my current one. perhaps their quote will prove helpful somehow. then i left for work, this time with boots and brolly.

...

work: sweet doggo at work a plus. lots of back and forth on my task, definite learning happening. meeting a couple more coworkers, eating pad thai for a very late lunch (as part of the pastafarian prayer for mr smear's art school application), and ridiculously good vegan happy hour treats that i brought home to share with gd and mr smear.

let's call today a cheat day.

...

in the afternoon, i was relieved to receive an update from mr smear's homeroom teacher informing me that the application was delivered! in addition to giving us something to celebrate, that means that i can reframe my shoes being damaged as a reasonable cost of giving my son a chance to get into the school :P

the hebrew reading this evening wasn't great, and by that i mean that mr smear didn't cooperate, but the actual reading itself was pretty good when it happened. dinner was great, we talked about a bunch of things and one thing in particular stood out - mr smear's best friend's sister came to their class, and some of the girls in their class were really mean to her. mr smear was pleased to report that a teacher came and gave the mean girls hell, and he sent his friend a message asking if she was okay and he received a grateful one back.

so that's good.

...

post-bedtime and my own shave - toothbrush - shower time, i've played some inscryption and i'm now feeling rather tired and getting ready for bed. it's been a big day. it's been a huge week.

fucking tuesday

 well... i was about to go to bed, i was falling asleep on my feet, when we realized that one of the key accomplishments of the day was for nothing - we lost a bag of t-shirts that we bought at the shuk this morning.

so now i've played some more inscryption, and i'm writing this up, and then hopefully i'll manage to get some actual sleep. last night i ended up playing final fantasy vi for about an hour after posting...

...

firstly, my cold / flu / whatever has been slightly better today, but still not great. it was rain weather, but fortunately not boot weather. after dropping mr smear off at school - with him having had a pretty good morning, and repeating his affirmation without hesitation, and being much more healthily social with his friends on the way to school than usual - gd and i headed to azrieli. we went through all the major clothing stores, and found nothing of interest, so we hopped on a bus to the shuk via dizengoff center (to pick up an emergency umbrella) and began the hunt.

we actually found what we were looking for pretty quickly. shirts for mr smear, shirts for me (now lost), and three pairs of decent, i-can-go-to-work-in-these cargo pants (that i had quite a time trying on in their open-air fitting room), and then we picked up a cauliflower meal from the frena place and sat down for coffee, enjoying a nice chat with an elderly couple that was in mixed hebrew and english, and which gd managed to follow and participate in quite nicely!

on the way to the bus i realized that my payment for the cauliflower hadn't gone through, so i returned to have my card declined a number of times before discovering that i had (rather unusually) some cash in my wallet. the ride home was consumed by me on the phone to my credit card company, learning that - once again - i blew straight past my limit by a lot and now i'm blocked for the next few days.

i really don't understand the point of the limit if they're only going to shut down my card way after i've spent too much money.

i mean, i kind of get it, but it's wrong and gross.

anyway.

i picked up mr smear from school, and on the way home we were treated to the sight of a jackal jumping out of the hedges at the park and racing right past us. which reminds me - one of the jackals by our apartment tried to start a howl in the middle of the night, and all the other jackals just ignored him so he dropped it 😂

we spent the next couple of hours doing his homework, which was at least a better experience than yesterday's attempt. slow going, though, and gd and i were horrified to discover that he doesn't know the order of the letters in the hebrew alphabet or the names of the months in the hebrew calendar.

WTAF.

after his "play therapist" arrived, i took a bus to the barber shop, chatting with one of ze germans about a project he wants me in on (which i can't be in on, officially). the haircut experience was pretty good, overall, although it had its awkward points: my "usual" barber had been the person i'd made the appointment with over the phone, so he knew that my first pick was someone else, the guy who did my hair did a pretty good job, though i ended up covered in hair and i had to ask him to fix something rather obvious, and my card was declined so i had to mission to find an ATM.

i waited so long for the bus home that i ended up walking instead, and i arrived home in time to shower and sit down to eat and watch the simpsons.

inspired by a chat with my mom, mr smear went to bed reading the hobbit graphic novel, which is very  exciting!

...

i started the day posting the following:

gaza-lighting: when you try to wipe out the jews in their own homeland, but after you've been defeated you occupy their territory and culturally appropriate their entire history in order to turn it against them, while raising your children as "martyrs" to complete your initial attempt to destroy them, claiming that *you're* indigenous and occupied and under threat of genocide.

("palestinians" are egyptians, jordanians and syrians who were abandoned in israel by their countries in order to use them as pawns in their long game of destroying israel. just to be clear, i'm very happy living with and alongside non-jewish israelis who accept our sovereignty and democratic rule of law. i don't feel the same about anyone who refuses that.)

what's happening with trump and netanyahu aligning to give hamas an ultimatum on returning the hostages on saturday is extremely exciting. this feels like what we should have been feeling the entire war - like america knows what's up and which side they're on - and while it may be too late to help most of the hostages it seems like it's on time to turn this whole ship around.

the night owls

 as i begin writing this post, it's 2.20am and everyone's awake. me, because i woke up an hour or two ago with indigestion (we had pizza for dinner, and every day since wednesday has been a celebratory cheat-day), mr smear because he woke up thirsty and coughing, and gd because i went to pee and him calling for me woke her up...

anyway. it's been a crazy couple of days, now seems as good an hour as any to get it down.

wednesday:

i walked home, furiously messages everyone who needed to be updated with my news. on my way, i picked up some rum. well, i picked up a bacardi mojito, to be precise, and the cashier expressed her disgust which reminded me that gd had asked for whiskey. but the whiskeys there were way overpriced, so i ended up taking the bacardi while she muttered "disgusting" under her breath 😂

gd had ordered from our favorite vegan burger joint, and i ate my entire meal which was twice as much as i should have :P

as part of my celebration, i also picked up a copy of final fantasy vi (pixel remaster) and car mechanic simulator 2021, but unfortunately the latter proved unplayable after mr smear and i enthusiastically gave it a go this evening after talking about it for almost two days :/

thursday:

i dropped mr smear off at school and then continued on to our clinic, where i finally received the authorization that gd's been waiting on. i walked through to the hospital compound to deliver it, then returned home.

by the time i entered the office i realized that i hadn't received any sign of my contract, so i signed in to the signing app and found it waiting for me - it had been sent immediately after i'd approved it the evening before, and gmail had filed its notification as spam :/

i immediately skimmed through it to ensure everything was as expected, signed it, and it was done.

HOORAY!!

nystire called and we had a quick chat, which began with us trying to remember the name of the ultra-orthodox guy we'd served with that i bumped into on my way to the office, and resulted in him suggesting something that bolstered my confidence that i was making the right decision.

for a while i had a live-stream open of the hostage release, though eventually i realized that it wasn't constructive and i just waited on occasional live updates instead.

everything about how hamas is behaving with the hostage release just seems completely unhinged. who is their footage aimed at, and what kind of bizarre narrative are they trying to convince people of? what the hell do the goodie bags and framed certificates even mean?!

and how does it help them to show such cruelty to an old man while releasing him?? make it make sense

two of my coworkers came in, and one of them is interviewing for the same company. i enjoy working with him, but he's a particularly quirky developer so i'm intrigued.

[half an hour later and mr smear's really struggling, gd's taking care of him but it's unsettling]

...

i received a dramatic message from mr smear's homeroom teacher informing me that the kid mr smear hit with a rock, and whose artwork he's torn up on a couple of occasions, was very upset because mr smear had insulted his mother by calling her fat and saying she was unable to move. made worse by the fact that those statements are true 🤦

he claims that he and this kid were playing a game that involved generating drama, and that he immediately recognized and regretted his going to far. considering the fact that his teacher told me she had to give him a talk and ask him to apologize, i have my suspicions.

to add insult to... insult, he took a pack of oreos to school today to give to the poor kid as an additional apology, and then ate them himself :/

...

while i'd already signed the new contract, i put a lot of effort into making sure that i rejected my other offer in as constructive (or, non-destructive) a way as possible. while it was true that i'd made up my mind before i got the one i signed, it was surprisingly easy to honestly express the aspects that i'd had to weigh (especially as it wasn't an apples-to-apples comparison) and how much i valued their offer and would enjoy working with them. 

it was a relief to get back warm, sympathetic responses from the three people i emailed my letter to and it feels like they're keeping the door open too, which is comforting.

...

i'd intended to get my chair and monitor home before taking mr smear to the second part of his evaluation, but it proved too tricky, so i walked home, fired off the aforementioned email i'd been preparing, and the bussed him to the evaluation. i enjoyed a decaf coffee while waiting for him, resuming learning about the dangers of localStorage and coming up with a potential mechanism for using it securely. 

while there, gd went to the dentist and finally got her first crown sorted out! it's a huge relief.

i picked mr smear up, we grabbed hummus at a hummusia close by, i showed him the building i'm about to start working in and we took the light rail home.

i didn't need to eat so much of the pita, but it was delicious.

...

it having been unseasonably warm the whole day, i left the apartment after dinner without a sweater and barely regretted it. i took the train to the office (i'd been misled by a bus stop display to believe that there was a protest causing traffic), picked up my chair and wheeled it out, then called a taxi. fortunately, the taxi driver not only had no issue with transporting a chair, but was able to jimmy it into the front seat in a way that i definitely wasn't capable of.

i'd originally intended to use an hourly rental, and i think i would have deeply regretted it.

yesterday/today (friday):

i got mr smear to school, and from there caught a bus to the office to pick up my monitor and drop off my key and keycard.

i was amused by my reflection in the elevator mirror when i realized i was taking office equipment out the building wearing a hoodie that says "pirate king" on the front 😅

i took the train home, and set up my workstation, which i'm happily using now and it makes an ENORMOUS difference to the experience of using my shitty windows machine!

i kinda regret not setting something like this up before.

i picked mr smear up from school, came home, helped a woman pick up a whole bunch of mr smear's unwanted books and toys, then walked with mr smear to one of ze germans' son's street exhibit on ben gurion, which was simply astonishing. what's just as astonishing to my mind is that most of his artwork was sold by the end of the afternoon!

amazing kid. even mr smear found his work riveting, and at some point told him "i'm good, but you're waaay better than me" 😅

...

we were supposed to meet up with the mongoose but hadn't heard from him, so we walked around until we discovered market vegan and stopped for lunch. i had a thai curry soup that came with glass noodles, mr smear wasn't a fan of the soup but enjoyed the noodles, then decided to try adding soup to the noodles, and at that point decided he could enjoy it properly :)

we also picked up one of their desserts, which was delicious, but mr smear looked like a chocolate version of heath ledger's joker so we stopped in at a bar/restaurant to clean up. on our way out, we stepped on broken glass that had simply been abandoned while whoever dropped it went to get something to sweep it with, and we were about twenty meters away when i realized that mr smear's shoes had a massive glass spike in it that almost went through to his foot :/

...

we met up with the mongoose and co. (wife/daughter/some friends), his daughter's really starting to speak! and i just realized that i never put her birthday in my calendar and we just missed her 2nd birthday 🤦

it was nice seeing them, but mr smear really got in my face and wouldn't let me talk, which not only infuriated me but also lost him a chunk of privilege time - it took three increments of 15 minutes to finally get him to stop. on the walk home i explained to him how bad that was.

we were almost home before he realized that his punishment was going to be carried out immediately, and we sat on a bench and had a massive fight about how punishments work, and how the punishment itself is his fault and not mine, and how what he was doing to me was assault and if he wasn't my kid he could get into real trouble for it.

eventually, with only an additional 15 minutes added on top for rudeness (he did try hitting me a couple of times, but i responded in kind so that stopped quickly), we returned home in surprisingly calm spirits.

...

we tried out the new vegan sachlav that's being advertised everywhere, and it is good! it's one of those things that i've missed every winter since i went vegan (so... almost 15 years now) and i really enjoyed it :)

after doing some dishes while mr smear served his sentence (some sentence, he just chilled and read for an hour), we headed to the synagogue. along the way i talked to him about prayer, that there are different forms of it, and that there's power in communal prayer (whether in synagogue or on a dance floor) and power in being connected to our ancestors and our history.

the chazan was in a bit of a droning mood, so it wasn't as vibrant a service as usual, and there was a weird choir thing as the end, but otherwise it was a pleasant experience and i'm glad that mr smear's going with the flow.

...

between getting home and saying kiddush, we had time to try out the mechanic simulators, and sadly our windows machine just isn't up to spec :(

at least i could get a refund.

[gd just went to bed, and mr smear's now up and reading todd strasser's the wave on the couch behind me]

we enjoyed the pizza dinner and the simpsons, and then mr smear got an extra half hour to play an FPS during which time i taught him how to strafe and not stand still when engaged in a fire fight. i then jumped in the shower, where i heard him yelling excitedly from the living room after he won his first game ^_^

after getting him into bed, i played a bit of final fantasy vi and then went to bed myself. it's 4.15am and i'm not feeling particularly tired myself...

noise and anti-noise

getting four hostages back this morning came as a welcome surprise, i hadn't realized the release was going to be so early. it's concerning that hamas are messing with the schedule, but most of us are just grateful to have a few more back in safety. i cannot imagine how devastating this must be for the bibas family...

...

mr smear didn't go to school yesterday because started the day with a cough, but he almost always starts the day with a cough* and it became pretty clear pretty quickly that he was actually fine. having said that, he's been struggling a fair amount the whole day today so maybe it was the actual start of something...

* i'm beginning to wonder if he's not allergic to the night

we had an incident (minor tantrum) getting him out the house yesterday for a walk, on the walk we sat down and had a real long talk and it feels like we cleared the air about some stuff. at the same time, i explained to him that as a parent it's really hard to have to convince him to leave the house every damned time...

i managed to get a couple of hours in on the job application exercise, it feels like i've made some progress but nothing amazing.

...

today has been quiet. mr smear and i started it with a couple of hours of inscryption, but at some point i started feeling like i was playing through him rather than advising him. i'm not quite sure how to balance that.

gd's neck's been hurting her a lot (nerve pain) since yesterday, so it looks like i'm off to ru55's eldest's barmitzvah alone in a few minutes.

...

RIP reddit. i cannot believe how ridiculously exaggerated the political echo chamber has become, even amongst the subreddits i would have least expected. it seems like everything's either anti-israel or anti-musk.

ritual insanity

yesterday the ceasefire went into effect. more psychological warfare, more terrorist propaganda, more anxiety. at least the first three hostages made it out alright, which was an enormous relief. i don't understand the schedule for the rest of the jesus-fucking-christ *third* of the hostages they're holding, but at this point i don't trust or believe anything to hold or make sense.

it's a relief that trump is now the american president. at least he's less likely to make things harder for us than the democrats have been...

...

i'm a bit tired, and sore. it's just past midnight, my brain's a bit fuzzy.

i dropped mr smear off at school, completely oblivious to the fact that it was a field trip day. and he'd left his phone at home. i came back, and then gd and i went off to our guidance session.

amongst other things, all three of us (the therapist, myself, and gd herself) learned that gd has been losing patience with the "play therapy" sessions. and i realized that we're going to have to be very careful about signing him up for the art school lottery...

we bussed home, i had breakfast, and then took off for the dermatologist. i had a list prepared, and was relieved to learn that most of the things that have been bothering me are just irritating getting-older-with-overly-sensitive-skin things, nothing dangerous or infectious (well, aside from one minor thing that i knew about, and now need to see a plastic surgeon for).

her exact description was "you have a ginger's skin" :P

on the way to pick mr smear up i saw photos from the field trip, and by then it was too late to cancel his hebrew tutor... fortunately, she was able and willing to make up the lesson in the evening.

a little later, while waiting for the kids to return, i had an awkward conversation with our hardcore-democrat friend's hardcore-democrat parent, and things got a bit uncomfortable.

mr smear got off the bus so grossed out that he wouldn't stop (literally) spitting, which was quite embarrassing. he claimed to be feeling sick, but i'm pretty confident it was psychological because he'd been sitting next to a sick, coughing kid the entire ride :/

on our way home, we purchased his next hebrew book: a translation of the first harry potter. i hope this goes well!

the next couple of hours were a mix of getting mr smear to do his homework, trying to read more about the exercise i'm doing, and then eventually taking my kindle to the couch and reading/napping for a while.

...

mona lisa overdrive: five stars for vision and depth, but it's hard to follow.

i recently re-read neuromancer, which has aged superbly and is nothing short of miraculous. i chased that with count zero, which takes a while to get warmed up and ends with a character abruptly tying up all the loose ends.

and then there's mona lisa overdrive. brilliant world-building, phenomenal ideas and a grand vision for bringing everything across the three novels together... but for the most part i found it incoherent. some scenes blew me away with how ingeniously and cleverly they were rendered, and some just left me feeling confused about who was doing what and why. i still enjoyed reading the book, but i feel like i missed a whole lot of stuff and i would need to go back and re-read it to put all the pieces together.

what i'd *really* like, though, is to see this adapted into a graphic novel or television series. i feel like gibson may just have been biting off a little more than even he could chew.

...

i took mr smear to his tutor and spent half an hour with a decaf coffee while studying the code, with a south african voice engaged in an intense conversation about investec nearby and an enormous flock of monk parakeets in the trees across the road erupting in a loud debate that lasted a few minutes and drew angry yells from someone in the building.

i picked up mr smear and we returned home, i helped him with his math homework and we watched the simpsons over dinner.

...

so far we're up to '92 (season 3), and there're two simpsons predictions nobody ever talks about:

1. with all my criminal buddies

2. otto the school bus driver not having a valid license. i'm not going to share it, but we have a video of mr smear's class stuck on a bus last year chanting "shame! shame!" at their bus driver after he arrived with an expired license 🤣

trade-offs (ceasefire?)

the psychological terror continues. now we pray each day for the (relative) well-being of the hostages that we're paying for in future blood as we release serial and mass murderers who have every intent on continuing to try to wipe us out.

i'm trying to not think about what we're doing and what it means but it's really hard, and there's no clear right course of action available to us. i hope our "leaders" have secured us more lives than we've already lost, and i pray we have a real plan for whenever this "ceasefire" falls apart.

...

if there's a silver lining to this shitstorm cloud, it's that otzma hayehudit has left the coalition. thank fuck.

yesterday:

it was a relaxed start to the day, but then there was another rocket attack by the houthis (who the fuck are these assholes?!) followed by a massive fight to get mr smear to come out with me for a ride, even though he'd already agreed.

what followed was gd sitting and talking him through things, for what felt like forever (probably about 20 minutes to half an hour), and then fifteen minutes of him calming down, and then...

... and then we were off. i pumped us his deflated front tire, we took a rather roundabout route to try and stay on reasonably good bike paths, and we stopped occasionally because he needed rest, but ultimately we ended up at givon square, where we stopped to have a bite - a very large bite - at schnitt.

not too far from the stabbing attack that took place in levontin :/

the food wasn't amazing, but mr smear was having such a good time that he actually - unsolicited, i might add - thanked me for taking him out on such a great day ^_^

the ride home was good too, including a long stop on a bench on rothschild to have a heart-to-heart.

the rest of the evening went really well, including a really fun session playing inscryption together, and bedtime was a riot.

then gd and i settled down to watch the end of the third venom movie. omg. the writing in the first part was weak, but by the end it felt like a parody of an eighties action flick and i turned over in disgust before passing out on the couch.

today:

i slept alright, for the most part. we had some trouble getting mr smear ready for school, but we left the apartment in good spirits anyway. when his friend and his friend's sister caught up with us crossing the road i hurriedly said goodbye so they could enjoy their walk together, then made my way to the clinic to try and figure out what they want in order to authorize gd's therapy sessions.

turns out... they don't really know. so they made me an appointment with our family doctor, who then sent me off to the hospital, where i had a bit of a back and forth before they sent me off. in the afternoon gd's therapist called and i explained to her what i'd understood, hopefully we'll get things right soon.

...

it's been a day full of distractions. i spent some of the morning working on the exercise, and managed to figure out how to get the thing running, and then some of the afternoon reading through their whitepaper to try and understand how all the pieces fit together. i spent a chunk of the day taking mr smear to his therapy session and handling him doing his homework. i've been made responsible for the keys to the bomb shelter for the building. i've been contacted by a company i interviewed for before taking my current (now-last) job.

it's been a day, so far. it's been a day.

the not-so-good doctor

 once upon a time, in 2018, gd and i were trying for another baby. gd's OB/GYN prescribed a medication that was supposed to increase her fertility, but instead triggered early menopause and obliterated any chances of her having more children.

i recently spoke to someone who's working in menopause studies, and mentioned this story, and she asked me what the medication was - but gd has forgotten and i have no records of it. so i've requested her medical records from her OB/GYN.

after two ignored emails, i called him up this morning. he knew exactly who i was, had all the details in front of him, and not only refused to release her records but directly lied about having prescribed any medications at all.

i was fuming - i'm still fuming - at his revolting behavior. although it's very clear to me that he's attempting to protect his ass from a malpractice lawsuit, but after making a mistake and hurting a patient he's now doing intentionally doing something that could interfere with her new practitioner's history-taking, even though we're living in a different country.

this evening i read the following. i don't know where this is going, but now i *know* we need to get hold of her records:

The Promotion of Access to Information Act 2000 gives everyone the right of

access to records held by either public or private bodies for legitimate purposes.

In the latter case, people should be allowed access to “any information that is held

by another person and that is required for the exercise or protection of any rights”.9

This includes access to health records.

Either the patient him/herself, or someone authorised to act on the patient’s behalf,

can request access; ordinarily the request itself is made in writing and should be

responded to within 30 calendar days.

...

yesterday:

another rocket attack in the middle of the night. it took forever for us to get out the apartment, and i honestly don't know why. when i got to the bottom of the stairs i saw mr smear and immediately yelled at him for not entering the shelter, then turned the corner and saw that everybody was outside the shelter because some asshole had locked it.

mr smear and i stopped to watch the demolition guys begin their work yesterday morning on the way to school, and he's decided that that's what he wants to do when he grows up.

i totally get it.

i was tired yesterday - my boss asked me if i was sleep-walking when he realized that i hadn't registered his existence while standing next to me in the elevator. it was a long work day, though by the time i left i felt like i'd made some good progress.

i knew on my way home that i was in no shape to go rollerblading.

on my way upstairs i checked the shelter and found it open. nobody's admitting to being responsible, and we still don't know who has the key :/

gd was at the dentist, so i took mr smear out for falafel. it was a really good experience.

i passed out pretty soon after putting mr smear to bed, and although some of the night was spent restlessly tossing and turning i mostly caught up on sleep.

today:

after dropping mr smear off at school, gd and i met with the guy who's going to do his psychological evaluation over the next few weeks. i feel it was a pretty good meeting.

gd and i had a small fight about something on the way to the bus stop, so that sucked, but we were fine shortly after. the work day was pretty good, minus my phone call to gd's OB/GYN and its aftermath, although the rude people from my cousin's office tried to crowd us out of the kitchen at lunchtime again and it makes things really unpleasant.

...

before dinner, i realized that mr smear hadn't completed his math homework (matific). when he completed it suspiciously quickly, i took a look and saw that he didn't quite do it in the requisite spirit of the thing. i made him do a time exercise because it's one his weaknesses, and where he was struggling i coached him through.

right until he threw an absolutely wobbly because, in his words, "it's IMPOSSIBLE!" even though he'd already done exactly the same thing successfully in the previous question. what followed was a tantrum of note, with much unpleasantness.

after his shower, and a very grumbly start to dinner, he cooled off. after dinner, i wrote out the question i remembered and he sat down and breezed through it (the IMPOSSIBLE question). he then begrudgingly apologized to me for the drama, and to gd, and finally to himself (he needed a bit of coercion to do that last apology out loud, but it's fine).

he then sat down to do the actual thing. the first few questions he breezed through, but then he got stuck again on a question where it was obvious to me why: he was overcomplicating things and confusing himself to the point where he was effectively guessing.

let me just say: there was a LOT of arguing. a LOT of me attempting different ways to get him to approach the question differently. a LOT of me pushing him to "think out loud" so that i could make sense of the weird leaps of logic he was performing.

but, goshdarnit, we got it in the end. and i witnessed what appeared to be a lightbulb moment, eyes wide and mouth agape, when he realized that he was confusing the numbers 0 and 60 because the minute of an hour is effectively both.

holy fucking shit.

the rest of the evening went swimmingly. emotions and strategic arguments with my mom and gd notwithstanding, and now that i've written this all down (has it been half an hour already?!) it's time to try watching venom again.

...

scratch that. after pausing for a twenty minute discussion with gd about the ceasefire agreement and the hostages being released, how every surviving hostage is as much a tragedy as every dead one, and how traumatized we all are, and how we can move forward as a people... i don't know what i'm doing or going to do.

the longest year

 in six and a half hours, it will have been one full year since the beginning of the october 7th attacks. it's hard to believe that it's been a year, that we still don't have our hostages back, that we've accomplished amazing things but suffered painful losses, that there are large numbers of people around the world calling for our destruction, and that includes pro-palestinian jews who have absolutely no understanding of the forces they're aligning with.

it's all insane.

...

this morning was alright. mr smear informed gd and me that in retrospect, pantheon isn't appropriate for him. after his initial enthusiasm died down, he found it disturbing. fair enough.

i sorted out some financial stuff - hopefully this month will be more stable, but who knows? - and then realized i couldn't find an important medical document of gd's. i walked to work past the hospital, where i got them to print it out and discovered that the previous receptionist i'd dealt with had entered something completely wrong (and seemingly incoherent) as gd's email address...

the work day was alright. i didn't feel like it, but it was productive nonetheless. i might have eaten too much - i finished off what remained of gd's challah, and that was most of it - and my biggest frustration of the day was that there wasn't any non-barista non-dairy milk alternative for me. so it wasn't a bad day.

i had a good chat with vfmp on my way home, and a short but meaningful talk with mr smear about the current war situation and what tomorrow means for us. the rest of the evening was pretty chilled, and my biggest issue right now is kinda the same as it's been for a few nights: i think i might be depressed, because i'm tired, but i can't sleep, and i don't feel like doing or watching anything.

i guess i'm just going to try stuff (like shadowrun) and see what i can do to run out the clock and go to bed as late as is reasonable.

humdrum or not

yesterday:

yesterday was a work-from-home day. it started off well - mr smear was fine. i legitimately enjoyed the work i was doing (first time in a while, especially after a few weeks of frontend) and made pretty good progress.

i picked mr smear up on time for his hebrew tutor, which, since she moved closer to the school, now means early. we literally sat on a corner and chatted for half an hour, which was really nice. once he was delivered, i found my "usual" coffee place was full so i walked to the next closest one. i got stuck into the work, and completely forgot that i wasn't right next door so arrived late to pick him up :P

we had about half an hour at home, and then i took him to his jiujitsu class (which went well). gd had packed his bag and forgotten his epipen, but i managed - after many attempts, and for the first time in months - to get his phone to purchase a bus ticket. on the way back, i figured out what appears to have been the problem this whole time: the old huawei's gps location is so completely off that the app refused to validate.

so hopefully that's resolved.

i ate a huge (early) dinner, did some chores, did a little bit more work, then walked to the school for the start-of-year establishment of ground rules with the parents. i realized that i don't know most of the parents - as in, i don't know their names, nor whose parents they are - even though we've all been in the same class for the past three years...

i struggled to here the teacher, but i got most of what she said and it looks like they're running things in a reasonably intelligent way; especially, surprisingly, how they're handling issues with mobile phones, whatsapp groups and online bullying. anyway, we'll see how things go.

i came home, laid out and discussed the rules with gd and mr smear, and bedtime went smoothly. including for me, because i passed out almost immediately afterwards and, for the most part, slept through until this morning.

i had dreams that included battling swarms of bees.

this morning so far:

gd's back feeling a better

hamas is playing more hostage negotiation games, proving netanyahu right (about the so-called "deal"). the only way we're going to come out on top is to stop playing the ignorant west's game of trying to negotiate; we need to understand that our hostages are lost, and we need to assert our dominance if we're going to have peace with our neighbors, or any security at all.

amusingly, netanyahu's trying to prevent israelis from seeing the new documentary that's just being screened in canada, and our courts said "nope" :)

mr smear walking into a pole after weeks of us warning him to look ahead: "i think i've learned my lesson now"

picking up a box-cutter blade on the sidewalk. wtf?!

gd unfriending rabbis who don't stand with israel (i should probably do that as well)

now i'm off to pick up a lunchbox that my mom sent via our capetonian hairdresser.